Heh. It's regarding the diverse nature of the hardware. Linux interfacing with toilets and model airplane parts? Heh, Linux is #1 when it comes to weird hardware support.
Yeah, but even if the patches were made available and lots of security notices were sent to users, people would still be too lazy to install them.
The best way would to run an update daemon which would automagically install security patches every night without user intervention. Something like using cvsup & make world with freebsd without having to build from source.
Yeah, if you can spare approx $300, you can order G4 towers with the geforce 3. BTW, the GeForce 2's in the Mac's are MX's, so they are memory crippled and somewhat disappointing when it comes to performance expectations...
Re:The Cube: A failure of market differentiation
on
Apple Dumps the Cube
·
· Score: 1
And the amazing thing is the Kyro2 does not have a GPU! It's a case of using smarter rendering technology versus throwing more silicon at the problem.
Yeah right. The way I see it, games will remain the same cost in addition to the presence of advertisements. Why?
The sad fact remains that most computer games are NOT blockbusters. Games like Halflife, Diablo, Starcraft, and The Sims are the exceptions and not the norm. This forces game developers to use tried and true formulas (read FPS, RTS, or RPG) and to literally develop game clones in the hope that fans of the original game won't mind snapping up a copy. (Not that game developers are at fault... Great, original games have been ignored by ignorant gamers.)
Now, with the advent of advertising, perhaps more unique games can be developed where developers aren't 100% forced to develop a game that will be "guaranteed" to return a minimum profit, because advertising income could be used to offset the cost of development.
Then again, it could also signal the downfall of gaming, which could parallel the downfall of television as a medium. Today, many of the sitcoms on TV are clones of others so that TV execs can make a sales pitch to advertising companies along the lines of "Hey! Our show is practically a clone of XX show, that we'd be guaranteed to attract XX's audience. You should advertise during our show's time block."
Of course, scenario two is probably the likely outcome, since most game publishers are out to maximize profit instead of maximizing "entertainment" value of their products.
The developers probably don't have to distribute the source as the games themselves are probably built on a set of proprietary Sony libraries.
HOWEVER, it's probably more likely that the compilation for games (ie cross-compiling) is done in a Linux environment, because GCC has been pretty much ported to most significant embedded CPU's these days.
Sony wouldn't want to use Linux on the PS2 because console's don't need to run multiple processes, they definitely don't need memory protection, and the kernel needs to have low latency.
It's most likely that the PS2 "kernel" is actually a boot library that is linked with the game so that cycle sucking system calls don't have to be used to tell the kernel to read some data from the dvd-rom drive, etc...
Wow. It works. And the old interactive fiction games:)
Wondering how are you handling the screen drawing? It looks like the screen is being slowly drawn, and the time to draw the screen is making it feel slow.
Perhaps you can draw into a memory buffer and then blit it at once to the screen?
You know that awful questionaire you fill out before you can get a nasty ICQ number? Chances are, Mirabilis sold the info to some profiling company (spamming).
And besides, back then, a lot of VC's were dumping tons of money into anything remotely related to the web and internet, regardless of any (lack) of profit.
Masquerading has a nice side effect in that it is now "impossible" for machines on the Internet to connect directly to your machine. (Impossible without some serious configuration work.)
So use your 486 as a masquerade box, and as a nice side effect, if your wife gets a machine of her own, it's really easy to setup a tiny lan in your home so both of you can use the cable modem.
The only caveat is that the machine doing the masquerading had better be secured down. So, I suggest that you strip all the unnecessary cruft from the machine, like most userland programs with the exception of the bare essentials. Kill all daemons on the machine, and setup a firewall on the machine. Run tripwire, keep the database on another machine and periodically check, yadda yadda yadda.
I think the reason behind this outbreak is Sega's plans to introduce a pay-to-play game service that they plan to open in Japan real soon.
The gist of this service is that people can pay a small fee for the right to checkout a ROM image of a classic Sega / Turbografx-16 game from a website and play it to their hearts content on their Dreamcast console.
They plan to shut down these ROM sites, probably because these sites will detract from their service (IE, all people, including me, are cheap bastards.) and steal away profit.
It's funny to note that this expected speed program works by examining the serial number burnt into the CPU.
HEck, people thought the serial number was going to be used for nefarious deals, and invasion of privacy, blah blah blah blah blah.
The serial number was designed for situations like this, to make sure you get what you pay for, and to allow Intel to take its giant thumb and push hard on distributors who are messing with the clock rating of the chips. (I'm pretty sure they know which chips go where.)
The beauty of the demo scene was the amazing amount of effects that they managed to achieve on a nonpowerful machine. For example, when I look at Into the Shadows, or at 2nd Reality, or Unreal, I have to remind myself that this demo runs well on a 386.
Unfortunately, today, there really isn't a challenge in creating eyecandy. There is no need to delve into assembler, because frankly, in many cases with modern cpu's, your compiler probably can optimise code pretty well. There is no need to explore and push your hardware with weird assembler tricks, because running at 400mhz, you don't have to really work that hard, and besides, with DirectX, with Simple Directmedia Layer, with PTC, there is no challenge.
Why even bother writing your own 3d engine when you can just use OpenGl/Direct3D and get hardware acceleration to boot?
A combination of underpowered hardware and DOS offered a minimialistic environment on which a hotshot coder could try his own ideas and distinguish himself from his peers by going the extra distance to optimise his code, to make sure his demo will run well on a 386sx25, to make sure his demo will run in 500kb of memory with 2 megs of expanded memory.
In short, it was a challenge in good old days.
Anyhow, the scene is still alive today, www.scene.org. In particular, people should check out TBL. www.tbl.scene.org, they are geniuses. (IE, they have written an ~80kb win32 demo that runs for minutes. It also runs in Linux! (www.s2.org for their demo loader for linux))
There is also Web and C-Web by the uber-god Knuth.
I've never tried it though:) I believe you type your C code in a way that allows comments to be mixed in with your code, and you just run the code through a special preprocessor to get a TeX source for documentation, and a gobblygook.c file that can be compiled.
OpenGL has a means to allow venders to include their own extensions. For example, right now, multitexturing is implemented as an extension that has a standardized interface.
So, even if OpenGl doesn't advance beyond 1.2, vendors still have the freedom to add their own extensions.
However, I don't see this as the case, because the OpenGl ARB is still around, and I'm pretty sure they'll have 1.3 coming "soon."
Then again, you can regard the relative stability of OpenGl as evidence of the amount of intelligent thought that went into the development of it:P
Slashdot Mirror
This is not the case on the PSX because the region code serves as the copy protection. Sony's engineers are a bunch of weenies.
Yeah. Considering Playstation 2 is MIPS based.
No this does not make me happy, because when it comes to money, companies assume I'm guilty until I prove myself innocent...
Heh. It's regarding the diverse nature of the hardware. Linux interfacing with toilets and model airplane parts? Heh, Linux is #1 when it comes to weird hardware support.
Yeah, but even if the patches were made available and lots of security notices were sent to users, people would still be too lazy to install them.
The best way would to run an update daemon which would automagically install security patches every night without user intervention. Something like using cvsup & make world with freebsd without having to build from source.
Yeah, if you can spare approx $300, you can order G4 towers with the geforce 3. BTW, the GeForce 2's in the Mac's are MX's, so they are memory crippled and somewhat disappointing when it comes to performance expectations...
And the amazing thing is the Kyro2 does not have a GPU! It's a case of using smarter rendering technology versus throwing more silicon at the problem.
Minor point. O'Reilly uses groff to do their layout. Nifty, eh? :)
Yeah right. The way I see it, games will remain the same cost in addition to the presence of advertisements. Why?
The sad fact remains that most computer games are NOT blockbusters. Games like Halflife, Diablo, Starcraft, and The Sims are the exceptions and not the norm. This forces game developers to use tried and true formulas (read FPS, RTS, or RPG) and to literally develop game clones in the hope that fans of the original game won't mind snapping up a copy. (Not that game developers are at fault... Great, original games have been ignored by ignorant gamers.)
Now, with the advent of advertising, perhaps more unique games can be developed where developers aren't 100% forced to develop a game that will be "guaranteed" to return a minimum profit, because advertising income could be used to offset the cost of development.
Then again, it could also signal the downfall of gaming, which could parallel the downfall of television as a medium. Today, many of the sitcoms on TV are clones of others so that TV execs can make a sales pitch to advertising companies along the lines of "Hey! Our show is practically a clone of XX show, that we'd be guaranteed to attract XX's audience. You should advertise during our show's time block."
Of course, scenario two is probably the likely outcome, since most game publishers are out to maximize profit instead of maximizing "entertainment" value of their products.
Read the manual. To insert a tab, try the Fn + Tab combination. I whipped out the manual to figure that out :)
The developers probably don't have to distribute the source as the games themselves are probably built on a set of proprietary Sony libraries.
HOWEVER, it's probably more likely that the compilation for games (ie cross-compiling) is done in a Linux environment, because GCC has been pretty much ported to most significant embedded CPU's these days.
Sony wouldn't want to use Linux on the PS2 because console's don't need to run multiple processes, they definitely don't need memory protection, and the kernel needs to have low latency.
It's most likely that the PS2 "kernel" is actually a boot library that is linked with the game so that cycle sucking system calls don't have to be used to tell the kernel to read some data from the dvd-rom drive, etc...
Well, not only that, but to allow companies to segregate markets so they can market DVD's at different prices to different markets.
Case in point: In the USA, I can get a DVD for about $20, maybe $24.
In Japan, a similar DVD might cost me about $50 - $60. (I'm going with anime prices here.)
Now, without region codes, what's to prevent a shrewd Japanese person from getting a friend in the USA to send him DVD's at 1/3 off?
Wow. It works. And the old interactive fiction games :)
Wondering how are you handling the screen drawing? It looks like the screen is being slowly drawn, and the time to draw the screen is making it feel slow.
Perhaps you can draw into a memory buffer and then blit it at once to the screen?
Just wondering.
You know that awful questionaire you fill out before you can get a nasty ICQ number? Chances are, Mirabilis sold the info to some profiling company (spamming).
And besides, back then, a lot of VC's were dumping tons of money into anything remotely related to the web and internet, regardless of any (lack) of profit.
Masquerading has a nice side effect in that it is now "impossible" for machines on the Internet to connect directly to your machine. (Impossible without some serious configuration work.)
So use your 486 as a masquerade box, and as a nice side effect, if your wife gets a machine of her own, it's really easy to setup a tiny lan in your home so both of you can use the cable modem.
The only caveat is that the machine doing the masquerading had better be secured down. So, I suggest that you strip all the unnecessary cruft from the machine, like most userland programs with the exception of the bare essentials. Kill all daemons on the machine, and setup a firewall on the machine. Run tripwire, keep the database on another machine and periodically check, yadda yadda yadda.
I think the reason behind this outbreak is Sega's plans to introduce a pay-to-play game service that they plan to open in Japan real soon.
The gist of this service is that people can pay a small fee for the right to checkout a ROM image of a classic Sega / Turbografx-16 game from a website and play it to their hearts content on their Dreamcast console.
They plan to shut down these ROM sites, probably because these sites will detract from their service (IE, all people, including me, are cheap bastards.) and steal away profit.
The loss of said body part speaks enough.
Need a finger print to get something? Well, bye bye finger.
Gosh, the thought of scanning an entire hand scares the shit out of me.
It's funny to note that this expected speed program works by examining the serial number burnt into the CPU.
HEck, people thought the serial number was going to be used for nefarious deals, and invasion of privacy, blah blah blah blah blah.
The serial number was designed for situations like this, to make sure you get what you pay for, and to allow Intel to take its giant thumb and push hard on distributors who are messing with the clock rating of the chips. (I'm pretty sure they know which chips go where.)
You should order online from their website.
Another workaround
:)
tail +160 PhotogenicsB86.sh | tar -xzvf
Run this in a new directory.
That autoself script package is rather flaky. It wouldn't work on my box at all.
Mr. Nolan, I hope the retail version uses a different installer
The beauty of the demo scene was the amazing amount of effects that they managed to achieve on a nonpowerful machine. For example, when I look at Into the Shadows, or at 2nd Reality, or Unreal, I have to remind myself that this demo runs well on a 386.
Unfortunately, today, there really isn't a challenge in creating eyecandy. There is no need to delve into assembler, because frankly, in many cases with modern cpu's, your compiler probably can optimise code pretty well. There is no need to explore and push your hardware with weird assembler tricks, because running at 400mhz, you don't have to really work that hard, and besides, with DirectX, with Simple Directmedia Layer, with PTC, there is no challenge.
Why even bother writing your own 3d engine when you can just use OpenGl/Direct3D and get hardware acceleration to boot?
A combination of underpowered hardware and DOS offered a minimialistic environment on which a hotshot coder could try his own ideas and distinguish himself from his peers by going the extra distance to optimise his code, to make sure his demo will run well on a 386sx25, to make sure his demo will run in 500kb of memory with 2 megs of expanded memory.
In short, it was a challenge in good old days.
Anyhow, the scene is still alive today, www.scene.org. In particular, people should check out TBL. www.tbl.scene.org, they are geniuses. (IE, they have written an ~80kb win32 demo that runs for minutes. It also runs in Linux! (www.s2.org for their demo loader for linux))
There is also Web and C-Web by the uber-god Knuth.
:) I believe you type your C code in a way that allows comments to be mixed in with your code, and you just run the code through a special preprocessor to get a TeX source for documentation, and a gobblygook .c file that can be compiled.
I've never tried it though
OpenGL has a means to allow venders to include their own extensions. For example, right now, multitexturing is implemented as an extension that has a standardized interface.
:P
So, even if OpenGl doesn't advance beyond 1.2, vendors still have the freedom to add their own extensions.
However, I don't see this as the case, because the OpenGl ARB is still around, and I'm pretty sure they'll have 1.3 coming "soon."
Then again, you can regard the relative stability of OpenGl as evidence of the amount of intelligent thought that went into the development of it
No, think about it.
AT&T got busted up, and in its place are a few strong baby Bells that have a monopoly over their respective areas with no hope of them leaving.
People are trying to cashing on the hope that whatever's left of Microsoft will still be a profitable company.
Nintendo owns a lions share of Rare.