I'm with you man, I really hate games that glorify violence against fish!
Seriously, though, while id has only ever made one game, DOOM (which was simply Wolf 3D with better graphics and multiplayer), and then made upmty-million dollars rereleasing the exact same game with better graphics for how many years now? FPS's are not all just mindless twitch-fests.
I haven't tried out Deus Ex yet, but System Shock, from way back and more recently System Shock 2 are FPS's with a rich environment, rich game mechanics, and while they do involve a fair amount of running around shooting things, they also have interesting story-lines that draw you in... characters you can take an interest in, and a great sense of immersion in an non-trivial science fiction world and satisfaction in succeeding at the game.
I was referring to NT 4. I haven't had enough experience with Win2k since none of the moron hardware people have drivers for it (like HP for the HP Photo Scanner).
You would think after 2 years + of betas and being out for 6 months people could support a new OS.
The Simpsons Movie (with 53% new material)
I'll have to forbid my oldest son from seeing it until he makes it to the Supreme Court.
Hey, as long as it's not "The Simpsons Meet the Flintstones", I'll go see it.
Well, since there are about upmty-bazillion places where life might exist but probably doesn't in the universe, as a prosepctive interstellar traveller, I'd much rather let the machines _find_ the life first than waste my life on the eleventy-scrillion-to-one odds that my target system has intelligent life.
If the Earth-bound SETI fails to locate anything, then our only hope is to visit places. I'd rather not make the trip myself until I'm sure there's something to see. If we start getting plans for a FTL device interlaced with Nazi films from Vega, I'd love to go, otherwise it's a pretty big haystack.
Excellent point. Explorer is probably _the_ buggiest and generally most poorly designed piece of software MS makes. It's ironic that it's the one we all use the most.
It's part of the OS the way IE is, underneath, except for using certain hardware, I've found NT is pretty hard to crash, and since a lot of the moron hardware vendors _still_ don't have Win2K drivers, I'm still using NT 4.0 most of the time.
Actually you've got a very good point. My BSOD joke was just karma whoring in a big way.
My personal experience with NT over several years is that the BSOD's I've seen always seem to be hardware related, like if I try to access SCSI devices while using DirectCD to write to a CD-R, etc. Now, this is a pretty crappy problem, but it is usually easy to work around.
In fact the only software I generally have to reboot to fix is Explorer (not IE normally, but Explorer itself).
My point is that MS could release Office for Linux, but no one would want to use it if it _required_ an MS distro.
Furthermore, don't think for a minute that any current Linux distro with any current Linux software package will be sufficient for the typical Windows user in the near future. Linux may come to rule the world, but it won't happen for many years. Office for Linux could, in fact, be a big thing _for_ Linux, since, as was pointed out above, Office is often the _only_ reason many businesses use Windows at all.
Windows isn't going away any time soon, nor should it, but as the Linux community continues to perfect the Linux platform, hopefully more and more people will move to it, and maybe, in turn, Microsoft will be pressured into making their own software better.
It's a shame it won't occur to anyone outside the geek community that the reason MICROS~1 can't port Office to Linux is that they can't write anything in an environment where they can't freely hack the OS to get around problems.
Unless, Office for Linux ultimately requires that you run it on MSLinux 2001.
Sega Nomad? I would love to get one (or more) of those for my kids, but it seems they only sold them for about 2 months. Can you still get one?
I was going to get one for my kids for Christmas, and they abruptly disappeared, which is a shame because I was waiting for Sega to make one for years, seeing as how the Game Gear was essentially a portable Master System.
I thought the Game Boy looked dated when it first came out. Imagine it still being popular in 2000. Heck, I thought it looked like an minor update to the Microvision from about 1980 (which was extremely cool in it's day, but now you can get better stuff on a $5 key chain). But I guess If there's decent games for it that's all that matters.
The new screenshots look nice, but I'll stick to Total Annihilation and Nethack on my laptop.
Personally, I think the ultimate hand-held would be an HP Jornada with a CE port of MAME and a nice plug-in controller. It can certainly handle emulating almost any game worth playing. We can all dream.
I don't think I can sell this any more. But look! Someone is giving it away on an abandonware site. Those bastards! And people want it, too. Therefore, it has value and they are stealing from me. I'm gonna make them stop, so I can continue to sit on this dead product.
Either way they don't make money, so I would argue they're being bastards just on principle.
Of course, I recently purchased a collection of over 30 Infocom games for about US$15 in a download-only format. Guess what? I was happy to do so, and would be happy to do so for many of these old abandoned classics. But if the owners aren't willing to make this software (or music, or movies, etc), available, they have, in effect, given up any copy protection rights they have.
Of course the letter of the law doesn't see it that way, but why should the government punish me just because I don't know where the one used software store in the country that actually has a copy of this package is (if there even is one)?
I think the same setup that allows Activision to sell me all the Interactive Fiction I'll ever need for the price of dinner can (and will) be utilized by more and more companies simply because it would require almost no work on their part to participate.
All they need to do is copy a few floppies (defeating copy-protection might be an issue for the turds who were actually malicious enough to have used it in the first place), scan some manuals, sign over a cut to the Web vendor and sit back and cash the checks.
I have no problem paying a small amount of money for abandoned software as-is with no warranty. After all, I generally expect a certain percentage of software (particularly games) I buy to ultimately prove worthless to me.
The solution is out there and companies who want to generate a little good will among customers for very little effort can do so, and those that just want to perpetuate the stereotype of the greedy corporate bastards (three times in one post, I need a new word) can do so too.
Unfortunately, we've seen which way most companies go. Let's hope that starts changing a little bit.
> how would he have gotten the word out other than being in front waving a standard?
Believe it or not, in MLK's day there was something called the printing press. It used a series of moveable type pieces to imprint dye markings of analog representations of the ASCII character set, as well as other character sets and even arbitrarily complex graphics onto pressed sheets of bleached wood pulp fiber. The system, which is still in use today, has a very high display resolution, requires no power, is not subject to magnetism or eletrical fields and is quite durable.
Seriously though, MLK's public actions, as well as Jesus, etc, were very important to getting their point across, but the fact of the matter is none of us were alive when Jesus was and many of us were not alive when MLK was. We have found out about these event by either oral tradition or reading about them (I think it can be argued that TV is analougous if much more elaborate), i.e., communication by language.
At the core, any kind of public discourse must and will be at the level of an exchange of words. Actions are certainly necessary to back upo your point, but they only directly affect a small number of people.
The ability to exchange even simple text documents freely (beer and speech) and anonymously will greatly empower anyone, particularly in an oppresive regime.
By the way, Kilroy happened during the Second World War. IIUC, he was working somewhere that involved shipping supplies for the military and would write "Kilroy was here" on the crates. Since these supplies were being shipped all over the world, his name started appearing mysteriously all over the place and no one could figure out how someone could spread graffiti literally from one side of the world to another. Eventually the reason came out.
It is still easy to find major pieces of software that don't support NT/2000. First off, unless you are using DirectX, USB or PnP, porting anything that runs on Win95 to NT 4.0 should be trivial, and yet many companies still don't do it. Now aside from the fact that most developers are idiots, the main reason for this is probably that there just isn't much demand for it.
I've kept Win9X installed on my machine for years for the sole purpose of playing games (and other software packages) that don't run on NT. I'm hoping this will get better with Windows 2000 to which I am slowly migrating, but I'm currently having difficulty getting even all the stuff I ran on NT to work on W2K...:(
Well, if Slashdot can do it with an article whose title implies Hotmail is about to fail due to Windows 2000, when no such thing was stated in the article, then I guess others can too.
I thought I read that the astronauts routinely took a laptop (or laptops) with them and that the computers could be used to help navigate if the shuttle's computer and 4 backups fail.
This kind of technology allows you to concurrently run multiple operating systems written for the same processor. In the case of Plex86, you will be able to run multiple Intel x86 based operating systems on the same machine. Thus the answer is no. However, the virtualization concepts used by Plex86 can be extended to other platforms.
For running x86 operating systems and applications on non-x86 machines, check out Kevin Lawton's x86 PC emulator site www.bochs.com. He's currently adding dynamic translation, which will really speed up the emulation.
The PiHex project is actually starting to run down. I think the project is actually ending soon. I've personally done a couple of CPU-years on it myself. However, at http://www.entropia.com, they are running very large distributed computing projects and are about to release a major new release of their software. I've also been crunching for Mersenne primes for them for a couple of years or so. After I first heard about SETI having more processing than they could ever use, I decided to devote my spare cycles to something a little more concrete. I think SETI is a fine project, but in the case of pi and Mersenne primes, you will eventually have a definitive answer (nth bit of pi, M[x] is/is not prime). Rick
Isn't sequencing the Human genome the equivalent of dumping the ROM's? Don't we now have to understand all the details of what it means, which, it seems to me, is orders of magnitude more complex? I'm sure a lot of progress can be made by twiddling bits and seeing what breaks (in the lab, or with lower organisms, I wouldn't expierment with people!), but isn't there a lot more to do (i.e., decades of work) before we become Gattaca?
But wait... we have a constitutional right to privacy according to "Roe v. Wade"!
Of course, that only applies if you want an abortion, and has nothing to do with privacy.
Seriously, though, the fourth amendment does guarantee a reasonable degree of privacy WRT the government. Of course, "unreasonable" is turning out to be as slippery a concept as "interstate commerce".
I can see advertisers, through DoubleClick, etc, notice that I never read ads (actually the Proxomitron filters out 95% of them for me, but I ignore them nonetheless) and they will charge me more when I attempt to buy something on-line.
You obviously haven't spent much time working with typical programmers have you?
While what you're saying is perfectly true, the advanced tools are making it harder and harder to go outside the narrowly-defined box of functionality they provide. To use VC++ as an example: To do anything non-trivial with MFC you need to dig into the source code and should really have a working knowledge of the Windows SDK (anyone remember that?). Microsoft is not going to go through any trouble to make this easier. The documentation is weak and often incomplete and MFC is easily an order of magnitude more complex than it needs to be for what it does. To this day, I still find myself having to use trial and error to figure what some things do. (In the meantime, I am slowly writing a class library that I will eventually use in place of MFC).
For those of us who worked our way up through the years (I started programming windows with 3.0), this is not insurmountable since it is part of a natural progression of the tools (however cheesy they may be), but for a complete novice, it would be overwhelming and almost impossible to make any progress without a whole lotta help from a senior person.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm with you man, I really hate games that glorify violence against fish!
Seriously, though, while id has only ever made one game, DOOM (which was simply Wolf 3D with better graphics and multiplayer), and then made upmty-million dollars rereleasing the exact same game with better graphics for how many years now? FPS's are not all just mindless twitch-fests.
I haven't tried out Deus Ex yet, but System Shock, from way back and more recently System Shock 2 are FPS's with a rich environment, rich game mechanics, and while they do involve a fair amount of running around shooting things, they also have interesting story-lines that draw you in... characters you can take an interest in, and a great sense of immersion in an non-trivial science fiction world and satisfaction in succeeding at the game.
I was referring to NT 4. I haven't had enough experience with Win2k since none of the moron hardware people have drivers for it (like HP for the HP Photo Scanner).
You would think after 2 years + of betas and being out for 6 months people could support a new OS.
The Simpsons Movie (with 53% new material) I'll have to forbid my oldest son from seeing it until he makes it to the Supreme Court. Hey, as long as it's not "The Simpsons Meet the Flintstones", I'll go see it.
They could lock you down to one distro if that's the only one the software worked on!
Just because MS releases their own distro, adhereing properly to the GPL doesn't mean they would GPL Office.
This is all a contrived scenario, but Ive seen MS do worse things.
Rick
Well, since there are about upmty-bazillion places where life might exist but probably doesn't in the universe, as a prosepctive interstellar traveller, I'd much rather let the machines _find_ the life first than waste my life on the eleventy-scrillion-to-one odds that my target system has intelligent life.
...er, skies
If the Earth-bound SETI fails to locate anything, then our only hope is to visit places. I'd rather not make the trip myself until I'm sure there's something to see. If we start getting plans for a FTL device interlaced with Nazi films from Vega, I'd love to go, otherwise it's a pretty big haystack.
Rick
Keep watching the skis!
Excellent point. Explorer is probably _the_ buggiest and generally most poorly designed piece of software MS makes. It's ironic that it's the one we all use the most. It's part of the OS the way IE is, underneath, except for using certain hardware, I've found NT is pretty hard to crash, and since a lot of the moron hardware vendors _still_ don't have Win2K drivers, I'm still using NT 4.0 most of the time.
Actually you've got a very good point. My BSOD joke was just karma whoring in a big way.
My personal experience with NT over several years is that the BSOD's I've seen always seem to be hardware related, like if I try to access SCSI devices while using DirectCD to write to a CD-R, etc. Now, this is a pretty crappy problem, but it is usually easy to work around.
In fact the only software I generally have to reboot to fix is Explorer (not IE normally, but Explorer itself).
Rick
>... and your point would be?
My point is that MS could release Office for Linux, but no one would want to use it if it _required_ an MS distro.
Furthermore, don't think for a minute that any current Linux distro with any current Linux software package will be sufficient for the typical Windows user in the near future. Linux may come to rule the world, but it won't happen for many years. Office for Linux could, in fact, be a big thing _for_ Linux, since, as was pointed out above, Office is often the _only_ reason many businesses use Windows at all.
Windows isn't going away any time soon, nor should it, but as the Linux community continues to perfect the Linux platform, hopefully more and more people will move to it, and maybe, in turn, Microsoft will be pressured into making their own software better.
It's a shame it won't occur to anyone outside the geek community that the reason MICROS~1 can't port Office to Linux is that they can't write anything in an environment where they can't freely hack the OS to get around problems.
Unless, Office for Linux ultimately requires that you run it on MSLinux 2001.
how difficult will it be to port the Blue Screen of Death?
Sega Nomad? I would love to get one (or more) of those for my kids, but it seems they only sold them for about 2 months. Can you still get one?
I was going to get one for my kids for Christmas, and they abruptly disappeared, which is a shame because I was waiting for Sega to make one for years, seeing as how the Game Gear was essentially a portable Master System.
I thought the Game Boy looked dated when it first came out. Imagine it still being popular in 2000. Heck, I thought it looked like an minor update to the Microvision from about 1980 (which was extremely cool in it's day, but now you can get better stuff on a $5 key chain). But I guess If there's decent games for it that's all that matters.
The new screenshots look nice, but I'll stick to Total Annihilation and Nethack on my laptop.
Personally, I think the ultimate hand-held would be an HP Jornada with a CE port of MAME and a nice plug-in controller. It can certainly handle emulating almost any game worth playing. We can all dream.
Rick
Look at it from the company's point of view:
I don't think I can sell this any more. But look! Someone is giving it away on an abandonware site. Those bastards! And people want it, too. Therefore, it has value and they are stealing from me. I'm gonna make them stop, so I can continue to sit on this dead product.
Either way they don't make money, so I would argue they're being bastards just on principle.
Of course, I recently purchased a collection of over 30 Infocom games for about US$15 in a download-only format. Guess what? I was happy to do so, and would be happy to do so for many of these old abandoned classics. But if the owners aren't willing to make this software (or music, or movies, etc), available, they have, in effect, given up any copy protection rights they have.
Of course the letter of the law doesn't see it that way, but why should the government punish me just because I don't know where the one used software store in the country that actually has a copy of this package is (if there even is one)?
I think the same setup that allows Activision to sell me all the Interactive Fiction I'll ever need for the price of dinner can (and will) be utilized by more and more companies simply because it would require almost no work on their part to participate.
All they need to do is copy a few floppies (defeating copy-protection might be an issue for the turds who were actually malicious enough to have used it in the first place), scan some manuals, sign over a cut to the Web vendor and sit back and cash the checks.
I have no problem paying a small amount of money for abandoned software as-is with no warranty. After all, I generally expect a certain percentage of software (particularly games) I buy to ultimately prove worthless to me.
The solution is out there and companies who want to generate a little good will among customers for very little effort can do so, and those that just want to perpetuate the stereotype of the greedy corporate bastards (three times in one post, I need a new word) can do so too.
Unfortunately, we've seen which way most companies go. Let's hope that starts changing a little bit.
> how would he have gotten the word out other than being in front waving a standard?
Believe it or not, in MLK's day there was something called the printing press. It used a series of moveable type pieces to imprint dye markings of analog representations of the ASCII character set, as well as other character sets and even arbitrarily complex graphics onto pressed sheets of bleached wood pulp fiber. The system, which is still in use today, has a very high display resolution, requires no power, is not subject to magnetism or eletrical fields and is quite durable.
Seriously though, MLK's public actions, as well as Jesus, etc, were very important to getting their point across, but the fact of the matter is none of us were alive when Jesus was and many of us were not alive when MLK was. We have found out about these event by either oral tradition or reading about them (I think it can be argued that TV is analougous if much more elaborate), i.e., communication by language.
At the core, any kind of public discourse must and will be at the level of an exchange of words. Actions are certainly necessary to back upo your point, but they only directly affect a small number of people.
The ability to exchange even simple text documents freely (beer and speech) and anonymously will greatly empower anyone, particularly in an oppresive regime.
By the way, Kilroy happened during the Second World War. IIUC, he was working somewhere that involved shipping supplies for the military and would write "Kilroy was here" on the crates. Since these supplies were being shipped all over the world, his name started appearing mysteriously all over the place and no one could figure out how someone could spread graffiti literally from one side of the world to another. Eventually the reason came out.
Rick
It is still easy to find major pieces of software that don't support NT/2000. First off, unless you are using DirectX, USB or PnP, porting anything that runs on Win95 to NT 4.0 should be trivial, and yet many companies still don't do it. Now aside from the fact that most developers are idiots, the main reason for this is probably that there just isn't much demand for it.
:(
I've kept Win9X installed on my machine for years for the sole purpose of playing games (and other software packages) that don't run on NT. I'm hoping this will get better with Windows 2000 to which I am slowly migrating, but I'm currently having difficulty getting even all the stuff I ran on NT to work on W2K...
Rick
Well, if Slashdot can do it with an article whose title implies Hotmail is about to fail due to Windows 2000, when no such thing was stated in the article, then I guess others can too.
You're right, it's all about the clicks.
Rick
I thought I read that the astronauts routinely took a laptop (or laptops) with them and that the computers could be used to help navigate if the shuttle's computer and 4 backups fail.
No, from http://www.plex86.org:
Will this run on my Mac?
This kind of technology allows you to concurrently run multiple operating systems written for the same processor. In the case of Plex86, you will be able to run multiple Intel x86 based operating systems on the same machine. Thus the answer is no. However, the virtualization concepts used by Plex86 can be extended to other platforms.
For running x86 operating systems and applications on non-x86 machines, check out Kevin Lawton's x86 PC emulator site www.bochs.com. He's currently adding dynamic translation, which will really speed up the emulation.
Well, at least we're working with a RISC processor... only 4 instructions. :)
He has defeated us numerous times, what makes him think he can do it again?
The PiHex project is actually starting to run down. I think the project is actually ending soon. I've personally done a couple of CPU-years on it myself. However, at http://www.entropia.com, they are running very large distributed computing projects and are about to release a major new release of their software. I've also been crunching for Mersenne primes for them for a couple of years or so. After I first heard about SETI having more processing than they could ever use, I decided to devote my spare cycles to something a little more concrete. I think SETI is a fine project, but in the case of pi and Mersenne primes, you will eventually have a definitive answer (nth bit of pi, M[x] is/is not prime). Rick
Isn't sequencing the Human genome the equivalent of dumping the ROM's? Don't we now have to understand all the details of what it means, which, it seems to me, is orders of magnitude more complex? I'm sure a lot of progress can be made by twiddling bits and seeing what breaks (in the lab, or with lower organisms, I wouldn't expierment with people!), but isn't there a lot more to do (i.e., decades of work) before we become Gattaca?
The difference being there are some attorneys that actually perform a useful service...
But wait... we have a constitutional right to privacy according to "Roe v. Wade"!
Of course, that only applies if you want an abortion, and has nothing to do with privacy.
Seriously, though, the fourth amendment does guarantee a reasonable degree of privacy WRT the government. Of course, "unreasonable" is turning out to be as slippery a concept as "interstate commerce".
Take this a step further:
I can see advertisers, through DoubleClick, etc, notice that I never read ads (actually the Proxomitron filters out 95% of them for me, but I ignore them nonetheless) and they will charge me more when I attempt to buy something on-line.
Rick
You obviously haven't spent much time working with typical programmers have you?
While what you're saying is perfectly true, the advanced tools are making it harder and harder to go outside the narrowly-defined box of functionality they provide. To use VC++ as an example: To do anything non-trivial with MFC you need to dig into the source code and should really have a working knowledge of the Windows SDK (anyone remember that?). Microsoft is not going to go through any trouble to make this easier. The documentation is weak and often incomplete and MFC is easily an order of magnitude more complex than it needs to be for what it does. To this day, I still find myself having to use trial and error to figure what some things do. (In the meantime, I am slowly writing a class library that I will eventually use in place of MFC).
For those of us who worked our way up through the years (I started programming windows with 3.0), this is not insurmountable since it is part of a natural progression of the tools (however cheesy they may be), but for a complete novice, it would be overwhelming and almost impossible to make any progress without a whole lotta help from a senior person.
Give the kid an Apple ][.