Way to use the moderator points. I reply to someone who insulted me, and in a civil manner, and lose a point, while they, for the original flame, don't.
Yet another moderator marks down posts they don't agree with. And they don't even do it right. What the hell does overrated mean in this context? Sheesh.
I've met the boss in real life, and he looks like that.
And, the boss in UF is completely different from the boss in Dilbert. The UF boss is reasonably clued and started the ISP himself. The boss in Dilbert couldn't start his computer himself.
Promiscuity doesn't seem to be a good indicator of intelligence. But, being religious seems to be a good indicator of a lack of critical thought. Not of bad thought, but just a lack of critical thinking, examining what you are told.
I'm not asserting that any religious people are idiots, let alone all of them. Some of them are, but that's not at all what I said. You didn't even bother to read the posting, just started spouting off.
...I must be trying to get people to stop thinking.
Quite simply, you are.
Judging someone by what they say is the least bigoted thing you can do. And I didn't even write Knuth off, I just said I'd be more careful in examining the rest of what he says.
Re:"Over our heads"? Nice cop out. UF is not funny
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Salon on User Friendly
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· Score: 1
Hmmm. Some of UF just doesn't really get a chuckle from me, but some other stuff does. The recent NT server stability one was a funny jab at mindcraft.
If you can read through the whole thing and not laugh at ANY of them, there's probably something wrong with you. I mean, I detest Peanuts and it can still make me laugh every now and then.
And, it's not really suprising that customers at a bookstore wouldn't laugh at most of the jokes, it's insider humor.
Hmmm, I just checked to see why your post had a +1 moderation and I noticed you had a 45 karma.
Hmmm. Nothing personal, because most of my karma is based on moderation too, from when I used to moderate, but this is a bit silly... You can get yourself a +1 from just moderating posts.
I think if the +20 karma to get a +1 score has to be in effect, it should be only if you have +20 karma from posting alone.
Sure. In times when you had to be a member of the primary churches or be persecuted, and in which almost everyone was brought up being told that the state religion was true, I'm not suprised that many great people didn't completely rid themselves of this.
I won't discount someone because they are religious, but I will examine what they say carefully because of the evidence that it's tainted.
You are mischaracterizing faith. It is much more than blindly accepting what someone else is telling you. It is accepting something because you *know* it to be true.
Well, if you *know* it to be true without a lot of evidence, then that seems to indicate something unflattering about how hard you are to convince.
Listen twerp, nobody cares. I don't discriminate against xians, I discriminate against all religions equally, as they all indicate the same complete lack of understanding.
And as for the voting thing. I don't. But unfortunately your poor little repressed self and hundreds of millions of others, are unable to vote away from the church line.
You are anything but repressed. You'll never be happy until you can have anyone who disagrees with you 're-educated'. 'Bullshit' like this post, and the one you replied to just proves that not everyone is a close-minded overly-sensitive uneducatable puke like you.
Take your sorry-ass self-pity off to a religious site where people are programmed to care.
Sure. I'll say that I'm less impressed with Knuth now that I know he's religious. No Xian, just religious at all.
I think eventually we'll see religious belief as the same sort of indicator we now see messages about perpetual motion machines. As a sign of someone a little unclear of the whole concept.
Christian bashing is the last refuge of the bigot in this era of political correctness.
Perhaps. But if you're not free to judge somebody based on their opinions, then how the hell are you supposed to form an opinion about anything?
Judging someone on personal grounds by race is wrong. Ethics/Morals aside, it's wrong simply because it skin color doesn't indicate personality. Judging possible skin-cancer victims by race makes sense. Intelligence or creativity have NOT be shown to correspond to skin color, and as such, are stupid things to judge by race.
But, someone's opinions ARE an indicator of their mental processes. Would YOU pick up a neo-nazi hitchhiker? Their behaviour and opinions would tend to indicate violent hatred. Would you go to a doctor who believed in the healing power of engergized crystals? Their opinion would seem to indicate a certain lack of critical thinking.
Similarly, I lose respect for someone who believes in god. It indicates a lack of judgement.
I'm not saying he's a bad person, or that he has nothing valuable to say, but I'll certainly be more critical of what he says, to sort out the good stuff from the religious babble.
On a side note... What really pissed me off with people like the author I'm responding to, and the trend they are a part of, is that they're trying to get people to stop thinking. We're not even allowed to judge people on what they say anymore. Where does this stupidity end?
It is different to accept certain facts without having proved them yourself, if they fit into the larger structure of beliefs you have proved.
I know a lot about CPUs. I haven't proved that they actually are doped semiconductors with parts etched away in such a way that electrons can flow through them in certain ways.
I have done enough to this end though that I think I would be justified in believing this, especially if I was willing to entertain the idea that it might be otherwise, if I was offered contradictory proof.
I have used a chisel to crack open chips. I've looked at them under a microscope and examined them as best I can. Both simple ones, like 555 timers, and complex ones like CPUs. In simple ones, or ones designed to work with high current, the elements are big enough you can follow them visually.
I've also taken courses in electronics. I have to accept the existence of an electron, but I have done a lot to verify the existance of, if not electrons, then particles that do exactly what electrons are said to do.
I haven't examined MY CPU by cracking it open, but I accept that if some CPUs are what they are said to be, then it's likely that the one I use now is. I haven't SEEN an electron, but I have seen the results of them in controlled experiements.
Sure, electrons *could* be replaced with tiny angels who are told to *act like* electrons and we'd never know. But I consider that one of the least likely scenarios. Similarly, my CPU could be different from all the others I've looked at, and those could have been planted by the CIA to lead me away from the real secret of digital computers... And I could be just a brain in a jar, and your posting could be generated by an AI.
But, I don't really think so.
I'll base by conclusions on the evidence I've seen, and where it seems I have to accept someone's word too much, I'll investigate myself, or accept as a good story, but unproven.
So in short, we do to accept that we can't know everything, but this doesn't mean we take the rest on faith. We have the proof that what we can investigate is true, and thus the rest seems more likely if it fits with that.
No, because what was said doesn't involve taking anything on faith.
We see many examples of people who believe things without proof. That is faith. We see them do stupid things because of their belief in that faith. That is the proof that faith is bad.
It's not that without faith, nothing is ever bad, but if you base your beliefs on rationality, you're more likely to change your beliefs when they aren't representative of the world.
If you believe what you're told, for example "God exists" without demanding evidence (and i don't mean the ambiguous and self-contradictory Bible), you're not cool - you're just plain dumb.
That is true. Maybe a bit harsh, but true. Especially the part about "without demanding evidence."
People can be lied to, or be wrong. If you look for evidence and find faked evidence, or a liar offering to teach you, that doesn't make you stupid. What makes you stupid is to not look for evidence, and reject it when you find it.
Almost everyone on/. would laugh at someone who believed company benchmarks without demanding to try the product himself. Especially with companies like MindCraft around who do everything possible to distort the truth. Why should we be less critical of someone who believes, with less evidence, in the existence of a god?
It doesn't make them a bad person, but it doesn't indicate a very critical mind.
The material *was* offered up for discussion and evaluation. It was evaluated and commented on.
Comments were solicited, and negative comments, especially when they list a reason, like this one did, are comments too. If the poster was needlessly rude, or just said they didn't like it, without reasons, then it would be a useless post. But the poster listed valid criticisms.
This is a common type of argument used to reduce freedoms. "If you were a good person, you wouldn't WANT to do X, so we can take it away and you shouldn't complain."
Legal penalties exist to punish people who do things 'we' decide are 'wrong'. This is why we don't have to take away the ability to do these things, because people who do them can be dealt with appropriately.
If it was illegal to decrypt these disks except in a licensed player, or to publish decryption information, or even to attempt it, as many companies seem to be lobbying for, then we would lose the ability to do many things that should be legal as well.
Cracking the encryption, being able to copy the movie as a big MPEG file, is an essential step in pirating the movie, but it's also an essential step in viewing the movie in the way that YOU want.
I support the freedoms that let people break the law (or encure civil penalties) because these freedoms are essential for us to live the life we know an deserve.
Good points. What is refered to as piracy is either copyright violation, or license violation, or just something that pisses the company off.
What really pissed me off though are things like DVD with support to stop the movie from being viewed in certain areas.
That's completely without any reasonable justification, and without a legal leg to stand on.
I support cracking of DVD encryption mainly for this reason.
(Yes, you could sign a license obligating you to only view the movie in north america, or on mondays, or while nude, but if you don't sign anything agreeing to it, they can't legally dictate your usage.)
Is this the only form of copy protection? With this code (and, I'd assume (I haven't look at it yet) some wrapper code) could we copy the movie from the DVD onto a hard drive and play it from there with a standard MPEG player?
There isn't a big fuss over a 5% speed increase. There's a big fuss about the company that designed the original x86 chip, and has always had the fastest product, being beaten by another company.
It rarely rates mention on a news site when a CPU is now 5% faster. What gets mentioned is either a new configuration (the EB rating, or S370, Celeron A, etc) or the breaking of a 'special' barrier, like 500Mhz, or 1Ghz, etc.
What is news worthy now isn't the speed of the CPUs, it's the fact that you have a choice of companies. How many companies are there making Alpha-compatible CPUs? (Not fabbing Alphas, but making a re-engineered CPU that is compatible but faster?)
Yup. You guys got that right. He tests with a T&L accelerated card, with bad AMD drivers.
And it's not like this was part of a Mindcraft-ish anti-AMD article, this looks like it was just a boneheaded mistake.
The TNT2 or V3 seem to have fairly decent drivers and have been out long enough to be known parts, where the GeForce will still have a lot of gotchas we don't know about.
I think that the patent system is broken. Useless. Any benefits that may have been caused by it are now lost.
The idea of a patent agency is that the government trades a temporary monopoly for full disclosure. Someone gets the right to be the only company making a product (or in some cases, doesn't, but gets royalties) and they tell everyone how to make the product so that when the time limit is up, competition will be helped.
It's a great idea. It's probably worth it for a company to trade the chance for a secrecy enforced monopoly for a temporary guaranteed one. It also helps the other companies because everyone gets the information at the same time, not just the sleezy ones who try to buy trade secrets. The consumer benefits because the company can make back R&D costs from higher prices, and thus will bring out a quality product, and the consumer benefits later as well, when the prices drop (ideally after the first company made back costs) and the device gets cheap.
But, what went wrong?
One thing is that protection is too long. And not just in the software field, in any. It doesn't take ten years to gear up a factory, or scour the country for trained engineers. The protection doesn't need to be so long to guarantee a monopoly for a time. Five years might be a better length.
Independent discovery (which is a defense in copyright cases) means nothing. This is a *big* problem. We've all heard of Elijah Grey(sp?) and Bell, and how they both had a telephone, but Elijah was a day(week?) late to patent it... If someone else independently invents something you're trying to patent, or just did, and can prove it was independent, then this should dismiss your patent on grounds that it was too obvious.
It should be "Use it or lose it". If a company patents a competing technology, RISC vs CISC, or Rotary vs Reciprocating engines, and then just lets one sit unused, the patent should be invalidated. The idea of a patent is that it gives the inventor a monopoly on the patented device, not that they can shut down discovery in whole fields to protect themselves for competitors looking for better methods.
This whole triple-indemnity thing stinks. If a patent isn't specific enough for a professional in the field to understand then it's not specific enough in its scope to warrant protection. (Any law saying layman can't function in the field of law is "By lawyers, for lawyers" and is **bad**, it undermines our whole society.)
The patent office should cover the initial cost of the trial for both parties. This way small businesses can afford to sue companies previously immune due to lawyers, and large companies can't put small companies out of business through legal fees. The cost could then be collected from the loser of the trial. So if you sued needlessly, it'd be free until you lost, then you'd have to cough up, so it wouldn't allow free attacks on companies, but it would enable you to protect yourself. Fines should also be attached to the court costs in cases where the patent laws were being misused. (If the patent office allows patents without checking them carefully and fully outlining the areas of coverage, then they should be made to front the costs of the inevitable lawsuits.)
The court proceedings should be handled by a special lawyer-free court for purposes of determining if infringement happened. Then if it did, passing it to the regular courts for damages. This would further lower the prohibitive costs of participating in the legal system. Much like many small-claims courts don't allow claimants to have a lawyer, because the judge plays an investigative role.
I can't think of any other specific changes now, but I'm sure there are more.
The main idea is to bring the patent system back to one that lives up to its old purpose, to encourage competition. To do this we need to punish abusers, lower entry barriers, and get rid of excessive legalese.
Not only should there be no area where non-lawyers are cautioned to stay away from, but if the field is better handled by engineers why do we even need the lawyers if we set the system up right?
Re:Does it really matter?
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No Next Q3Test
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· Score: 1
Unreal is nice, but I can't see how it compares to Q3 in the eye candy department...
Q3 has vastly more detailed levels and the textures are stunning.
UT's levels are muted and awkward.
UT is imho the second best FPS out there, after Q3, but Q3 is *so* far ahead in term of looks.
Re:Q3Test2 map, and smallishness
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No Next Q3Test
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· Score: 1
How true. When player limits are set unreasonably high the game gets less fun. And some maps (q3tourney) just suck.
Reasonable limits:
Q3Test1: 2 - 12 Q3Test2: 2 - 4 Q3Tourney: 2 - 3
The open aspect of q3test2 limits the useful number of players. Everyone can be attacked when respawning, and stocking up again is very hard.
Q3Tourney is a badly designed map in that it's easy for one player to collect all the armor and most weapons/ammo. Three people are recomended to stop massively lopsided games.
Q3Test1 will work for 1on1 games, but is more appropriate with five to eight people.
If you run a server with a playerlimit of more than twelve, run two servers. And you might want to not rotate between all maps because different numbers of players are appropriate for each. Q3test1 is playable with 16, q3tourney is not.
The idea of using a numeric system for internet naming would be to remove the value of any particular address. And then domain name squatting would be as silly as sitting on a random phone number.
Do you remember phone number or business names? Now imagine that instead of having to get out a phone book you merely typed in the name to get the number. Nice and easy.
Especially if you could bookmark the addresses. I mean, when you pull down the bookmarks, do you see http://... or the page titles? It wouldn't matter what the address of the page was because you'd scroll own your bookmark list looking for what the page was called.
And the best thing about this is that it would get rid of DNS problems like 1) the company that runs it, 2) the companies that exploit it, 3) hacks that may barely work, like unicode dns.
If addresses were found based on company names, then merely having a directory system (like altavista, I imagine they'd be ad-revenue driven) and a browser that supported unicode would be enough.
I don't think unicode DNS will ever happen. I mean, IPv6 is a *good* thing and it's hard to convince people of the worth of upgrading, a protocol I'll never see the benefit of, like unicode support, won't be high on my list, nor that of any isp in a country using a roman alphabet. I personally can't see the worth of going through a lot of trouble to expand the system for what seems like negligible benefit. (I can't honestly see any benefit in supporting pictoral-characterset languages. It just makes it easier for people to keep using native languages, and I think the net would benefit if more people used a common language.)
Re: back then - Hex editing System Shock 2 (review
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IBMs 73Gig Drive
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· Score: 1
I just did that in System Shock 2. The adventure was neat, but the running out of ammo and stuff sucked, so I used UltraEdit (Great program) and gave myself 32K nanites and 32K modules. It might have worked with higher numbers, but I didn't need any more...
And the game was great. Go up to a dispenser and get 100+ clips, auto-repair tools, etc.
Then it was just a matter of running around and doing stuff.
BTW, was I the only one who couldn't find all the display panels for the uplink code?
I had three numbers, for four digits, out of five. I didn't know the order, but the 6 had a ] next to it hinting it was at the end. So I tried all the combinations and hit it fairly quickly. Luckily the program didn't start auto-failing all password attempts after three failures in five minutes.:)
Cool game. Too bad you couldn't actually interact with anybody. And you didn't meet any NPCs, just heard messages. And, like most games, you're the only one to survive. Too bad some of the 'cool' people who left the neat messages didn't make it.
But, definately playable. The only drawbacks were the engine (yuck) and the clumsy hand-to-hand weapons.
Slashdot Mirror
Way to use the moderator points. I reply to someone who insulted me, and in a civil manner, and lose a point, while they, for the original flame, don't.
Yet another moderator marks down posts they don't agree with. And they don't even do it right. What the hell does overrated mean in this context? Sheesh.
Actually, he didn't steal the hair.
I've met the boss in real life, and he looks like that.
And, the boss in UF is completely different from the boss in Dilbert. The UF boss is reasonably clued and started the ISP himself. The boss in Dilbert couldn't start his computer himself.
I don't think much was borrowed there.
Not at all.
Promiscuity doesn't seem to be a good indicator of intelligence. But, being religious seems to be a good indicator of a lack of critical thought. Not of bad thought, but just a lack of critical thinking, examining what you are told.
I'm not asserting that any religious people are idiots, let alone all of them. Some of them are, but that's not at all what I said. You didn't even bother to read the posting, just started spouting off.
Quite simply, you are.
Judging someone by what they say is the least bigoted thing you can do. And I didn't even write Knuth off, I just said I'd be more careful in examining the rest of what he says.
Hmmm. Some of UF just doesn't really get a chuckle from me, but some other stuff does. The recent NT server stability one was a funny jab at mindcraft.
If you can read through the whole thing and not laugh at ANY of them, there's probably something wrong with you. I mean, I detest Peanuts and it can still make me laugh every now and then.
And, it's not really suprising that customers at a bookstore wouldn't laugh at most of the jokes, it's insider humor.
Heh. The only picture I saw from the show was of you and Thyla.
:)
Cute.
Hmmm, I just checked to see why your post had a +1 moderation and I noticed you had a 45 karma.
Hmmm. Nothing personal, because most of my karma is based on moderation too, from when I used to moderate, but this is a bit silly... You can get yourself a +1 from just moderating posts.
I think if the +20 karma to get a +1 score has to be in effect, it should be only if you have +20 karma from posting alone.
Just a gripe about the way the system works.
I won't discount someone because they are religious, but I will examine what they say carefully because of the evidence that it's tainted.
You are mischaracterizing faith. It is much more than blindly accepting what someone else is telling you. It is accepting something because you *know* it to be true.
Well, if you *know* it to be true without a lot of evidence, then that seems to indicate something unflattering about how hard you are to convince.
Yeesh. They never stop whining.
Listen twerp, nobody cares. I don't discriminate against xians, I discriminate against all religions equally, as they all indicate the same complete lack of understanding.
And as for the voting thing. I don't. But unfortunately your poor little repressed self and hundreds of millions of others, are unable to vote away from the church line.
You are anything but repressed. You'll never be happy until you can have anyone who disagrees with you 're-educated'. 'Bullshit' like this post, and the one you replied to just proves that not everyone is a close-minded overly-sensitive uneducatable puke like you.
Take your sorry-ass self-pity off to a religious site where people are programmed to care.
I think eventually we'll see religious belief as the same sort of indicator we now see messages about perpetual motion machines. As a sign of someone a little unclear of the whole concept.
Christian bashing is the last refuge of the bigot in this era of political correctness.
Perhaps. But if you're not free to judge somebody based on their opinions, then how the hell are you supposed to form an opinion about anything?
Judging someone on personal grounds by race is wrong. Ethics/Morals aside, it's wrong simply because it skin color doesn't indicate personality. Judging possible skin-cancer victims by race makes sense. Intelligence or creativity have NOT be shown to correspond to skin color, and as such, are stupid things to judge by race.
But, someone's opinions ARE an indicator of their mental processes. Would YOU pick up a neo-nazi hitchhiker? Their behaviour and opinions would tend to indicate violent hatred. Would you go to a doctor who believed in the healing power of engergized crystals? Their opinion would seem to indicate a certain lack of critical thinking.
Similarly, I lose respect for someone who believes in god. It indicates a lack of judgement.
I'm not saying he's a bad person, or that he has nothing valuable to say, but I'll certainly be more critical of what he says, to sort out the good stuff from the religious babble.
On a side note... What really pissed me off with people like the author I'm responding to, and the trend they are a part of, is that they're trying to get people to stop thinking. We're not even allowed to judge people on what they say anymore. Where does this stupidity end?
If you can only appreciate beauty via mystical means, I pity you.
A tree can be just a bunch of wood, and still be beautiful. No need for god in there.
It is different to accept certain facts without having proved them yourself, if they fit into the larger structure of beliefs you have proved.
I know a lot about CPUs. I haven't proved that they actually are doped semiconductors with parts etched away in such a way that electrons can flow through them in certain ways.
I have done enough to this end though that I think I would be justified in believing this, especially if I was willing to entertain the idea that it might be otherwise, if I was offered contradictory proof.
I have used a chisel to crack open chips. I've looked at them under a microscope and examined them as best I can. Both simple ones, like 555 timers, and complex ones like CPUs. In simple ones, or ones designed to work with high current, the elements are big enough you can follow them visually.
I've also taken courses in electronics. I have to accept the existence of an electron, but I have done a lot to verify the existance of, if not electrons, then particles that do exactly what electrons are said to do.
I haven't examined MY CPU by cracking it open, but I accept that if some CPUs are what they are said to be, then it's likely that the one I use now is. I haven't SEEN an electron, but I have seen the results of them in controlled experiements.
Sure, electrons *could* be replaced with tiny angels who are told to *act like* electrons and we'd never know. But I consider that one of the least likely scenarios. Similarly, my CPU could be different from all the others I've looked at, and those could have been planted by the CIA to lead me away from the real secret of digital computers... And I could be just a brain in a jar, and your posting could be generated by an AI.
But, I don't really think so.
I'll base by conclusions on the evidence I've seen, and where it seems I have to accept someone's word too much, I'll investigate myself, or accept as a good story, but unproven.
So in short, we do to accept that we can't know everything, but this doesn't mean we take the rest on faith. We have the proof that what we can investigate is true, and thus the rest seems more likely if it fits with that.
We see many examples of people who believe things without proof. That is faith. We see them do stupid things because of their belief in that faith. That is the proof that faith is bad.
It's not that without faith, nothing is ever bad, but if you base your beliefs on rationality, you're more likely to change your beliefs when they aren't representative of the world.
If you believe what you're told, for example "God exists" without demanding evidence (and i don't mean the ambiguous and self-contradictory Bible), you're not cool - you're just plain dumb.
That is true. Maybe a bit harsh, but true. Especially the part about "without demanding evidence."
People can be lied to, or be wrong. If you look for evidence and find faked evidence, or a liar offering to teach you, that doesn't make you stupid. What makes you stupid is to not look for evidence, and reject it when you find it.
Almost everyone on /. would laugh at someone who believed company benchmarks without demanding to try the product himself. Especially with companies like MindCraft around who do everything possible to distort the truth. Why should we be less critical of someone who believes, with less evidence, in the existence of a god?
It doesn't make them a bad person, but it doesn't indicate a very critical mind.
The material *was* offered up for discussion and evaluation. It was evaluated and commented on.
Comments were solicited, and negative comments, especially when they list a reason, like this one did, are comments too. If the poster was needlessly rude, or just said they didn't like it, without reasons, then it would be a useless post. But the poster listed valid criticisms.
This is a common type of argument used to reduce freedoms. "If you were a good person, you wouldn't WANT to do X, so we can take it away and you shouldn't complain."
Legal penalties exist to punish people who do things 'we' decide are 'wrong'. This is why we don't have to take away the ability to do these things, because people who do them can be dealt with appropriately.
If it was illegal to decrypt these disks except in a licensed player, or to publish decryption information, or even to attempt it, as many companies seem to be lobbying for, then we would lose the ability to do many things that should be legal as well.
Cracking the encryption, being able to copy the movie as a big MPEG file, is an essential step in pirating the movie, but it's also an essential step in viewing the movie in the way that YOU want.
I support the freedoms that let people break the law (or encure civil penalties) because these freedoms are essential for us to live the life we know an deserve.
Good points. What is refered to as piracy is either copyright violation, or license violation, or just something that pisses the company off.
What really pissed me off though are things like DVD with support to stop the movie from being viewed in certain areas.
That's completely without any reasonable justification, and without a legal leg to stand on.
I support cracking of DVD encryption mainly for this reason.
(Yes, you could sign a license obligating you to only view the movie in north america, or on mondays, or while nude, but if you don't sign anything agreeing to it, they can't legally dictate your usage.)
Is this the encryption that hides the raw MPEG2?
Is this the only form of copy protection? With this code (and, I'd assume (I haven't look at it yet) some wrapper code) could we copy the movie from the DVD onto a hard drive and play it from there with a standard MPEG player?
If not, what are the things that prevent this?
There isn't a big fuss over a 5% speed increase. There's a big fuss about the company that designed the original x86 chip, and has always had the fastest product, being beaten by another company.
It rarely rates mention on a news site when a CPU is now 5% faster. What gets mentioned is either a new configuration (the EB rating, or S370, Celeron A, etc) or the breaking of a 'special' barrier, like 500Mhz, or 1Ghz, etc.
What is news worthy now isn't the speed of the CPUs, it's the fact that you have a choice of companies. How many companies are there making Alpha-compatible CPUs? (Not fabbing Alphas, but making a re-engineered CPU that is compatible but faster?)
Yup. You guys got that right. He tests with a T&L accelerated card, with bad AMD drivers.
And it's not like this was part of a Mindcraft-ish anti-AMD article, this looks like it was just a boneheaded mistake.
The TNT2 or V3 seem to have fairly decent drivers and have been out long enough to be known parts, where the GeForce will still have a lot of gotchas we don't know about.
If I hadn't posted in this thread already, I would. This is the best written post I've seen yet on how to deal with the situation!
I think that the patent system is broken. Useless. Any benefits that may have been caused by it are now lost.
The idea of a patent agency is that the government trades a temporary monopoly for full disclosure. Someone gets the right to be the only company making a product (or in some cases, doesn't, but gets royalties) and they tell everyone how to make the product so that when the time limit is up, competition will be helped.
It's a great idea. It's probably worth it for a company to trade the chance for a secrecy enforced monopoly for a temporary guaranteed one. It also helps the other companies because everyone gets the information at the same time, not just the sleezy ones who try to buy trade secrets. The consumer benefits because the company can make back R&D costs from higher prices, and thus will bring out a quality product, and the consumer benefits later as well, when the prices drop (ideally after the first company made back costs) and the device gets cheap.
But, what went wrong?
One thing is that protection is too long. And not just in the software field, in any. It doesn't take ten years to gear up a factory, or scour the country for trained engineers. The protection doesn't need to be so long to guarantee a monopoly for a time. Five years might be a better length.
Independent discovery (which is a defense in copyright cases) means nothing. This is a *big* problem. We've all heard of Elijah Grey(sp?) and Bell, and how they both had a telephone, but Elijah was a day(week?) late to patent it... If someone else independently invents something you're trying to patent, or just did, and can prove it was independent, then this should dismiss your patent on grounds that it was too obvious.
It should be "Use it or lose it". If a company patents a competing technology, RISC vs CISC, or Rotary vs Reciprocating engines, and then just lets one sit unused, the patent should be invalidated. The idea of a patent is that it gives the inventor a monopoly on the patented device, not that they can shut down discovery in whole fields to protect themselves for competitors looking for better methods.
This whole triple-indemnity thing stinks. If a patent isn't specific enough for a professional in the field to understand then it's not specific enough in its scope to warrant protection. (Any law saying layman can't function in the field of law is "By lawyers, for lawyers" and is **bad**, it undermines our whole society.)
The patent office should cover the initial cost of the trial for both parties. This way small businesses can afford to sue companies previously immune due to lawyers, and large companies can't put small companies out of business through legal fees. The cost could then be collected from the loser of the trial. So if you sued needlessly, it'd be free until you lost, then you'd have to cough up, so it wouldn't allow free attacks on companies, but it would enable you to protect yourself. Fines should also be attached to the court costs in cases where the patent laws were being misused. (If the patent office allows patents without checking them carefully and fully outlining the areas of coverage, then they should be made to front the costs of the inevitable lawsuits.)
The court proceedings should be handled by a special lawyer-free court for purposes of determining if infringement happened. Then if it did, passing it to the regular courts for damages. This would further lower the prohibitive costs of participating in the legal system. Much like many small-claims courts don't allow claimants to have a lawyer, because the judge plays an investigative role.
I can't think of any other specific changes now, but I'm sure there are more.
The main idea is to bring the patent system back to one that lives up to its old purpose, to encourage competition. To do this we need to punish abusers, lower entry barriers, and get rid of excessive legalese.
Not only should there be no area where non-lawyers are cautioned to stay away from, but if the field is better handled by engineers why do we even need the lawyers if we set the system up right?
Unreal is nice, but I can't see how it compares to Q3 in the eye candy department...
Q3 has vastly more detailed levels and the textures are stunning.
UT's levels are muted and awkward.
UT is imho the second best FPS out there, after Q3, but Q3 is *so* far ahead in term of looks.
How true. When player limits are set unreasonably high the game gets less fun. And some maps (q3tourney) just suck.
Reasonable limits:
Q3Test1: 2 - 12
Q3Test2: 2 - 4
Q3Tourney: 2 - 3
The open aspect of q3test2 limits the useful number of players. Everyone can be attacked when respawning, and stocking up again is very hard.
Q3Tourney is a badly designed map in that it's easy for one player to collect all the armor and most weapons/ammo. Three people are recomended to stop massively lopsided games.
Q3Test1 will work for 1on1 games, but is more appropriate with five to eight people.
If you run a server with a playerlimit of more than twelve, run two servers. And you might want to not rotate between all maps because different numbers of players are appropriate for each. Q3test1 is playable with 16, q3tourney is not.
The idea of using a numeric system for internet naming would be to remove the value of any particular address. And then domain name squatting would be as silly as sitting on a random phone number.
Do you remember phone number or business names? Now imagine that instead of having to get out a phone book you merely typed in the name to get the number. Nice and easy.
Especially if you could bookmark the addresses. I mean, when you pull down the bookmarks, do you see http://... or the page titles? It wouldn't matter what the address of the page was because you'd scroll own your bookmark list looking for what the page was called.
And the best thing about this is that it would get rid of DNS problems like 1) the company that runs it, 2) the companies that exploit it, 3) hacks that may barely work, like unicode dns.
If addresses were found based on company names, then merely having a directory system (like altavista, I imagine they'd be ad-revenue driven) and a browser that supported unicode would be enough.
I don't think unicode DNS will ever happen. I mean, IPv6 is a *good* thing and it's hard to convince people of the worth of upgrading, a protocol I'll never see the benefit of, like unicode support, won't be high on my list, nor that of any isp in a country using a roman alphabet. I personally can't see the worth of going through a lot of trouble to expand the system for what seems like negligible benefit. (I can't honestly see any benefit in supporting pictoral-characterset languages. It just makes it easier for people to keep using native languages, and I think the net would benefit if more people used a common language.)
I just did that in System Shock 2. The adventure was neat, but the running out of ammo and stuff sucked, so I used UltraEdit (Great program) and gave myself 32K nanites and 32K modules. It might have worked with higher numbers, but I didn't need any more...
:)
And the game was great. Go up to a dispenser and get 100+ clips, auto-repair tools, etc.
Then it was just a matter of running around and doing stuff.
BTW, was I the only one who couldn't find all the display panels for the uplink code?
I had three numbers, for four digits, out of five. I didn't know the order, but the 6 had a ] next to it hinting it was at the end. So I tried all the combinations and hit it fairly quickly. Luckily the program didn't start auto-failing all password attempts after three failures in five minutes.
Cool game. Too bad you couldn't actually interact with anybody. And you didn't meet any NPCs, just heard messages. And, like most games, you're the only one to survive. Too bad some of the 'cool' people who left the neat messages didn't make it.
But, definately playable. The only drawbacks were the engine (yuck) and the clumsy hand-to-hand weapons.