Well look how well your current administration "walked right over" Iraq, who aren't possessed of exactly the most technically sophiphisticated fighting force on the planet.. and that was in a country that the government doesn't even particularly need to be mostly intact afterwards (ie they're not shitting where they sleep every time they blow a building up)
I don't know too much about asymmetric warfare but I'd bet fighting a pitched urban war against a mostly unsympathetic population is as much of a walk in the park as it's made out to be.
I would love to see a large scale tournament like this for DDR sometime (google for 10K Commotion -- it's a webcomic based around a fictional event of this scale).
Being good at DDR isn't a walk in the park either, you have to be in good shape and have a pretty impeccable sense of rhythm. Good players can keep up with the 10 step per second step charts at the top end of the difficulty range, the best can hit every single step in those songs to within 30 milliseconds of the beat, which is the criterion required to achieve the maximum grade of AAA. Suffice it to say I'm not quite that good (although I've managed to get a few AAAs on the easier songs...)
Because the Sun guy actually makes coherent and valid points whereas this guy says a load of what is essentially meaningless cheer-leading? I think you'll find a lot of businesses like to have a reasonable degree of reliability in their servers. Telling people to get stuffed when ReiserFS decides to randomly shit the bed and completely annihilate your business data won't impress many people (it's done this several times for me on MAINLINE KERNELS, there is absolutely NO excuse for that. Don't tell me to send in dumps and patches, mainline means "this does not NEED debugging and is safe to use", period). I'm not talking running a major financial institution or a nuclear power plant here, I'm talking about being reasonably sure that today's data will still be here tomorrow.
That's just filesystems. Once upon a time Linux was really great because it was amazingly robust, small, fast and elegant. Today we have frequent kernel panics and X server flakiness, gigantic frameworks for desktop environments and gigabyte sized base installs. I suppose I can forgive flaky and sometimes limited support for exotic hardware because PCs are really complicated beasts these days, and a lot of hardware manufacturers are incredibly pig headed about these things but it would really be nice to have my two year old laptop actually wake up from ACPI sleep. No it's not a DSDT error. No I do not want to use Software Suspend because it is a hack. Nevermind the fact that it takes 5 minutes (as in around 300 seconds) to suspend on a 1GB swap with 256MB of RAM and several minutes to wake up again.
Linux sucks, get over it. Yes I use it, that's because everything else sucks more.
MythTV wasted a month of my life (I was somewhat roped into installing it, otherwise I wouldn't get a replacement system for my aging laptop)
Just off the top of my head you need to set up:
- XMLTV grabbing and channel numbering. In the UK this is murderous... I ended up writing a scraper for the NTL EPG called tv_grab_uk_ntl, I'll prolly post it to the xmltv mailing list or summat.
- Dual head X. nVidia makes this easyish if you're happy with XF86Config but running GNOME alongside is absolutely infuriating. It insists on drawing those damn bars on the TV display as well, and Myth needs to be focused to work properly. I still haven't found a solution to this. Not being able to use a desktop alongside is kind of a no-no. This is unforgivable because marking a window Always On Top makes it go above the bars. Why doesn't Myth do this.
- Infra-red is a nightmare. You have to muck about with settings.pro to make it link against lirc (ever heard of autoconf?), and there's no graphical toolkit for it so you have to edit lircrc and restart and try it and edit and restart and... Oh yeah did I mention the keyboard interface is REALLY damn hard to usefully map to a remote control? It doesn't even have an explicit PLAY button ffs!
- Infra red part 2. This isn't so much a problem with MythTV but setting up an infra red blaster to work with a cable box is also a pain. I subscribe to NTL so I bought something called RedEye (google for Pace Redeye) and modified the software that came with it a bit to run as a daemon that listens of a FIFO to avoid the startup delay on the device every time the channel needs to be switched. I shall release that patched version back to the owner too once I've got some time spare.
I think this is more to do with LIRC, but LIRC as it is now really feels like some sort of hobbyist kit (complete with the circuit diagrams for rolling your own IR hardware... I just went with an Irman and Redeye to save the hassle). Some GUI setup tools would really not go amiss.
- PAGES AND PAGES AND PAGES of settings, the defaults for which don't make much sense usually. Here's a suggestion, when in doubt do what TiVo does. The default ffwd/rewind behaviour is unusable, it doesn't remember where you left off watching a programme unless you tell it to (why not?). To name just two problems.
- Weird menu system. The setup menus are split almost arbitrarily between mythfrontend and mythsetup, using the system from a remote is very strange (menu navigation and channel switching seems to collide). There is no warning about scheduling collisions so you always have to check the recording schedule. There's no at-a-glance "season pass" editor, so if you want to cancel a season pass you have to find the next instance of the show. Many many minor niggles like this.
- Inexplicable encoding weirnesses everywhere. It either skips and stutters or records in awful quality (on a 2GHz hyperthreading Xeon with half a GB of memory, which the site claims should be able to record TWO streams in MPEG4 at once AND play one back at the same time). Or you spend ages messing about with the recording profiles to get it just right (would it really be so hard to add a 'PAL/NTSC/VGA/Custom' resolution option instead of having to guess that the encoder will only be happy with 740x578 or whatever the hell it is?). I got frustrated with this and got a Hauppage MPEG2 hardware encoder. After getting IVTV up and running on Linux 2.6 with some oddball patched version it then encoded great... except the A/V then began to drift. Back to another round of messing with the settings then recording another programme to test it then messing with them again. Yes I have messed with all the AV sync settings. Should this REALLY require user intervention?
- NUV format with opaque filenames. WHY? Okay if you have it set up to use RTJPEG/NuppelVideo for realtime encoding then yes I can understand this but why use the container after transcoding when the data is in MPEG4/MP3? I know about mythtranscod
Good weather: check Good food: check Nice people: check Hot women: CHECK. Loads of bemani: well, at least in Rimini... Judiciary that knows its head from its ass: possibly, by the looks of things
Lemme put it this way, it's tempting (I went on holiday there about a week ago).
This is in my opinion just another patch and not a true solution, but it stops people from claiming that they're from your domain and quite a few large ISPs observe SPF now (AOL being one of them)
But yeah, the parent poster was absoultely right. Coding in zillions of special cases and heuristics and different authentication protocols won't help. An internet with pervasive IP-level security and a federated set of PKI roots backed by an agreed on Internet Constitution drawn up by We The Fucking People (as opposed to In Disney We Trust) is the long term goal.
"Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."
A BIOS where there's nothing left to take away hauls the OS into memory, maybe sets up pmode and jumps into it. Granted there might be some issues with stuff like ATA/SATA/SCSI/USB/Firewire/Ethernet/InsertNewStand ardHere but a well defined x86 "OS image loading capability interface" or something can handle that. EFI bytecode only makes sense when you have a large number of architectures using EFI in the first place. Considering the snobbishness and NIH syndrome rampant everywhere I somehow doubt that's going to happen.
And I once commented to myself that my odds of going out with a certain girl were "about as great as the chance of me being hit by a meteorite whilst indoors"
I think I'll need to add "in the next five seconds" next time I use that.
3. My computer is a tool and not a battle ground. Yes I know XP can be kept secure by constantly applying service packs, virus scans, scumware cleaners, popup blockers, alternative web browsers and "firewalls" (it's great how you need a utility that only makes sense on a LAN border to block up sockets that shouldn't be there in the first place. My Linux box has no iptables simply because it has no listening services. "personal firewall" is an oxymoron). I personally don't think it's worth the hassle. This is probably offset by rather dodgy driver support under Linux, though.
2. I like command lines. Just a personal preference.
1. _I_ own my god damn computer. Putting their business practices aside, I dislike Microsoft for one simple reason: they're all about making you use their web browser, their office suite, their media player under their rules. Whether it's that infernal box pestering me to get a Passport, which can't be disabled, or the locks on WMA files (ok these can be disabled. I think), or the reporting back of my software and music preferences, which can't be disabled, or the deliberate crippling of the media functions, which can't be disabled, I am SICK TO THE FUCKING STOMACH of their bloody "my way or the highway" attitude towards everything.
And the reason that I don't use a Mac is that Apple really aren't much better with their obsession with AAC and FairPlay(TM) and a quite obvious bent towards iPod (you're not going to see an open music player synchronisation API/framework in iTunes, and here's a hint: it's not because of technical reasons) and an upgrade treadmill quite reminiscent of YouKnowWho.
How's about the following: Choose MP3. Choose OGG. Choose FLAC. Choose MPlayer, choose Xine. Choose KDE. Choose GNOME. Choose Firefox, Konqueror, kmail, evolution. Choose "mencoder -o my_dvd_that_i_fucking_paid_for.avi dvd://1". Choose no Client Access Licenses on Apache or ProFTPd or SAMBA.
My computer answers to ME and not some cunt in Redmond. Same as any other tool I have in my house, why should my computer be any different. Now if only it would actually wake up after ACPI sleep...
As opposed to a gigantically bloated "Platform" that's about as speedy as a quadrapalegic on ketamine? And where one business has a very strong interest in the platform, interests which can quickly lead to conflicts of interest which will make the whole thing drown in politics?
D looks like a good idea. I'd actually support that, the language is clean and straightforward. Although I don't know how open it is, but it was consciously designed, and doesn't have a VM or a religious mania about it so I think I like it already.
The Java spec and compatibility will be diluted? Surely trademark law was designed to prevent this very problem.
I dunno if Java is a trademark or not, but either with a trademark or a license clause in the distribution, Sun could require that any derivative product that does not conform to the Java spec may not use the word "Java" in its name or in any promotional literature (kinda like a saner version of the BSD advertising clause).
I can't imagine Sun actually depends on the technical specification as a significant revenue source. People despise Microsoft these days more than ever and don't much care to be locked into their.NET system which has just one lord who can force you further along the upgrade treadmill at a whim. Sun putting their money where their mouth is and truly making an open Java implementation available could be just what it needs.
(Come to think of it the spec already is pretty much 'open' thanks to the JCP. So you have to pay Sun for a copy of the spec. You have to pay ISO or ANSI or whoever to the C and C++ specs too... right?)
The Xbox version (Ultramix) has a Live! play facility... but personally I think it misses the point a bit.
Even if you've got a CF kit and all the damn home mixes ever DDR is still at its heart an arcade game. You play on standardised hardware with good, challenging timing windows. There's a scoreboard for you to try to knock local players' scores off, and there's usually plenty of other people around who you can chat with and compare accomplishments with. I've got a few good friends in a nearby city just because I turned up at the arcade there once for a quick game.
DDR has a major competitive element, and it's the driving force that makes people keep playing and accomplish more and more. There are a lot of tournaments, but the problem is it's very hard for a new player to get a look in there. Most of the people in the tournaments have been playing for _years_ and they know every in and out of every last song on the machine and it's becoming more and more common to see people with tens or even hundreds of AAA's under their belt (a AAA is a perfect score on a song which requires you to hit every last arrow to within 33 milliseconds of the beat. This is HARD -- I've done it a couple of times on one really really easy song, although that was on Standard difficulty and when someone says AAA the implication is AAA on Maniac difficulty). There is also a general concensus that DDR is dying at the moment (cue BSD trolls). The fact that Konami have all but officially axed the arcade series of games, which is the only one that expert players really care about, doesn't help matters..
The actual gameplay concept DDR is basically a cross between playing the drums with your feet and jumping like a jackrabbit on amphetamines. The only thing the game grades you on is how close to the beat you are (the highest step grade is within about 30 milliseconds).
I'm a hardcore DDR player... I can pass just about all the songs on the game and with a good grade, but my dancing sucked awful before I started and it hasn't got any better (trust me. There's bad dancers and there's people the bad dancers point and laugh at).
DDR's really good fun and all but I strongly recommend you don't try and bust out Max 300 on an actual dance floor. Although, to quote a guy on a DDR messageboard: "You wouldn't DDR step in a club, but then you wouldn't mosh in a ballroom either". Dancing has a fairly broad definition... but even so it does tend to involve some upper body movement. A lot of expert players just clamp their upper body to the support bar behind the dance stage so that they can hit 10 steps per second and still stay upright, although I personally find this to be bad form.
Hi. I'm Second_Derivative, and I am also a DDR addict. Unfortunately I'm a skinny little bastard so I didn't have any weight to lose in the first place from playing DDR (although I seem to have lost some anyway which is a bit worrying). With that in mind, take what I say with a pinch of salt.
Firstly, before you shell out $300 for a cobalt flux, grab $10 or so and pop down to your local arcade (I'm assuming you live in the US or Canada). With luck you should see a DDR Extreme machine (or maybe some flavour of Max. Don't play DDRUSA, the hardware is ancient and the song selection is pretty abysmal). Pop in a few credits, put it on Beginner or Light mode and try a few songs. Ask some of the other players there if you need any help -- one of the things that really stands out about DDR is its community. Unless the players there are a load of elitist wankers they'll usually be more than happy to help a newcomer get to grips with the game.
Try this for a few days and see if DDR is the game for you. If you don't like the game, it isn't going to work, pure and simple. To get to the stage where you're going to really burn large amounts of energy, you'll need to be playing songs with a rating of 9 (these are referred to as 'catas' in the lingo), or 10 if you can manage those. Ask some of the local players to demonstrate what this involves. The point is it will take several months' worth of practice to get up to that level. You have to keep pushing yourself to try the next difficulty level otherwise you're not going to exert yourself. Hopefully though if you like the game you'll find yourself wanting to do that anyway.
Anyway, if you decide you're up for it, then yeah go for at least a RedOctane pad (although I'd buy a BNS Beatgear if you want to go down that route. Same sort of construction, cheaper, and RedOctane tends to astroturf a lot which personally really pisses me off), but if you can afford it go for Cobalt Flux. If you're in the EU, go to liksang.com or playasia.com and look for "metal mat with rail". Anything below Cobalt Flux will usually require some custom modifications to be able to withstand heavy play. That and I haven't heard of anyone passing, say, Max 300 on a soft mat (the 300 refers to the song's BPM by the way. Let's just say it's one of the harder ones...).
As for a PC setup, Stepmania is a good bet, and DDRUK.com do some good bumper packs (just download the Dance Dance Revolution (n)th Mix -(Whatever)- and PSX/PS2 and Solo packs and don't bother with all the weird Disney/Tokemeki/whatever offshoot versions). Any good non-Radioshack PS2 to USB converter should work... other posts have covered this issue in more detail.
Try to get into the community of it a bit as well. Competition with your fellow players is the single best driving force for getting better, and I certainly wouldn't be as good as I am now if I didn't regularly converse with people who were much better. DDRUK itself has a really good community, try joining that (list Tau as your referer:D )
For servers, go with something like Debian: good clean integrated system with timely and automatic security updates. Not bleeding edge, but if it's at all a serious server you really don't want it to be.
Desktops, Ports based system all the way. Why? Because with something like Gentoo, it might take several days to compile but you can be assured you're not going to dependency hell anytime soon when you want to try the latest and greatest. Headers and such are installed by default, so you can usually compile something by hand and it will Just Work whereas if you're using three different unofficial package streams and you need to do some upgrade of a simple library somewhere which has an anal retentive versioning and dependency specification, attempting to apt-get that new version will cause your entire house of cards to come crashing down. I lived with Debian on a desktop like that for god knows how many years until I decided "No more". Yeah I have to wait a while with Gentoo but at least I only have to do it once.
I study at the University of Edinburgh, and the entire Informatics system runs on a customized version of RedHat. They teach Java instead of C (okay Java sucks, but for a lot of tasks everything else sucks more) but the electronic submission still happens from the good old command line (they teach a bit about how to work on your assignments from home, but generally the focus is on using a Linux machine there).
That and the Inf labs are 24 hour, and the machines are fairly specced up with DRI on the X server... hmm. Obviously that's just for that Java3D Fractals assignment we had to do;)
Good uni this, and the four year course is also a plus (although that's an opinion of mine few agree with for some reason). Just wish the first year wasn't a total pisstake; the only assignment we've had so far which wasn't a dumb "fill in the gaps in the skeleton code" exercise was an Instant Runoff Voting system, although that might have something to do with the fact that you could count the number of people who have actually written a single line of code before in that class on one hand... they're smart people though, just about everyone had much better A-Level results than me (I think these are the UK equivalent of SATs, although confusingly enough SATs in the UK are a different set of exams altogether, they're for little kids)
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Ah I see. We call it the Sandwich Theorem.
Don't remind me... (CS exam tomorrow, language processing can go to hell)
Although I've never heard of a squeeze theorem. Maybe he meant sandwich thm?
before we have a talking dog named Nina then?
(I've been watching too much Fullmetal Alchemist lately and all these chimera stories are giving me the heebie jeebies)
Well look how well your current administration "walked right over" Iraq, who aren't possessed of exactly the most technically sophiphisticated fighting force on the planet.. and that was in a country that the government doesn't even particularly need to be mostly intact afterwards (ie they're not shitting where they sleep every time they blow a building up)
I don't know too much about asymmetric warfare but I'd bet fighting a pitched urban war against a mostly unsympathetic population is as much of a walk in the park as it's made out to be.
I would love to see a large scale tournament like this for DDR sometime (google for 10K Commotion -- it's a webcomic based around a fictional event of this scale).
Being good at DDR isn't a walk in the park either, you have to be in good shape and have a pretty impeccable sense of rhythm. Good players can keep up with the 10 step per second step charts at the top end of the difficulty range, the best can hit every single step in those songs to within 30 milliseconds of the beat, which is the criterion required to achieve the maximum grade of AAA. Suffice it to say I'm not quite that good (although I've managed to get a few AAAs on the easier songs...)
Because the Sun guy actually makes coherent and valid points whereas this guy says a load of what is essentially meaningless cheer-leading? I think you'll find a lot of businesses like to have a reasonable degree of reliability in their servers. Telling people to get stuffed when ReiserFS decides to randomly shit the bed and completely annihilate your business data won't impress many people (it's done this several times for me on MAINLINE KERNELS, there is absolutely NO excuse for that. Don't tell me to send in dumps and patches, mainline means "this does not NEED debugging and is safe to use", period). I'm not talking running a major financial institution or a nuclear power plant here, I'm talking about being reasonably sure that today's data will still be here tomorrow.
That's just filesystems. Once upon a time Linux was really great because it was amazingly robust, small, fast and elegant. Today we have frequent kernel panics and X server flakiness, gigantic frameworks for desktop environments and gigabyte sized base installs. I suppose I can forgive flaky and sometimes limited support for exotic hardware because PCs are really complicated beasts these days, and a lot of hardware manufacturers are incredibly pig headed about these things but it would really be nice to have my two year old laptop actually wake up from ACPI sleep. No it's not a DSDT error. No I do not want to use Software Suspend because it is a hack. Nevermind the fact that it takes 5 minutes (as in around 300 seconds) to suspend on a 1GB swap with 256MB of RAM and several minutes to wake up again.
Linux sucks, get over it. Yes I use it, that's because everything else sucks more.
MythTV wasted a month of my life (I was somewhat roped into installing it, otherwise I wouldn't get a replacement system for my aging laptop)
Just off the top of my head you need to set up:
- XMLTV grabbing and channel numbering. In the UK this is murderous... I ended up writing a scraper for the NTL EPG called tv_grab_uk_ntl, I'll prolly post it to the xmltv mailing list or summat.
- Dual head X. nVidia makes this easyish if you're happy with XF86Config but running GNOME alongside is absolutely infuriating. It insists on drawing those damn bars on the TV display as well, and Myth needs to be focused to work properly. I still haven't found a solution to this. Not being able to use a desktop alongside is kind of a no-no. This is unforgivable because marking a window Always On Top makes it go above the bars. Why doesn't Myth do this.
- Infra-red is a nightmare. You have to muck about with settings.pro to make it link against lirc (ever heard of autoconf?), and there's no graphical toolkit for it so you have to edit lircrc and restart and try it and edit and restart and... Oh yeah did I mention the keyboard interface is REALLY damn hard to usefully map to a remote control? It doesn't even have an explicit PLAY button ffs!
- Infra red part 2. This isn't so much a problem with MythTV but setting up an infra red blaster to work with a cable box is also a pain. I subscribe to NTL so I bought something called RedEye (google for Pace Redeye) and modified the software that came with it a bit to run as a daemon that listens of a FIFO to avoid the startup delay on the device every time the channel needs to be switched. I shall release that patched version back to the owner too once I've got some time spare.
I think this is more to do with LIRC, but LIRC as it is now really feels like some sort of hobbyist kit (complete with the circuit diagrams for rolling your own IR hardware... I just went with an Irman and Redeye to save the hassle). Some GUI setup tools would really not go amiss.
- PAGES AND PAGES AND PAGES of settings, the defaults for which don't make much sense usually. Here's a suggestion, when in doubt do what TiVo does. The default ffwd/rewind behaviour is unusable, it doesn't remember where you left off watching a programme unless you tell it to (why not?). To name just two problems.
- Weird menu system. The setup menus are split almost arbitrarily between mythfrontend and mythsetup, using the system from a remote is very strange (menu navigation and channel switching seems to collide). There is no warning about scheduling collisions so you always have to check the recording schedule. There's no at-a-glance "season pass" editor, so if you want to cancel a season pass you have to find the next instance of the show. Many many minor niggles like this.
- Inexplicable encoding weirnesses everywhere. It either skips and stutters or records in awful quality (on a 2GHz hyperthreading Xeon with half a GB of memory, which the site claims should be able to record TWO streams in MPEG4 at once AND play one back at the same time). Or you spend ages messing about with the recording profiles to get it just right (would it really be so hard to add a 'PAL/NTSC/VGA/Custom' resolution option instead of having to guess that the encoder will only be happy with 740x578 or whatever the hell it is?). I got frustrated with this and got a Hauppage MPEG2 hardware encoder. After getting IVTV up and running on Linux 2.6 with some oddball patched version it then encoded great... except the A/V then began to drift. Back to another round of messing with the settings then recording another programme to test it then messing with them again. Yes I have messed with all the AV sync settings. Should this REALLY require user intervention?
- NUV format with opaque filenames. WHY? Okay if you have it set up to use RTJPEG/NuppelVideo for realtime encoding then yes I can understand this but why use the container after transcoding when the data is in MPEG4/MP3? I know about mythtranscod
Hmm...
Good weather: check
Good food: check
Nice people: check
Hot women: CHECK.
Loads of bemani: well, at least in Rimini...
Judiciary that knows its head from its ass: possibly, by the looks of things
Lemme put it this way, it's tempting (I went on holiday there about a week ago).
Three letters for you:
SPF.
This is in my opinion just another patch and not a true solution, but it stops people from claiming that they're from your domain and quite a few large ISPs observe SPF now (AOL being one of them)
But yeah, the parent poster was absoultely right. Coding in zillions of special cases and heuristics and different authentication protocols won't help. An internet with pervasive IP-level security and a federated set of PKI roots backed by an agreed on Internet Constitution drawn up by We The Fucking People (as opposed to In Disney We Trust) is the long term goal.
... this reminds me of a quote by Descartes:
d ardHere but a well defined x86 "OS image loading capability interface" or something can handle that. EFI bytecode only makes sense when you have a large number of architectures using EFI in the first place. Considering the snobbishness and NIH syndrome rampant everywhere I somehow doubt that's going to happen.
"Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."
A BIOS where there's nothing left to take away hauls the OS into memory, maybe sets up pmode and jumps into it. Granted there might be some issues with stuff like ATA/SATA/SCSI/USB/Firewire/Ethernet/InsertNewStan
And I once commented to myself that my odds of going out with a certain girl were "about as great as the chance of me being hit by a meteorite whilst indoors"
I think I'll need to add "in the next five seconds" next time I use that.
"Apathy is spreading and nobody cares"
This could be a considerable problem in the future.
(Let's not even go into the fact that most parties the today are just the same shit coming out of a different horse's ass)
3. My computer is a tool and not a battle ground. Yes I know XP can be kept secure by constantly applying service packs, virus scans, scumware cleaners, popup blockers, alternative web browsers and "firewalls" (it's great how you need a utility that only makes sense on a LAN border to block up sockets that shouldn't be there in the first place. My Linux box has no iptables simply because it has no listening services. "personal firewall" is an oxymoron). I personally don't think it's worth the hassle. This is probably offset by rather dodgy driver support under Linux, though.
2. I like command lines. Just a personal preference.
1. _I_ own my god damn computer. Putting their business practices aside, I dislike Microsoft for one simple reason: they're all about making you use their web browser, their office suite, their media player under their rules. Whether it's that infernal box pestering me to get a Passport, which can't be disabled, or the locks on WMA files (ok these can be disabled. I think), or the reporting back of my software and music preferences, which can't be disabled, or the deliberate crippling of the media functions, which can't be disabled, I am SICK TO THE FUCKING STOMACH of their bloody "my way or the highway" attitude towards everything.
And the reason that I don't use a Mac is that Apple really aren't much better with their obsession with AAC and FairPlay(TM) and a quite obvious bent towards iPod (you're not going to see an open music player synchronisation API/framework in iTunes, and here's a hint: it's not because of technical reasons) and an upgrade treadmill quite reminiscent of YouKnowWho.
How's about the following: Choose MP3. Choose OGG. Choose FLAC. Choose MPlayer, choose Xine. Choose KDE. Choose GNOME. Choose Firefox, Konqueror, kmail, evolution. Choose "mencoder -o my_dvd_that_i_fucking_paid_for.avi dvd://1". Choose no Client Access Licenses on Apache or ProFTPd or SAMBA.
My computer answers to ME and not some cunt in Redmond. Same as any other tool I have in my house, why should my computer be any different. Now if only it would actually wake up after ACPI sleep...
As opposed to a gigantically bloated "Platform" that's about as speedy as a quadrapalegic on ketamine? And where one business has a very strong interest in the platform, interests which can quickly lead to conflicts of interest which will make the whole thing drown in politics?
D looks like a good idea. I'd actually support that, the language is clean and straightforward. Although I don't know how open it is, but it was consciously designed, and doesn't have a VM or a religious mania about it so I think I like it already.
The Java spec and compatibility will be diluted? Surely trademark law was designed to prevent this very problem.
.NET system which has just one lord who can force you further along the upgrade treadmill at a whim. Sun putting their money where their mouth is and truly making an open Java implementation available could be just what it needs.
... right?)
I dunno if Java is a trademark or not, but either with a trademark or a license clause in the distribution, Sun could require that any derivative product that does not conform to the Java spec may not use the word "Java" in its name or in any promotional literature (kinda like a saner version of the BSD advertising clause).
I can't imagine Sun actually depends on the technical specification as a significant revenue source. People despise Microsoft these days more than ever and don't much care to be locked into their
(Come to think of it the spec already is pretty much 'open' thanks to the JCP. So you have to pay Sun for a copy of the spec. You have to pay ISO or ANSI or whoever to the C and C++ specs too
finally, the media writes a story about a game that hasn't inspired someone to go on a shooting rampage!
Clearly you've never True Black Flagged anything...
The Xbox version (Ultramix) has a Live! play facility... but personally I think it misses the point a bit.
Even if you've got a CF kit and all the damn home mixes ever DDR is still at its heart an arcade game. You play on standardised hardware with good, challenging timing windows. There's a scoreboard for you to try to knock local players' scores off, and there's usually plenty of other people around who you can chat with and compare accomplishments with. I've got a few good friends in a nearby city just because I turned up at the arcade there once for a quick game.
DDR has a major competitive element, and it's the driving force that makes people keep playing and accomplish more and more. There are a lot of tournaments, but the problem is it's very hard for a new player to get a look in there. Most of the people in the tournaments have been playing for _years_ and they know every in and out of every last song on the machine and it's becoming more and more common to see people with tens or even hundreds of AAA's under their belt (a AAA is a perfect score on a song which requires you to hit every last arrow to within 33 milliseconds of the beat. This is HARD -- I've done it a couple of times on one really really easy song, although that was on Standard difficulty and when someone says AAA the implication is AAA on Maniac difficulty). There is also a general concensus that DDR is dying at the moment (cue BSD trolls). The fact that Konami have all but officially axed the arcade series of games, which is the only one that expert players really care about, doesn't help matters..
No.
The actual gameplay concept DDR is basically a cross between playing the drums with your feet and jumping like a jackrabbit on amphetamines. The only thing the game grades you on is how close to the beat you are (the highest step grade is within about 30 milliseconds).
I'm a hardcore DDR player... I can pass just about all the songs on the game and with a good grade, but my dancing sucked awful before I started and it hasn't got any better (trust me. There's bad dancers and there's people the bad dancers point and laugh at).
DDR's really good fun and all but I strongly recommend you don't try and bust out Max 300 on an actual dance floor. Although, to quote a guy on a DDR messageboard: "You wouldn't DDR step in a club, but then you wouldn't mosh in a ballroom either". Dancing has a fairly broad definition... but even so it does tend to involve some upper body movement. A lot of expert players just clamp their upper body to the support bar behind the dance stage so that they can hit 10 steps per second and still stay upright, although I personally find this to be bad form.
Hi. I'm Second_Derivative, and I am also a DDR addict. Unfortunately I'm a skinny little bastard so I didn't have any weight to lose in the first place from playing DDR (although I seem to have lost some anyway which is a bit worrying). With that in mind, take what I say with a pinch of salt.
...).
... other posts have covered this issue in more detail.
:D )
Firstly, before you shell out $300 for a cobalt flux, grab $10 or so and pop down to your local arcade (I'm assuming you live in the US or Canada). With luck you should see a DDR Extreme machine (or maybe some flavour of Max. Don't play DDRUSA, the hardware is ancient and the song selection is pretty abysmal). Pop in a few credits, put it on Beginner or Light mode and try a few songs. Ask some of the other players there if you need any help -- one of the things that really stands out about DDR is its community. Unless the players there are a load of elitist wankers they'll usually be more than happy to help a newcomer get to grips with the game.
Try this for a few days and see if DDR is the game for you. If you don't like the game, it isn't going to work, pure and simple. To get to the stage where you're going to really burn large amounts of energy, you'll need to be playing songs with a rating of 9 (these are referred to as 'catas' in the lingo), or 10 if you can manage those. Ask some of the local players to demonstrate what this involves. The point is it will take several months' worth of practice to get up to that level. You have to keep pushing yourself to try the next difficulty level otherwise you're not going to exert yourself. Hopefully though if you like the game you'll find yourself wanting to do that anyway.
Anyway, if you decide you're up for it, then yeah go for at least a RedOctane pad (although I'd buy a BNS Beatgear if you want to go down that route. Same sort of construction, cheaper, and RedOctane tends to astroturf a lot which personally really pisses me off), but if you can afford it go for Cobalt Flux. If you're in the EU, go to liksang.com or playasia.com and look for "metal mat with rail". Anything below Cobalt Flux will usually require some custom modifications to be able to withstand heavy play. That and I haven't heard of anyone passing, say, Max 300 on a soft mat (the 300 refers to the song's BPM by the way. Let's just say it's one of the harder ones
As for a PC setup, Stepmania is a good bet, and DDRUK.com do some good bumper packs (just download the Dance Dance Revolution (n)th Mix -(Whatever)- and PSX/PS2 and Solo packs and don't bother with all the weird Disney/Tokemeki/whatever offshoot versions). Any good non-Radioshack PS2 to USB converter should work
Try to get into the community of it a bit as well. Competition with your fellow players is the single best driving force for getting better, and I certainly wouldn't be as good as I am now if I didn't regularly converse with people who were much better. DDRUK itself has a really good community, try joining that (list Tau as your referer
Hope this helps...
I just got my first ever polling card in the post a few days ago. "MEP elections? Bah, dunno what to do with that"
Now I do.
Where's mod points when you need them
[nt]
For servers, go with something like Debian: good clean integrated system with timely and automatic security updates. Not bleeding edge, but if it's at all a serious server you really don't want it to be.
Desktops, Ports based system all the way. Why? Because with something like Gentoo, it might take several days to compile but you can be assured you're not going to dependency hell anytime soon when you want to try the latest and greatest. Headers and such are installed by default, so you can usually compile something by hand and it will Just Work whereas if you're using three different unofficial package streams and you need to do some upgrade of a simple library somewhere which has an anal retentive versioning and dependency specification, attempting to apt-get that new version will cause your entire house of cards to come crashing down. I lived with Debian on a desktop like that for god knows how many years until I decided "No more". Yeah I have to wait a while with Gentoo but at least I only have to do it once.
I study at the University of Edinburgh, and the entire Informatics system runs on a customized version of RedHat. They teach Java instead of C (okay Java sucks, but for a lot of tasks everything else sucks more) but the electronic submission still happens from the good old command line (they teach a bit about how to work on your assignments from home, but generally the focus is on using a Linux machine there).
;)
That and the Inf labs are 24 hour, and the machines are fairly specced up with DRI on the X server... hmm. Obviously that's just for that Java3D Fractals assignment we had to do
Good uni this, and the four year course is also a plus (although that's an opinion of mine few agree with for some reason). Just wish the first year wasn't a total pisstake; the only assignment we've had so far which wasn't a dumb "fill in the gaps in the skeleton code" exercise was an Instant Runoff Voting system, although that might have something to do with the fact that you could count the number of people who have actually written a single line of code before in that class on one hand... they're smart people though, just about everyone had much better A-Level results than me (I think these are the UK equivalent of SATs, although confusingly enough SATs in the UK are a different set of exams altogether, they're for little kids)
Nah, they named a city Wormwood.
Though you probably know it better as Chernobyl...