More importantly, they fixed most of the things in the Baldur's Gate engine that really pissed me off. Moving between maps is much faster, and you never get waylayed when traveling large distances. And, resting the party doesn't have that f-ing animation - you just click the rest button and 8 or 16 hours pass
Unfortunately, they made a few minor blunders with the pathfinding engine. When you command your characters to walk a long distance, like from the entrance of a cleared out dungeon level to the exit, it's anyone's guess what path they'll actually take and where they'll end up stopping. Many times I've done that and flipped to the big map only to shout "What the hell are you guy's doing over there!?!".
If you put a terminal on the PIX's console port and watch what it does when it boots. The first thing you will notice is that it's a Phoenix BIOS modified to a) use a serial port instead of a VGA board, b) boot the OS from flash memory. It also identifies it's CPU at that point (in the PIX-515 it actually a Pentium 200 MMX) - that's why I'm kind of surprised that you were surprised to find it was just a really expensive Intel PC. It tells you what it is, you just have to listen:).
As an aside, I did try to put the PIX 4-port ethernet card into a normal PC. Linux identified it as 4 Intel EEpro adapters. I didn't try to see if it would actually work.
Everything important to a convention is worse in San Francisco than San Jose - parking, traffic, airport access, hotel space all suck much worse in San Francisco (though San Jose is no gem either). They're moving for floor space - at over 400,000 sq. ft. the hall in SF is 3x bigger than the San Jose convention center.
I hate -- absolutely HATE -- NTSC...it is just aweful and I am still amazed we tolerate it daily
I disagree, though not about NTSC sucking as a video standard. I take our continued acceptance of NTSC as a positive sign - a sign that TV is not yet so important that we must spend billions just so we can watch the local news at such a high res that you can count the hairs in the anchor's nose. Long live NTSC!
Maybe, but all of Red Hat's code names have double meanings. For example:
6.1 was called "Cartman", a cartoon character 6.2 Beta was "Piglet", a cartoon character, and also a charcter from Monty Python's Holy Grail 6.2 was "Zoot", also a character from the Holy Grail, and a type of suit. so 7.0 beta is "Pinstripe", also a type of suit, but also has some other meaning that 7.0 (or 7.0 beta 2;) will play off of.
No. It uses the same mechanism as the MS optical mice, and those work OK at one or two millimeters off the desk, but cease working completely at about 5mm off the desk.
Thirdly, there's SSH, SCP, et al. This is OK, but it's main drawback as a -transparent- VPN is that it's not very transparent. It's at the application level, rather than the stack level, which means that it's going to be more visible to the average user.
There are tools out there that will let you tunnel PPP over SSH or SSL. Five minutes of config work and you have a completely transparent VPN (though granted one better suited for LAN-to-LAN VPN than remote client-type VPN like this question is asking about). Do a freshmeat search for vpnstarter (for SSH) or stunnel (for SSL) for more info.
There's a phrase to describe things like this: Cultural Necrophila. Cultural Necrophila is committed by espousing how much better life was before X, where X is some arbitrary event (ie. "before the Internet was big", "before Clinton was president", "before the Vikings found North America"). It is slightly less productive than actual Necrophilia, and almost as tasteless. But, it must be part of human nature, because I'd bet that if decipher most Neanderthal cave paintings, they probably say "Things were better before the Cro-Magnons showed up. Now the land is expensive, they're making trails all over the place, and they're killing all the mammoths."
Been there. The first computer I owned was a C64 (the first one I used was a Commodore PET). I can't tell you ow many of those programs from Compute!'s Gazette I've typed in. Ahh, memories of MLX and SpeedCheck (or whatever that BASIC checksum program was called).
Okay. Maybe I'm wrong, but I'm basing that statement on a presentation I attended by a NASA engineer. The gist of it was that the external tank is made of millions of these ~1 foot long interlocking metal bars. When the empty tank falls away for reentry, the shock breaks up the bonds between the bars, and they all reenter seperately, and since they are small they vaporize easily (much more easily than a solid ~150-foot long tank, for sure). Now that I think about it, I do remember the engineer mentioning that there was enough rigidity in an empty tank to support it's own weight + the weight of the shuttle but not much more. It had to have pressure to withstand any extra force.
It wouldn't even work very well for that, either. The main tank is built like a balloon. It's made of millions of little interlocking pieces, and it only has structural integrity when their is positive pressure on the inside.
Visual and soud effects were worth the price of admission. Especially the nebula and ice ring sequences
The Bad
The only way the soudtrack could suck more is if the characters started singing along like a Disney musical.
Spoiler: The betrayal of Korso is sudden, unforshadowed and rather pointless, as is his "redemtion".
The Drej's ill will towards humanity is poorly explained and seems rather random.
Drew Barrymore's voice did not match her character very well.
After the thousandth time that Matt Damon's character says "What's in it for me?" I was hoping the rest of the crew would get a clue and just cut off his hand with the map on it and push him out the airlock.
Why put Linux on a handheld? Because it can be done.
Seriously, while I can't speak for the people who actually did this one, this is why I like to see this happen. Okay, it's not really that I want Linux, per se, it's that I want to see a completely open-source PDA platform. A brand new free OS written specifically for PDA's would satisfy me just as much, but why write one? Linux is here, and we know it can scale down to fit in PDA class devices, so why not use it?
But the kernel is the first step. It handles all of the grunt work, ie. memory managment, communications and networking, device drivers, etc., and provides a good, solid foundation to build the rest of a PDA. But, most, if not all, of the software in a typical Linux distribution is irrelevant to a PDA. A command line on a PDA would be frustrating at best, and most X11 apps would have a hard time on such a low resolution (try running X in 320x200x16, then imagine that on a PDA you often don't get nearly that many pixels, and often not nearly that many colors). So, you pretty much have to throw out the whole user space environment, right down to "init", and start from scratch. In fact, you probably wouldn't even keep much of the UNIX filesystem heirarchy.
So, why go to all the trouble? Because you end up with a fully open PDA platform, from the lowest device driver all the way on up.
Slashdot Mirror
More importantly, they fixed most of the things in the Baldur's Gate engine that really pissed me off. Moving between maps is much faster, and you never get waylayed when traveling large distances. And, resting the party doesn't have that f-ing animation - you just click the rest button and 8 or 16 hours pass
Unfortunately, they made a few minor blunders with the pathfinding engine. When you command your characters to walk a long distance, like from the entrance of a cleared out dungeon level to the exit, it's anyone's guess what path they'll actually take and where they'll end up stopping. Many times I've done that and flipped to the big map only to shout "What the hell are you guy's doing over there!?!".
I almost hate to say this, but if someone is able to
- replace IOS with Linux on my router
- write a driver for Cisco's CSU/DSU modules and other proprietary hardware
- have the whole thing work
I say they can have my router. Hell I might even send 'em a case of Leinie's Red for just for putting on a good show.If you put a terminal on the PIX's console port and watch what it does when it boots. The first thing you will notice is that it's a Phoenix BIOS modified to a) use a serial port instead of a VGA board, b) boot the OS from flash memory. It also identifies it's CPU at that point (in the PIX-515 it actually a Pentium 200 MMX) - that's why I'm kind of surprised that you were surprised to find it was just a really expensive Intel PC. It tells you what it is, you just have to listen :).
As an aside, I did try to put the PIX 4-port ethernet card into a normal PC. Linux identified it as 4 Intel EEpro adapters. I didn't try to see if it would actually work.
The Cisco PIX firewall uses an x86. But that's the only one I can think of.
Which is really ironic, considering his user number isn't all that low.
Everything important to a convention is worse in San Francisco than San Jose - parking, traffic, airport access, hotel space all suck much worse in San Francisco (though San Jose is no gem either). They're moving for floor space - at over 400,000 sq. ft. the hall in SF is 3x bigger than the San Jose convention center.
It is a short story called "They're made out of meat." You can find the text here.
I disagree, though not about NTSC sucking as a video standard. I take our continued acceptance of NTSC as a positive sign - a sign that TV is not yet so important that we must spend billions just so we can watch the local news at such a high res that you can count the hairs in the anchor's nose. Long live NTSC!
That Windows problem is interesting and all, but it pales in comparison to this gem. I almost feel sorry for the person who had to write that.
Actually, they've already covered that. One of the air-drops of supplies hit their shelter a week or two ago. :)
Maybe, but all of Red Hat's code names have double meanings. For example:
;) will play off of.
6.1 was called "Cartman", a cartoon character
6.2 Beta was "Piglet", a cartoon character, and also a charcter from Monty Python's Holy Grail
6.2 was "Zoot", also a character from the Holy Grail, and a type of suit.
so 7.0 beta is "Pinstripe", also a type of suit, but also has some other meaning that 7.0 (or 7.0 beta 2
No. It uses the same mechanism as the MS optical mice, and those work OK at one or two millimeters off the desk, but cease working completely at about 5mm off the desk.
Ancient USENET .sig:
"UNIX? What do I need UNIX for? I don't even have a harem."
-- A VMS User
Ummm, I think you mean 1210Mhz.
There are tools out there that will let you tunnel PPP over SSH or SSL. Five minutes of config work and you have a completely transparent VPN (though granted one better suited for LAN-to-LAN VPN than remote client-type VPN like this question is asking about). Do a freshmeat search for vpnstarter (for SSH) or stunnel (for SSL) for more info.
There's a phrase to describe things like this: Cultural Necrophila. Cultural Necrophila is committed by espousing how much better life was before X, where X is some arbitrary event (ie. "before the Internet was big", "before Clinton was president", "before the Vikings found North America"). It is slightly less productive than actual Necrophilia, and almost as tasteless. But, it must be part of human nature, because I'd bet that if decipher most Neanderthal cave paintings, they probably say "Things were better before the Cro-Magnons showed up. Now the land is expensive, they're making trails all over the place, and they're killing all the mammoths."
Been there. The first computer I owned was a C64 (the first one I used was a Commodore PET). I can't tell you ow many of those programs from Compute!'s Gazette I've typed in. Ahh, memories of MLX and SpeedCheck (or whatever that BASIC checksum program was called).
"Where is my flying car? Damn it! I was promised flying cars!"
Okay. Maybe I'm wrong, but I'm basing that statement on a presentation I attended by a NASA engineer. The gist of it was that the external tank is made of millions of these ~1 foot long interlocking metal bars. When the empty tank falls away for reentry, the shock breaks up the bonds between the bars, and they all reenter seperately, and since they are small they vaporize easily (much more easily than a solid ~150-foot long tank, for sure). Now that I think about it, I do remember the engineer mentioning that there was enough rigidity in an empty tank to support it's own weight + the weight of the shuttle but not much more. It had to have pressure to withstand any extra force.
Who says you'd even have to go to the trouble of actually encrypting it. Well encrypted data should be indistiguishable from randomness.
It wouldn't even work very well for that, either. The main tank is built like a balloon. It's made of millions of little interlocking pieces, and it only has structural integrity when their is positive pressure on the inside.
Perhaps you're too new to Linux to remember it but one of the old filesystems, xiafs, was also named after it's creator, Frank Xia.
The Good
The Bad
Actually, the plugin for XMMS os already part of source, as well as a plugin for WinAMP.
Why put Linux on a handheld? Because it can be done.
Seriously, while I can't speak for the people who actually did this one, this is why I like to see this happen. Okay, it's not really that I want Linux, per se, it's that I want to see a completely open-source PDA platform. A brand new free OS written specifically for PDA's would satisfy me just as much, but why write one? Linux is here, and we know it can scale down to fit in PDA class devices, so why not use it?
But the kernel is the first step. It handles all of the grunt work, ie. memory managment, communications and networking, device drivers, etc., and provides a good, solid foundation to build the rest of a PDA. But, most, if not all, of the software in a typical Linux distribution is irrelevant to a PDA. A command line on a PDA would be frustrating at best, and most X11 apps would have a hard time on such a low resolution (try running X in 320x200x16, then imagine that on a PDA you often don't get nearly that many pixels, and often not nearly that many colors). So, you pretty much have to throw out the whole user space environment, right down to "init", and start from scratch. In fact, you probably wouldn't even keep much of the UNIX filesystem heirarchy.
So, why go to all the trouble? Because you end up with a fully open PDA platform, from the lowest device driver all the way on up.