Re:Who are *YOU* spending Christmas with?
on
Merry Christmas
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· Score: 2
Ugh, that should be http://www.kirstensroom.com , not kirstensrrom.com . Either way, it offends a lot of people. Offending people is fun...
Anyway, it's funny that Canadian people get so offended because she's Canadian too.
Re:Who are *YOU* spending Christmas with?
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Merry Christmas
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· Score: 2
Wow, you're surprisingly great looking for someone spending a working Xmas bored to death. I only thought we fat stereotypical geeks did that.;-) And your homepage is actually interesting, unlike 99.9999999999999999999999999999% of them.
So, since your homepage says
> email me with a subject for me to post about.. it can be anything from dirty socks to my stance
> on abortion to why i like sprouts so much...
I simply have to ask, why would you like sprouts? And what is your stance on aborting them? And as a Canadian and a female are you offended by http://www.kirstensrrom.com , a site I ran across when the guy who runs http://www.cupfart.com said he finds it embarrassing as a Canadian?
Just some stuff to keep those like you who are stuck listening to the hum of servers busy.:-) Have a happy Christmas, even those who may be quite bored at work right now. I guess *someone* has to babysit the servers...
Who are *YOU* spending Christmas with?
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Merry Christmas
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· Score: 2
> I hope you all have the ability to spend the holidays with the ones who mean the most to you:
> even if those are friends like Solid Snake or Rikku
No, no sulking alone with masturbatory foods and computer games today.:-) I'm about to leave to get together with the family, as most of us are, but I thought I'd give a big "Merry Non-Denominational Winter Vacation" to the whole/. community first.
That said, who here saw the Christmas episode of *Futurama* on Sunday, the one which the execs at Fox refused to air last year? Pretty hilarious. Pity what dicks the executives were in not showing it in the first place.:-(
I never once asserted anything about nuclear families where the dad works and mommy stays home, etc. I said that until about the last 60 years, maybe 100, women and men did not get married based on common interests. I can prove this going back to the earliest civilizations themselves, since in most of them women were the property of their fathers who sold them to their husbands. Common interests had absolutely nothing to do with who procreated with whom--what kind of wife you could afford, and who your friends were who might have daughters they want to get rid of, were the major factors.
And do you really believe the prehistoric mating game had anything to do with common interests? Nope. Mating probably occurred under a wide variety of rather obvious circumstances, none of which have to do with two early humans sharing a technical interest in tool construction or somesuch.
Taking ancient Athens as an example, women were considered little better than slaves and were once again bartered, and usually denied any education beyond the most basic. Again, no one was going to mate based on a mutual profession.
In Rome women enjoyed many more rights, and indeed women could even sue their husbands for divorce. However, once again there was no place for women in most professions, so a woman and a man would not be married based having such things in common. Women in the lower and middle classes would usually work at whatever labor their husband worked at, out of necessity not out of mutual interest. And despite the fairly progressive rights women had, only the wealthy ones were ever educted to realize it--poor women were still bought and sold into marriage by fathers and husbands much as a commodity.
Moving along into the colonial era you mention, once again women did not go into professions based on their interests unless they were wealthy, and even wealthy women were unlikely to be able to take up a given profession outright. For example, during the 1600s, how many women were members of the Royal Society ("guild" for scientists)? That would be, none. So, with no women in most professions which one would enter based on ability and aptitude and desire--not mere labor entered into from necessity--how would you expect that people with like intersts would marry? The fact is, as I have shown, they usually wouldn't.
What you described is just husbands and wives sharing manual labor. Not the same thing at all as professionals meeting in the workplace, sharing common interests, and getting married. Not the same at all.
Not until the 1800s would we really see the start of this, with a famous example being Marie Curie and her husband, who shared common interests and common work. Not until the 20th century would such marriages based on common interests become the norm.
So, I think I've adequately shown my point and backed it up. Only in very very recent times have women and men met and courted and married based on professions which they entered due to mutual interest.
I hate to say this, but I think most of the disorders and non-bacterial, non-viral diseases that are on the rise are explained by two things: women's liberation and environmental contamination.
The first might seem like a silly joke, but think about what's different today in the mating game from what was the norm in almost all of human history until it started changing in the last 60 years. Traditionally, marriage had little at all to do with common interests, and nothing to do with common professions. Male-dominated society meant that men would engage in professions and women, if they were in a working class, worked at common "women's jobs" like straight factory work or sewing or teaching/watching young children. People didn't marry because of anything they had in common. People usually married based on convenience, friendships between families, whoever lived nearby, whatever wife they could afford, etc.
By contrats, today women and men meet, date, then marry, and most of the people they meet work in similar professions and therefore have similar interests and if those interests are determined genetically, similar genes. It's like a mild, remote form of inbreeding. More often than not techies marry techies, teachers marry teachers, scientists marry scientists, lawyers marry lawyers, etc. The result over time is to reinforce those genetic factors which are common between these people who have married and procrated thanks to common interests or employment. And if some of those traits have slightly negative side-effects, then those side-effects will become more pronounced. Add in this selective breeding over several generations, and well--you're looking at a pronounced enhancement of both the positives and negatives inherent in genes which cause one to have a predisposition towards certain vocations.
Second, I think we can't deny that we've changed our environment significantly, particularly in the area of foodstuffs and radiation. We now eat more and more genetically enhanced food--some of it enhanced through centuries of selective breeding, such as the milk we drink and the meat we eat, and some of it more recently enhanced through artificial hormones which may leave traces in that food--such as, again, milk and meat, and now even some vegetable foods. For at least 6 years people have expressed concern that hormones in milk may be contributing to the progressively earlier ages at which girls are hitting puberty, and that perhaps the same hormones contribute to cancer. Whether that's true or not, surely some of our food additives and genetic enhancements have effects we cannot measure or imagine. I'm not saying to go organic--I liberally at such altered foodstuffs--but I am saying only a person with his head in the sand would refuse to realize that some of our alterations to our food, whether genetic or chemical, have to have effects we don't fully understand yet.
The same is true of radiation. I'm not a nut who insists on not using cell phones because they allegedly cause cancer, but I do believe that with all the low-level radiation that passes through our bodies on a daily basis, at least a few particles eventually interact with our matter. This could easily explain the huge upswing in cancer over the last 40 years, as low-level radiation exposure has steadily increased. Before you dismiss it, think about how much radio, cell phone, television, cordless phone, microwave, and myriad other forms of man-made radiation passes through your body each day. Almost none of it interacts with you, since most of it can even pass cleanly through feet of concrete without interaction. But think of what a small antenna or dish it takes to get reception of so many radio, TV, satellite, or other channels, compared to the much larger size of your human body. What if only 1 in a billion of these low-energy particles interacts with your body? That's still a rather large interaction, when you consider the constant levels we experience day and night, even when sitting at home. What if it's only 1 in a trillion? Then it's still significant, given the constant bombardment. All it takes is one particle interacting with one cell to potentially cause a change that could spark a cancer. Given constant bombardment by so many low-level radiation sources, this has to be significant. We don't want to believe it, and usually dismiss it our of hand because we like our technology, but this is just so much sticking of heads in the sand. We're never going to give up our tech, even if it's the primary cause of cancer, but we could at least be honest about it when we look at it.
Sure, there are genetic predispositions for things like cancer. We know this. But factors which are most likely environmental have increased cancer rates exponentially over the last 40 years. A genetic predispostion still needs a trigger. I think large amounts of low-level radiation are a likely candidate for this.
Well, those are my theories, anyway. I know people are just lining up to disagree, so let's hear it!;-)
Re:ATI software is the weak link in a roll-your-ow
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Comparing the DVRs?
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· Score: 3, Informative
Have you run MultiMedia Center on the 2k/XP line of OSes? I'll admit MMC can be flaky on Win9x, but I've never had an issue with MMC 7 or higher on 2k/XP. Currently I'm running the recently released 7.2 on WinXP and it's rock-solid, no cashes during use no matter what I'm doing to it. The card I'm using at the moment is the All-in-Wonder 128, though I plan to buy one of the newer cards for the DV project and continue using my PCI A-i-W 128 on my regular PC for my video capture and encoding needs there as a secondary display card.
Also, I've heard that their add-on boards and external TV Wonder products can be flaky, which makes sense since they're not integrated with the display and in some cases use the USB bus to transfer video data which is obviously not optimal. But running on 2k/XP with MultiMedia Center 7.2 and a real, full All-in-Wonder, I foresee no stability problems at all, since I'm doing just that right now on my regular PC with no issues.
As an aside--go to ati.com and look at their new All-in-Wonder Radeon 8500 DV, and at the preview on Tom's Hardware. My god, that card's a monster, the remote looks perfect, and if it runs under XP as stably as my All-in-Wonder 128 does then it's perfect for a DVR project.
This is not what I've read before at all. I recall that during the last discussion of satellite DVRs on/., several people adamently insisted that the satellite systems with integrated DVR just re-encode the signal just like a standalone DVR would.
If you can point to a real page about a particular satellite DVR product which disproves what I said about this, please do so and I'll gladly withdraw that comment. Until then, I have to insist that most of what I've read contradicts you.
This highlights the quality issue...
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Comparing the DVRs?
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Basically, when you purchase a PVR/DVR, you're leaving the quality choices up to the makers, as well as most other aspects of the hardware and how it operates.
That's why I'm just going to build my own, as many others have. When I next upgrade my PC, I'll be cramming the old one into a small set-top case with a 10x DVD-ROM, a 100GB HD (or more, depending on pricing at the time), and an ATI All-in-Wonder Radeon (or Radeon 8500, depending on price at the time), a RealMagic Hollywood+ DVD decoder, an SB Audigy Value, and a NIC.
Most of those components I already have, and some of them aren't really necessary--like the H+ card, since the ATI card also has iDCT-assisted DVD decoding, or the DVD drive at all if you just want a PVR and not an integrated DVD playback. I included the H+ card on the list just because I already have one, and I prefer its image quality on a standard TV although the ATI decoder looks better on a high-res TV, and because some rare titles have gklitches on one or the other just as some rare titles have glitches on regular set-top DVD players. Back-ups are always good.;-)
I can't speak for what Linux software is available, but I plan my device to be based on a stripped-down WinXP kernel once http://www.98lite.net finishes their Windows XP version of their famous installer, which lets you strip away almost any unneeded part of the typical install. As such, there's some great and polished software available that's perfect for this--the ATI card's MultiMedia Center, for instance, which includes an integrated Guide+ feature and DVR capabilities. The A-i-W 8500 card will even come with a remote that looks perfect, with an integrated mouse device and everything, and runs on RF instead of IR so you can even control the thing from another room through thick walls. Tom's Hardware recently gave a great review of a pre-release sample.
Best of all, when you roll your own there's total control over encoding and NO COPY PROTECTION. Why worry about losing saved shows in case of disaster or hard drive malfunction or hardware burnout requiring a return to a stupid company which reformats the drive? That's what the NIC is for. Transfer them to a back-up HD or when DVD-R drives and media get cheap enough, burn 'em to DVD. Lots of flexibility and expandability. And I know from personal experience that the All-in-Wonder cards encode a beautiful MPEG-2 stream in real-time with a decent Athlon processor.
The only feature my box won't have that a commercial PVR will is the record-shows-it-thinks-you-may-like feature, which I personally wouldn't find useful anyway. The only feature a DVR integrated with a satellite receiver has that my box won't is digital-to-digital transfer, which isn't such a huge boon when you remember that it doesn't save the digital feed from the satellite, it *re-encodes* it so that there'll be some quality issue anyway. sing high-quality analogue cables shouldn't introduce any more noticeable quality issues.
It's something to consider, and maybe someone else here can point to Linux software with similar functions?
Several years ago I had a roommate in college who was *very* into gaming on the original Playstation. He even had his own review site on the WWW back before the gaming craze when everyone put one up. He specifically bought one of the early Playstations that came out with no region restrictions, so that he wouldn't need to install a modchip to play import titles.
And boy, did he play import titles. He spent most of his disposable income importing games from Japan 6 months before they'd hit the U.S., if ever. Cost an arm and a leg, but he was willing to do it to get the games early and often.
And there's nothing wrong with that. Sony exerts region controls through artificial means, sometimes never distributing a title in a given region at all. Why should we allow companies to arbitrarily cut up the world into marketing regions, so that they can maximize profits through regional licensing deals, at the detriment of the public at large? They shouldn't. In the U.S. at least, copyrights and patents are instituted not as a fundamental right of property ownership but rather to improve the public good through furthering the "useful arts and sciences." So, as far as I'm concerned companies shouldn't be allowed to divide the world up into marketing fiefdoms to the detriment of the public. There ought to be laws against that, and prior to corporations completely controlling Congress through big campaign contributions, there would have been.
Fortunately, the piracy-havens in the Far East are also the last bastions of the freedom to buy hardware that's region-free or to buy kits to make your hardware region-free. http://www.lik-sang.com is the place to go. Hong Kong may pirate everything, but they're no worse in the final analysis than the corporate assholes control what we can see, hear, and play in any given region. I think they're a necessary, counter-balancing force.
This is especially so when we reflect that Europeans are forbidden by their governments from ever seeing some American films and games in their entirety, and Americans are forbidden by corporate censorship from ever seeing some Japanese or European films and games. Why should a German be forbidden from seeing Nazi symbols and red blood in games like Return to Castle Wolfenstein? Why should an American not get to see the complete version of *The Professional*, which was actually a good movie while the American cut was dreck. (They finally released the full film in the U.S. many years later, as *Leon*, but I ordered it from France years before that.) And you'd never believe how many Japanese anime cartoons and games are censored and Bowdlerized before they ever reach the U.S. Oh, and Britain is utterly insane in the extent to which it censors American films for violence.
Technical controls to prevent you from seeing anything your government or corporate censors don't want you to see are being implemented. Sony, the DVD-CA and others are attempting to destroy ways around these controls. Just because current controls are minor and largely ineffectual means nothing. In the future they can be made (almost?) unbreakable and be applied to everything you see and hear, from games to movies to television to music to radio--maybe even to the Internet. Don't think that last is impossible--remember that the FBI has a plan to concentrate all Internet traffic at key points for monitoring purposes, so if the FBI can get the backbones to play along for this, who knows what might be orchestrated 10 years from now.
That's not a future I want to live in. That's a dystopia if ever there were one.
> something that's pretty routine during times of war
Ah, but whether you want to consider it "routine" during "wartime" or not, has nothing to do at all with what it was brought up to demonstrate. The poster above stated that the executive branch only puts into practice what the legislative branch tells it to do. I gave a very direct and very recent example of the executive branch doing something very major (suspending Constitutional rights is always major--and whether you like it or not, even non-citizens have them according to the Supremes), without Congress authorizing it in any way, and which caused Congress to complain that it should have beenh consulted prior to the executive branch's little excursion into imposing executive order over duly passed law.
The example was given to demonstrate that very specific point, not to argue that we shouldn't have the tribunals. Frankly, I don't care since I don't believe full Constitutional protections should apply to non-citizens in the first place, and the executive fiat only applies to non-citizens. Of course, Carnivore and Magic Lantern themselves are evidence that the executive branch doesn't merely do what Congress tells it to do. Congress never authorized these programs; the FBI spent our tax dollars developing malware all on its own decisions.
As for this being a time of war, it isn't. Congress is too lazy and inept to even pass a real declaration of war, which in effect makes this a police action not unlike our involvment in Vietnam. We may call it a war, but technically speaking it isn't, since the procedurs for declaring war are very well established in our system and we haven't even attempted to follow them. Sheer legislative laziness and sloth. I was sorely disappointed that even after being attacked so far below the belt, our Congress still couldn't get off its pampered and corrupt collective ass to pass a simple declaration of war.
And as for "unlawful combatants," I hate to say this since Al Quaeda and the the Taliban disgust me so, but there's really no such thing. "Laws of war" and "international law" are modern contrivances with no historical standing, which ultimately stand in the way of progress and peace and stability in the long term. "Total war" is the correct concept, a concept which by the way was quite well expressed by the actions of the North during the Civil War in the U.S.--or as I like to call it, The War of Northern Aggression.;-) The only way to ensure long-term peace and stability is to solve your problems through quick, total, no-holds-barred military action which de-fangs your enemy entirely. The U.S. is one nation today solely because our forefather suffered through a great and horrible war which decided all issues quickly and forever.
By way of contrast, all our international problems of today can be attributed quite justly to a globalist dove mentality, in which peace is to be maintained at almost any cost and "international laws" have to be respected--with no regard to the devastating long-term consequences of not allowing regions to solve their problems decisively and get past it.
The former Yugoslavia is the archetypal example. For a thousand years tension between the native Orthodox peoples and the Muslims who came in as a by-product of conquest had been present, resulting in continual hostilities that were only kept at bay by one totalitarian regime after another--from the Muslim empires which originally practically enslaved the Serbs, to the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, to subjugation as a Soviet satellite state. Hostilities still ran deep and flared up--such as when a certain Arch-Duke was assassinated, culminating in World War I thanks to the alliance system--but all-out inter-tribal warfare was only averted by the presence of strong repressive governments. The moment those repressive forces disappeared, the thousand-year hostilities erupted into outright warfare. Instead of letting the natural course of warfare play itself out, allowing one group to consolidate its power over a given region while the other group retreats into another, resultng in a stable set of nation-states to replace tribal enclaves, the "international community" of goody-goodies had to step in and demand that everyone stop having a war. Our excuse was that Serbs were committing genocide, but in reality the Bosnians had committed equally bloody atrocities and the Serbs just happened to be the ones winning when we stuck our noses in.
The result is that, thanks to our "rules of war" and "international laws," the entire area is still just as much of a powder-keg of enmity as it was when the Black Hand was terrorizing people in the early part of the last century. Those ethnic groups will never live together peacefully, and the only reason they approximate it now is that U.N. stormtroopers have taken the place of Soviet dictatorship in providing an oppressive influence. The minute they get the chance, hostilities will arise again, and again, and again, and in the long run far more people will be killed in the hostilities than if the first war had just been allowed to play out. If it had, each ethnic group would have had a nearly-unmixed and therefore hostility-free zone in which to found a real nation, and long-term stability and balance would have come to the region at last.
The same sort of unholy internationalization is responsible for the terrorism that originates from the Middle East today. Israel has been fighting for a stalemate for the last forty years. They could have banished Palestinians from their territories decades ago if a normal war had taken place instead of one of these silly let's-follow-International-Law affairs. The result would have been that Israel could have established secure borders 20 years ago, the banished Palestinians would have become mostly-satisfies Egyptians and Iraqis and Iranians, etc., by now, and tensions in the area would be in a subsiding phase with Muslim neighbors being forced to accept Israel's existence. What keeps them from doing that, what put them on their quest to drive the Israelis out, is that their fellow-Muslims the Palestinians are within Israel's borders and as long as that's the case there will be hostility. If a real war had been conducted, 20 or 30 years of stable Israeli borders without any fellow Muslims being oppressed inside them would have gained a measure of grudging acceptance by its neighbors, as opposed to the Jihad to push Israel into the sea for oppressing their Muslim brethren.
A dirty little secret is that we did precisely the ame thing to several small ethnic groups right after World War II. To ensure long-term stability for Europe, we shuffled ethnic groups around by the trainload, until we had all the lines drawn in all the right places so that only people who could reasonably get along were grouped together under one flag. This is seldom taught today unless you take upper-level classes at university on the history of the period, probably because it would offend the delicate sensibilities of our U.N.-uber-alles culture. We don't want to admit that total war resulting in the displacement of ethnic groups to other areas is the only way to ensure long-term peace. But history proves that it is. The only time total war has failed is when the unnatural modern "international law" notion of war reparations was introduced, against Germany after World War I. Before that, losers just gave up a big chunk of land and that was the end of it. Reparations and all that touchy-feely stuff leads, at the risk of someone yelling "Godwin's Law!," to fascist and Nazist backlashes and worse conflicts than before.
So no, I have no problem with tribunals. But I do have a problem with hiding the reason for their existence behind silly and meaningless phrases like "unlawful combatants" instead of just being honest anhd saying "they aren't my citizens, so I'm going to fry the bastards as quickly as possible."
The funny thing is, Congress didn't tell Janet "the Waco wacko" Reno to create and deploy Carnivore and to authorize development of Magic Lantern. And Congress didn't tell John "junior Fuhrer" Ashcroft to continue deploying the former and developing the latter.
We know this because even the Congressional leadership didn't know about them, as evidenced by the hearings certain privacy-conscious sons of liberty among them demanded once Carnivore became known. The fact is the executive branch does most of what it does without any Congressional approval at all. Or what would you call President Bush's fiat about using military tribunals, an order which the Legislative branch did not authorize and, though most support it, almost all complain that they weren't even consulted.
You're quite naive if you believe this nation still operates as the Constitution intended it to. Instead of the Legislative branch setting things into motion through passing laws, the Executive branch carrying those laws out, and the Judicial branch overturning laws when necessary and interpreting them in just ways, it now works like this:
The Executive branch sets things into motion by executive order and abuse of over-broadened discretion; the Legislative branch quite rarely then puts the Executive back in its place by passing laws to curb its abuses, but much more often is too busy setting other abuses into motion through its own powers, such as CDA, COPA, DMCA, SSSCA, etc., which generally serve to magnify and reinforce the abuses of the Executive branch; meanwhile the Judicial branch occasionally slaps down a particular abusive law or executive practice only to be largely ignored and "worked around" by those other two branches who just keep hawking the same old abuses of liberty under new bills of sale, ceaselessly, since the actions of the Judicial have no bearing at all on what the Legislative and Executive branches have the power to do--write the same policy up into different words and all of a sudden it's a new law or executive order, which has to be nullified by a Court again through the same long and painful process, even though it's essentially the same abuse. Not that the Judicial branch can be trusted to defend liberty much better than the other two, though--cf. the insane decision upholding anti-sodomy laws by the High Court in *Bowers v. Hardwick*, which boils down to "your right to privacy doesn't include the right to go against mainstream moral teachings." Read the text of the decision--it actually uses the word "morality," as if the Judicial branch is there to enforce subjective Christian moral concepts rather than invoke objective attempts at justice.
To put it simply, the FBI has a Congressional mandate to arrest people for breaking laws, but it does not have a Congressional mandate to do whatever it wants and invent any methods of snooping it wants while investigating people it desires to arrest. The unfortunate part is that the Legislative branch is too busy violating our other rights and taking corporate perks to ever use its power to restrain the FBI by law, while the Judicial branch is so slow and addlepated that multitudes of people will have the FBI's Orwellian thoughtcrime-control toys unleashed on them before it ever decides to uphold or invalidate these invasions. Not that we can trust it to make the right decision anyway, considering that it won't even let me lick my adult and consenting wife or girlfriend's pussy in private.
Thomas Jefferson was right, my friends--"An elective despotism was not the government we fought for."
An awful lot has changed in the Win32 world since Windows 95 premiered, not the least of which is the latest switch to the NT kernel for the consumer OS as well as the "pro" OS. This I think is the main reason Microsoft is abandoning Win95 support--it makes sense to stop supporting the crashy Win9x kernel as quickly as possible, now that the home version of the OS is built on NT. Let's face it: Win9x is a huge pain in the ass and support nightmare for average joes. They're always mucking something in that delicate little ecosystem up, and needing help. Compared to Win9x, WinXP is practically uncrashable and much harder for home users to screw up. The sooner Win9x is retired, the better for everyone, not just MS. And that process begins with retiring each release in turn.
Also, even within the Win9x world Windows 95 is a nightmare. The original release doesn't even support USB and can be a pain just to establish a net connection. It has drivers for, well, almost nothing beyond very bland generic basic hardware--and home users aren't very prone to updating drivers manually. Which reminds me, in the original release, no functional Windows Update to get the system updates for most people. Plus, there are three distinct flavors of Win95, and just try asking a home user "Well, is it Win95 A, Win95B, or Win95C? Well, right-click on 'My Computer' and select 'About this computer', then read off the very very long number..." And any recent USB devices can be very flaky even on the Win95 versions with USB support.
And even non-USB hardware may not work on Win95. Some hardware vendors have abandoned support for Windows 95, long before MS is abandoning it. Just try to get supported Win95 drivers for a brand new ATI video card if you isbelieve--their website explicitly disclaims all support for Win95; so, maybe Win98 drivers will work, maybe not.
The problem is made worse when considering WinME, and how the subtle changes made to ME to keep average joes from seeing any DOS underpinnings broke some drivers and code. Consequently, that leaves a hardware vendor or software maker with supporting Windows 95's lack of all features and libraries in later versions, Win98's much better "completeness" of libraries and features and compatibility, WinME's not-total-compatibility with Win98 thanks to its stupid "features", Windows NT which is even more archaic in terms of compatibility and libraries and worse to support than Windows 95, Win2k and its quirks, and finally WinXP which is the new standard in the MS world. Or, they can require Win98 or Win2k minimum, as many are already doing. A lot of hardware and software makers probably don't even test on Win95 anymore even if they do claim Windows 95 will work with their product, since most of the time it *probably* will, in one way or another.
So, I think it's great that MS is dumping Win95 support at last, and not releasing new packages like DX 8.1 for it. Now, I'm all for backwards compatability--in a recent post, I even lamented that nVidia doesn't seem interested in either including rudimentary Glide support in their drivers or releasing what code they can for the Glide API, for the sake of continuing to be able to use a few great Glide games that are out there. But that's a far cry from dumping support for a 6 year old OS when Win98SE runs everything Win95 can and a lot better. After all, would you expect a Linux distro compiled in 1995 to run most apps compiled today perfectly? No--libraries have changed, and a whole lot of code everywhere has been updated since then. Win9x has always strived for compatability, so the situation is much better with Win95, but surely it's time to drop any official support.
That said, I went to the MS support download site about a month ago to download all the Windows updates to keep handy, since I have copies of all flavors and like to set up archaic OSes in VMware, and I couldn't find most of the Win95 updates. There was a download for administrators of all of them, but the link is broken now.
So, offhand, can anyone think of a place to easily obtain all of the Win95 updates at once?
Hmm. Your logic is severely lacking. Martin Luther King, Jr., never committed a crime, and yet he FBI was on his ass like white on rice. Err, maybe that isn't an appropriate metaphor to use with a great Black leader...
Point being, anyone who does anything the people in power don't like are targets. That would be why when the FBI caught MLK in an extramarital affair thanks to their illegal bugging, they mailed him an anonymous note telling him to back down or commit suicide or else they'll release their audiotape of him with another woman.
The FBI (and sister agency ATF) does evil things like that all the time. For example, in Ruby Ridge they murdered the wife and son of an innocent gun owner for the "crime" of legally exercising his 2nd Amendment rights--all because the administration in power didn't like guns and wanted to subvert the 2nd Amendment. And no wonder, because "An armed man is a citizen. An unarmed man is a subject."--Robert Heinlein And of course at Waco, David Koresh's only crime was selling one sawed-off shotgun (the barrel had only been shortened a little, and by a third-party--Koresh was in business with a registered gun dealer). Yet for that small infraction the FBI and ATF killed dozens of people including many innocent little children. And afterwards, they accused Koresh of child abuse--which the sherriff in the town they lived in disproved, since Koresh's wives were above the age of consent for marriage in Texas. And if the ATF hadn't botched the operation and fired first, prompting a justified return of fire from the twitchy Texans (c'mon--everyone owns a gun in Texas!), then the surviving Branch Davidians who were charged with murder would not have been acquitted on the grounds of self defense--which they were, though it wasn't much publicized. And if they hadn't fired first then the 300 lb. steel front doors which they fired through wouldn't have been "lost" by the FBI along with the rolls of film taken the day of the storming by the Texas Rangers which the FBI took from them. How can you lose 3oo lb. steel doors, especially when they were the only part of the building left after you burnt it down by accidently igniting the CS gas you were pumping into the building through the nozzle of a Bradley Fighting Vehicle? In the end, Waco was about the ATF/FBI storming a religious community instead of just showing up with a warrant like they should have, because they didn't agree with the religion of the commune's members, even though the only thing illegal that any of them had done was that the leader, a licensed gun dealer, sold a shotgun whose previous owner had cut a couple inches off the barrel. There's a wonderful HBO-sponsored documentary about it, among others.
Face it: no one whose political views are anything like Thomas Jefferson's or George Washington's is safe from the Department of Justice in this country. This legislation basically frees the FBI to initiate a campaign of monitoring exactly like their campaign against the civil rights leaders and student demonstrators of the 1960s. Only now, it will be against hackers, WTO protesters, anti-corporatists, anyone who violates the DMCA by enforcing his Fair Use rights, and anyone who pisses off a big corporate benefactor like the RIAA or MPAA--and anyone else they just don't like. Read Declan's Politech list for a good sampling of who that is.
Al Quaida isn't the biggest terrorist organization operating in this country. The FBI is.
Correction: I post TEXT to alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.pre-teen , which is more or less a discussion group these days despite its location in the binaries hierarchy. People who look for illicit material usually go elsewhere these days, like alt.binaries.pictures.underage-admirers or alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.mclt . I'm sorry if you think posting text messages to a discussion forum, not unlike the messages we're posting now to this discussion forum, should be a shooting offence.
Since you seem intent on mentioning to everyone my text posting habits at that forum, you could also mention that I arrived in my capacity as a writer conducting research on pedophiles online, observed the text postings to get an understanding of the subject, and then started talking to the regs over there because dspite their odd habit of collecting images of nude 12 year old girls, they're largely intelligent guys with a very twisted and enjoyable sense of humour. Imagine John Cleese portraying a paedophile in a sketch, and that's what some of the regs are like. And what geek doesn't like John Cleese?:-)
See, it's folks like yourself we should all be worried about, because it's people with your attitude who usually work for the FBI. I have little doubt I will be unfairly and unconstitutionally monitored online by some law enforcement agency or another thanks to the legislation like this which makes it far too easy to monitor people for any reason, even if it only be because of the opinions they hold or the company they keep. Fortunately for me I only hang out with people who collect illegal binary 1s and 0s, rather than doing anything illicit myself. And I'll also note, lest anyone think the company I sometimes keep is truly bad company, that I'm informed that almost all of the images they trade in are scans of magazines from the 1970s when such magazines were legal and sold in normal porn shops, and that the new images are soft Playboy-esque photographs shot in art studios in Russia where it isn't illegal to possess a picture merely because a minor is nude in it in a nonsexual way. Minors are even occasionally seen nude in mainstram movies in Europe--like the Oscar-winning German film *The Tin Drum* which was declared by hillbilly Courts in Oklahoma to be child porn yet which has been shown on Cinemax and HBO. So, the notion of such things is usually very distorted--the idea of hardcore porn involving minors even offends the regulars at alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.pre-teen , and most of what is termed such by the FBI for publicity purposes is usually from what I hear soft and artistic like the famous Robert Mapplethorpe photograph which was unsuccessfully prosecuted in Cincinatti as depicted in the recent Showtime movie *Dirty Pictures*.
Getting back on-topic, add the Internet wiretapping provisions in Magic Lantern mentioned here, to the FBI plan discussed befor on/. to concentrate Net traffic through a few Carnivore-equipped nodes on the backbones, to the fact that the new laws allow the FBI to monitor and log all header data even with no warrant and even on a broad basis, and you have a framework under which the FBI will really be watching anyone it doesn't like without warrant and without oversight. And with dicks like the AC above permeating the FBI, I won't be the only one watched--everyone who goes anywhere online that the FBI dislikes, like the IMC abnd other alternative news outlets or hacker hangouts, will be monitored. They'll be able to look at all your headers with no warrants or orders, and for going somewhere "subversive" or alternative or progressive and talking to the wrong people they'll be able to use that to get an order from their favorite judge to install monitoring or keylogging software on your PC. Before you think it's far-fetched, remember what they tried to do with monitoring the IMC website just recently, and what they did all the time to people like Martin Luther King Jr. in the not-so-distant past. And remember what FBI Director Freeh said: "The American people must be willing to give up a degree of personal
privacy in exchange for safety and security." And that was years before 9/11, the day the FBI got carte blanche to do anything it wants as long as it claims to be fighting terrorists and other baddies.
Because no modern OS, aside from very hobbled forms of Linux without fulloptimization to take advantage of your hardware and make config changes as needed, will let you do that.
No, that's for games. Some games will start to take advantage of Dolby Digital 5.1 sound, especially since the standard gamer soundcards for PC have supported it since the Live! 5.1 and Hercules GameTheater. Now the newer cards all have it unless you buy a bargain basement card.
Aside from which, some of the things he mentioned are very usable for games from a visual standpoint. HD video output is naturally much better than standard A/V or even S-Video out if you have a HD screen to view it on, since standard NTSC and PAL TVs don't even show standard 640x480 or 800x600 at full quality thanks to their interlacing and weird pixels.
Personally, back when I still had an N64, I had it set up to send the RCA video to a good quality A/V switch so that when I wanted to play multiplayer I'd put it on the TV, but when I wanted to play with myself (err...) I'd press the switch button and send the N64 output to the video input on my ATI card, set the card's input to fullscreen in my OS, and play games on my 21" ColorSync monitor. Much better visual quality than on the TV--more detail, cleaner, crisper, and perfect for a PC gamer who appreciates what a monitor can offer over a TV.
The point is, NO YOU DON"T HAVE TO CLICK ON WHATEVER THE FBI SENDS YOU. Why don't you READ the bloody USA/PATRIOT stuff and what has been released so far of the FBI's "evil plans" before you waste our time?
The FBI is given carte-blanche to install spyware on your machine in any way they wish, without needing a search warrant (which takes a relatively high measure of cause to get) from a Court in your jurisdiction, but rather by getting a wiretap order (much lower showing of cause) from Any Court ANYWHERE. They don't even need to go to your jurisdiction to a real Court--they can go to any Court whatsoever, like for example a Mickey Mouse Court right down the street from FBI HQ where there's a judge who hands out orders like they're Tick-Tacs.
That in itself is troubling. They can pick any judge anywhere to ask for permission to hack anyone's box. I'm sure they already have a good working relationship with judges who'd give them anything. Jurisdiction is there to protect you from judges like that. But not any more.
And the FBI can get their spyware onto your machine by any electronic means, including by exploiting any security vulnerability there is to get the conde on your box. Remember the bad root exploit that was revealed a few days ago for Linux? You can bet the FBI is subscribing to every bug track list and logging exploits they can use as they come up, so that they'll know how to break into your computer before you even know what the security flaw is and how to patch it. So, it isn't just stupid people who run foreign executables who are hackable. It's everyone.
Now, combine all that with what the FBI has done in the recent past, like getting a warrant and a gag order against the Independent Media Center to seize all their logs so that they could trace users who reported on the Canadian police report on how to deal with WTO protestors that someone had lifted from an unattended car in Canada, and interrogate them for the Mounties to try to find the guy who did it. Oh, and the IMC would have been unable to inform anyone of the order, and that visitors to the site were being logged and monitored by the FBI.
Now, that order was reversed the very next day by a real judge who actually knew what the Bill of Rights means. But with these new laws and regs, the FBI doesn't even have to tell anyone that an order ever existed in the first place. There's no real oversight, and no chance for an order to be overturned or deemed fraudulent or unconstitutionally vague or overbroad or just plains wrong. Today, the FBI would simply handle the above IMC freedom of press/speech "problem" like this: they'd go to the chambers of Judge Unconstitutional next door, get an order to install spyware on the IMC web server so that they can retrieve the logs they want and monitor any connections which might be from the user they want, and then go down a list of known exploits--some of which probably won't have been announced yet and won't have patches at all--until they get their software onto the IMC's server. Then they get their logs, and monitor connections--and of course if anyone talks about any protest plans that may be questionable to the FBI while the spyware is installed, then hey, it's in plain sight during an investigation which required them to view server logs. And even if it isn't, who cares--the FBI isn't known for their oppenness and honesty; they'll use the information to find or manufacture a legally more acceptable excuse for going after their new suspect. Their new suspect who was just exercising his right to free speech and his right to peaceably assemble to ask the government for redress, BTW.
As you can see, the potential for this legislation goes far beyond just logging keystrokes to get PGP passwords of terrorist suspects. Right now, that's what the FBI has publicly disclosed about Magic Lantern. What they haven't disclosed could well be the cababilities to remotely access the whole system to do things like what I outlined above. Remember that when the Carnivore documents were initially released, the parts about Magic Lantern were blacked out. What makes you therefore think the FBI has told us everything about Magic Lantern now that its existence is no longer blacked out?
At any rate, if you read the new laws, they give the FBI the chance to do far more than sniff PGP keys. Knowing what we all know about the FBI, they are planning to exploit the law to its fullest. If Magic Lantern really is only a key logger, then you can bet they have another piece of software that's still classified to do the rest. And isn't a key logger bad enough as it is, since they now have the ability to get secret installation orders from any judge they choose at any kangaroo Court? That in itself can be used to access a lot more than your PGP keys, which is already an invasion. Every word you ever write on your computer could be theirs, and you'd never know it if they disguise their program well enough--have it replace your networking layer, let's say, so that for all intents and purposes it's indistinguisable from the processes that run whenever you're net-connected. What might any of us be suspect for? Going to the IMC website and posting our opinions or protest experiences? Running a site like the IMC, which might itself get bugged and logged thanks to a sympathetic judge? Again, the orders can be secret, so there's no real oversight.
We're on dangerous ground. I visit forums where people sometimes talk about illegal things, like borderline protest activities, or illicit datastreams, though I never do so and never do any illegal things (except maybe smoke cigars in public--what a country) myself. Does that mean my PC should be tagged, bagged, and monitored? The FBI probably thinks so. Anyone who'd even think of protesting must be a communist--if only we could tap 'em all like we did with the civil rights leaders in the 60s. Oh wait, now we can! Who needs J. Edgar Hoover, when you have thousands of FBI agents who are trained according to the methods he set up himself?
Why do ignorant, lazy people who obviously don't know what they're talking about always say that Microsoft "stole" the GUI idea from Apple? It's just such a stupid thing to believe on SO MANY LEVELS.
First of all, having a GUI interface with windows and icons and menus and such is just an idea, and a fairly obvious one at that--which is why, as everyone knows, Xerox PARC came up with the notion back when Apple was still two geeks playing with breadboards and text, and the idea existed in incipient form long before that in the conversations of computer scientists wishing for more processing and graphical power to make it happen. Furthermore, it's just an extension of obvious physical items into an electronic, symbolic form and as such is nothing new--clicking an icon to access a function is really no different from pressing a physical button to perform a function. As an idea, here's what Thomas Jefferson would say about it: "If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possess the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening mine."--Thomas Jefferson Our society went wrong and our capacity for growth and equality was severely diminished the moment we made ideas instead of just specific implementations patentable, which is what we have done by accepting fuzzy generic patents on generalities. Back in the 19th century you had to be much, much more specific and your protections were much, much more narrow.
And the reason Apple lost its suit against MS had nothing to do with how vigorously or not they chose to attack people who used ideas they had used first. The Court found that Microsoft had access to Apple's IP through licensing rights it had already had through agreements and purchases with other companies, so that Apple had already given them permission to use their IP even though they didn't realize it. Furthermore, Apple's other IP claims to the GUI in general were specious and just plain stupid thanks to an abundance of prior art.
Let's face it--a GUI is an obvious idea, not something that should be protected IP. Only a specific implementation should be protected--so that for example if you wanted to
Sorry, but journalists have every right to publish this information. After all, they had the right to publish the Pentagon Papers. The issue is that the folks at MacFixIt were first-parties to a breach of contract, not that they provided information, which is their First Amendment right.
Separate yourself from the person who broke the EULA and contract law no longer applies AT ALL since you are a third-party. So, any site that wants to publish this sort of information should say that it comes from a third party, and that no one working at the site has verified the information. That completely frees the site from having broken any contract, whether the EULA is a valid contrat or not (where I live, it is NOT A VALID CONTRACT ANYWAY).
Now, that only leaves Apple with the argument that the MPAA used against DeCSS, which is hardly very applicable since putting a plainly labeled piece of software on a CD does not constitute a trade secret, whereas keeping the CSS keys secret did. And it doesn't qualify as a copy control mchanism either under the DMCA, since its purpose is not to prevent copies of the CD from being made, whereas the purpose of CSS is. You can easily copy the MacOS Update CD using any standard CD-R(W) drive, whereas even with a DVD-R(W) you cannot copy a DVD because CSS requirs data that won't be copied to the copy.
The best argument Apple could make is that it's an access control mechanism under the DMCA, but an equally valid argument could be made that it is not due to the fact that the user has free access to the data on the disc since no effort is made at keeping its contents inaccessible. Anyone can browse to it, copy whatever packages he wants to a hard disk, etc. Again, this is something that isn't true under a real access control mechanism like CSS, which effectively renders any copies of any data files "scrambled" and unusable.
In other words, breaking the EULA is Apple's only valid legal leg to stand on, and so sites should be smart enough to lie and say that third parties gave them this information. If you didn't dirctly break the EULA, you didn't violate your silly "contract" with Apple. If Apple demands to know who, cite journalistic privileges and the need to protect your sources.
As has been pointed out, Nintendo put twice as many boxes on the shelves as Microsoft did, so you have to expect it to sell twice as many units--which is exactly what it's doing since both are selling out. While that does make your statement correct, it also means that this is in no way an accurate measure of consumer demand. Demand could be greater for the Xbox, and it would still be outsold 2:1 by Gamecube until MS gets more boxen on the shelves of retail outlets.
And none of that supports your assertion that Xbox will be dead in a year. What so many people fail to remember is that Microsoft can afford to bleed money for several years on their Xbox division, and still remain a very, very profitable company overall. The problem with Sega was that they couldn't financially afford to play with the big boys anymore--that, and the fact that most gamers held onto their PSXs and/or N64s while holding out for the PS2.
Sega counted on the Dreamcast becoming a hit because it was going to be out so long before the PS2 that gamers would jump on it. And some did, and loved it. But the vast majority of people are not hardcore gamers willing to spend lots of money on getting every game console under the sun. The vast majority of console customers are average teenagers, twentysomethings, and parents who buy them for their kids. And most of them already had Playstation or N64 machines they were pretty happy with. And when they read about how this new Sega Dreamcast is coming out that has much better graphics and will have more realistic, cool games that the PSX or N64 can't do, they'd consider maybe shelling out the money for it--until at the end of the same article they see that Sony claims the PS2 will be out within a year of Dreamcast, and that it has this incredible Emotion Engine chip that will make things look completely realistic and have games that will be totally revolutionary.
Now, I remember clearly at the time that that's what happened in every article or TV spot discussing the Dreamcast--it's great, it's so much better; and the Playstation 2 will completely kick its ass and bring us to a new dimension of gaming realism, and be out within a year of Dreamcast. Now, we all know that most of that stuff was just Sony hype, and the PS2 isn't revolutionary, and came out a lot later than Sony originally said. But hindsight is 20/20, and people went by what they read and saw and heard, and by Sony marketing hype like Emotion Engine. Since Sega couldn't afford to bleed money like Microsoft can, they had to withdraw with their tail between their legs when sales didn't meet projections.
Now, Microsoft can and will happily bleed money if necessary. Why? So that they can get their box into every household they possibly can. And it will be a lot of households, especially once the price drops 6 months to a year from now. You see, the Xbox has one advantage that neither the PS2 nor the Gamecube has. It's just a PC with some proprietary connectors. As such, it's more versatile than the competition, and it has a much longer usable life.
See, right now Microsoft is downplaying the PC aspects of the Xbox, so that it will appeal first to the gaming market. MS wants it to appeal to kids, their parents, and dumb college kids who'd buy a Playstation instead of PC, for the gaming and entertainment/DVD features. In that respect it and the PS2 are perfect--Little Johnny gets a game station and his parents get themselves a DVD player; Johnny Fratboy gets a game machine and DVD player in one. The fact that you can buy a separate DVD player for the price delta between the Gamecube and the Xbox or PS2 doesn't matter, because Johnny Average wants one easy box instead of two that might be more complicated. Flashing 12:00 syndrome, and all.
Once it saturates the gamer market, and gets into a lot of homes already, Microsoft can suddenly unveil Phase 2. You see, if Microsoft had wanted to make their console more console-like and less PC-like they easily could have. In fact, they had to know that hardwar enthusiasts would start ripping them apart and turning them into PCs just like they did with Netpliances and all the other webterminals that were essentially PCs. And if people do that, it costs them money since they lose $ on the hardware, selling it at such a low price point. MS knows this, they are not stupid when it comes to business. They would have changed it to make it less PC-like and more unhackable, unless there were a reason to keep it PC-like. I mean, it even has what are essentially USB connectors with a different shape and slight changes, which certainly makes it easy for hackers to find a way to hook up keyboards and mice. They will, sooner or later.
But you see, this is Microsoft's Phase 2 for the Xbox. When the gamer market is saturated, they roll-out their own inexpensive keyboard and mouse and start not only appealing to a new market of Net users and people who need a PC, but also they already have a huge installed base of gamers who might not have bought a complicated computer thingy in the first place to play their games on, but now who figure "I need to use the Internet or get a computer anyway, so why not just shell out $40 for the Xbox keyboard/mouse and see if that's good enough." It will be integral to their.Net strategy. They will make money through the $20/month subscription to MSN.
By starting the marketing as a game box, and then turning it into a PC that only works with their service second, they maximize their use of both markets, and get an MSN terminal into a lot more households than would have ever, ever, ever bought a crappy Netpliance or WebTV. Then they rake in the $20/month subscription fees for MSN. Oh, and for just $5/month extra, you can use their slick new network-enabled word processing suite on your Xbox, too, so that you can not only use MSN and the Interney and send and get e-mails, you can also write all your serious stuff and have it sent over the Net straight to your work or school. Brilliant. A few Linux hackers will get their OS running on it and cost them a comparatively small amount, but Joe and Jane Average will happily use their Xbox game console/Internet terminal/Hailstorm-driven word processing networked dynamo.
It's clear by how PC-like the Xbox remains, despite all the easy ways they could have modified it, that their intention is eventually to have it take over the function of a PC. And it fits in nicely with.Net.
I'm an American. I have every right to complain, and to still do things my own way, whether it be legal or not. That's the American way, dagnabbit. You have your way of dealing with Microsoft--by not doing so--and I have my way--by freely copying their software when others see fit to post it. Neither is inherently better unless you subscribe to the notion of intellectual property in ways which I, and even a lot of Linux evangelists, do not.
To most hardcore Linux eangelists I would say, We are more alike than you think, young Skywalker.;-) But the fact remains that Linux is not yet as efficient a platform for those of us who are more spatially oriented and want GUIs and standardization. KDE and GNOME are slowly fixing this, but the operative word is still slowly. The day I can run Linux with a completely standardized GUI and widgets across all my apps including a GIMP with full CMYK/Pantone support or a native Linux port of Photoshop, and the other tools I need or suitable GUI-licious replacements for them, I will gladly switch. But that day will not come for some time since so many Linux evangelists don't want standardization. Well, I do, and most of us end users do, and we have it with Windows and MacOS. Until that day comes when Linux is as GUI-licious and standardized in interface and apps as can be, though, I will continue to use Microsoft OSes, and as long as Microsoft insists on unsavory things that get in my way as a hardware enthusiast like WPA, I will not pay for their OS upgrades.
And that's that. Bitch and disagree all you want, but my view of "intellectual property" is probably closer to Stallman's than many of the hard-core Linux advocates' are, and that view legitimizes my choice. IP was meant by the Founders to last 14 years, and meant to apply only in areas where it advanced science and the "useful arts." but lest this degenerate into a quarrel on IP, I won't go where you know I'm headed anyway.;-)
To quote one of the comments in the original/. article:
> it isn't the complete Glide library that older applications (such as Quake II) depend on.
> Rather, it is a subset of the Glide API that allows Mesa and their new OpenGL driver to
> access the Voodoo3.
They never, ever, ever opened the Glide libraries. Instead, they released the source for the part of their Linux driver that hooks into Mesa. That's all. The rest has always been, and unless nVidia can be persuaded to do so will always remain, binary-only and hence not easily hackable (no successful efforts so far) to work with all video cards.
Note also that this/. article was from the same period when 3Dfx was suing Creative Labs for working on their Unified driver which would have offered Glide compatability for Creative TNT2 based cards. Today, all mention of the Unified driver has been removed from Creative's site except for a few old press releases, which link to pages which no longer exist.
The Glide code is still closed and proprietary and hence old Glide games will probably be unplayable unless one uses an old Voodoo card, which will be increasingly difficult as time goes on for obvious reasons. After all, right now how many Voodoo 1's do you see floating around? There's the occasional one on eBay. In a few years, the same will be the case for Voodoo 2's through Voodoo 5's.
Doubtless there are a few tiny bits of Glide which are proprietary to third parties and hence unreleasable. But from what I understand most of Glide was developed in-house by 3Dfx, so most of it should be releasable. The only question is whether nVidia can be prodded to release it.
I don't know of any really informative sites offhand, but I got my latest Glide wrappers to try out (none work for me, though--blast you, ATI!--you foil me again...) from here:
http://www.ngemu.com/n64/plugins.php?page=wrappe r
It has links to some of the most recent versions of the most popular wrappers. eVoodoo and XGL2000 are the best for most people, from what I've read.
If anyone has a better, more informativ site, please let us all know.
I don't care whether they adapt any of 3Dfx's hardware ideas. What I really wish they'd do is either implement a Glide support into their drivers, or open up the Glide source code to whatever extent they can (some bits and bobs may be proprietary to other companies).
Obviously, I'm wishing for this for compatibility with old Glide-only apps, not so that new ones could be written. No one has written new ones in eons AFAIK, since as soon as more open standards like OpenGL and DirectX came onto the scene people dumped the 3Dfx-only Glide route, thank God. But there are still several older games written in the Voodoo and Voodoo 2's heyday which are Glide-only, or which work significantly better under Glide than they do in DX.
These apps are few but they contain a couple of early PC classics, as well as the first and still-most-compatible N64 emulator UltraHLE and its offshoot SupraHLE. There are several Glide-wrappers that translate Glide calls into standard DirectX calls, but they don't work well or at all for everybody--me included. None of the Glide wrappers will let me play any Glide-only games or any game through SupraHLE. In addition, some older titles like the first *Tomb Raider* look much, much better under Glide than they do under DX.
So, for the sake of compatability with old games I wish they would release as much of the Glide code as they can, if not write a quick-and-dirty Glide implementation into their drivers. Some may remember that Creative Labs had promised a near-perfect Glide compatibility for their TNT2-based cards back in 1999, in a driver they called Unified. But after 3Dfx sued them the project disappeared, and now that a couple years have passed the desire for Glide capabilities has died down since the games are now so old. But some of us like those old games, and the idea of continued compatability. I just hate it when things break unnecessarily. It's funny how, although some of them need CPU-slowdown programs because they lack internal timing routines, I can still run almost any DOS game with the oldest I've run going back to 1982, yet the development of proprietary 3D APIs like Glide and even DX (Microsoft could break backwards-compatibility with older versions any time they wish) takes away that continuity and certainty.
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Ugh, that should be http://www.kirstensroom.com , not kirstensrrom.com . Either way, it offends a lot of people. Offending people is fun...
Anyway, it's funny that Canadian people get so offended because she's Canadian too.
Wow, you're surprisingly great looking for someone spending a working Xmas bored to death. I only thought we fat stereotypical geeks did that. ;-) And your homepage is actually interesting, unlike 99.9999999999999999999999999999% of them.
:-) Have a happy Christmas, even those who may be quite bored at work right now. I guess *someone* has to babysit the servers...
So, since your homepage says
> email me with a subject for me to post about.. it can be anything from dirty socks to my stance
> on abortion to why i like sprouts so much...
I simply have to ask, why would you like sprouts? And what is your stance on aborting them? And as a Canadian and a female are you offended by http://www.kirstensrrom.com , a site I ran across when the guy who runs http://www.cupfart.com said he finds it embarrassing as a Canadian?
Just some stuff to keep those like you who are stuck listening to the hum of servers busy.
> I hope you all have the ability to spend the holidays with the ones who mean the most to you:
:-) I'm about to leave to get together with the family, as most of us are, but I thought I'd give a big "Merry Non-Denominational Winter Vacation" to the whole /. community first.
:-(
> even if those are friends like Solid Snake or Rikku
Hmm. Does a bowl of Jell-O, a copy of *Divi Dead*, and a DVD of *Virtual Porn Sex with Asia* count? Hehe.
No, no sulking alone with masturbatory foods and computer games today.
That said, who here saw the Christmas episode of *Futurama* on Sunday, the one which the execs at Fox refused to air last year? Pretty hilarious. Pity what dicks the executives were in not showing it in the first place.
Merry Christmas!
I never once asserted anything about nuclear families where the dad works and mommy stays home, etc. I said that until about the last 60 years, maybe 100, women and men did not get married based on common interests. I can prove this going back to the earliest civilizations themselves, since in most of them women were the property of their fathers who sold them to their husbands. Common interests had absolutely nothing to do with who procreated with whom--what kind of wife you could afford, and who your friends were who might have daughters they want to get rid of, were the major factors.
And do you really believe the prehistoric mating game had anything to do with common interests? Nope. Mating probably occurred under a wide variety of rather obvious circumstances, none of which have to do with two early humans sharing a technical interest in tool construction or somesuch.
Taking ancient Athens as an example, women were considered little better than slaves and were once again bartered, and usually denied any education beyond the most basic. Again, no one was going to mate based on a mutual profession.
In Rome women enjoyed many more rights, and indeed women could even sue their husbands for divorce. However, once again there was no place for women in most professions, so a woman and a man would not be married based having such things in common. Women in the lower and middle classes would usually work at whatever labor their husband worked at, out of necessity not out of mutual interest. And despite the fairly progressive rights women had, only the wealthy ones were ever educted to realize it--poor women were still bought and sold into marriage by fathers and husbands much as a commodity.
Moving along into the colonial era you mention, once again women did not go into professions based on their interests unless they were wealthy, and even wealthy women were unlikely to be able to take up a given profession outright. For example, during the 1600s, how many women were members of the Royal Society ("guild" for scientists)? That would be, none. So, with no women in most professions which one would enter based on ability and aptitude and desire--not mere labor entered into from necessity--how would you expect that people with like intersts would marry? The fact is, as I have shown, they usually wouldn't.
What you described is just husbands and wives sharing manual labor. Not the same thing at all as professionals meeting in the workplace, sharing common interests, and getting married. Not the same at all.
Not until the 1800s would we really see the start of this, with a famous example being Marie Curie and her husband, who shared common interests and common work. Not until the 20th century would such marriages based on common interests become the norm.
So, I think I've adequately shown my point and backed it up. Only in very very recent times have women and men met and courted and married based on professions which they entered due to mutual interest.
I hate to say this, but I think most of the disorders and non-bacterial, non-viral diseases that are on the rise are explained by two things: women's liberation and environmental contamination.
;-)
The first might seem like a silly joke, but think about what's different today in the mating game from what was the norm in almost all of human history until it started changing in the last 60 years. Traditionally, marriage had little at all to do with common interests, and nothing to do with common professions. Male-dominated society meant that men would engage in professions and women, if they were in a working class, worked at common "women's jobs" like straight factory work or sewing or teaching/watching young children. People didn't marry because of anything they had in common. People usually married based on convenience, friendships between families, whoever lived nearby, whatever wife they could afford, etc.
By contrats, today women and men meet, date, then marry, and most of the people they meet work in similar professions and therefore have similar interests and if those interests are determined genetically, similar genes. It's like a mild, remote form of inbreeding. More often than not techies marry techies, teachers marry teachers, scientists marry scientists, lawyers marry lawyers, etc. The result over time is to reinforce those genetic factors which are common between these people who have married and procrated thanks to common interests or employment. And if some of those traits have slightly negative side-effects, then those side-effects will become more pronounced. Add in this selective breeding over several generations, and well--you're looking at a pronounced enhancement of both the positives and negatives inherent in genes which cause one to have a predisposition towards certain vocations.
Second, I think we can't deny that we've changed our environment significantly, particularly in the area of foodstuffs and radiation. We now eat more and more genetically enhanced food--some of it enhanced through centuries of selective breeding, such as the milk we drink and the meat we eat, and some of it more recently enhanced through artificial hormones which may leave traces in that food--such as, again, milk and meat, and now even some vegetable foods. For at least 6 years people have expressed concern that hormones in milk may be contributing to the progressively earlier ages at which girls are hitting puberty, and that perhaps the same hormones contribute to cancer. Whether that's true or not, surely some of our food additives and genetic enhancements have effects we cannot measure or imagine. I'm not saying to go organic--I liberally at such altered foodstuffs--but I am saying only a person with his head in the sand would refuse to realize that some of our alterations to our food, whether genetic or chemical, have to have effects we don't fully understand yet.
The same is true of radiation. I'm not a nut who insists on not using cell phones because they allegedly cause cancer, but I do believe that with all the low-level radiation that passes through our bodies on a daily basis, at least a few particles eventually interact with our matter. This could easily explain the huge upswing in cancer over the last 40 years, as low-level radiation exposure has steadily increased. Before you dismiss it, think about how much radio, cell phone, television, cordless phone, microwave, and myriad other forms of man-made radiation passes through your body each day. Almost none of it interacts with you, since most of it can even pass cleanly through feet of concrete without interaction. But think of what a small antenna or dish it takes to get reception of so many radio, TV, satellite, or other channels, compared to the much larger size of your human body. What if only 1 in a billion of these low-energy particles interacts with your body? That's still a rather large interaction, when you consider the constant levels we experience day and night, even when sitting at home. What if it's only 1 in a trillion? Then it's still significant, given the constant bombardment. All it takes is one particle interacting with one cell to potentially cause a change that could spark a cancer. Given constant bombardment by so many low-level radiation sources, this has to be significant. We don't want to believe it, and usually dismiss it our of hand because we like our technology, but this is just so much sticking of heads in the sand. We're never going to give up our tech, even if it's the primary cause of cancer, but we could at least be honest about it when we look at it.
Sure, there are genetic predispositions for things like cancer. We know this. But factors which are most likely environmental have increased cancer rates exponentially over the last 40 years. A genetic predispostion still needs a trigger. I think large amounts of low-level radiation are a likely candidate for this.
Well, those are my theories, anyway. I know people are just lining up to disagree, so let's hear it!
Have you run MultiMedia Center on the 2k/XP line of OSes? I'll admit MMC can be flaky on Win9x, but I've never had an issue with MMC 7 or higher on 2k/XP. Currently I'm running the recently released 7.2 on WinXP and it's rock-solid, no cashes during use no matter what I'm doing to it. The card I'm using at the moment is the All-in-Wonder 128, though I plan to buy one of the newer cards for the DV project and continue using my PCI A-i-W 128 on my regular PC for my video capture and encoding needs there as a secondary display card.
Also, I've heard that their add-on boards and external TV Wonder products can be flaky, which makes sense since they're not integrated with the display and in some cases use the USB bus to transfer video data which is obviously not optimal. But running on 2k/XP with MultiMedia Center 7.2 and a real, full All-in-Wonder, I foresee no stability problems at all, since I'm doing just that right now on my regular PC with no issues.
As an aside--go to ati.com and look at their new All-in-Wonder Radeon 8500 DV, and at the preview on Tom's Hardware. My god, that card's a monster, the remote looks perfect, and if it runs under XP as stably as my All-in-Wonder 128 does then it's perfect for a DVR project.
This is not what I've read before at all. I recall that during the last discussion of satellite DVRs on /., several people adamently insisted that the satellite systems with integrated DVR just re-encode the signal just like a standalone DVR would.
If you can point to a real page about a particular satellite DVR product which disproves what I said about this, please do so and I'll gladly withdraw that comment. Until then, I have to insist that most of what I've read contradicts you.
Basically, when you purchase a PVR/DVR, you're leaving the quality choices up to the makers, as well as most other aspects of the hardware and how it operates.
;-)
That's why I'm just going to build my own, as many others have. When I next upgrade my PC, I'll be cramming the old one into a small set-top case with a 10x DVD-ROM, a 100GB HD (or more, depending on pricing at the time), and an ATI All-in-Wonder Radeon (or Radeon 8500, depending on price at the time), a RealMagic Hollywood+ DVD decoder, an SB Audigy Value, and a NIC.
Most of those components I already have, and some of them aren't really necessary--like the H+ card, since the ATI card also has iDCT-assisted DVD decoding, or the DVD drive at all if you just want a PVR and not an integrated DVD playback. I included the H+ card on the list just because I already have one, and I prefer its image quality on a standard TV although the ATI decoder looks better on a high-res TV, and because some rare titles have gklitches on one or the other just as some rare titles have glitches on regular set-top DVD players. Back-ups are always good.
I can't speak for what Linux software is available, but I plan my device to be based on a stripped-down WinXP kernel once http://www.98lite.net finishes their Windows XP version of their famous installer, which lets you strip away almost any unneeded part of the typical install. As such, there's some great and polished software available that's perfect for this--the ATI card's MultiMedia Center, for instance, which includes an integrated Guide+ feature and DVR capabilities. The A-i-W 8500 card will even come with a remote that looks perfect, with an integrated mouse device and everything, and runs on RF instead of IR so you can even control the thing from another room through thick walls. Tom's Hardware recently gave a great review of a pre-release sample.
Best of all, when you roll your own there's total control over encoding and NO COPY PROTECTION. Why worry about losing saved shows in case of disaster or hard drive malfunction or hardware burnout requiring a return to a stupid company which reformats the drive? That's what the NIC is for. Transfer them to a back-up HD or when DVD-R drives and media get cheap enough, burn 'em to DVD. Lots of flexibility and expandability. And I know from personal experience that the All-in-Wonder cards encode a beautiful MPEG-2 stream in real-time with a decent Athlon processor.
The only feature my box won't have that a commercial PVR will is the record-shows-it-thinks-you-may-like feature, which I personally wouldn't find useful anyway. The only feature a DVR integrated with a satellite receiver has that my box won't is digital-to-digital transfer, which isn't such a huge boon when you remember that it doesn't save the digital feed from the satellite, it *re-encodes* it so that there'll be some quality issue anyway. sing high-quality analogue cables shouldn't introduce any more noticeable quality issues.
It's something to consider, and maybe someone else here can point to Linux software with similar functions?
Several years ago I had a roommate in college who was *very* into gaming on the original Playstation. He even had his own review site on the WWW back before the gaming craze when everyone put one up. He specifically bought one of the early Playstations that came out with no region restrictions, so that he wouldn't need to install a modchip to play import titles.
And boy, did he play import titles. He spent most of his disposable income importing games from Japan 6 months before they'd hit the U.S., if ever. Cost an arm and a leg, but he was willing to do it to get the games early and often.
And there's nothing wrong with that. Sony exerts region controls through artificial means, sometimes never distributing a title in a given region at all. Why should we allow companies to arbitrarily cut up the world into marketing regions, so that they can maximize profits through regional licensing deals, at the detriment of the public at large? They shouldn't. In the U.S. at least, copyrights and patents are instituted not as a fundamental right of property ownership but rather to improve the public good through furthering the "useful arts and sciences." So, as far as I'm concerned companies shouldn't be allowed to divide the world up into marketing fiefdoms to the detriment of the public. There ought to be laws against that, and prior to corporations completely controlling Congress through big campaign contributions, there would have been.
Fortunately, the piracy-havens in the Far East are also the last bastions of the freedom to buy hardware that's region-free or to buy kits to make your hardware region-free. http://www.lik-sang.com is the place to go. Hong Kong may pirate everything, but they're no worse in the final analysis than the corporate assholes control what we can see, hear, and play in any given region. I think they're a necessary, counter-balancing force.
This is especially so when we reflect that Europeans are forbidden by their governments from ever seeing some American films and games in their entirety, and Americans are forbidden by corporate censorship from ever seeing some Japanese or European films and games. Why should a German be forbidden from seeing Nazi symbols and red blood in games like Return to Castle Wolfenstein? Why should an American not get to see the complete version of *The Professional*, which was actually a good movie while the American cut was dreck. (They finally released the full film in the U.S. many years later, as *Leon*, but I ordered it from France years before that.) And you'd never believe how many Japanese anime cartoons and games are censored and Bowdlerized before they ever reach the U.S. Oh, and Britain is utterly insane in the extent to which it censors American films for violence.
Technical controls to prevent you from seeing anything your government or corporate censors don't want you to see are being implemented. Sony, the DVD-CA and others are attempting to destroy ways around these controls. Just because current controls are minor and largely ineffectual means nothing. In the future they can be made (almost?) unbreakable and be applied to everything you see and hear, from games to movies to television to music to radio--maybe even to the Internet. Don't think that last is impossible--remember that the FBI has a plan to concentrate all Internet traffic at key points for monitoring purposes, so if the FBI can get the backbones to play along for this, who knows what might be orchestrated 10 years from now.
That's not a future I want to live in. That's a dystopia if ever there were one.
> something that's pretty routine during times of war
;-) The only way to ensure long-term peace and stability is to solve your problems through quick, total, no-holds-barred military action which de-fangs your enemy entirely. The U.S. is one nation today solely because our forefather suffered through a great and horrible war which decided all issues quickly and forever.
Ah, but whether you want to consider it "routine" during "wartime" or not, has nothing to do at all with what it was brought up to demonstrate. The poster above stated that the executive branch only puts into practice what the legislative branch tells it to do. I gave a very direct and very recent example of the executive branch doing something very major (suspending Constitutional rights is always major--and whether you like it or not, even non-citizens have them according to the Supremes), without Congress authorizing it in any way, and which caused Congress to complain that it should have beenh consulted prior to the executive branch's little excursion into imposing executive order over duly passed law.
The example was given to demonstrate that very specific point, not to argue that we shouldn't have the tribunals. Frankly, I don't care since I don't believe full Constitutional protections should apply to non-citizens in the first place, and the executive fiat only applies to non-citizens. Of course, Carnivore and Magic Lantern themselves are evidence that the executive branch doesn't merely do what Congress tells it to do. Congress never authorized these programs; the FBI spent our tax dollars developing malware all on its own decisions.
As for this being a time of war, it isn't. Congress is too lazy and inept to even pass a real declaration of war, which in effect makes this a police action not unlike our involvment in Vietnam. We may call it a war, but technically speaking it isn't, since the procedurs for declaring war are very well established in our system and we haven't even attempted to follow them. Sheer legislative laziness and sloth. I was sorely disappointed that even after being attacked so far below the belt, our Congress still couldn't get off its pampered and corrupt collective ass to pass a simple declaration of war.
And as for "unlawful combatants," I hate to say this since Al Quaeda and the the Taliban disgust me so, but there's really no such thing. "Laws of war" and "international law" are modern contrivances with no historical standing, which ultimately stand in the way of progress and peace and stability in the long term. "Total war" is the correct concept, a concept which by the way was quite well expressed by the actions of the North during the Civil War in the U.S.--or as I like to call it, The War of Northern Aggression.
By way of contrast, all our international problems of today can be attributed quite justly to a globalist dove mentality, in which peace is to be maintained at almost any cost and "international laws" have to be respected--with no regard to the devastating long-term consequences of not allowing regions to solve their problems decisively and get past it.
The former Yugoslavia is the archetypal example. For a thousand years tension between the native Orthodox peoples and the Muslims who came in as a by-product of conquest had been present, resulting in continual hostilities that were only kept at bay by one totalitarian regime after another--from the Muslim empires which originally practically enslaved the Serbs, to the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, to subjugation as a Soviet satellite state. Hostilities still ran deep and flared up--such as when a certain Arch-Duke was assassinated, culminating in World War I thanks to the alliance system--but all-out inter-tribal warfare was only averted by the presence of strong repressive governments. The moment those repressive forces disappeared, the thousand-year hostilities erupted into outright warfare. Instead of letting the natural course of warfare play itself out, allowing one group to consolidate its power over a given region while the other group retreats into another, resultng in a stable set of nation-states to replace tribal enclaves, the "international community" of goody-goodies had to step in and demand that everyone stop having a war. Our excuse was that Serbs were committing genocide, but in reality the Bosnians had committed equally bloody atrocities and the Serbs just happened to be the ones winning when we stuck our noses in.
The result is that, thanks to our "rules of war" and "international laws," the entire area is still just as much of a powder-keg of enmity as it was when the Black Hand was terrorizing people in the early part of the last century. Those ethnic groups will never live together peacefully, and the only reason they approximate it now is that U.N. stormtroopers have taken the place of Soviet dictatorship in providing an oppressive influence. The minute they get the chance, hostilities will arise again, and again, and again, and in the long run far more people will be killed in the hostilities than if the first war had just been allowed to play out. If it had, each ethnic group would have had a nearly-unmixed and therefore hostility-free zone in which to found a real nation, and long-term stability and balance would have come to the region at last.
The same sort of unholy internationalization is responsible for the terrorism that originates from the Middle East today. Israel has been fighting for a stalemate for the last forty years. They could have banished Palestinians from their territories decades ago if a normal war had taken place instead of one of these silly let's-follow-International-Law affairs. The result would have been that Israel could have established secure borders 20 years ago, the banished Palestinians would have become mostly-satisfies Egyptians and Iraqis and Iranians, etc., by now, and tensions in the area would be in a subsiding phase with Muslim neighbors being forced to accept Israel's existence. What keeps them from doing that, what put them on their quest to drive the Israelis out, is that their fellow-Muslims the Palestinians are within Israel's borders and as long as that's the case there will be hostility. If a real war had been conducted, 20 or 30 years of stable Israeli borders without any fellow Muslims being oppressed inside them would have gained a measure of grudging acceptance by its neighbors, as opposed to the Jihad to push Israel into the sea for oppressing their Muslim brethren.
A dirty little secret is that we did precisely the ame thing to several small ethnic groups right after World War II. To ensure long-term stability for Europe, we shuffled ethnic groups around by the trainload, until we had all the lines drawn in all the right places so that only people who could reasonably get along were grouped together under one flag. This is seldom taught today unless you take upper-level classes at university on the history of the period, probably because it would offend the delicate sensibilities of our U.N.-uber-alles culture. We don't want to admit that total war resulting in the displacement of ethnic groups to other areas is the only way to ensure long-term peace. But history proves that it is. The only time total war has failed is when the unnatural modern "international law" notion of war reparations was introduced, against Germany after World War I. Before that, losers just gave up a big chunk of land and that was the end of it. Reparations and all that touchy-feely stuff leads, at the risk of someone yelling "Godwin's Law!," to fascist and Nazist backlashes and worse conflicts than before.
So no, I have no problem with tribunals. But I do have a problem with hiding the reason for their existence behind silly and meaningless phrases like "unlawful combatants" instead of just being honest anhd saying "they aren't my citizens, so I'm going to fry the bastards as quickly as possible."
The funny thing is, Congress didn't tell Janet "the Waco wacko" Reno to create and deploy Carnivore and to authorize development of Magic Lantern. And Congress didn't tell John "junior Fuhrer" Ashcroft to continue deploying the former and developing the latter.
We know this because even the Congressional leadership didn't know about them, as evidenced by the hearings certain privacy-conscious sons of liberty among them demanded once Carnivore became known. The fact is the executive branch does most of what it does without any Congressional approval at all. Or what would you call President Bush's fiat about using military tribunals, an order which the Legislative branch did not authorize and, though most support it, almost all complain that they weren't even consulted.
You're quite naive if you believe this nation still operates as the Constitution intended it to. Instead of the Legislative branch setting things into motion through passing laws, the Executive branch carrying those laws out, and the Judicial branch overturning laws when necessary and interpreting them in just ways, it now works like this:
The Executive branch sets things into motion by executive order and abuse of over-broadened discretion; the Legislative branch quite rarely then puts the Executive back in its place by passing laws to curb its abuses, but much more often is too busy setting other abuses into motion through its own powers, such as CDA, COPA, DMCA, SSSCA, etc., which generally serve to magnify and reinforce the abuses of the Executive branch; meanwhile the Judicial branch occasionally slaps down a particular abusive law or executive practice only to be largely ignored and "worked around" by those other two branches who just keep hawking the same old abuses of liberty under new bills of sale, ceaselessly, since the actions of the Judicial have no bearing at all on what the Legislative and Executive branches have the power to do--write the same policy up into different words and all of a sudden it's a new law or executive order, which has to be nullified by a Court again through the same long and painful process, even though it's essentially the same abuse. Not that the Judicial branch can be trusted to defend liberty much better than the other two, though--cf. the insane decision upholding anti-sodomy laws by the High Court in *Bowers v. Hardwick*, which boils down to "your right to privacy doesn't include the right to go against mainstream moral teachings." Read the text of the decision--it actually uses the word "morality," as if the Judicial branch is there to enforce subjective Christian moral concepts rather than invoke objective attempts at justice.
To put it simply, the FBI has a Congressional mandate to arrest people for breaking laws, but it does not have a Congressional mandate to do whatever it wants and invent any methods of snooping it wants while investigating people it desires to arrest. The unfortunate part is that the Legislative branch is too busy violating our other rights and taking corporate perks to ever use its power to restrain the FBI by law, while the Judicial branch is so slow and addlepated that multitudes of people will have the FBI's Orwellian thoughtcrime-control toys unleashed on them before it ever decides to uphold or invalidate these invasions. Not that we can trust it to make the right decision anyway, considering that it won't even let me lick my adult and consenting wife or girlfriend's pussy in private.
Thomas Jefferson was right, my friends--"An elective despotism was not the government we fought for."
An awful lot has changed in the Win32 world since Windows 95 premiered, not the least of which is the latest switch to the NT kernel for the consumer OS as well as the "pro" OS. This I think is the main reason Microsoft is abandoning Win95 support--it makes sense to stop supporting the crashy Win9x kernel as quickly as possible, now that the home version of the OS is built on NT. Let's face it: Win9x is a huge pain in the ass and support nightmare for average joes. They're always mucking something in that delicate little ecosystem up, and needing help. Compared to Win9x, WinXP is practically uncrashable and much harder for home users to screw up. The sooner Win9x is retired, the better for everyone, not just MS. And that process begins with retiring each release in turn.
Also, even within the Win9x world Windows 95 is a nightmare. The original release doesn't even support USB and can be a pain just to establish a net connection. It has drivers for, well, almost nothing beyond very bland generic basic hardware--and home users aren't very prone to updating drivers manually. Which reminds me, in the original release, no functional Windows Update to get the system updates for most people. Plus, there are three distinct flavors of Win95, and just try asking a home user "Well, is it Win95 A, Win95B, or Win95C? Well, right-click on 'My Computer' and select 'About this computer', then read off the very very long number..." And any recent USB devices can be very flaky even on the Win95 versions with USB support.
And even non-USB hardware may not work on Win95. Some hardware vendors have abandoned support for Windows 95, long before MS is abandoning it. Just try to get supported Win95 drivers for a brand new ATI video card if you isbelieve--their website explicitly disclaims all support for Win95; so, maybe Win98 drivers will work, maybe not.
The problem is made worse when considering WinME, and how the subtle changes made to ME to keep average joes from seeing any DOS underpinnings broke some drivers and code. Consequently, that leaves a hardware vendor or software maker with supporting Windows 95's lack of all features and libraries in later versions, Win98's much better "completeness" of libraries and features and compatibility, WinME's not-total-compatibility with Win98 thanks to its stupid "features", Windows NT which is even more archaic in terms of compatibility and libraries and worse to support than Windows 95, Win2k and its quirks, and finally WinXP which is the new standard in the MS world. Or, they can require Win98 or Win2k minimum, as many are already doing. A lot of hardware and software makers probably don't even test on Win95 anymore even if they do claim Windows 95 will work with their product, since most of the time it *probably* will, in one way or another.
So, I think it's great that MS is dumping Win95 support at last, and not releasing new packages like DX 8.1 for it. Now, I'm all for backwards compatability--in a recent post, I even lamented that nVidia doesn't seem interested in either including rudimentary Glide support in their drivers or releasing what code they can for the Glide API, for the sake of continuing to be able to use a few great Glide games that are out there. But that's a far cry from dumping support for a 6 year old OS when Win98SE runs everything Win95 can and a lot better. After all, would you expect a Linux distro compiled in 1995 to run most apps compiled today perfectly? No--libraries have changed, and a whole lot of code everywhere has been updated since then. Win9x has always strived for compatability, so the situation is much better with Win95, but surely it's time to drop any official support.
That said, I went to the MS support download site about a month ago to download all the Windows updates to keep handy, since I have copies of all flavors and like to set up archaic OSes in VMware, and I couldn't find most of the Win95 updates. There was a download for administrators of all of them, but the link is broken now.
So, offhand, can anyone think of a place to easily obtain all of the Win95 updates at once?
Hmm. Your logic is severely lacking. Martin Luther King, Jr., never committed a crime, and yet he FBI was on his ass like white on rice. Err, maybe that isn't an appropriate metaphor to use with a great Black leader...
Point being, anyone who does anything the people in power don't like are targets. That would be why when the FBI caught MLK in an extramarital affair thanks to their illegal bugging, they mailed him an anonymous note telling him to back down or commit suicide or else they'll release their audiotape of him with another woman.
The FBI (and sister agency ATF) does evil things like that all the time. For example, in Ruby Ridge they murdered the wife and son of an innocent gun owner for the "crime" of legally exercising his 2nd Amendment rights--all because the administration in power didn't like guns and wanted to subvert the 2nd Amendment. And no wonder, because "An armed man is a citizen. An unarmed man is a subject."--Robert Heinlein And of course at Waco, David Koresh's only crime was selling one sawed-off shotgun (the barrel had only been shortened a little, and by a third-party--Koresh was in business with a registered gun dealer). Yet for that small infraction the FBI and ATF killed dozens of people including many innocent little children. And afterwards, they accused Koresh of child abuse--which the sherriff in the town they lived in disproved, since Koresh's wives were above the age of consent for marriage in Texas. And if the ATF hadn't botched the operation and fired first, prompting a justified return of fire from the twitchy Texans (c'mon--everyone owns a gun in Texas!), then the surviving Branch Davidians who were charged with murder would not have been acquitted on the grounds of self defense--which they were, though it wasn't much publicized. And if they hadn't fired first then the 300 lb. steel front doors which they fired through wouldn't have been "lost" by the FBI along with the rolls of film taken the day of the storming by the Texas Rangers which the FBI took from them. How can you lose 3oo lb. steel doors, especially when they were the only part of the building left after you burnt it down by accidently igniting the CS gas you were pumping into the building through the nozzle of a Bradley Fighting Vehicle? In the end, Waco was about the ATF/FBI storming a religious community instead of just showing up with a warrant like they should have, because they didn't agree with the religion of the commune's members, even though the only thing illegal that any of them had done was that the leader, a licensed gun dealer, sold a shotgun whose previous owner had cut a couple inches off the barrel. There's a wonderful HBO-sponsored documentary about it, among others.
Face it: no one whose political views are anything like Thomas Jefferson's or George Washington's is safe from the Department of Justice in this country. This legislation basically frees the FBI to initiate a campaign of monitoring exactly like their campaign against the civil rights leaders and student demonstrators of the 1960s. Only now, it will be against hackers, WTO protesters, anti-corporatists, anyone who violates the DMCA by enforcing his Fair Use rights, and anyone who pisses off a big corporate benefactor like the RIAA or MPAA--and anyone else they just don't like. Read Declan's Politech list for a good sampling of who that is.
Al Quaida isn't the biggest terrorist organization operating in this country. The FBI is.
Correction: I post TEXT to alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.pre-teen , which is more or less a discussion group these days despite its location in the binaries hierarchy. People who look for illicit material usually go elsewhere these days, like alt.binaries.pictures.underage-admirers or alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.mclt . I'm sorry if you think posting text messages to a discussion forum, not unlike the messages we're posting now to this discussion forum, should be a shooting offence.
:-)
/. to concentrate Net traffic through a few Carnivore-equipped nodes on the backbones, to the fact that the new laws allow the FBI to monitor and log all header data even with no warrant and even on a broad basis, and you have a framework under which the FBI will really be watching anyone it doesn't like without warrant and without oversight. And with dicks like the AC above permeating the FBI, I won't be the only one watched--everyone who goes anywhere online that the FBI dislikes, like the IMC abnd other alternative news outlets or hacker hangouts, will be monitored. They'll be able to look at all your headers with no warrants or orders, and for going somewhere "subversive" or alternative or progressive and talking to the wrong people they'll be able to use that to get an order from their favorite judge to install monitoring or keylogging software on your PC. Before you think it's far-fetched, remember what they tried to do with monitoring the IMC website just recently, and what they did all the time to people like Martin Luther King Jr. in the not-so-distant past. And remember what FBI Director Freeh said: "The American people must be willing to give up a degree of personal
Since you seem intent on mentioning to everyone my text posting habits at that forum, you could also mention that I arrived in my capacity as a writer conducting research on pedophiles online, observed the text postings to get an understanding of the subject, and then started talking to the regs over there because dspite their odd habit of collecting images of nude 12 year old girls, they're largely intelligent guys with a very twisted and enjoyable sense of humour. Imagine John Cleese portraying a paedophile in a sketch, and that's what some of the regs are like. And what geek doesn't like John Cleese?
See, it's folks like yourself we should all be worried about, because it's people with your attitude who usually work for the FBI. I have little doubt I will be unfairly and unconstitutionally monitored online by some law enforcement agency or another thanks to the legislation like this which makes it far too easy to monitor people for any reason, even if it only be because of the opinions they hold or the company they keep. Fortunately for me I only hang out with people who collect illegal binary 1s and 0s, rather than doing anything illicit myself. And I'll also note, lest anyone think the company I sometimes keep is truly bad company, that I'm informed that almost all of the images they trade in are scans of magazines from the 1970s when such magazines were legal and sold in normal porn shops, and that the new images are soft Playboy-esque photographs shot in art studios in Russia where it isn't illegal to possess a picture merely because a minor is nude in it in a nonsexual way. Minors are even occasionally seen nude in mainstram movies in Europe--like the Oscar-winning German film *The Tin Drum* which was declared by hillbilly Courts in Oklahoma to be child porn yet which has been shown on Cinemax and HBO. So, the notion of such things is usually very distorted--the idea of hardcore porn involving minors even offends the regulars at alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.pre-teen , and most of what is termed such by the FBI for publicity purposes is usually from what I hear soft and artistic like the famous Robert Mapplethorpe photograph which was unsuccessfully prosecuted in Cincinatti as depicted in the recent Showtime movie *Dirty Pictures*.
Getting back on-topic, add the Internet wiretapping provisions in Magic Lantern mentioned here, to the FBI plan discussed befor on
privacy in exchange for safety and security." And that was years before 9/11, the day the FBI got carte blanche to do anything it wants as long as it claims to be fighting terrorists and other baddies.
Because no modern OS, aside from very hobbled forms of Linux without fulloptimization to take advantage of your hardware and make config changes as needed, will let you do that.
No, that's for games. Some games will start to take advantage of Dolby Digital 5.1 sound, especially since the standard gamer soundcards for PC have supported it since the Live! 5.1 and Hercules GameTheater. Now the newer cards all have it unless you buy a bargain basement card.
Aside from which, some of the things he mentioned are very usable for games from a visual standpoint. HD video output is naturally much better than standard A/V or even S-Video out if you have a HD screen to view it on, since standard NTSC and PAL TVs don't even show standard 640x480 or 800x600 at full quality thanks to their interlacing and weird pixels.
Personally, back when I still had an N64, I had it set up to send the RCA video to a good quality A/V switch so that when I wanted to play multiplayer I'd put it on the TV, but when I wanted to play with myself (err...) I'd press the switch button and send the N64 output to the video input on my ATI card, set the card's input to fullscreen in my OS, and play games on my 21" ColorSync monitor. Much better visual quality than on the TV--more detail, cleaner, crisper, and perfect for a PC gamer who appreciates what a monitor can offer over a TV.
Dolby Digital 5.1/DTS receiver, $299. Sony, so midrange consumer quality. Not perfect, but good enough unless your ears are much better than most.
The point is, NO YOU DON"T HAVE TO CLICK ON WHATEVER THE FBI SENDS YOU. Why don't you READ the bloody USA/PATRIOT stuff and what has been released so far of the FBI's "evil plans" before you waste our time?
The FBI is given carte-blanche to install spyware on your machine in any way they wish, without needing a search warrant (which takes a relatively high measure of cause to get) from a Court in your jurisdiction, but rather by getting a wiretap order (much lower showing of cause) from Any Court ANYWHERE. They don't even need to go to your jurisdiction to a real Court--they can go to any Court whatsoever, like for example a Mickey Mouse Court right down the street from FBI HQ where there's a judge who hands out orders like they're Tick-Tacs.
That in itself is troubling. They can pick any judge anywhere to ask for permission to hack anyone's box. I'm sure they already have a good working relationship with judges who'd give them anything. Jurisdiction is there to protect you from judges like that. But not any more.
And the FBI can get their spyware onto your machine by any electronic means, including by exploiting any security vulnerability there is to get the conde on your box. Remember the bad root exploit that was revealed a few days ago for Linux? You can bet the FBI is subscribing to every bug track list and logging exploits they can use as they come up, so that they'll know how to break into your computer before you even know what the security flaw is and how to patch it. So, it isn't just stupid people who run foreign executables who are hackable. It's everyone.
Now, combine all that with what the FBI has done in the recent past, like getting a warrant and a gag order against the Independent Media Center to seize all their logs so that they could trace users who reported on the Canadian police report on how to deal with WTO protestors that someone had lifted from an unattended car in Canada, and interrogate them for the Mounties to try to find the guy who did it. Oh, and the IMC would have been unable to inform anyone of the order, and that visitors to the site were being logged and monitored by the FBI.
Now, that order was reversed the very next day by a real judge who actually knew what the Bill of Rights means. But with these new laws and regs, the FBI doesn't even have to tell anyone that an order ever existed in the first place. There's no real oversight, and no chance for an order to be overturned or deemed fraudulent or unconstitutionally vague or overbroad or just plains wrong. Today, the FBI would simply handle the above IMC freedom of press/speech "problem" like this: they'd go to the chambers of Judge Unconstitutional next door, get an order to install spyware on the IMC web server so that they can retrieve the logs they want and monitor any connections which might be from the user they want, and then go down a list of known exploits--some of which probably won't have been announced yet and won't have patches at all--until they get their software onto the IMC's server. Then they get their logs, and monitor connections--and of course if anyone talks about any protest plans that may be questionable to the FBI while the spyware is installed, then hey, it's in plain sight during an investigation which required them to view server logs. And even if it isn't, who cares--the FBI isn't known for their oppenness and honesty; they'll use the information to find or manufacture a legally more acceptable excuse for going after their new suspect. Their new suspect who was just exercising his right to free speech and his right to peaceably assemble to ask the government for redress, BTW.
As you can see, the potential for this legislation goes far beyond just logging keystrokes to get PGP passwords of terrorist suspects. Right now, that's what the FBI has publicly disclosed about Magic Lantern. What they haven't disclosed could well be the cababilities to remotely access the whole system to do things like what I outlined above. Remember that when the Carnivore documents were initially released, the parts about Magic Lantern were blacked out. What makes you therefore think the FBI has told us everything about Magic Lantern now that its existence is no longer blacked out?
At any rate, if you read the new laws, they give the FBI the chance to do far more than sniff PGP keys. Knowing what we all know about the FBI, they are planning to exploit the law to its fullest. If Magic Lantern really is only a key logger, then you can bet they have another piece of software that's still classified to do the rest. And isn't a key logger bad enough as it is, since they now have the ability to get secret installation orders from any judge they choose at any kangaroo Court? That in itself can be used to access a lot more than your PGP keys, which is already an invasion. Every word you ever write on your computer could be theirs, and you'd never know it if they disguise their program well enough--have it replace your networking layer, let's say, so that for all intents and purposes it's indistinguisable from the processes that run whenever you're net-connected. What might any of us be suspect for? Going to the IMC website and posting our opinions or protest experiences? Running a site like the IMC, which might itself get bugged and logged thanks to a sympathetic judge? Again, the orders can be secret, so there's no real oversight.
We're on dangerous ground. I visit forums where people sometimes talk about illegal things, like borderline protest activities, or illicit datastreams, though I never do so and never do any illegal things (except maybe smoke cigars in public--what a country) myself. Does that mean my PC should be tagged, bagged, and monitored? The FBI probably thinks so. Anyone who'd even think of protesting must be a communist--if only we could tap 'em all like we did with the civil rights leaders in the 60s. Oh wait, now we can! Who needs J. Edgar Hoover, when you have thousands of FBI agents who are trained according to the methods he set up himself?
Why do ignorant, lazy people who obviously don't know what they're talking about always say that Microsoft "stole" the GUI idea from Apple? It's just such a stupid thing to believe on SO MANY LEVELS.
First of all, having a GUI interface with windows and icons and menus and such is just an idea, and a fairly obvious one at that--which is why, as everyone knows, Xerox PARC came up with the notion back when Apple was still two geeks playing with breadboards and text, and the idea existed in incipient form long before that in the conversations of computer scientists wishing for more processing and graphical power to make it happen. Furthermore, it's just an extension of obvious physical items into an electronic, symbolic form and as such is nothing new--clicking an icon to access a function is really no different from pressing a physical button to perform a function. As an idea, here's what Thomas Jefferson would say about it: "If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possess the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening mine."--Thomas Jefferson Our society went wrong and our capacity for growth and equality was severely diminished the moment we made ideas instead of just specific implementations patentable, which is what we have done by accepting fuzzy generic patents on generalities. Back in the 19th century you had to be much, much more specific and your protections were much, much more narrow.
And the reason Apple lost its suit against MS had nothing to do with how vigorously or not they chose to attack people who used ideas they had used first. The Court found that Microsoft had access to Apple's IP through licensing rights it had already had through agreements and purchases with other companies, so that Apple had already given them permission to use their IP even though they didn't realize it. Furthermore, Apple's other IP claims to the GUI in general were specious and just plain stupid thanks to an abundance of prior art.
Let's face it--a GUI is an obvious idea, not something that should be protected IP. Only a specific implementation should be protected--so that for example if you wanted to
Sorry, but journalists have every right to publish this information. After all, they had the right to publish the Pentagon Papers. The issue is that the folks at MacFixIt were first-parties to a breach of contract, not that they provided information, which is their First Amendment right.
Separate yourself from the person who broke the EULA and contract law no longer applies AT ALL since you are a third-party. So, any site that wants to publish this sort of information should say that it comes from a third party, and that no one working at the site has verified the information. That completely frees the site from having broken any contract, whether the EULA is a valid contrat or not (where I live, it is NOT A VALID CONTRACT ANYWAY).
Now, that only leaves Apple with the argument that the MPAA used against DeCSS, which is hardly very applicable since putting a plainly labeled piece of software on a CD does not constitute a trade secret, whereas keeping the CSS keys secret did. And it doesn't qualify as a copy control mchanism either under the DMCA, since its purpose is not to prevent copies of the CD from being made, whereas the purpose of CSS is. You can easily copy the MacOS Update CD using any standard CD-R(W) drive, whereas even with a DVD-R(W) you cannot copy a DVD because CSS requirs data that won't be copied to the copy.
The best argument Apple could make is that it's an access control mechanism under the DMCA, but an equally valid argument could be made that it is not due to the fact that the user has free access to the data on the disc since no effort is made at keeping its contents inaccessible. Anyone can browse to it, copy whatever packages he wants to a hard disk, etc. Again, this is something that isn't true under a real access control mechanism like CSS, which effectively renders any copies of any data files "scrambled" and unusable.
In other words, breaking the EULA is Apple's only valid legal leg to stand on, and so sites should be smart enough to lie and say that third parties gave them this information. If you didn't dirctly break the EULA, you didn't violate your silly "contract" with Apple. If Apple demands to know who, cite journalistic privileges and the need to protect your sources.
As has been pointed out, Nintendo put twice as many boxes on the shelves as Microsoft did, so you have to expect it to sell twice as many units--which is exactly what it's doing since both are selling out. While that does make your statement correct, it also means that this is in no way an accurate measure of consumer demand. Demand could be greater for the Xbox, and it would still be outsold 2:1 by Gamecube until MS gets more boxen on the shelves of retail outlets.
.Net strategy. They will make money through the $20/month subscription to MSN.
.Net.
And none of that supports your assertion that Xbox will be dead in a year. What so many people fail to remember is that Microsoft can afford to bleed money for several years on their Xbox division, and still remain a very, very profitable company overall. The problem with Sega was that they couldn't financially afford to play with the big boys anymore--that, and the fact that most gamers held onto their PSXs and/or N64s while holding out for the PS2.
Sega counted on the Dreamcast becoming a hit because it was going to be out so long before the PS2 that gamers would jump on it. And some did, and loved it. But the vast majority of people are not hardcore gamers willing to spend lots of money on getting every game console under the sun. The vast majority of console customers are average teenagers, twentysomethings, and parents who buy them for their kids. And most of them already had Playstation or N64 machines they were pretty happy with. And when they read about how this new Sega Dreamcast is coming out that has much better graphics and will have more realistic, cool games that the PSX or N64 can't do, they'd consider maybe shelling out the money for it--until at the end of the same article they see that Sony claims the PS2 will be out within a year of Dreamcast, and that it has this incredible Emotion Engine chip that will make things look completely realistic and have games that will be totally revolutionary.
Now, I remember clearly at the time that that's what happened in every article or TV spot discussing the Dreamcast--it's great, it's so much better; and the Playstation 2 will completely kick its ass and bring us to a new dimension of gaming realism, and be out within a year of Dreamcast. Now, we all know that most of that stuff was just Sony hype, and the PS2 isn't revolutionary, and came out a lot later than Sony originally said. But hindsight is 20/20, and people went by what they read and saw and heard, and by Sony marketing hype like Emotion Engine. Since Sega couldn't afford to bleed money like Microsoft can, they had to withdraw with their tail between their legs when sales didn't meet projections.
Now, Microsoft can and will happily bleed money if necessary. Why? So that they can get their box into every household they possibly can. And it will be a lot of households, especially once the price drops 6 months to a year from now. You see, the Xbox has one advantage that neither the PS2 nor the Gamecube has. It's just a PC with some proprietary connectors. As such, it's more versatile than the competition, and it has a much longer usable life.
See, right now Microsoft is downplaying the PC aspects of the Xbox, so that it will appeal first to the gaming market. MS wants it to appeal to kids, their parents, and dumb college kids who'd buy a Playstation instead of PC, for the gaming and entertainment/DVD features. In that respect it and the PS2 are perfect--Little Johnny gets a game station and his parents get themselves a DVD player; Johnny Fratboy gets a game machine and DVD player in one. The fact that you can buy a separate DVD player for the price delta between the Gamecube and the Xbox or PS2 doesn't matter, because Johnny Average wants one easy box instead of two that might be more complicated. Flashing 12:00 syndrome, and all.
Once it saturates the gamer market, and gets into a lot of homes already, Microsoft can suddenly unveil Phase 2. You see, if Microsoft had wanted to make their console more console-like and less PC-like they easily could have. In fact, they had to know that hardwar enthusiasts would start ripping them apart and turning them into PCs just like they did with Netpliances and all the other webterminals that were essentially PCs. And if people do that, it costs them money since they lose $ on the hardware, selling it at such a low price point. MS knows this, they are not stupid when it comes to business. They would have changed it to make it less PC-like and more unhackable, unless there were a reason to keep it PC-like. I mean, it even has what are essentially USB connectors with a different shape and slight changes, which certainly makes it easy for hackers to find a way to hook up keyboards and mice. They will, sooner or later.
But you see, this is Microsoft's Phase 2 for the Xbox. When the gamer market is saturated, they roll-out their own inexpensive keyboard and mouse and start not only appealing to a new market of Net users and people who need a PC, but also they already have a huge installed base of gamers who might not have bought a complicated computer thingy in the first place to play their games on, but now who figure "I need to use the Internet or get a computer anyway, so why not just shell out $40 for the Xbox keyboard/mouse and see if that's good enough." It will be integral to their
By starting the marketing as a game box, and then turning it into a PC that only works with their service second, they maximize their use of both markets, and get an MSN terminal into a lot more households than would have ever, ever, ever bought a crappy Netpliance or WebTV. Then they rake in the $20/month subscription fees for MSN. Oh, and for just $5/month extra, you can use their slick new network-enabled word processing suite on your Xbox, too, so that you can not only use MSN and the Interney and send and get e-mails, you can also write all your serious stuff and have it sent over the Net straight to your work or school. Brilliant. A few Linux hackers will get their OS running on it and cost them a comparatively small amount, but Joe and Jane Average will happily use their Xbox game console/Internet terminal/Hailstorm-driven word processing networked dynamo.
It's clear by how PC-like the Xbox remains, despite all the easy ways they could have modified it, that their intention is eventually to have it take over the function of a PC. And it fits in nicely with
I'm an American. I have every right to complain, and to still do things my own way, whether it be legal or not. That's the American way, dagnabbit. You have your way of dealing with Microsoft--by not doing so--and I have my way--by freely copying their software when others see fit to post it. Neither is inherently better unless you subscribe to the notion of intellectual property in ways which I, and even a lot of Linux evangelists, do not.
;-) But the fact remains that Linux is not yet as efficient a platform for those of us who are more spatially oriented and want GUIs and standardization. KDE and GNOME are slowly fixing this, but the operative word is still slowly. The day I can run Linux with a completely standardized GUI and widgets across all my apps including a GIMP with full CMYK/Pantone support or a native Linux port of Photoshop, and the other tools I need or suitable GUI-licious replacements for them, I will gladly switch. But that day will not come for some time since so many Linux evangelists don't want standardization. Well, I do, and most of us end users do, and we have it with Windows and MacOS. Until that day comes when Linux is as GUI-licious and standardized in interface and apps as can be, though, I will continue to use Microsoft OSes, and as long as Microsoft insists on unsavory things that get in my way as a hardware enthusiast like WPA, I will not pay for their OS upgrades.
;-)
To most hardcore Linux eangelists I would say, We are more alike than you think, young Skywalker.
And that's that. Bitch and disagree all you want, but my view of "intellectual property" is probably closer to Stallman's than many of the hard-core Linux advocates' are, and that view legitimizes my choice. IP was meant by the Founders to last 14 years, and meant to apply only in areas where it advanced science and the "useful arts." but lest this degenerate into a quarrel on IP, I won't go where you know I'm headed anyway.
To quote one of the comments in the original /. article:
/. article was from the same period when 3Dfx was suing Creative Labs for working on their Unified driver which would have offered Glide compatability for Creative TNT2 based cards. Today, all mention of the Unified driver has been removed from Creative's site except for a few old press releases, which link to pages which no longer exist.
> it isn't the complete Glide library that older applications (such as Quake II) depend on.
> Rather, it is a subset of the Glide API that allows Mesa and their new OpenGL driver to
> access the Voodoo3.
They never, ever, ever opened the Glide libraries. Instead, they released the source for the part of their Linux driver that hooks into Mesa. That's all. The rest has always been, and unless nVidia can be persuaded to do so will always remain, binary-only and hence not easily hackable (no successful efforts so far) to work with all video cards.
Note also that this
The Glide code is still closed and proprietary and hence old Glide games will probably be unplayable unless one uses an old Voodoo card, which will be increasingly difficult as time goes on for obvious reasons. After all, right now how many Voodoo 1's do you see floating around? There's the occasional one on eBay. In a few years, the same will be the case for Voodoo 2's through Voodoo 5's.
Doubtless there are a few tiny bits of Glide which are proprietary to third parties and hence unreleasable. But from what I understand most of Glide was developed in-house by 3Dfx, so most of it should be releasable. The only question is whether nVidia can be prodded to release it.
I don't know of any really informative sites offhand, but I got my latest Glide wrappers to try out (none work for me, though--blast you, ATI!--you foil me again...) from here:
e r
http://www.ngemu.com/n64/plugins.php?page=wrapp
It has links to some of the most recent versions of the most popular wrappers. eVoodoo and XGL2000 are the best for most people, from what I've read.
If anyone has a better, more informativ site, please let us all know.
I don't care whether they adapt any of 3Dfx's hardware ideas. What I really wish they'd do is either implement a Glide support into their drivers, or open up the Glide source code to whatever extent they can (some bits and bobs may be proprietary to other companies).
Obviously, I'm wishing for this for compatibility with old Glide-only apps, not so that new ones could be written. No one has written new ones in eons AFAIK, since as soon as more open standards like OpenGL and DirectX came onto the scene people dumped the 3Dfx-only Glide route, thank God. But there are still several older games written in the Voodoo and Voodoo 2's heyday which are Glide-only, or which work significantly better under Glide than they do in DX.
These apps are few but they contain a couple of early PC classics, as well as the first and still-most-compatible N64 emulator UltraHLE and its offshoot SupraHLE. There are several Glide-wrappers that translate Glide calls into standard DirectX calls, but they don't work well or at all for everybody--me included. None of the Glide wrappers will let me play any Glide-only games or any game through SupraHLE. In addition, some older titles like the first *Tomb Raider* look much, much better under Glide than they do under DX.
So, for the sake of compatability with old games I wish they would release as much of the Glide code as they can, if not write a quick-and-dirty Glide implementation into their drivers. Some may remember that Creative Labs had promised a near-perfect Glide compatibility for their TNT2-based cards back in 1999, in a driver they called Unified. But after 3Dfx sued them the project disappeared, and now that a couple years have passed the desire for Glide capabilities has died down since the games are now so old. But some of us like those old games, and the idea of continued compatability. I just hate it when things break unnecessarily. It's funny how, although some of them need CPU-slowdown programs because they lack internal timing routines, I can still run almost any DOS game with the oldest I've run going back to 1982, yet the development of proprietary 3D APIs like Glide and even DX (Microsoft could break backwards-compatibility with older versions any time they wish) takes away that continuity and certainty.
Just my opinion, though.