Havn't you seen the games were a severly disadvantaged (poor starting spot, many nearby monsters, etc...) but experianced player is able to defeat a newbie though careful company management and solid tactics? I'd laugh if I saw an army (6 companies) of skeletons facting off against 3 Grenadier/Channeler/Cleric companies. Despite being more expensive to maintain and numerically superior, the skeletons will loose.
Besides, how radical of a concept are you looking for? A game where you have to kill off your armies to gain strength? Or maybe a game where you start with an army, and they become more effective as you plant more flowers (oops, that's building up), or maybe one where you just get some force and you just attack at random? WarCraft III has some elements of this with the creep hunting, but IMHO it requires too much micromanagement for me to play effectively, at my best I can only beat the computer about 3/4 of the time, and that's pretty sad.
The problem was that in a large game, you were almost certain to get a "sync failure". Apparently the cause of this was differences in the way Windows and Linux handle floating point. Apparently they round to different numbers of digits internally or something, and eventually you send your company on path A around some obsticle, and on the windows machine it chooses path B and you get kicked off. If you play small games (2-4 people) you can usually get away with it, but most windows players seem to go for the 4v4 TvB 256x256 maps with maximum indy/monster/mine settings.
One more thing. The Loki Kohan folks still have an
active community on the Loki newsgroup. There are even a few sites dedicated to Kohan on Linux/FreeBSD:
I thought the entire point of a corporation was to prevent exactly this sort of thing, to protect the people of the company from direct legal responsibility for the companys actions. That's why we made them pseudo-people for goodness sake.
The lesson here: If everything you know about pumbing you read on the internet, do not make a high precision mixing of electonics and water your first project.
Generally, the people who look into these fancy overclocking rigs are the people who already bought the fastest chip on the market. People with way more money than common sense who feel the need to proclaim that they have the fastest PC in the world.
Huh? Maybe you've changed the base on me without telling, but isn't 1854 + 200 == 2054?
Besides, much like this theory, boolean algebra was all but ignored by the mathematical community at large until the 1940s, when the introduction of computers made the field suddenly relevant.
Sounds like the ultimate result of one of those "Ha! I've got more FPS from Quake by turning off all of the textures and killing every graphics feature in the game, and running it at 640x480!"
"Ha! I'm running it in 1 bit mode, I've got more FPS than you. You don't stand a chance!"
"Oh yeah! Well, I've dropped my bit depth down to 1 pixel too! AND I've dropped my resolution to 320x240! Look, 5000 FPS! You are so dead!"
"Oh yeah! I've dropped my resolution to 1x1 at 1 bit. I can't read the FPS counter anymore, but I know it's higher than yours! So there!"
That seems like Cold War MAD mentality right there. "We'll make a nuclear missile so big that it'll not only blow up our enemies, but us too!" Heck, you don't even technically need to make it a missile, just detonate it and your destruction is assured.
Of course this isn't a new idea. Just do a google search for "doomsday machine". Or watch Dr. Strangelove.
That's a pretty weak counterargument. You're saying that if you want to get a copy of something from the library, you will have to wait for it and you're more likely to just go and buy it? In the vast majority of cases, the library has 1 copy of the book, and you're the only one interested in it (at least that month). Sometimes you can't even find a song on Napster/Kazaa/whatever, and you have to go out and track it down at a used music store.
The honest truth is that it is hard to reconcile our modern interpretation of IP with the concept of a Library. In fact, if we didn't have libraries and someone tried to start one today, they'd be sued in a heartbeat by the publishing industry, especially since early libraries were frequently for-pay.
Your car has a digital audio cassette system? The mp3 audio is naturally digital because there is no way to record an analog mp3. The system outputs analog audio because that's what ever cassette recorder expects to hear. Seems pretty simple doesn't it?
Nope, the CueCat does everything in hardware. Just run cat and scan your cuecat over something and it will spit out junk to your buffer. Heck, the "decrypting" routine is so trivial that all you need is a one (somewhat long) line perl script to decode it.
Beware the Fdisk on the windows install disc. I tried using that once and not telling it to eat the entire disc. It did exactly what I told it to, it took about half of the disk, right from the middle. I kid you not, I pulled the disk up in Partition Magic after it was installed and was horrified to discover that the windows installer stuck its partition smack dab in the middle of my disk. I had two quarter sized unused blocks on either side of the windows install. That blew my mind. How could the Fdisk be so stupid? Fortunatly Partition Magic has no troble moving windows paritions around.
That an FireWire manufacturers don't want to give up their tasty tasty profit margins. The only reason ATA is even still around is because the drives are cheap. I'd bet if the manufacturers were willing to sell SCSI devices at consumer prices (say $25 to $40 more per drive over ATA to cover the cost of the electronics) most Slashdotters would be running SCSI and would scoff at ATA and lump it in with built-in video, built-in sound, and the built-in modems on consumer machines.
I hate ATA, but I still run it in my machines because I can't justify the 100%+ markup for SCSI devices. Heck, it's still really hard to get Command Tagged Queueing support on ATA devices, and the CTQ implementations I've seen have been at best half assed.
Cool, Look at this, one laptop with crap video. another with a bum motherboard. Whatever will I do? Void the warrenty? Wait, these laptops have been out of warrenty for quite some time now.
Then again, I'm usually working with the Latitude CP series, which is much harder to hack (everything is integrated or not there).
Didn't popups disappear from the web back around Mozilla M17 days? Isn't it silly to deprive yourself of all sorts of informative content just because your browser is dumb?
While it feels like I'm being trolled, there are some things about your post that have me scratching my head.
$1300 / 5 == $260. You're looking at quite a bit more than $100/speaker. Honestly I tend to gravitate away from the ultra expensive home audio equiptment personally (my ears aren't all that hot and my apartment is noisy anyway). So I can't really comment on the quality of the equiptment you'll get for that price.
That said, I do know some things about HDTV, and I can tell you that you are crazy if you think you're going to get any sort of HDTV worth having for $2500, much less a rear projection setup. Depending on the size, $2500 will be tight for an NTSC rear projection unit.
Why do you want to leave the world in suspense? How the heck are people going to "prepare" for something when you won't even tell them what it is. Your scenereo sounds something like this:
You make a news annoucement saying "I've discovered a terrible secret, but I won't tell you what it is for 20 years!"
Then 20 years later you finally announce your discovery to people who have forgotten about you.
The reason entire world has forgotten about you is because you sound just like another crackpot trumpeting hidden vauge doom.
Are people going to be "better prepared" in 20 years? Why? I'd say get the truth out in the open when you discover the problem and let society work it out. That or just never ever release your secret if you fear that humanity would not survive (hint: people are pretty resourceful, they're good at suriving).
If you just don't want to be around when people discover your secret, put it in your safe deposit box and forget about it. When you die your heirs will go through the box and be faced with the same dilemma you have. Note: this is the cowards way out.
Re:Apple switching to intel?
on
PowerPC Goes 64 bit
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
On the other hand, Jobs might be a control freak because he saw what other people did to Apple when he left. Remember when Gil Amelio left Apple saying "but Jobs won't push the 100Mhz bus technology through fast enough..." That was when I realized just how much the old CEO didn't understand Apple or its customers.
In a lot of ways Apple's story is very similar to SGI. SGI got a new CEO (and old PC guy at that) that immediatly began to waste tons of money building PCs. For some reason CEOs of PC companies get this myopia that prevents them from seeing the future. This leads to conclusions like: Well, PCs are big now, maybe we can do PCs. I heard that Dell, Microsoft, and Intel made a killing in the PC market, I wonder if I can get a chunk of that pie...
It's not that I'm happy with NTSC, it's that I'm very unhappy with all of the digital solutions out there currently. I'm not one of these people who has $10,000 to blow on a TV, and that's the market all of the digital TVs seemed to be trying to capture at the moment. Not only that, but in most places (outside of large cities) you have to special order such a TV, as your local WalMart certainly sin't going to carry it.
Actually Missile Commander isn't used for guiding missiles. It is used for controlling the missile defense sheild (Star Wars project). That's why all of the critics point out that it is hard to stop missiles when 10 of them show up at one all heading towards different cities.
Slashdot Mirror
You must not play against experienced players.
Havn't you seen the games were a severly disadvantaged (poor starting spot, many nearby monsters, etc...) but experianced player is able to defeat a newbie though careful company management and solid tactics? I'd laugh if I saw an army (6 companies) of skeletons facting off against 3 Grenadier/Channeler/Cleric companies. Despite being more expensive to maintain and numerically superior, the skeletons will loose.
Besides, how radical of a concept are you looking for? A game where you have to kill off your armies to gain strength? Or maybe a game where you start with an army, and they become more effective as you plant more flowers (oops, that's building up), or maybe one where you just get some force and you just attack at random? WarCraft III has some elements of this with the creep hunting, but IMHO it requires too much micromanagement for me to play effectively, at my best I can only beat the computer about 3/4 of the time, and that's pretty sad.
The problem was that in a large game, you were almost certain to get a "sync failure". Apparently the cause of this was differences in the way Windows and Linux handle floating point. Apparently they round to different numbers of digits internally or something, and eventually you send your company on path A around some obsticle, and on the windows machine it chooses path B and you get kicked off. If you play small games (2-4 people) you can usually get away with it, but most windows players seem to go for the 4v4 TvB 256x256 maps with maximum indy/monster/mine settings.
Even if you've never played before, the Linux folks are great to play with and kind to newbies.
I thought the entire point of a corporation was to prevent exactly this sort of thing, to protect the people of the company from direct legal responsibility for the companys actions. That's why we made them pseudo-people for goodness sake.
The lesson here: If everything you know about pumbing you read on the internet, do not make a high precision mixing of electonics and water your first project.
Generally, the people who look into these fancy overclocking rigs are the people who already bought the fastest chip on the market. People with way more money than common sense who feel the need to proclaim that they have the fastest PC in the world.
Huh? Maybe you've changed the base on me without telling, but isn't 1854 + 200 == 2054?
Besides, much like this theory, boolean algebra was all but ignored by the mathematical community at large until the 1940s, when the introduction of computers made the field suddenly relevant.
Sounds like the ultimate result of one of those "Ha! I've got more FPS from Quake by turning off all of the textures and killing every graphics feature in the game, and running it at 640x480!"
"Ha! I'm running it in 1 bit mode, I've got more FPS than you. You don't stand a chance!"
"Oh yeah! Well, I've dropped my bit depth down to 1 pixel too! AND I've dropped my resolution to 320x240! Look, 5000 FPS! You are so dead!"
"Oh yeah! I've dropped my resolution to 1x1 at 1 bit. I can't read the FPS counter anymore, but I know it's higher than yours! So there!"
and so on...
That seems like Cold War MAD mentality right there. "We'll make a nuclear missile so big that it'll not only blow up our enemies, but us too!" Heck, you don't even technically need to make it a missile, just detonate it and your destruction is assured.
Of course this isn't a new idea. Just do a google search for "doomsday machine". Or watch Dr. Strangelove.
That's a pretty weak counterargument. You're saying that if you want to get a copy of something from the library, you will have to wait for it and you're more likely to just go and buy it? In the vast majority of cases, the library has 1 copy of the book, and you're the only one interested in it (at least that month). Sometimes you can't even find a song on Napster/Kazaa/whatever, and you have to go out and track it down at a used music store.
The honest truth is that it is hard to reconcile our modern interpretation of IP with the concept of a Library. In fact, if we didn't have libraries and someone tried to start one today, they'd be sued in a heartbeat by the publishing industry, especially since early libraries were frequently for-pay.
Your car has a digital audio cassette system? The mp3 audio is naturally digital because there is no way to record an analog mp3. The system outputs analog audio because that's what ever cassette recorder expects to hear. Seems pretty simple doesn't it?
Nope, the CueCat does everything in hardware. Just run cat and scan your cuecat over something and it will spit out junk to your buffer. Heck, the "decrypting" routine is so trivial that all you need is a one (somewhat long) line perl script to decode it.
You forgot to factor in the cost of the boxes originally. I'd bet the boxes themselves paid for a big chunk of the R&D.
Dunno about the ATI, but any form of Brooktree 848 or 878 based card works great. I even use it under FreeBSD.
Beware the Fdisk on the windows install disc. I tried using that once and not telling it to eat the entire disc. It did exactly what I told it to, it took about half of the disk, right from the middle. I kid you not, I pulled the disk up in Partition Magic after it was installed and was horrified to discover that the windows installer stuck its partition smack dab in the middle of my disk. I had two quarter sized unused blocks on either side of the windows install. That blew my mind. How could the Fdisk be so stupid? Fortunatly Partition Magic has no troble moving windows paritions around.
That an FireWire manufacturers don't want to give up their tasty tasty profit margins. The only reason ATA is even still around is because the drives are cheap. I'd bet if the manufacturers were willing to sell SCSI devices at consumer prices (say $25 to $40 more per drive over ATA to cover the cost of the electronics) most Slashdotters would be running SCSI and would scoff at ATA and lump it in with built-in video, built-in sound, and the built-in modems on consumer machines.
I hate ATA, but I still run it in my machines because I can't justify the 100%+ markup for SCSI devices. Heck, it's still really hard to get Command Tagged Queueing support on ATA devices, and the CTQ implementations I've seen have been at best half assed.
I don't know, with me it's usually:
Cool, Look at this, one laptop with crap video. another with a bum motherboard. Whatever will I do? Void the warrenty? Wait, these laptops have been out of warrenty for quite some time now.
Then again, I'm usually working with the Latitude CP series, which is much harder to hack (everything is integrated or not there).
Popups???
Didn't popups disappear from the web back around Mozilla M17 days? Isn't it silly to deprive yourself of all sorts of informative content just because your browser is dumb?
NOO!! You mean Diamonds aren't forever? DeBeers lied to me! I can't believe monopolistic ganster slavers would lie to me!
Do you even know what you're talking about?
While it feels like I'm being trolled, there are some things about your post that have me scratching my head.
$1300 / 5 == $260. You're looking at quite a bit more than $100/speaker. Honestly I tend to gravitate away from the ultra expensive home audio equiptment personally (my ears aren't all that hot and my apartment is noisy anyway). So I can't really comment on the quality of the equiptment you'll get for that price.
That said, I do know some things about HDTV, and I can tell you that you are crazy if you think you're going to get any sort of HDTV worth having for $2500, much less a rear projection setup. Depending on the size, $2500 will be tight for an NTSC rear projection unit.
Why do you want to leave the world in suspense? How the heck are people going to "prepare" for something when you won't even tell them what it is. Your scenereo sounds something like this:
You make a news annoucement saying "I've discovered a terrible secret, but I won't tell you what it is for 20 years!"
Then 20 years later you finally announce your discovery to people who have forgotten about you.
The reason entire world has forgotten about you is because you sound just like another crackpot trumpeting hidden vauge doom.
Are people going to be "better prepared" in 20 years? Why? I'd say get the truth out in the open when you discover the problem and let society work it out. That or just never ever release your secret if you fear that humanity would not survive (hint: people are pretty resourceful, they're good at suriving).
If you just don't want to be around when people discover your secret, put it in your safe deposit box and forget about it. When you die your heirs will go through the box and be faced with the same dilemma you have. Note: this is the cowards way out.
On the other hand, Jobs might be a control freak because he saw what other people did to Apple when he left. Remember when Gil Amelio left Apple saying "but Jobs won't push the 100Mhz bus technology through fast enough..." That was when I realized just how much the old CEO didn't understand Apple or its customers.
In a lot of ways Apple's story is very similar to SGI. SGI got a new CEO (and old PC guy at that) that immediatly began to waste tons of money building PCs. For some reason CEOs of PC companies get this myopia that prevents them from seeing the future. This leads to conclusions like: Well, PCs are big now, maybe we can do PCs. I heard that Dell, Microsoft, and Intel made a killing in the PC market, I wonder if I can get a chunk of that pie...
It's not that I'm happy with NTSC, it's that I'm very unhappy with all of the digital solutions out there currently. I'm not one of these people who has $10,000 to blow on a TV, and that's the market all of the digital TVs seemed to be trying to capture at the moment. Not only that, but in most places (outside of large cities) you have to special order such a TV, as your local WalMart certainly sin't going to carry it.
It's these kind of posts that need the "-1 wrong" moderation.
Actually Missile Commander isn't used for guiding missiles. It is used for controlling the missile defense sheild (Star Wars project). That's why all of the critics point out that it is hard to stop missiles when 10 of them show up at one all heading towards different cities.
double-tapping CTRL switches inputs
I take it you don't play much Quake on that system.