The British have become pros at determining the migratory patterns of small, insignificant birds. Why, back in the 12th century, England's own king was doing similar research on swallows...
SOLDIER #1: Where'd you get the coconuts?
ARTHUR: We found them.
SOLDIER #1: Found them? In Mercia? The coconut's tropical!
ARTHUR: What do you mean?
SOLDIER #1: Well, this is a temperate zone.
ARTHUR: The swallow may fly south with the sun or the house martin or the plover may seek warmer climes in winter, yet these are not strangers to our land?
SOLDIER #1: Are you suggesting coconuts migrate?
ARTHUR: Not at all. They could be carried.
SOLDIER #1: What? A swallow carrying a coconut?
ARTHUR: It could grip it by the husk!
SOLDIER #1: It's not a question of where he grips it! It's a simple question of weight ratios! A five ounce bird could not carry a one pound coconut.
ARTHUR: Well, it doesn't matter. Will you go and tell your master that Arthur from the Court of Camelot is here?
SOLDIER #1: Listen. In order to maintain air-speed velocity, a swallow needs to beat its wings forty-three times every second, right?
ARTHUR: Please!
SOLDIER #1: Am I right?
ARTHUR: I'm not interested!
SOLDIER #2: It could be carried by an African swallow!
SOLDIER #1: Oh, yeah, an African swallow maybe, but not a European swallow. That's my point.
SOLDIER #2: Oh, yeah, I agree with that.
ARTHUR: Will you ask your master if he wants to join my court at Camelot?!
SOLDIER #1: But then of course a-- African swallows are non-migratory.
SOLDIER #2: Oh, yeah.
SOLDIER #1: So, they couldn't bring a coconut back anyway.
[clop clop clop]
SOLDIER #2: Wait a minute! Supposing two swallows carried it together?
SOLDIER #1: No, they'd have to have it on a line.
SOLDIER #2: Well, simple! They'd just use a strand of creeper!
SOLDIER #1: What, held under the dorsal guiding feathers?
That's really funny. You could say just about the same things when comparing American Democracy with COMMUNISM.
The fact is, openness in itself does not make something better. I could go on and make a long list of communist governments which failed, but I'm not going to.... as there have been no successes.
The orignal drivers of Communism:
----Everybody shares work. Every man does his equal part and gives back to the motherland.
----Freedom from oppressive governments. Let the people rule. (As you know, this has never been the case, and was probably the biggest point of failure of communism)
----Not being locked into a proprietary government:) . It's sort of funny how we slashdot is defining proprietary these days. If 95% of people use something, it's not really proprietary, is it? And plus, linux is quite proprietary in itself. Linux runs windows programs much better than windows runs linux apps using Qt, GTK, and the likes.
----"Doing something useful with software you would have written anyway, but don't want to commercialize." You have neatly summed communism up in a single sentence. I congratulate you.
-----It's not like we can forcibly remove RMS or Linus if we don't like them or they're doing a bad job, though, the theory behind their philosophy says we should be able to. *cough... Stalin... cough*
Am I saying that open-source is communist? No. I'm not going to pass any judgement on it. But the community is portraying it as such, and seem to have some sort of false illusions about it without really having proof (just like the way in which virtually every country who had a communist revolution acted before the revolution, followed quickly by a chatostrophic depression. go read "House of the Spirits" by Isabel Allende if you don't get what I'm saying)
Face it, everybody needs some sort of standard or a strong leader who admits he is such. Proprietary doesn't mean bad. Open doesn't necessarily mean good. (Open USUALLY IS good, but good is not necessarily open).
What it comes down to in the end is that if something does something well at a low cost (cost is not always releated to money) , it is good. For example, AFAIK, Symbian OS does its job really well at the expense of money and a small loss of freedom. On the other hand, Linux doesn't do as good of a job with regard to mobile phones, but is free, and allows more freedom. To the phone makers, the balance of costs and benefits seen in Symbian makes it a better product.
The $11,000 on average for a programming job is a myth. On an average a fresh graduate out of a college gets between Rs. $4426 to $6639 ($1= Rs.46 approx) . A senior programmer with experience earns between (Rs. $7745 - $13,278) . And remeber like USA we have an income tax on higher side (30 - 40%)
And for the living costs $11,000 does not makes you live like a king for the stats
1) An average flat with (2-3 rooms) costs between $22. - $332) per month on rent. But these flats are still below par with what you would call an average flat in USA.
2) Buying a flat would cost you around (Rs. $22,133- $55,332 ) and thats average (as above ).
3) A car costs between Rs. $5,533 for a Maruti 800 (a 800 cc car with no frills not even an A/C ) to a Ford Ikon (a low end luxury car yeah we call it a luxury car ) for $11,067 and yeah they have a lot of other realy luxury cars like Mitsuibishi Lancer , Mercedes Benz but they are all out of reach of even a good earning programmer. Most programmers would generally own a two wheeler as the cost of running is low due to low petrol (oops gas) consumption (petrol is Rs. 36 / litre approx )
4) A music CD would cost around $2.25 to $7. A DVD for $8.85 5) A decent shirt would cost in excess of Rs. $11 and a decent pair of trousers arount Rs. $22.
6) Food costs are arount Rs. $5 - $10 if you cook at home or $1.66 - $3 if u eat out. The cheapest coffee at Barrista (the most popular coffee shop chain here) costs Rs. $0.66
7) And yeah a desktop costs around $664 for an economy machine to $1,107 for a decent one.
8) Telephone costs aroud $22 pm under basic use and $44 to $66 if u make more call or are using dialup internet connectivity (and 98% or so use it). 9) Broadband is either not available or if it costs around Rs. $44 pm with dload speeds of 20 kbps (yeah thats b-band in India). There are other basic eminities but this can give an idea of living costs in India and yeah $11,000 gives you only a decent living below par a middle class in USA but its more than enough for an Indian as we are not as materialistic as the West and there are a lot more people earning a lot less than us.
Why do slashdot readers have to make everything difficult by somehow involving Linux?
As far as I know, the broadcasting industry has been fine without Linux for decades, and I don't possibly see how on earth a small-scale radio station would incorporate it.
As another poster mentioned, all you need is a mixing board, a couple of mikes and a transmitter.
A few years back I worked with a system in my middle school attached to a microscope system with various cameras.
The equipment was donated, and nobody ever bothered figuring out how it worked. That is, until I came along, and fooled around with it a few months before graduating.
The stuff wasn't new - it wasn't new when it was donated five years earlier. The microscopes and cameras in particular - many of the insturments bore markings "Made in WEST Germany".
Anyhow, back to the point. The cameras were a bit more recent, and outputted their signal in a VGA format in a manner similar to the equipment the poster is talking about.
A PC was also donated to the school along with the microscope. It was newer - a 486/100 (though this was around the time the school began standardizing upon WinME (ugh!)), ran Win 3.11, and had a peculiar hardware device.
It had a highly advanced graphics card for the time, along with another card which appeared to have the ability to input and output one (possibly two.. I forget) VGA signal and process it via. a special software application (which was quite good IIRC, and offered many tools to adjust the images). The card appeared to be made by Matrox. It was capable of capturing individual still frames, and I believe was also able to do a time-lapse recording (a capture every 5 seconds or so), though this wasn't exactly useful for our purposes, and we never used it. Remember, full motion capture was not an option due to the age of the equipment. If you were able to capture at 30fps, the processor would never keep up, and the hard drive would fill up with raw data after about 2 minutes.
I really wish I could have seen the hardware, though that was certainly not an option - the computer was in a solid steel full tower (GIANT!) case, held together with tons of screws. I would get in trouble for taking it apart 'just for a peek'. I returned recently to find that they THREW THE ENTIRE SETUP IN THE TRASH. It was very disappointing, and a great example of the wastefulness of our public education system.
Hope this helps. You might still be able to find the matrox cards somewhere. Look also under RGB capture (many of these devices used 5 BNC plugs for their VGA signal instead of the D-sub connectors we're used to nowindays.
These are good for extending the output of the devices, but in the end, all you end up is the same monitor connected to a really long cable.
Remember... CAT5 DOES NOT IMPLY TCP/IP. I cannot emphasize this enough. If you plug one of these extenders into a switch, you will probably destroy both the switch and extender. They use cat5 simply because it is cheap and universally availible.
While they might not have the world's most descriptive titles, you'd do well to check out Rrootage and Noiz2sa
They're both highly abstract top-down shooters with pretty cool graphics. It's quite difficult to describe them with words -- the only way to experience them is to just play them. There are also windows ports availible somewhere.
Ah. This must be from the german speaking part of Russia.
Re:MSN, Just a Poor Search Engine?
on
Google v. Microsoft
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Yeah, but MSN only shows 32 results for SCO. Google shows 3.8 million. (if the site stays down, how long until they're delisted?)
Searching google for MSN yields 44.8 million. Searching google for google yields 41.7 million (this page among them)
Searching msn for msn yields 3,389 Searching msn for google yields 102, which, ironically, is listed as an "MSN Top Pick"
Fair? Maybe. Maybe not. It just seems that MSN's crawler hasn't mapped nearly as much of the web as Google's has, but has managed to map most stuff pertaining to itself (which it should).
The engine and all of the underlying code and tools are open source. However, the graphics and the levels are still property of whoever made FS2
I fail to name a company, as that is still questionable - however, it is almost certain that Interplay does NOT have the rights to sell it, and that the original authors will most likely never see any of the profits from this limited edition. This is why the code was initially released, and why you can easily get a semi-legal version of the game off the net for free. From what I remember, one of the original developers also gave a copy of the source art and levels to the community under the terms that the company's logo remain unchanged, nothing else. Of course, to determine the owner of FS2 would be more complicated than to determine the owner of Unix (a la SCO). That's why there's no FS3
Freespace 2 is one of those great games which makes you wonder why on earth it didn't sell better.
In fact, I believe it is one of the only mass-produced American games to sell for more than the original MSRP on eBay several years after its release. It's not uncommon for a copy of FS2 to sell for $75.
But enough on the price of the game. The game itself is sweet. Gameplay is simply awesome. The graphics are amazing -- not even taking their age into consideration.
I've only played the CD-rip version of the game which didn't include the music, cutscenes, voices, or cinematics (which I am told are some of the best parts of the game). Even still, the gameplay is excellent, the storyline is pretty cool, and it's addicting as hell. (Word to the wise: Don't start this game the week before exams!). It's a pretty unique experience being caught in the midst of two capital ships battling it out, and has yet to be duplicated in any other game.
Plus, the engine's open source! There's a working linux port and a mac port! (The mac version is still under development and doesn't have a permanent website. You have to hunt around to find it). Even cooler is that a bunch of coders ported the entire Freespace 1 campagin to the FS2 engine.
So. In short, go out and buy this game! You will not regret it. It has much more longetivity and replay-value than most games made today.
Oh yeah. You can still download the CD-Rip for free. Chances are that HOTU will take it down in the next few days, as the game is now commercially availible once more. (Would somebody seed this as a torrent?)
I'm just curious as to how much Disney was actually "involved" in the making of their films at pixar...
Were the movies written at disney and animated at Pixar, or is the whole thing done at Pixar (and Disney takes care of the marketing)?
I just wonder, because, while Pixar does indeed produce some of the highest quality animation in the world, it's the story and the creativity which make the movie (anyone remember the Final Fantasy movie? blah).
That being said, I wish all of Pixar the best of luck, and hope their last two Disney films are as great as the last few. (It would be tragic if disney significantly cut funding to pixar for these films as a result of this announcement).
That also being said, I want to wish Roy Disney the best of luck in his quest to bring the company back to the way it used to be.
Here's another deviation. Not related to the books... but, after Peter Jackson recieved the Golden Globe award, he noticed that New Zealand is absent from the 'globe' trophy.
I hear you. Getting de-blacklisted is quite possibly one of the most frustrating tasks in existance.
Last week, every site in my netblock got classified by SPEWS, and consequently, SpamCop picked up a message coming from another account on my server and placed us on their 'experimental' blocklist which is apparently used by quite a few ISPs. This prompted a million and a half other spam lists to classify us just because we appeared on spamcop (who handled it much more fairly than the rest - they properly bounce detected spam, and removed us from their list after two days of inactivity.
All because we were A) In the same colo facility as a big-time spammer, and B) on a shared webhost which happened to host a small-time spammer on the same IP.
Long story short, I had to threaten my host that i'd cancel the service unless I got moved to a new IP. After a heated argument, they finally did.
Oh yeah. The two servers which were blocked hosted no more than a boy scout troop and a convent.
From looking at this story, so far we have about 200 comments so far - and about 5 reviews. Most comments are highly moderated flames. Anyhow, I'll do my best to contribute my "actual" experiences with DirecWay.
Short review: It sucks. You're better off with ISDN.
Long review:
I helped to set a good friend of mine up with a DirecWay connection, as he lives on the outskirts of town on a private road, and is unable to recieve any other form of broadband. This was about 3 years ago, and at the time, it was DirecPC, and only worked one-way.
And it was okay. When it worked, we could get a respectable 150kB/s (close to the advertised 1.5mbps) and about 700ms pings. Not great, but certainly tolerable. The slow 56k upload was a hassle, though. In addition, I will testify that their software was bad--no, it was horrible. It was buggy, and behaved erratically.
DirecWay promised that when they rolled out two-way service, the software and the service would be completely revamped.
Around this time, my friend spent one year abroad. During this time, he cancelled his subscription.
When he returned, he called DirecWay and had them install the two-way service. Thanks to the installer, he never did any setup on his PC, and didn't install the connection software, nor did he leave a CD.
As we found out, there is no easy way to download the software via. the net. In fact, once they finally sent us a CD, we couldn't find patches on their site. Which brings me to the topic of their support. I have called them many many times. Their staff is unknowledgable, hold times are guarrunteed to be over an hour, and they are barely fluent in English. DirecWay recieves a F- for support.
The new modem was little more than a modifed one-way modem which only connected via USB - not the promised revamped hardware. The software installation process was buggy. Very buggy. You had to try two to three times before an installation would finally work. Once we got it running, we saw that it was the exact same software we had used a year earlier - with a small patch to enable two-way communications - NOT the promised revamped software. And there was no way to see if there was an update via. DirecWay's website. They do have a support site. It's well hidden, and down most of the time.
Oh yes. Most everything is down most of the time. In the year we weren't using it, their NOC continued it's decline. DNS was a mixed bag - sometimes it worked sometimes it didn't, and you couldn't use a non-direcway DNS server. You also had to use a proxy server to access HTTP sites. This combination meant that the service was down. A lot.
Thanks to direcway's otherwise useless diagnostic utility, we could see that our modem was indeed in tip-top shape. We never dropped below 80% signal. It was clearly not the weather. When the service went down (which was quite often), it was usually a result of network trouble at DW. Even when we were able to get on, it wasn't that fast in terms of thoroughput or latency. Ironically, the site which always had the most trouble was DW's own site. It was ALWAYS down.
Now, the DW6000 caught my eye as solving many of these problems. However, after several phone calls to DW, I determined that not one of their representatives had even HEARD of the modem.
However, even if we could try it out, we wouldn't. They failed to come through on every other one of their promises they had made in the past. Their support was terrible, and their whole company was poorly run.
This is on top of all the stuff being discussed in this thread about the TOS policies, bandwidth caps, etc.
In short, we cancelled it. It just wasn't worth the pain and aggrivation. They keep promising improvements, but have always failed to deliver. If you can get ISDN, go for that, or attempt to do some sort of line-of-sight WiFi with a friend across town. You could even try to make your own DSL by ordering a dry copper loop between your house and one with broadband. Heck, even multilink 56k would be better...
(MWD must mean mass weapons of destruction... scary to think that not only has your company developed nuclear technology, but also developed antimatter)
This only applies if you don't work for Halliburton.
Slashdot Mirror
The British have become pros at determining the migratory patterns of small, insignificant birds. Why, back in the 12th century, England's own king was doing similar research on swallows...
SOLDIER #1: Where'd you get the coconuts?
ARTHUR: We found them.
SOLDIER #1: Found them? In Mercia? The coconut's tropical!
ARTHUR: What do you mean?
SOLDIER #1: Well, this is a temperate zone.
ARTHUR: The swallow may fly south with the sun or the house martin or the plover may seek warmer climes in winter, yet these are not strangers to our land?
SOLDIER #1: Are you suggesting coconuts migrate?
ARTHUR: Not at all. They could be carried.
SOLDIER #1: What? A swallow carrying a coconut?
ARTHUR: It could grip it by the husk!
SOLDIER #1: It's not a question of where he grips it! It's a simple question of weight ratios! A five ounce bird could not carry a one pound coconut.
ARTHUR: Well, it doesn't matter. Will you go and tell your master that Arthur from the Court of Camelot is here?
SOLDIER #1: Listen. In order to maintain air-speed velocity, a swallow needs to beat its wings forty-three times every second, right?
ARTHUR: Please!
SOLDIER #1: Am I right?
ARTHUR: I'm not interested!
SOLDIER #2: It could be carried by an African swallow!
SOLDIER #1: Oh, yeah, an African swallow maybe, but not a European swallow. That's my point.
SOLDIER #2: Oh, yeah, I agree with that.
ARTHUR: Will you ask your master if he wants to join my court at Camelot?!
SOLDIER #1: But then of course a-- African swallows are non-migratory.
SOLDIER #2: Oh, yeah.
SOLDIER #1: So, they couldn't bring a coconut back anyway.
[clop clop clop]
SOLDIER #2: Wait a minute! Supposing two swallows carried it together?
SOLDIER #1: No, they'd have to have it on a line.
SOLDIER #2: Well, simple! They'd just use a strand of creeper!
SOLDIER #1: What, held under the dorsal guiding feathers?
SOLDIER #2: Well, why not?
That's really funny. You could say just about the same things when comparing American Democracy with COMMUNISM.
:) . It's sort of funny how we slashdot is defining proprietary these days. If 95% of people use something, it's not really proprietary, is it? And plus, linux is quite proprietary in itself. Linux runs windows programs much better than windows runs linux apps using Qt, GTK, and the likes.
The fact is, openness in itself does not make something better. I could go on and make a long list of communist governments which failed, but I'm not going to.... as there have been no successes.
The orignal drivers of Communism:
----Everybody shares work. Every man does his equal part and gives back to the motherland.
----Freedom from oppressive governments. Let the people rule. (As you know, this has never been the case, and was probably the biggest point of failure of communism)
----Not being locked into a proprietary government
----"Doing something useful with software you would have written anyway, but don't want to commercialize." You have neatly summed communism up in a single sentence. I congratulate you.
-----It's not like we can forcibly remove RMS or Linus if we don't like them or they're doing a bad job, though, the theory behind their philosophy says we should be able to. *cough... Stalin... cough*
Am I saying that open-source is communist? No. I'm not going to pass any judgement on it. But the community is portraying it as such, and seem to have some sort of false illusions about it without really having proof (just like the way in which virtually every country who had a communist revolution acted before the revolution, followed quickly by a chatostrophic depression. go read "House of the Spirits" by Isabel Allende if you don't get what I'm saying)
Face it, everybody needs some sort of standard or a strong leader who admits he is such. Proprietary doesn't mean bad. Open doesn't necessarily mean good. (Open USUALLY IS good, but good is not necessarily open).
What it comes down to in the end is that if something does something well at a low cost (cost is not always releated to money) , it is good. For example, AFAIK, Symbian OS does its job really well at the expense of money and a small loss of freedom. On the other hand, Linux doesn't do as good of a job with regard to mobile phones, but is free, and allows more freedom. To the phone makers, the balance of costs and benefits seen in Symbian makes it a better product.
How are immigrants from America / Europe treated? (With specific regard to race and religion)
Are they met with the same unfair prejudices we treat our immigrants with?
Apart from the language barrier, what are the biggest changes an American would need to make to his/her lifestyle if he were to move to India?
Finally, are there even many immigrants?
Parent post converted to $USD
The $11,000 on average for a programming job is a myth. On an average a fresh graduate out of a college gets between Rs. $4426 to $6639 ($1= Rs.46 approx) . A senior programmer with experience earns between (Rs. $7745 - $13,278) . And remeber like USA we have an income tax on higher side (30 - 40%)
And for the living costs $11,000 does not makes you live like a king for the stats
1) An average flat with (2-3 rooms) costs between $22. - $332) per month on rent. But these flats are still below par with what you would call an average flat in USA.
2) Buying a flat would cost you around (Rs. $22,133- $55,332 ) and thats average (as above ).
3) A car costs between Rs. $5,533 for a Maruti 800 (a 800 cc car with no frills not even an A/C )
to a Ford Ikon (a low end luxury car yeah we call it a luxury car ) for $11,067 and yeah they have a lot of other realy luxury cars like Mitsuibishi Lancer , Mercedes Benz but they are all out of reach of even a good earning programmer. Most programmers would generally own a two wheeler as the cost of running is low due to low petrol (oops gas) consumption (petrol is Rs. 36 / litre approx )
4) A music CD would cost around $2.25 to $7. A DVD for $8.85
5) A decent shirt would cost in excess of Rs. $11 and a decent pair of trousers arount Rs. $22.
6) Food costs are arount Rs. $5 - $10 if you cook at home or $1.66 - $3 if u eat out. The cheapest coffee at Barrista (the most popular coffee shop chain here) costs Rs. $0.66
7) And yeah a desktop costs around $664 for an economy machine to $1,107 for a decent one.
8) Telephone costs aroud $22 pm under basic use and $44 to $66 if u make more call or are using dialup internet connectivity (and 98% or so use it).
9) Broadband is either not available or if it costs around Rs. $44 pm with dload speeds of 20 kbps (yeah thats b-band in India).
There are other basic eminities but this can give an idea of living costs in India and yeah $11,000 gives you only a decent living below par a middle class in USA but its more than enough for an Indian as we are not as materialistic as the West and there are a lot more people earning a lot less than us.
Why do slashdot readers have to make everything difficult by somehow involving Linux?
As far as I know, the broadcasting industry has been fine without Linux for decades, and I don't possibly see how on earth a small-scale radio station would incorporate it.
As another poster mentioned, all you need is a mixing board, a couple of mikes and a transmitter.
Ambient has a very informative FAQ on their site. It answers pressing questions such as
"Does this device emit radiation"
and when the answer contains "all things emit radiaion", you know the author must have went to MIT.
Why bother with the trouble of VoIP?
Verizon offers DSL + Unlimited Local/Long distance for $85/month.
While it't not cheap, it's also not that much more than a cable connection, and you get to keep your normal phone!
I'm in no way affiliated with verizon. I just find it amazing that people pay such high bills for no clear reason.
No. Us americans are by no means barbaric when it comes to this sort of thing. No sir!
A few years back I worked with a system in my middle school attached to a microscope system with various cameras.
The equipment was donated, and nobody ever bothered figuring out how it worked. That is, until I came along, and fooled around with it a few months before graduating.
The stuff wasn't new - it wasn't new when it was donated five years earlier. The microscopes and cameras in particular - many of the insturments bore markings "Made in WEST Germany".
Anyhow, back to the point. The cameras were a bit more recent, and outputted their signal in a VGA format in a manner similar to the equipment the poster is talking about.
A PC was also donated to the school along with the microscope. It was newer - a 486/100 (though this was around the time the school began standardizing upon WinME (ugh!)), ran Win 3.11, and had a peculiar hardware device.
It had a highly advanced graphics card for the time, along with another card which appeared to have the ability to input and output one (possibly two.. I forget) VGA signal and process it via. a special software application (which was quite good IIRC, and offered many tools to adjust the images). The card appeared to be made by Matrox. It was capable of capturing individual still frames, and I believe was also able to do a time-lapse recording (a capture every 5 seconds or so), though this wasn't exactly useful for our purposes, and we never used it. Remember, full motion capture was not an option due to the age of the equipment. If you were able to capture at 30fps, the processor would never keep up, and the hard drive would fill up with raw data after about 2 minutes.
I really wish I could have seen the hardware, though that was certainly not an option - the computer was in a solid steel full tower (GIANT!) case, held together with tons of screws. I would get in trouble for taking it apart 'just for a peek'. I returned recently to find that they THREW THE ENTIRE SETUP IN THE TRASH. It was very disappointing, and a great example of the wastefulness of our public education system.
Hope this helps. You might still be able to find the matrox cards somewhere. Look also under RGB capture (many of these devices used 5 BNC plugs for their VGA signal instead of the D-sub connectors we're used to nowindays.
These are good for extending the output of the devices, but in the end, all you end up is the same monitor connected to a really long cable.
Remember... CAT5 DOES NOT IMPLY TCP/IP. I cannot emphasize this enough. If you plug one of these extenders into a switch, you will probably destroy both the switch and extender. They use cat5 simply because it is cheap and universally availible.
While they might not have the world's most descriptive titles, you'd do well to check out Rrootage and Noiz2sa
They're both highly abstract top-down shooters with pretty cool graphics. It's quite difficult to describe them with words -- the only way to experience them is to just play them. There are also windows ports availible somewhere.
Yes. 299 792 458 m/s is very fast.
And not only should it be fast, IT'S THE LAW
(m/s being meters/second for anybody who hasn't already gotten the joke
Not likely, but it's legal
(Click! It's funny...)
(evil soviet underlings) Da Commrad!
Ah. This must be from the german speaking part of Russia.
Yeah, but MSN only shows 32 results for SCO.
Google shows 3.8 million. (if the site stays down, how long until they're delisted?)
Searching google for MSN yields 44.8 million.
Searching google for google yields 41.7 million (this page among them)
Searching msn for msn yields 3,389
Searching msn for google yields 102, which, ironically, is listed as an "MSN Top Pick"
Fair? Maybe. Maybe not. It just seems that MSN's crawler hasn't mapped nearly as much of the web as Google's has, but has managed to map most stuff pertaining to itself (which it should).
The cd-rip version only has the files required for the 640x480 resolution :(
Even so, 640x480 doesn't look that bad, and you can probably find the files needed to do 1024 on the net.
It's similar to quake.
The engine and all of the underlying code and tools are open source. However, the graphics and the levels are still property of whoever made FS2
I fail to name a company, as that is still questionable - however, it is almost certain that Interplay does NOT have the rights to sell it, and that the original authors will most likely never see any of the profits from this limited edition. This is why the code was initially released, and why you can easily get a semi-legal version of the game off the net for free. From what I remember, one of the original developers also gave a copy of the source art and levels to the community under the terms that the company's logo remain unchanged, nothing else. Of course, to determine the owner of FS2 would be more complicated than to determine the owner of Unix (a la SCO). That's why there's no FS3
Freespace 2 is one of those great games which makes you wonder why on earth it didn't sell better.
In fact, I believe it is one of the only mass-produced American games to sell for more than the original MSRP on eBay several years after its release. It's not uncommon for a copy of FS2 to sell for $75.
But enough on the price of the game. The game itself is sweet. Gameplay is simply awesome. The graphics are amazing -- not even taking their age into consideration.
I've only played the CD-rip version of the game which didn't include the music, cutscenes, voices, or cinematics (which I am told are some of the best parts of the game). Even still, the gameplay is excellent, the storyline is pretty cool, and it's addicting as hell. (Word to the wise: Don't start this game the week before exams!). It's a pretty unique experience being caught in the midst of two capital ships battling it out, and has yet to be duplicated in any other game.
Plus, the engine's open source! There's a working linux port and a mac port! (The mac version is still under development and doesn't have a permanent website. You have to hunt around to find it). Even cooler is that a bunch of coders ported the entire Freespace 1 campagin to the FS2 engine.
So. In short, go out and buy this game! You will not regret it. It has much more longetivity and replay-value than most games made today.
Oh yeah. You can still download the CD-Rip for free. Chances are that HOTU will take it down in the next few days, as the game is now commercially availible once more. (Would somebody seed this as a torrent?)
I'm just curious as to how much Disney was actually "involved" in the making of their films at pixar...
Were the movies written at disney and animated at Pixar, or is the whole thing done at Pixar (and Disney takes care of the marketing)?
I just wonder, because, while Pixar does indeed produce some of the highest quality animation in the world, it's the story and the creativity which make the movie (anyone remember the Final Fantasy movie? blah).
That being said, I wish all of Pixar the best of luck, and hope their last two Disney films are as great as the last few. (It would be tragic if disney significantly cut funding to pixar for these films as a result of this announcement).
That also being said, I want to wish Roy Disney the best of luck in his quest to bring the company back to the way it used to be.
Here's another deviation. Not related to the books... but, after Peter Jackson recieved the Golden Globe award, he noticed that New Zealand is absent from the 'globe' trophy.
I hear you. Getting de-blacklisted is quite possibly one of the most frustrating tasks in existance.
Last week, every site in my netblock got classified by SPEWS, and consequently, SpamCop picked up a message coming from another account on my server and placed us on their 'experimental' blocklist which is apparently used by quite a few ISPs. This prompted a million and a half other spam lists to classify us just because we appeared on spamcop (who handled it much more fairly than the rest - they properly bounce detected spam, and removed us from their list after two days of inactivity.
All because we were A) In the same colo facility as a big-time spammer, and B) on a shared webhost which happened to host a small-time spammer on the same IP.
Long story short, I had to threaten my host that i'd cancel the service unless I got moved to a new IP. After a heated argument, they finally did.
Oh yeah. The two servers which were blocked hosted no more than a boy scout troop and a convent.
Augh.
From looking at this story, so far we have about 200 comments so far - and about 5 reviews. Most comments are highly moderated flames. Anyhow, I'll do my best to contribute my "actual" experiences with DirecWay.
Short review: It sucks. You're better off with ISDN.
Long review:
I helped to set a good friend of mine up with a DirecWay connection, as he lives on the outskirts of town on a private road, and is unable to recieve any other form of broadband. This was about 3 years ago, and at the time, it was DirecPC, and only worked one-way.
And it was okay. When it worked, we could get a respectable 150kB/s (close to the advertised 1.5mbps) and
about 700ms pings. Not great, but certainly tolerable. The slow 56k upload was a hassle, though. In addition, I will testify that their software was bad--no, it was horrible. It was buggy, and behaved erratically.
DirecWay promised that when they rolled out two-way service, the software and the service would be completely revamped.
Around this time, my friend spent one year abroad. During this time, he cancelled his subscription.
When he returned, he called DirecWay and had them install the two-way service. Thanks to the installer, he never did any setup on his PC, and didn't install the connection software, nor did he leave a CD.
As we found out, there is no easy way to download the software via. the net. In fact, once they finally sent us a CD, we couldn't find patches on their site. Which brings me to the topic of their support. I have called them many many times. Their staff is unknowledgable, hold times are guarrunteed to be over an hour, and they are barely fluent in English. DirecWay recieves a F- for support.
The new modem was little more than a modifed one-way modem which only connected via USB - not the promised revamped hardware. The software installation process was buggy. Very buggy. You had to try two to three times before an installation would finally work. Once we got it running, we saw that it was the exact same software we had used a year earlier - with a small patch to enable two-way communications - NOT the promised revamped software. And there was no way to see if there was an update via. DirecWay's website. They do have a support site. It's well hidden, and down most of the time.
Oh yes. Most everything is down most of the time. In the year we weren't using it, their NOC continued it's decline. DNS was a mixed bag - sometimes it worked sometimes it didn't, and you couldn't use a non-direcway DNS server. You also had to use a proxy server to access HTTP sites. This combination meant that the service was down. A lot.
Thanks to direcway's otherwise useless diagnostic utility, we could see that our modem was indeed in tip-top shape. We never dropped below 80% signal. It was clearly not the weather. When the service went down (which was quite often), it was usually a result of network trouble at DW. Even when we were able to get on, it wasn't that fast in terms of thoroughput or latency. Ironically, the site which always had the most trouble was DW's own site. It was ALWAYS down.
Now, the DW6000 caught my eye as solving many of these problems. However, after several phone calls to DW, I determined that not one of their representatives had even HEARD of the modem.
However, even if we could try it out, we wouldn't. They failed to come through on every other one of their promises they had made in the past. Their support was terrible, and their whole company was poorly run.
This is on top of all the stuff being discussed in this thread about the TOS policies, bandwidth caps, etc.
In short, we cancelled it. It just wasn't worth the pain and aggrivation. They keep promising improvements, but have always failed to deliver. If you can get ISDN, go for that, or attempt to do some sort of line-of-sight WiFi with a friend across town. You could even try to make your own DSL by ordering a dry copper loop between your house and one with broadband. Heck, even multilink 56k would be better...
They're not accepting donations for Bush.
If you want a laugh, take a look at the Sharpton page.
$20 from 4 contributions. $5 (which is the minimum alowed) per contribution.
You've got MWDs and oil????
Don't tell Bush!
(MWD must mean mass weapons of destruction... scary to think that not only has your company developed nuclear technology, but also developed antimatter)
This only applies if you don't work for Halliburton.
Forgotten? Yes. Most anything made in the 80's deserves to be forgotten and dropped from the history books.