Was anyone else disappointed at NWN? I haven't played any of the expansions, but I found the original game lacking in many ways to BG and Torment. You can definitely tell that Black Isle's story telling abilities are sorely missed. It never seemed to draw you in or give you any "cool" story experiences.
Well, I never even finished playing the initial scenario beyond chapter 3. I bought the SoU expansion and never played its campaign. I'm gonna buy HotU this weekend and to be honest with you, I don't even intend to play it's campaign either anytime soon. Multiplayer is where its at. Remember that Dungeons and Dragons was originally a social role-playing game? Neverwinter Nights actually re-creates this when you play online. Get your butt online on some PW server like the Nordock one that guy mentioned in the post above and you'll see what I'm talking about. You can't beat a party of 4-5 real humans on your team for total and complete chaos and D&D goodness. Add a DM who is invisibly making it rain monsters on you and you will be having the time of your life.
Doom 3 will have SMP support, and my Dual Opteron will eat it up like a fat man at a candy convention:). I want more SMP capable games too.
NwN is not so framerate sensitive as most FPS games and things like Doom3. If you get 20fps its totally playable and your not likely to notice any ill effects. And of course you can benefit from SMP. The nwmain process will just live on one of the cpu's and use up 99% cpu cycles for that processor, leaving you lots of cycles to run system processes, a web browser on your other monitor, etc. Really the game depends more on your OpenGL board than your CPU speed anyways.
I didn't buy 2 LCD's for no reason. For example, NWN could do it where one screen is your Char sheet, inventory and message window, and the other is your play window. If anyone at Bioware is listening, do this, and you will be revered as my gods...
I think you will find that when you are slugging it out in the middle of a pack of giants or running for your life from a dragon, or casting fireballs as fast as you possibly can that you really don't have time to be fooling around with your inventory or looking at your character sheet:-)
I can't find a way to bash Microsoft in this article.
Please advise.
Well the Windows client tends to crash a lot because little MSN Messenger spam popups keep dropping you back to the desktop. Also, people with the windows version seem to have to do a hard reboot when the game crashes. OTOH, in my experience the linux client is very robust and has only crashed once or twice in my memory, and all it did was drop out to X11 to be quickly restarted with no reboot required. Also, in multiplayer, I seem to consistenly beat people through doors and zone transitions as the system loads up new maps very quickly. And finally, I get to make a lot of smug ha ha, you crashed eh -- my Linux client doesnt do that. comments while playing online.
Yes it does. I have a 11th level Barbarian / 3rd level Rogue named "Ogg" who is fully supported by the new expansion pack. And if you want to find out why I named him Ogg just find him online and tell him that he's one ugly mother.
You are missing the whole deal. Multiplayer is where NwN shows its stuff best. You really don't need henchman AI to be very good because you will have several human players on your team instead. And enemy AI is definately good. Enemy spellcasters will use their best spells to deadly effect, grunts will often target who they perceive to be the biggest threat.
For the single player game, BGI/II/ToB are hard to beat, but compared to live action NwN multiplayer on a good server with competent players and a well designed module, well it just isn't anything like NwN at all. NwN really has transcended to a new kind of game entirely. Think along the lines of counterstrike, except playing in Co-op mode, with the NwN engine, and a hodge-podge group of character classes. You should see the fireworks when you put a wizard, sorcerer, cleric, and a couple fighters together in a group and get in a decent sized battle. It is just amazing.
Some of the persistant world modules that are out there now are intensely fun. There is plenty to do all the time, tremendously challenging quests, and plenty of other players to for a party with. Then add to that you may have dm's online stirring up the soup and spreading mischief, and it all adds up to great fun.
Personally I never finished the OC, never even bothered to play the SoU campaign. The game sat kind of idle for a while until I tried out multiplayer, but now I feel like I am seeing NwN as it was envisioned to be. Wait until you are in an army of 20+ high level characters attacking some epic fortress, it is fantastic!
I'm not going to mention which PW I play on because I don't want all of you slashdot dorks ruining my fun. I leave it to you to find a suitable campaign which suits you.
The idea is that university computers should be used for learning purposes and not for non-education related things. I took some courses at Penn State and have to say that the old computer labs were mainly filled with people typing in chatboxes and such. I think if you just want to fool around online you should just get a dialup account and just use the school computers and network for school things.
The problem with this implementation is that it is a "sneaky" way to do it which allows people to still get in trouble only to be caught at a later time. The job of a school is to teach not punish. They should just teach students not to abuse the school network. Whats so hard about that?
Well, I don't think you could buy a replacement for the rights to life, liberty or the pursuit of happiness (or property)...those are the things my "Father" gave to me. So I would be very sad indeed.
Well said, and I agree, although I wasn't intending to get that deep here. Even still this is the kind of feelings that get invoked. A gift, which is essentially what Open Office is, is much almost always more meaningfull and valuable than a purchased item, even if the purchased item is supposedly superior (which in this case it clearly is not).
Hundreds and thousands of people have given their valuable time and effort, donating the time from their lives, the one thing that each of us has in so limited a supply, to make this wonderfull Open Office suite, so that poor students and, well anybody, can have a first class little computer system without paying tribute the the MS monster that murdered all the other little guys like WordPerfect and Lotus123 so that they could be the only game in town.
Microsoft:
Bought DOS to begin with!
Stole IBM OS/2 technology and made Windows 3.0 and NT
Blatantly copied Apple MacOS in a sucky way
Crushed all competitors mercilessly and now stifle newcomers
Were responsible for thousands of buggy commerical programs
Have caused untold trillions of dollars of lost productivity
Make my Mom have to deal with stupid viruses
I've watched them claw their way to the top over the last fifteen years. You aren't going to get me to ever say one good thing about them until they are gone. They are like some kind of organized crime group and I for one will not deal with them ever.
Sorry, I didn't mean to be so darn vicious, but that just ticked me off for some reason. Your comment is both untrue and inflamatory, and its like your are beating on a baby. Pick on somebody your own size. OO is spanky new and generally used only at home except in the rare enlightened companies which never caved in to MS strong-arm tactics and still run Unix or the like.
OO is better than MS Office and it always will be. Any gift given out of charity is much more meaningful than a similar thing which you bought. If I destroyed something your Father gave you, then offered to "buy you a replacement" how would you feel?
How in the hell am I going to use MS Office in Debian Linux? When I need to print out an envelope or mailing label or little letter, I fire up OO and get the damn job done. Its great, and it doesn't have all the idiotic quirks that MS Office has which presumes that I am some kind of moron like you who needs my dick held for me every time I need to take a piss. Get back under the bridge, you evil MS ass-troll.
I wouldn't be suprised if SCO's stock price is overinflated due to short-selling. I'll be the first to admit that I have a rather limited knowledge of Wall Street finance, but there is a huge demand for the stock because everybody wants to sell short, wouldn't this make the price spike temporarily before it implodes?
Probably just wishfull thinking on my part. SCO gives the phrase "flogging a dead horse" a whole new world of meaning. It must be some kind of mutant zombie robot horse like something from Quake2, and no doubt they are using the Super Cattle Prod, like from Fallout, to flog it. Makes me think of the Grinch when he was whipping his dog Max to drag that big overloaded sleigh up that mountain.
You must be joking right. We had some old pile of cdroms and tapes. There was no usable media anywhere to be found. If that server died that was it, there was nothing because the company decided that SCO's license terms were outrageous and stopped paying them years ago. I was hacking on a totally unsupported old SCO machine which license had expired years ago. I even fixed a Y2k bug when I rebooted it once.
I have personally ran SCO OpenServer in the past and I was really not impressed at all. Their kernel sucks and blows (kind of like a suck-blow if you know what that is). This was in, oh 2000 I believe, and SCO OpenServer reminded me of the ancient UNIX system I used to toy with at Penn State in the 80's except it wasn't as good. My former employer paid out some tremendous sum to run this crap.
They had installed a UniBasic system which ran the company database, written for the TeleVidio terminal family which was being emulated by Wyse-30's. Naturally I found this intolerable so I modified the UniBasic code and inserted VT100 escape sequences to fix the most important screens so that we could telnet to the SCO box instead of using the Wyse-30's which were blowing up and not being replaced.
That was until I dumped the entire UniBasic system. I wrote a terminal macro to repeat a sequence of keypresses and logged the session to a text file. Then I wrote an awk script to parse the text file into a bunch of smaller files. Then I prepended and html-ized these little files, and finally I indexed them with Glimpse.
Man it rocked. You could do a glimpse search and get exactly the same info that you would have gotten by using the Unibasic from the Wyse-30 right from your web browser.
Right after I did this ( I was a temp ), the parent company completely shut down our company and moved it to Massachussets, firing everybody at my factory. Unfortunately, they still haven't figured out how to connect the SCO box back up and make it work again. Eh? Fixed IP what the hell is that!?! Hahahahah you dumb asses!
SCO is so ass-backwards I can see how this whole thing came about. They must have fired anybody with brains decades ago, and they are just milking their cash cow until it dies.
Or, and this is pretty far-fetched, perhaps they covet the Linux kernel and GNU software. Their conjecture is, if they can win, maybe they can take ownership of GNU/Linux and hijack the whole deal. They realize that they can't make their OS better, so they are now attempting to steal ours.
> It was due to his vision and hard work that > Linux was ABLE to take off and start flying > high right away instead of floundering around > in the muck for a long time.
Yeah when I booted Debian for the first time, back in 1993, it was all there. You had gcc, emacs, all the binutils, just about everything you needed to program to your heart's content. What was lacking back then was hardware drivers for the kernel, and nobody could afford decent graphics cards that were supported by XFree86 way back then. I had a crap EGA card and monitor on my 386/40 and I could only fool around in text console mode. Even so, it was way better than DesqView, and Windows 3.0 wasn't too well suited for anything except solitaire. I was experimenting with converting my DOS/DesqView based BBS system to run on a getty. About that time I went broke and it all fell apart for a few years. When I got straightened out the internet was king. I got a copy of OS2/Warp 3.0 (this was before Windows95) and was suprised to find out that the GNU tools were available for OS/2 also. I was compiling OS/2 EXE files with gcc! Had a Bash shell, all that good stuff. For some reason I had forgotten about Linux, but a year or so later I remembered it and I've been running it ever since! But I for one am willing to give RMS his credit. GNU "is" a complete OS and it provides me that Unix-like system that I crave. Face it, running command.com or explorer.exe on the Linux kernel would probably be less than thrilling. The XFree86 group really deserves a lot of credit too, because they have been there from the start too, and X is one awesome windowing system for sure (depending on how well you got it set up). [Drifts off into thought about the old days...]
However, it also has some kind of sysvinit package which is usually installed too. Actually I really don't understand Hurd's boot process. I think you'd have to ask Marcus or Roland about that. Hurd is pretty alien as to how it goes about its business. Its really nothing like Linux if you peek under the hood.
No, I tell them that I have been screwed by MS Operating systems for fifteen years, and that I won't propogate the situation any more. I give some smart-assed advice which is the the actual solution and walk away. They know me and they don't dis Linux because they don't know that it exists, and I don't tell them either. I just say I hate Windows and leave it up to them to find an alternative. I'm not an advocate anymore, been there, done that. I just let them flounder in their own ignorance.
No, for a very long time all companies were scared to death of it. Linux has been the Pariah Dog of OS's for the last decade just because of this. No company would touch it for fear of viral licensing contamination. Personally, I understand the GPL and as an engineer, I leverage it!
Consider, if I, at work, want to program a robot or something, I can totally use GPL code until the cows come home, and nobody or nothing can do anything about it. The GPL gives me this freedom. As long as I don't try to distribute my derived code, I'm totally legit! And since my company doesn't sell robots, nobody gives a crap as long as it works flawlessly. It is an in-house thing never to be sold or given away, and it does what it is supposed to do perfectly.
That is how the GPL works for you. And don't try and say I'm ripping off the GPL because I'm not, this is perfectly within the License and my robot program is none of your business as long as I don't try and sell it to you.
This is a powerfull license for engineers, I sincerely doubt that Visual Studio would give you these broad freedoms even if it was suitable for programming industrial equipment, which I will never know because my company will never pay the ridiculous licensing fees for something like that if a GPL alternative is viable.
Linus wrote the Linux kernel because he wanted to toy around with a Unix-ish system but he couldn't afford the AT&T license. I use GNU because I want the same thing, and no, as a home user, I do not want to have to license SCO Unixware. A _lot_ of hard work has gone into GNU and the Linux kernel just so that people like you and me can have the worlds best operating system to experiment with and learn from.
I have indeed been a SCO sysadmin, and it is an ugly hard-core Unix with no frills, no hand-holding, and it ain't Linux. If you think that Linux isn't ready for the desktop then SCO Unix is about ten years behind Linux in this regard. Basically it sucks in every respect except that SCO will come in and hook up a bunch of consoles for you and will write you some lame app in Unibasic to run on your terminals. That was the old SCO, the new SCO probably doesn't get their hands dirty with such stuff like writing programs.
Having run their OS, it was OK, nowhere near as good as GNU+Linux but it was OK, something like NetBSD with FVWM2 I suppose, except not as good. SCO reminded me of Ultrix on the university terminals about ten years ago.
But Linus did a clean-room implementation of the Unix kernel, and Stallman's FSF wrote the rest of the GNU OS as a clean room implementation as well. This was so that you and me could piss around with a real Unix-like system at home without having the bankroll to install AT&T UNIX. I don't know what you know about how SCO operates, but they implement the High Priesthood almost as good as IBM does.
When I was the SCO sysadmin, the management totally freaked out when they found out I had even touched the SCO box! But the mods I made (since I had learned using Linux) pleased them so they let me keep working with it. I replaced as much as I could with GNU so I was running SCO/GNU which was better than SCO. The little box was humming better than it ever did. I hacked the Unibasic code and implemented ANSI-BBS terminal support in addition to Wyse-30 "magic cookie codes" and Whoaa! We could use the "telnet" thing just as good as the Wyse-30's!!! Amazing! No more garbled screens... don't have to walk over to the termial anymore!
Linux exists as a learning tool. How else are you going to learn Unix as a home user? No it isn't ready for the desktop, and it may never. It is an old-school "big iron" OS and you ought to thank your lucky stars that you have it.
They seem to think that it is a bunch of malarky and they can walk all over it. Stallmann et. al. crafted the GPL so that they could write GNU's Not Unix from the very start. If you think that I would donate my free time writing programs so that SCO can steal them then you are sadly mistaken. Just like I don't help people at work who have problems with Windows even though I am an expert. If I were to donate my time helping somebody with Windows, then Bill Gates and Microsoft are essentially stealing my time for free. If somebody has problems I tell them to call the IT department or Microsoft Technical Support.
Same deal with GNU software. I rely on the GPL to know that my code is going into the public pool. I do it as a hobby and I don't get paid for my time, so my one recompense is knowing that some jerks can't steal my hours of labor. I give them as a gift for all the world and that is good enough for me.
When these "SCO" big-shots start attacking the GPL I take it personal, and so does anybody else who has written for Linux and GNU. I'm certainly not writing code to make SCO rich. They don't pay me, they don't like my "philosophy", well they can go piss up a rope because I'm getting tired of them walking all over the GPL like it somehow doesn't apply to them because they are "big-shots." Bullshit! They are a bunch of crack-heads if they think they can pull this swindle off. They got big balls, I'll give them that, but their big balls are gonna get kicked hard.
Why should anybody make it easy for these jerks either? Hey if you want "real UNIX" then some BSD variant should meet your needs. People who use SC0 are just "technologically challenged" and they think that they will get this great support. SC0 blows, think UNIX about fifteen years ago. Yep the ancient source code, thats about what you get.
If you run SC0 and you want to use GNU software, then you should run GNU, not SC0.
Obviously GNU utilities could never be superior to professionally developed software in a million years right?
Apache... bah! The SCOHelp http server is vastly superior in every way. I'm sure all those SCO people who run Apache just do it because Apache is the more trendier of the two.
Right. In the Newtonian zone, acceleration varies directly with the applied force. However, as an object approaches relativistic speeds, the curve goes non-linear and an infinetesmal increase in velocity requires a prodigious amount of force. I believe this is due to the "Lorentz transformation."
However what this provides is a virtual wall to push upon which is only a mere atom. In space, mass is the critical commodity, if you run out of propulsion mass, you are basically out of control with no means to change your velocity. You want to get the most thrust using the least amount of matter.
It is not inconcievable that a powerfull reactor could be made which could provide a lot of electrical energy for a pretty long time, but there is a definate limit to how much rocket fuel you can take. I guess you could maximize things by using your spent nuclear fuel atoms as your propulsion mass. These are mere technical problems, the physics is real and it is believed that this scheme is viable.
However, zero-point energy fields for magnetic propulsion has no basis in anything. This is typical hokester mumbo-jumbo. Don't get me wrong I would love to see this technology, but nobody has ever made any successful demonstration, and it is all based on way-out vibratory holographic universe theory and wacky fringe pseudo-science which sounds plausible when explained by a charismatic speaker, but it is completely alien to all known science.
These guys always say that "narrow-minded academics refuse to accept these cutting-edge concepts" but that is just crap. When any honest scientist makes a real attempt to investigate them, they bolt and then accuse the scientists of trying to steal "their secret technology." It is all a big scam. You are better off making a space church and praying for propulsion because at least there is a pretty good argument that God exists. Zero point energy is a pipe dream, there is no argument as to why it should exist, they just claim that it does because they want it to.
Stick with known science. If you happen to make a breakthrough in the process than that is awesome, but at least you aren't just pissing in the wind.
The closest thing to this that even remotely has a chance of working is a Laithwaite style "Rock Crusher" or GIT "Gyroscopic Inertial Propulsion." Unfortunately this hypothetical torque to thrust loophole doesn't seem to work after so many failed attempts to make one. Bummer.
The best bet is an ion drive "relativity rocket" where you fire something like a lead atom out of a barrel at the speed of light. Theroetically it takes infinite force to accelerate a particle to the speed of light, so you would get an equal an opposite infinite reaction force. Even in this case you always need a propellant. This is the how to theoretically maximize your thrust produced per mass consumed. You'd need one heck of a particle accelerator, and some humongous nuclear powerplant to run it. Getting all this put together in orbit is beyond our means right now, we can't even build anything like this on the surface yet.
Same here. If I could stay up for 22 and sleep for 8 then I would have zero problems. I'm just not ready to sleep after a mere 16 hours. Typically I sleep about 3 - 4 hours per night, feel like absolute crap in the morning, drag all day, and by 8pm I feel fine and am ready to stay up until 3am again. At 3am I force myself to go to bed, although I feel fine, but as soon as I am horizontal I'm out like a light.
For me, I find I have ADHD symptoms if I am tired but not if I am well rested. It is rather dramatic actually. Those rare occasions where I get a full 8 hours of snooze make me extrordinarily productive the following day. Thats a problem with technology jobs, you never become physically tired so your sleep cycle gets all messed up. When I worked labor jobs I was so physically tired that I never had much trouble making myself sleep.
Now that we are all more or less brains in a jar in front of a computer, the 24 hour cycle is just too short.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I never even finished playing the initial scenario beyond chapter 3. I bought the SoU expansion and never played its campaign. I'm gonna buy HotU this weekend and to be honest with you, I don't even intend to play it's campaign either anytime soon. Multiplayer is where its at. Remember that Dungeons and Dragons was originally a social role-playing game? Neverwinter Nights actually re-creates this when you play online. Get your butt online on some PW server like the Nordock one that guy mentioned in the post above and you'll see what I'm talking about. You can't beat a party of 4-5 real humans on your team for total and complete chaos and D&D goodness. Add a DM who is invisibly making it rain monsters on you and you will be having the time of your life.
Well the Windows client tends to crash a lot because little MSN Messenger spam popups keep dropping you back to the desktop. Also, people with the windows version seem to have to do a hard reboot when the game crashes. OTOH, in my experience the linux client is very robust and has only crashed once or twice in my memory, and all it did was drop out to X11 to be quickly restarted with no reboot required. Also, in multiplayer, I seem to consistenly beat people through doors and zone transitions as the system loads up new maps very quickly. And finally, I get to make a lot of smug ha ha, you crashed eh -- my Linux client doesnt do that. comments while playing online.
Yes it does. I have a 11th level Barbarian / 3rd level Rogue named "Ogg" who is fully supported by the new expansion pack. And if you want to find out why I named him Ogg just find him online and tell him that he's one ugly mother.
For the single player game, BGI/II/ToB are hard to beat, but compared to live action NwN multiplayer on a good server with competent players and a well designed module, well it just isn't anything like NwN at all. NwN really has transcended to a new kind of game entirely. Think along the lines of counterstrike, except playing in Co-op mode, with the NwN engine, and a hodge-podge group of character classes. You should see the fireworks when you put a wizard, sorcerer, cleric, and a couple fighters together in a group and get in a decent sized battle. It is just amazing.
Personally I never finished the OC, never even bothered to play the SoU campaign. The game sat kind of idle for a while until I tried out multiplayer, but now I feel like I am seeing NwN as it was envisioned to be. Wait until you are in an army of 20+ high level characters attacking some epic fortress, it is fantastic!
I'm not going to mention which PW I play on because I don't want all of you slashdot dorks ruining my fun. I leave it to you to find a suitable campaign which suits you.
The problem with this implementation is that it is a "sneaky" way to do it which allows people to still get in trouble only to be caught at a later time. The job of a school is to teach not punish. They should just teach students not to abuse the school network. Whats so hard about that?
Well said, and I agree, although I wasn't intending to get that deep here. Even still this is the kind of feelings that get invoked. A gift, which is essentially what Open Office is, is much almost always more meaningfull and valuable than a purchased item, even if the purchased item is supposedly superior (which in this case it clearly is not).
Hundreds and thousands of people have given their valuable time and effort, donating the time from their lives, the one thing that each of us has in so limited a supply, to make this wonderfull Open Office suite, so that poor students and, well anybody, can have a first class little computer system without paying tribute the the MS monster that murdered all the other little guys like WordPerfect and Lotus123 so that they could be the only game in town.
Microsoft:
I've watched them claw their way to the top over the last fifteen years. You aren't going to get me to ever say one good thing about them until they are gone. They are like some kind of organized crime group and I for one will not deal with them ever.
Sorry, I didn't mean to be so darn vicious, but that just ticked me off for some reason. Your comment is both untrue and inflamatory, and its like your are beating on a baby. Pick on somebody your own size. OO is spanky new and generally used only at home except in the rare enlightened companies which never caved in to MS strong-arm tactics and still run Unix or the like.
OO is better than MS Office and it always will be. Any gift given out of charity is much more meaningful than a similar thing which you bought. If I destroyed something your Father gave you, then offered to "buy you a replacement" how would you feel?
How in the hell am I going to use MS Office in Debian Linux? When I need to print out an envelope or mailing label or little letter, I fire up OO and get the damn job done. Its great, and it doesn't have all the idiotic quirks that MS Office has which presumes that I am some kind of moron like you who needs my dick held for me every time I need to take a piss. Get back under the bridge, you evil MS ass-troll.
I wouldn't be suprised if SCO's stock price is overinflated due to short-selling. I'll be the first to admit that I have a rather limited knowledge of Wall Street finance, but there is a huge demand for the stock because everybody wants to sell short, wouldn't this make the price spike temporarily before it implodes?
Probably just wishfull thinking on my part. SCO gives the phrase "flogging a dead horse" a whole new world of meaning. It must be some kind of mutant zombie robot horse like something from Quake2, and no doubt they are using the Super Cattle Prod, like from Fallout, to flog it. Makes me think of the Grinch when he was whipping his dog Max to drag that big overloaded sleigh up that mountain.
You must be joking right. We had some old pile of cdroms and tapes. There was no usable media anywhere to be found. If that server died that was it, there was nothing because the company decided that SCO's license terms were outrageous and stopped paying them years ago. I was hacking on a totally unsupported old SCO machine which license had expired years ago. I even fixed a Y2k bug when I rebooted it once.
I have personally ran SCO OpenServer in the past and I was really not impressed at all. Their kernel sucks and blows (kind of like a suck-blow if you know what that is). This was in, oh 2000 I believe, and SCO OpenServer reminded me of the ancient UNIX system I used to toy with at Penn State in the 80's except it wasn't as good. My former employer paid out some tremendous sum to run this crap.
They had installed a UniBasic system which ran the company database, written for the TeleVidio terminal family which was being emulated by Wyse-30's. Naturally I found this intolerable so I modified the UniBasic code and inserted VT100 escape sequences to fix the most important screens so that we could telnet to the SCO box instead of using the Wyse-30's which were blowing up and not being replaced.
That was until I dumped the entire UniBasic system. I wrote a terminal macro to repeat a sequence of keypresses and logged the session to a text file. Then I wrote an awk script to parse the text file into a bunch of smaller files. Then I prepended and html-ized these little files, and finally I indexed them with Glimpse.
Man it rocked. You could do a glimpse search and get exactly the same info that you would have gotten by using the Unibasic from the Wyse-30 right from your web browser.
Right after I did this ( I was a temp ), the parent company completely shut down our company and moved it to Massachussets, firing everybody at my factory. Unfortunately, they still haven't figured out how to connect the SCO box back up and make it work again. Eh? Fixed IP what the hell is that!?! Hahahahah you dumb asses!
SCO is so ass-backwards I can see how this whole thing came about. They must have fired anybody with brains decades ago, and they are just milking their cash cow until it dies.
Or, and this is pretty far-fetched, perhaps they covet the Linux kernel and GNU software. Their conjecture is, if they can win, maybe they can take ownership of GNU/Linux and hijack the whole deal. They realize that they can't make their OS better, so they are now attempting to steal ours.
> It was due to his vision and hard work that
> Linux was ABLE to take off and start flying
> high right away instead of floundering around
> in the muck for a long time.
Yeah when I booted Debian for the first time, back in 1993, it was all there. You had gcc, emacs, all the binutils, just about everything you needed to program to your heart's content. What was lacking back then was hardware drivers for the kernel, and nobody could afford decent graphics cards that were supported by XFree86 way back then. I had a crap EGA card and monitor on my 386/40 and I could only fool around in text console mode. Even so, it was way better than DesqView, and Windows 3.0 wasn't too well suited for anything except solitaire. I was experimenting with converting my DOS/DesqView based BBS system to run on a getty. About that time I went broke and it all fell apart for a few years. When I got straightened out the internet was king. I got a copy of OS2/Warp 3.0 (this was before Windows95) and was suprised to find out that the GNU tools were available for OS/2 also. I was compiling OS/2 EXE files with gcc! Had a Bash shell, all that good stuff. For some reason I had forgotten about Linux, but a year or so later I remembered it and I've been running it ever since! But I for one am willing to give RMS his credit. GNU "is" a complete OS and it provides me that Unix-like system that I crave. Face it, running command.com or explorer.exe on the Linux kernel would probably be less than thrilling. The XFree86 group really deserves a lot of credit too, because they have been there from the start too, and X is one awesome windowing system for sure (depending on how well you got it set up). [Drifts off into thought about the old days...]
No, I tell them that I have been screwed by MS Operating systems for fifteen years, and that I won't propogate the situation any more. I give some smart-assed advice which is the the actual solution and walk away. They know me and they don't dis Linux because they don't know that it exists, and I don't tell them either. I just say I hate Windows and leave it up to them to find an alternative. I'm not an advocate anymore, been there, done that. I just let them flounder in their own ignorance.
Consider, if I, at work, want to program a robot or something, I can totally use GPL code until the cows come home, and nobody or nothing can do anything about it. The GPL gives me this freedom. As long as I don't try to distribute my derived code, I'm totally legit! And since my company doesn't sell robots, nobody gives a crap as long as it works flawlessly. It is an in-house thing never to be sold or given away, and it does what it is supposed to do perfectly.
That is how the GPL works for you. And don't try and say I'm ripping off the GPL because I'm not, this is perfectly within the License and my robot program is none of your business as long as I don't try and sell it to you.
This is a powerfull license for engineers, I sincerely doubt that Visual Studio would give you these broad freedoms even if it was suitable for programming industrial equipment, which I will never know because my company will never pay the ridiculous licensing fees for something like that if a GPL alternative is viable.
I have indeed been a SCO sysadmin, and it is an ugly hard-core Unix with no frills, no hand-holding, and it ain't Linux. If you think that Linux isn't ready for the desktop then SCO Unix is about ten years behind Linux in this regard. Basically it sucks in every respect except that SCO will come in and hook up a bunch of consoles for you and will write you some lame app in Unibasic to run on your terminals. That was the old SCO, the new SCO probably doesn't get their hands dirty with such stuff like writing programs.
Having run their OS, it was OK, nowhere near as good as GNU+Linux but it was OK, something like NetBSD with FVWM2 I suppose, except not as good. SCO reminded me of Ultrix on the university terminals about ten years ago.
But Linus did a clean-room implementation of the Unix kernel, and Stallman's FSF wrote the rest of the GNU OS as a clean room implementation as well. This was so that you and me could piss around with a real Unix-like system at home without having the bankroll to install AT&T UNIX. I don't know what you know about how SCO operates, but they implement the High Priesthood almost as good as IBM does.
When I was the SCO sysadmin, the management totally freaked out when they found out I had even touched the SCO box! But the mods I made (since I had learned using Linux) pleased them so they let me keep working with it. I replaced as much as I could with GNU so I was running SCO/GNU which was better than SCO. The little box was humming better than it ever did. I hacked the Unibasic code and implemented ANSI-BBS terminal support in addition to Wyse-30 "magic cookie codes" and Whoaa! We could use the "telnet" thing just as good as the Wyse-30's!!! Amazing! No more garbled screens ... don't have to walk over to the termial anymore!
Linux exists as a learning tool. How else are you going to learn Unix as a home user? No it isn't ready for the desktop, and it may never. It is an old-school "big iron" OS and you ought to thank your lucky stars that you have it.
Yes but that gives me karma and takes away theirs... W00T!
Same deal with GNU software. I rely on the GPL to know that my code is going into the public pool. I do it as a hobby and I don't get paid for my time, so my one recompense is knowing that some jerks can't steal my hours of labor. I give them as a gift for all the world and that is good enough for me.
When these "SCO" big-shots start attacking the GPL I take it personal, and so does anybody else who has written for Linux and GNU. I'm certainly not writing code to make SCO rich. They don't pay me, they don't like my "philosophy", well they can go piss up a rope because I'm getting tired of them walking all over the GPL like it somehow doesn't apply to them because they are "big-shots." Bullshit! They are a bunch of crack-heads if they think they can pull this swindle off. They got big balls, I'll give them that, but their big balls are gonna get kicked hard.
Why should anybody make it easy for these jerks either? Hey if you want "real UNIX" then some BSD variant should meet your needs. People who use SC0 are just "technologically challenged" and they think that they will get this great support. SC0 blows, think UNIX about fifteen years ago. Yep the ancient source code, thats about what you get.
If you run SC0 and you want to use GNU software, then you should run GNU, not SC0.
Obviously GNU utilities could never be superior to professionally developed software in a million years right?
Apache... bah! The SCOHelp http server is vastly superior in every way. I'm sure all those SCO people who run Apache just do it because Apache is the more trendier of the two.
Right. In the Newtonian zone, acceleration varies directly with the applied force. However, as an object approaches relativistic speeds, the curve goes non-linear and an infinetesmal increase in velocity requires a prodigious amount of force. I believe this is due to the "Lorentz transformation."
However what this provides is a virtual wall to push upon which is only a mere atom. In space, mass is the critical commodity, if you run out of propulsion mass, you are basically out of control with no means to change your velocity. You want to get the most thrust using the least amount of matter.
It is not inconcievable that a powerfull reactor could be made which could provide a lot of electrical energy for a pretty long time, but there is a definate limit to how much rocket fuel you can take. I guess you could maximize things by using your spent nuclear fuel atoms as your propulsion mass. These are mere technical problems, the physics is real and it is believed that this scheme is viable.
However, zero-point energy fields for magnetic propulsion has no basis in anything. This is typical hokester mumbo-jumbo. Don't get me wrong I would love to see this technology, but nobody has ever made any successful demonstration, and it is all based on way-out vibratory holographic universe theory and wacky fringe pseudo-science which sounds plausible when explained by a charismatic speaker, but it is completely alien to all known science.
These guys always say that "narrow-minded academics refuse to accept these cutting-edge concepts" but that is just crap. When any honest scientist makes a real attempt to investigate them, they bolt and then accuse the scientists of trying to steal "their secret technology." It is all a big scam. You are better off making a space church and praying for propulsion because at least there is a pretty good argument that God exists. Zero point energy is a pipe dream, there is no argument as to why it should exist, they just claim that it does because they want it to.
Stick with known science. If you happen to make a breakthrough in the process than that is awesome, but at least you aren't just pissing in the wind.
The closest thing to this that even remotely has a chance of working is a Laithwaite style "Rock Crusher" or GIT "Gyroscopic Inertial Propulsion." Unfortunately this hypothetical torque to thrust loophole doesn't seem to work after so many failed attempts to make one. Bummer.
The best bet is an ion drive "relativity rocket" where you fire something like a lead atom out of a barrel at the speed of light. Theroetically it takes infinite force to accelerate a particle to the speed of light, so you would get an equal an opposite infinite reaction force. Even in this case you always need a propellant. This is the how to theoretically maximize your thrust produced per mass consumed. You'd need one heck of a particle accelerator, and some humongous nuclear powerplant to run it. Getting all this put together in orbit is beyond our means right now, we can't even build anything like this on the surface yet.
Same here. If I could stay up for 22 and sleep for 8 then I would have zero problems. I'm just not ready to sleep after a mere 16 hours. Typically I sleep about 3 - 4 hours per night, feel like absolute crap in the morning, drag all day, and by 8pm I feel fine and am ready to stay up until 3am again. At 3am I force myself to go to bed, although I feel fine, but as soon as I am horizontal I'm out like a light.
For me, I find I have ADHD symptoms if I am tired but not if I am well rested. It is rather dramatic actually. Those rare occasions where I get a full 8 hours of snooze make me extrordinarily productive the following day. Thats a problem with technology jobs, you never become physically tired so your sleep cycle gets all messed up. When I worked labor jobs I was so physically tired that I never had much trouble making myself sleep.
Now that we are all more or less brains in a jar in front of a computer, the 24 hour cycle is just too short.