It's one of those things you grow to like, IMHO. On the surface, it looks basic and awkward, but once you really get to understand it's way of working (selection masks, layering and so on), it's very powerful and flexible. Once you know what's going on, there is a lot you can do without resorting to filters and plugins (except perhaps a few of the blurs - when I was a lad, we didn't have drop shadow filters, and we had to wear wooden shoes).
Of course, Paintshop and Photopaint both have a lot of similar features now, as does GIMP, but they all seem clunkier at doing the same thing (to me). The feel isn't quite right. Obviously that's partly just that I'm comfortable with Photoshop now.
Don't get me started on vector graphics packages though - can't anyone make a decent one with more useful snap options? The guys who made Calamus for the Atari ST had a good illustrator clone with features you still can't get in Canvas, Illustrator or Freehand.
But if you can do all these great things you speak of, why haven't you?
I think that unlike novels, a lot of people don't have a good game inside them, but a derivative re-hash. I have a little list of games I'd like to written in my copious spare time, and they're mainly conversion/rewrite/revamps - networked, shiny Paradroid 90 for example, and the obligatory Elite-done-right. That said, I like Paradroid, so for me that'd be a good game. It'd probably piss off a lot of 'modern game' fans though.
Actually competing with the big boys at the technical biggest-fastest-prettiest-FPS-engine game is hard work, but coming up with an interesting game concept isn't easy either. Ones the perspiration and the other the inspiration that, err, that guy talked about (edison?).
And another thing...3DStudio Max? Did you buy that or did you steal it? Last I checked it was around $4000.
Doesn't appear to be out yet, but 3d Studio gMAX will be a free, game-design-oriented version of Max, aimed at the modding communities. Even without that, I believe an educational Max license is considerably less that $4000.
My memory of NT 3.51 is one of a much stabler OS than NT 4 - once you got to SP5 or whatever it was when the TCP/IP worked properly, NT 3.51 used to run and run for us, even on the little 486 we were using for it. It also had the benefit that when the shell crashed (which did happen), it *wasn't* in the kernel, and the file sharing and whatnot all carried on, so you could still admin the machine remotely to cleanly shut it down. NT4 and Win2k just stick their legs up in the air at that point.
as long as * expands only to 'li' and changes the existing i to a u, though, isn't it?
are/dev/dsp ioctl's really portable across systems (e.g. sparc audio or iris audio?) - if they are, cool, but it doesn't sound right to me (no pun intended)
My impression, from references in things like Austin Powers and Midtown Madness 2 (which has some really awful "brit-isms", but also treats you to an 'upper class women' calling your fellow drivers tossers, amongst others) that wank does at least double-duty.
There's the one I know and love (right-handed), which is a reference to masturbation, and this other more vague 'crap' or something similar, as in the The Wonderful Wank-o-meter or the jargon file entry.
I would agree with c*nt being probably the most offensive here (UK) too - a sound yelling from my dad when I first discovered the word and called my sister one at age 7 has seen to that with me:)
It is an ugly word though.
[oh yeah - I am a britfag, blah blah blah, two world wars, whatever - save you the bother]
Indeed, like the number of people that assume that thingy@thingy.com doesn't go somewhere when entering 'fake' details for registration - I get all those, thanks.
(there are a few amusing upsides - I've recieved other people's (paid for) passwords for, uh, 'premium content', before now)
A neat spamtrap I saw somewhere was a sentence halfway down someones page that just said: "Whatever you do don't mail me at pink-and-wobbly@asdkjlwelkj.com, because then I'll know you're just an address-harvester, and blacklist your IP until the end of time", just before their normal contact details.
Some of you may remember the good old days of big endian machines. The standard low-byte high-byte order we know now was invented by Intel...
According to this, the DEC PDP-11 and VAX lines were little-endian too - I'm not old enough to remember these machines (apart from FORTRAN torture at college on a VAX), but I know enough that they form a huge chunk of the history of the Internet, and Unix. Before Intel.
despite the fact that base 10 numbers were still printed with the most significant digits on the left by Intel's C library.
the ones with the green paint and the giant xylophone
badges?
Re:code for blah was Re:Do yourself a favor: Try i
on
FreeBSD 4.2 Is Out
·
· Score: 1
Since I happen to have just come across it in this weeks NTK, here
http://sources.redhat.com/autobook/download.html is some (so far - I haven't finished reading it) pretty decent docs for autoconf and automake.
From a purely profit/bottom-line line point of view they are doing something right (short-term anyway), but both MS and Intel are reviled for their 'creative' business practices rather than their end-of-year accounts, I think.
Intel has a long-standing record of obnoxious behaviour with it's resellers (including apparently threatening those looking to make Athlon boards), it's staff (see inside intel, mentioned elsewhere), reviewers (ask tomshardware about intel) and little respect for customers (seemingly deliberately confusing and incompatible product lines, recalls, plain old bugs). And those blue guys, too.
Re:code for blah was Re:Do yourself a favor: Try i
on
FreeBSD 4.2 Is Out
·
· Score: 1
There is a difference between testing it on all those things, and deliberately using linux-specific things in writing software! Writing portable code is usually not much harder than writing platform-specific, if at all, aside from situations where you need to use particular ioctls or similar.
I don't write much code that others would find useful, but I sometimes do test it on the 5 platforms I have access to (Irix, Linux, NetBSD, FreeBSD, and BSD/OS) more out of curiosity than anything else - the majority can easily be made to work. GNU autoconf can do a lot of the things for you that would otherwise tie you down to a specific system.
The point is not that it could be changed to run on particular systems, but that it needn't be changed to run on any system.
[if I were to supply patches for your softwware (whatever it is) to allow it to run on (say) SGIs or *BSD, would you incorporate them?]
For remote NT, take a look at Freevision - the KVM switch From Hell. It starts at 64 servers and 32 users, and seems to be PC Anywhere (or similar) done in hardware, rather than an analog switch. It runs over cat5, and has a bolt-on to run over any IP network, which appears to be a video codec type of deal.
Happily, we don't have anywhere near enough NT servers to justify one of these.
The result - when is the last time you saw an FIF file?
MS used to use FIF for Encarta, Art Gallery and a bunch of other multimedia reference titles - I expect they've gone to JPEG since they now use DVDROMs and don't care so much about space or quality.
The interesting thing with FIF was that because of the way it's done, you can zoom in to arbitrary depth and get a smooth image - not much detail, but a smooth image.
Re:So with old machines...
on
Linux Routers
·
· Score: 1
I have a Compaq Deskpro 486/66 that has been beefed up in some areas to make an excellent X terminal.
I added an 8Mb ATI card, and all the spare SIMMs in the junkbox that would fit to get about 96Mb, and it goes like a train with truecolour driving a 'spare' 21" monitor. It's relatively quiet too. I believe there are either netboot or floppyboot options like this that can do away with the harddrive altogether to make a very quiet system - the 486 has no fan, and the PSU can be knobbled to shut up a bit.
Getting PCI video cards is getting harder though, and X network security sucks big time.
This was the problem - and Tcl/Tk is handled in a similar way because of the many variations between versions there too. I can see the reasons for doing it, but the DESCR for the package doesn't let you know about it, even! The fix is just a bunch of extra configure options, but it's still hassle.
The linuxisms comment wasn't really directly related to that problem but just to some generally suboptimal practices I've come across lately with stuff - assuming GID 0 is called root (and not wheel or something else), mentioning a requirement for GNU Make if there is one (many systems don't have GNU Make), using linux/types.h rather than sys/types.h for standard types (I think it was time_t or size_t), that sort of thing. With potentially very little additional tweaking, you can get your app onto quite a few more platforms.
The port tree is indeed very cool, as long as you stick within it. I spent a few annoying hours yesterday trying to convince various GTK/KDE/Tk napster-clones to compile on my 4.1 system, without a great deal of luck.
I'm not sure if it's just people assuming that GTK==Linux and the files will be in particular places (FreeBSD prefixes stuff with the version number for gtk and tcl/tk at least) or me or dodgy software, but it was rather frustrating.
While on that subject, could those folks writing these types of things stop writing Linux apps, and start writing Unix apps, please? It's like "all the world's SunOS 4.1" or "all the world's a VAX" all over again!
If it takes 55 accountants to keep up with your 5 programmers, then you really need to revoke those company credit cards.
(quite amusing though, BTW:) )
Re:Golden Age of Music Sharing is over
on
Scour is Dead
·
· Score: 1
what are we left with???
Mojo Nation. Less leechable, more balanced. Cool name for a parent company (whois mojonation.net).
As far as I can tell, you are in the interesting position (potentially) of not even knowing what is on your system, let alone whether it is illegal or not. Of course, I haven't actually managed to get it working yet, either.
I've only had experience of qmail and sendmail, and qmail has been much better for us.
Qmail's modular approach makes most things easier, once you figure out how it all fits together. It chews through mail very quickly, has the (IMHO) benefit of Maildir support - great if you share mailspools, or have a lot of POP users with big mailboxes - and a really flexible alias/rewriting mechanism.
The downsides are that things get a little rocky off of the beaten track sometimes. You do come across situations where qmail behaves differently enough from sendmail to be a pain (though not wrong), and I've found the mailing list to be somewhat obtuse at times (I don't subscribe - just searching other people's queries).
The other thing is to make sure that the HOWTO's you use match the software you have - several ancillary programs used with qmail have changed in incompatible ways in the past (the logging system, and the supervise setup - aka daemontools). The names have not changed to protect the innocent.
I agree about the rack-case - they are expensive, but what I was originally thinking of was something the size/shape of the old USR Courier modems.
And that wall wart power supply has a mtbf measured in months.
Is this is US thing? I've never had a wall-wart die. The only thing near that I've had is the cable mangled beyond use by me carrying it around a lot (on my old CD walkman), and I have a few running continuously (hub, modem, scanner etc...). American AC outlets have always struck me as flimsy, especially when you hang heavy things from them. Or is it just generally crappy components? I assumed I get my 240VAC wall-wart from the same korean (or wherever) factory that you get your 110VAC one.
And what was with that company which wanted both ".kids" and ".sex"? That's a blatant case of pedophilia.
Since a domain name can only have one TLD, I think it's forcing the.kids and the.sex to be separate. Maybe you could only have.kids after you've had a.sex one. (Cue crappy manpage parodies ad nauseum).
from the one that I downloaded from a link in a slashdot story last week? Or is it the same thing but now they've remembered to tell people? Is it worth another 25Mb? I've only played a little, but last week's one seems OK so far...
Slashdot Mirror
It's one of those things you grow to like, IMHO. On the surface, it looks basic and awkward, but once you really get to understand it's way of working (selection masks, layering and so on), it's very powerful and flexible. Once you know what's going on, there is a lot you can do without resorting to filters and plugins (except perhaps a few of the blurs - when I was a lad, we didn't have drop shadow filters, and we had to wear wooden shoes).
Of course, Paintshop and Photopaint both have a lot of similar features now, as does GIMP, but they all seem clunkier at doing the same thing (to me). The feel isn't quite right. Obviously that's partly just that I'm comfortable with Photoshop now.
Don't get me started on vector graphics packages though - can't anyone make a decent one with more useful snap options? The guys who made Calamus for the Atari ST had a good illustrator clone with features you still can't get in Canvas, Illustrator or Freehand.
But if you can do all these great things you speak of, why haven't you?
I think that unlike novels, a lot of people don't have a good game inside them, but a derivative re-hash. I have a little list of games I'd like to written in my copious spare time, and they're mainly conversion/rewrite/revamps - networked, shiny Paradroid 90 for example, and the obligatory Elite-done-right. That said, I like Paradroid, so for me that'd be a good game. It'd probably piss off a lot of 'modern game' fans though.
Actually competing with the big boys at the technical biggest-fastest-prettiest-FPS-engine game is hard work, but coming up with an interesting game concept isn't easy either. Ones the perspiration and the other the inspiration that, err, that guy talked about (edison?).
And another thing...3DStudio Max? Did you buy that or did you steal it? Last I checked it was around $4000.
Doesn't appear to be out yet, but 3d Studio gMAX will be a free, game-design-oriented version of Max, aimed at the modding communities. Even without that, I believe an educational Max license is considerably less that $4000.
My memory of NT 3.51 is one of a much stabler OS than NT 4 - once you got to SP5 or whatever it was when the TCP/IP worked properly, NT 3.51 used to run and run for us, even on the little 486 we were using for it. It also had the benefit that when the shell crashed (which did happen), it *wasn't* in the kernel, and the file sharing and whatnot all carried on, so you could still admin the machine remotely to cleanly shut it down. NT4 and Win2k just stick their legs up in the air at that point.
as long as * expands only to 'li' and changes the existing i to a u, though, isn't it?
/dev/dsp ioctl's really portable across systems (e.g. sparc audio or iris audio?) - if they are, cool, but it doesn't sound right to me (no pun intended)
are
My impression, from references in things like Austin Powers and Midtown Madness 2 (which has some really awful "brit-isms", but also treats you to an 'upper class women' calling your fellow drivers tossers, amongst others) that wank does at least double-duty.
:)
There's the one I know and love (right-handed), which is a reference to masturbation, and this other more vague 'crap' or something similar, as in the The Wonderful Wank-o-meter or the jargon file entry.
I would agree with c*nt being probably the most offensive here (UK) too - a sound yelling from my dad when I first discovered the word and called my sister one at age 7 has seen to that with me
It is an ugly word though.
[oh yeah - I am a britfag, blah blah blah, two world wars, whatever - save you the bother]
but I have wankyspanky.com, also as part of a silly private joke (Hi Clairey & Lex!).
I think wank is a lot ruder in britain than america though.
Indeed, like the number of people that assume that thingy@thingy.com doesn't go somewhere when entering 'fake' details for registration - I get all those, thanks.
(there are a few amusing upsides - I've recieved other people's (paid for) passwords for, uh, 'premium content', before now)
A neat spamtrap I saw somewhere was a sentence halfway down someones page that just said: "Whatever you do don't mail me at pink-and-wobbly@asdkjlwelkj.com, because then I'll know you're just an address-harvester, and blacklist your IP until the end of time", just before their normal contact details.
or betamax?
(oh - first post?)
Some of you may remember the good old days of big endian machines. The standard low-byte high-byte order we know now was invented by Intel...
According to this, the DEC PDP-11 and VAX lines were little-endian too - I'm not old enough to remember these machines (apart from FORTRAN torture at college on a VAX), but I know enough that they form a huge chunk of the history of the Internet, and Unix. Before Intel.
despite the fact that base 10 numbers were still printed with the most significant digits on the left by Intel's C library.
Errr... and by the entirety of civilisation too.
the ones with the green paint and the giant xylophone
badges?
Since I happen to have just come across it in this weeks NTK, here
http://sources.redhat.com/autobook/download.html is some (so far - I haven't finished reading it) pretty decent docs for autoconf and automake.
From a purely profit/bottom-line line point of view they are doing something right (short-term anyway), but both MS and Intel are reviled for their 'creative' business practices rather than their end-of-year accounts, I think.
Intel has a long-standing record of obnoxious behaviour with it's resellers (including apparently threatening those looking to make Athlon boards), it's staff (see inside intel, mentioned elsewhere), reviewers (ask tomshardware about intel) and little respect for customers (seemingly deliberately confusing and incompatible product lines, recalls, plain old bugs). And those blue guys, too.
There is a difference between testing it on all those things, and deliberately using linux-specific things in writing software! Writing portable code is usually not much harder than writing platform-specific, if at all, aside from situations where you need to use particular ioctls or similar.
I don't write much code that others would find useful, but I sometimes do test it on the 5 platforms I have access to (Irix, Linux, NetBSD, FreeBSD, and BSD/OS) more out of curiosity than anything else - the majority can easily be made to work. GNU autoconf can do a lot of the things for you that would otherwise tie you down to a specific system.
The point is not that it could be changed to run on particular systems, but that it needn't be changed to run on any system.
[if I were to supply patches for your softwware (whatever it is) to allow it to run on (say) SGIs or *BSD, would you incorporate them?]
For remote NT, take a look at Freevision - the KVM switch From Hell. It starts at 64 servers and 32 users, and seems to be PC Anywhere (or similar) done in hardware, rather than an analog switch. It runs over cat5, and has a bolt-on to run over any IP network, which appears to be a video codec type of deal.
Happily, we don't have anywhere near enough NT servers to justify one of these.
I know - I bit my tongue too.
The result - when is the last time you saw an FIF file?
MS used to use FIF for Encarta, Art Gallery and a bunch of other multimedia reference titles - I expect they've gone to JPEG since they now use DVDROMs and don't care so much about space or quality.
The interesting thing with FIF was that because of the way it's done, you can zoom in to arbitrary depth and get a smooth image - not much detail, but a smooth image.
I have a Compaq Deskpro 486/66 that has been beefed up in some areas to make an excellent X terminal.
I added an 8Mb ATI card, and all the spare SIMMs in the junkbox that would fit to get about 96Mb, and it goes like a train with truecolour driving a 'spare' 21" monitor. It's relatively quiet too. I believe there are either netboot or floppyboot options like this that can do away with the harddrive altogether to make a very quiet system - the 486 has no fan, and the PSU can be knobbled to shut up a bit.
Getting PCI video cards is getting harder though, and X network security sucks big time.
This was the problem - and Tcl/Tk is handled in a similar way because of the many variations between versions there too. I can see the reasons for doing it, but the DESCR for the package doesn't let you know about it, even! The fix is just a bunch of extra configure options, but it's still hassle.
The linuxisms comment wasn't really directly related to that problem but just to some generally suboptimal practices I've come across lately with stuff - assuming GID 0 is called root (and not wheel or something else), mentioning a requirement for GNU Make if there is one (many systems don't have GNU Make), using linux/types.h rather than sys/types.h for standard types (I think it was time_t or size_t), that sort of thing. With potentially very little additional tweaking, you can get your app onto quite a few more platforms.
And there is the very clean port tree.
The port tree is indeed very cool, as long as you stick within it. I spent a few annoying hours yesterday trying to convince various GTK/KDE/Tk napster-clones to compile on my 4.1 system, without a great deal of luck.
I'm not sure if it's just people assuming that GTK==Linux and the files will be in particular places (FreeBSD prefixes stuff with the version number for gtk and tcl/tk at least) or me or dodgy software, but it was rather frustrating.
While on that subject, could those folks writing these types of things stop writing Linux apps, and start writing Unix apps, please? It's like "all the world's SunOS 4.1" or "all the world's a VAX" all over again!
If it takes 55 accountants to keep up with your 5 programmers, then you really need to revoke those company credit cards.
:) )
(quite amusing though, BTW
what are we left with???
Mojo Nation. Less leechable, more balanced. Cool name for a parent company (whois mojonation.net).
As far as I can tell, you are in the interesting position (potentially) of not even knowing what is on your system, let alone whether it is illegal or not. Of course, I haven't actually managed to get it working yet, either.
I've only had experience of qmail and sendmail, and qmail has been much better for us.
Qmail's modular approach makes most things easier, once you figure out how it all fits together. It chews through mail very quickly, has the (IMHO) benefit of Maildir support - great if you share mailspools, or have a lot of POP users with big mailboxes - and a really flexible alias/rewriting mechanism.
The downsides are that things get a little rocky off of the beaten track sometimes. You do come across situations where qmail behaves differently enough from sendmail to be a pain (though not wrong), and I've found the mailing list to be somewhat obtuse at times (I don't subscribe - just searching other people's queries).
The other thing is to make sure that the HOWTO's you use match the software you have - several ancillary programs used with qmail have changed in incompatible ways in the past (the logging system, and the supervise setup - aka daemontools). The names have not changed to protect the innocent.
I'd recommend qmail though.
I agree about the rack-case - they are expensive, but what I was originally thinking of was something the size/shape of the old USR Courier modems.
And that wall wart power supply has a mtbf measured in months.
Is this is US thing? I've never had a wall-wart die. The only thing near that I've had is the cable mangled beyond use by me carrying it around a lot (on my old CD walkman), and I have a few running continuously (hub, modem, scanner etc...). American AC outlets have always struck me as flimsy, especially when you hang heavy things from them. Or is it just generally crappy components? I assumed I get my 240VAC wall-wart from the same korean (or wherever) factory that you get your 110VAC one.
And what was with that company which wanted both ".kids" and ".sex"? That's a blatant case of pedophilia.
.kids and the .sex to be separate. Maybe you could only have .kids after you've had a .sex one. (Cue crappy manpage parodies ad nauseum).
Since a domain name can only have one TLD, I think it's forcing the
from the one that I downloaded from a link in a slashdot story last week? Or is it the same thing but now they've remembered to tell people? Is it worth another 25Mb? I've only played a little, but last week's one seems OK so far...