Ironically, no. Most modern machines can't play Wolf3D anymore because none of their hardware (sound cards generally) is supported in DOS anymore. Not that it matters since they can't run Wolf3D from Win2k or WinXp anyway.
This has bit me recently when I felt a hankering for some classic games, only to discover that my hardware isn't compatable anymore, also, some old games can't throttle down big beefy processers enough anymore and play way too fast.
I'd say no. Every copy of a game that Loki sold sent money back to the original company. You can't give it away because the original authors wouldn't get paid. You should buy the games while you have the chance if you really want it.
Nothing like the hipocracy when you have one person saying one thing and another person saying something different. Indeed on Slashdot all people must be part of a group mind, except people already blame Slashdotters of groupthink.
Slashdot is a good example of how you can never please all of the people all of the time, no matter what you do someone will blame you of having a bias against something. Must be why people who go to the trouble to set these kinds of things up burn out so quick.
Hmm, reread the Service agreement and FAQ as part of this. Apparently ComCast DOES offer a service for multiple computers. You can buy additional IP addresses for the low low price of $7/month/each. But here's the real kicker: you can have up to 2 additional IP addresses. If you have more than 3 machines you are SOL I guess. This is smelling more and more like a hoax now.
This is interesting. I guess they're going to go after people running those custom firewall/NAT boxes. Now all these people will just have to plug their windows machine directly into the net.
As everybody else is wondering: how do they plan to ferret out NAT users? Go to everyone's home and count the number of computers? ComCast used to be such a nice service, it's a shame what they're doing to it. Lets count the ways they've made the service worse recently:
No VPNs. If you want to use a VPN you have to get a special "business" plan. Good luck finding anything about this plan on their website.
Upload/Download caps: We used to have wonderful bandwidth, and our local loop isn't even heavily taxed. Now we have an artifical bandwidth cap that does not appear to help us OR our neighbors.
No Newsserver. The usenet is a valuble resource, every ISP worth it's salt has usenet access. Comcast customrs (the ones that got switched over) do not.
Now this anti-NAT policy. I wondier if you will be able to find anything at all about this "I have a NAT" service on their website...
Still, even with all of these indiscresions, I'm inclined not to believe this story as is. There doesn't appear to be much actual evidence (has anyone been flagged for having a NAT yet?) to support the claims. Also, did the co-worker quit because the job is nigh-impossible? My hoax sense is tingling...
or if fewer than 85% of the TV households in a market are able to receive digital TV signals off the air
The law will be pushed back unless there is a price revolution in the digital TV industry soon. People don't upgrade their TVs very often and the vast majority of TV's currently on the market are not equipped with anything like a digital reciever. Very few people have converter boxes (I've never even seen them for sale at Wal-Mart or anywhere else John and Jane shop.)
I suspect the only way to get people to switch is to start turning some of their favorite TV shows over to digital only, and no TV station wants to do that because they'd lose viewers.
Of course I also think the US Treasury should just stop printing $1 bills and start handing out those gold coins everytime someone asks for more ones. The reason these things are failing is because nobody has the balls to say "no, you cannot do it the old inferior way, you have to do it this way, it's for the best, really!".
Why do you think material doesn't apply to the HTML? Look at how it's defined: one copy of the information ("Materials")
Materials are defined as a copy of the information, HTML is information, even the legal notice is information. Annoyingly they did not define what information is, so I have to use the general definition.
An RPN calculator? Back when I used to play with Scheme in school (Scheme is the toy version of Lisp), I noticed that anything with a stack based logic was natural in Scheme. The C implementation was considerably less elegant in the end.
I think you're overestimating DivX. Even under FreeBSD (which isn't renown for it's Multimedia) I can run DivX great with a PII-400. Granted my Video card (a G200) supports Xv so I don't have to do the YUV->RGB conversions (which is a big time saver).
Not that you're going to be using the modem a lot when watching DivX files. If you get a real modem (not a winmodem) the cpu requirements are really quite modest, especially for anything that has a 3 digit Mhz rating. I never observed my system with USB stuff running, so I don't have any comment on it, other than I'm not surprised that it's kind of a pig considering that Intel invented it...
I certainly don't agree with your last statement. I'm not a big 3D shooter fan (more of an RTS, Roguelike, and turn based person myself), so my current hardware is more than sufficent for any games I want to play. Memory is something of an issue, but when you can buy 256MB for less than a meal at a good restaruant that isn't a valid excuse anymore.
I wouldn't buy any I86 machine slower than a Ghz today, because the saving aren't worth it. Just get the processor that has the most bang for the buck and be happy. Apparently that's somewhere around 1.4Ghz according to the article. I also think some people pay too much for their video cards these days, but that's a topic for a different thread.
Um, speak for youself. I use vim because I can get the most done with the fewest keystrokes, not out of some weird sence of nostalga, that and Emacs took up too much memory on my original system (I had to exit out of the editor to free up enough memory for the compiler). These days with vim the size argument is pretty much moot (there's not a lot of difference at times), but I've become more efficent with vi like editors so I stay with it.
This is the second time someone has come out and said that Calculators ruined their long divison ability. I just have to ask: is this really such a bad thing? It's not like long divison is really that hard to learn later in life (it's learning the multiplication tables, forward and backward, that's the real struggle), and I can count on one hand the number of times I've had to work out a long divison problem by hand since grade school.
Long division is in many ways a waste of time in grade school (especially considering how long it takes to teach it to kids). The only real advantage I see to it is that it helps kids learn how to handle long complex tedious procedures (especially since you have to do a LOT of long division in grade school). If you really need the skill later in life it's not that hard to pick up (for someone who already has experiance with complex procedures).
Note, the above assumes you can already do simple division (IE, you know that 56 / 7 == 8). I recommend never letting kids look at a calculator until they have the multiplications tables (at least up to 10) memorzied fully.
Of course this is just my opinion, I could be wrong.
Actually, if you chopped flint handaxes 8 hours a day you would probably have a much worse case of C-T than typists. I remember the first cases of C-T were from factoryworkers who had to hammer in some nails, a job that required them to swing a hammer for 8 hours a day, they would get C-T after only a few months on the job (before they were replaced with heartless robots that could do the job 10x faster despite the loud objections from the worker's union...)
I'm not sure you could get buy with $1000 for a cheap desktop PC (remember to pay for the power supply, case, motherboard, etc...) with a DVD writer and bundled software (including a consumer OS!). Too many people on Slashdot only count up the cheap components cost when they build a system (although if you install Linux on it the OS cost will be less (perhaps $0), but you won't have the nifty bundled photo manipulation and video software). Oh, and given Apple's track record (which I'm admittedly a little spotty on at times), the hardware will be of at least average (of not better) quality on average. This is stark constrast to the average $1000 PC that uses only the crappiest hardware slave labor can build most of the time.
Because they are a rip off. Since they are marketed now for the high end "power user" who supposedly has money to burn, they jack the price up to outragous levels. There's also the cost of licensing the various technologies (you wouldn't want those nasty pirates out there to get ahold of HDTV now would you?) and finally there is merely the economies of scale at work here. HDTV hasn't sold particularly well in the states (gee, it adds $500 to the cost of the set so I can see a couple of shows I never watch in extra clarity? Sign me up! Oh, and we're still not entirely sure if we're going to keep the scheme that doesn't work very well in the city either...OH! and your local cable provider won't support it either, and you can forget about VHS tapes and pretty much all DVD players...).
This will teach them for dragging their feet on High Definition Television!
Honestly I think people have blown this problem completely out of proportion. From my experiance, the screen is a little bit dark and somewhat difficult to use in dark (or rapidly strobing, like in a car driving through a forest) light conditions, but it's certainly not the 1000W required pitch black monstrosoty that everybody makes it out to be.
I don't think the FF sequels really ARE sequels to a large degree. Most of the games have different characters, worlds, game systems, etc... so that it is more like Square is putting out different RPGs each time with the same name. Granted there are some simliarties between each game (Sid, Airships, etc...), but they really have less in common with each other than most (II, III, IV...) games. It would be like Doom II where all of the enemies were different and you weren't a space marine, but you were still blowing up things to save the world.
Heck, if you want StileProject off the net, all you have to do is get a Slashdot writeup on it.
Actually this reminds me of a local news broadcast (we're hard hitting!) on "the terror of filth on the web" where they had screenshots of the StileProject up and said "We aren't going to give out the URL because it might increase his hits". It reminded me of the old Simpson's line:
Cheif Wiggum (to Ralph): What IS your fascination with my forbidden closet of mystery?
Really? Back when I was in college the professors ALL had research projects on the side. It seems that part of being a tenured professor is that you have to do research and get yourself published, etc...
Now most undergrads aren't doing research, mostly because the system isn't set up for them to be researchers. Many (especially in the engineering and CS degress) barely have enough time to finish their homework/projects/work in the evening, much less do exaustive research in some new field. Post graduate students naturally have plenty of research projects.
Still, one thing that became painfully obvious after awhile is just how much money it takes to run a school, and how little of it there was to go around. I'm not surprised in the least to find them looking for more things to sell.
Re:What's Woz playing with?
on
Apple PDA?
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
That mystery unit looks suspiciously like a Game Boy to me. I think Woz was enjoying a bit of Tetris.:)
Amen to that. It seems like every time I go online the only thing I find is a bunch of Big Gay Hunters games set on fastest. Nobody seems to want to do anything other than just build a bunch of units and rush. That's why I usually play with friends (on normal mode with speed set at normal or merely fast). It lends to a much more strategic game overall.
Slashdot Mirror
Ironically, no. Most modern machines can't play Wolf3D anymore because none of their hardware (sound cards generally) is supported in DOS anymore. Not that it matters since they can't run Wolf3D from Win2k or WinXp anyway.
This has bit me recently when I felt a hankering for some classic games, only to discover that my hardware isn't compatable anymore, also, some old games can't throttle down big beefy processers enough anymore and play way too fast.
I'd say no. Every copy of a game that Loki sold sent money back to the original company. You can't give it away because the original authors wouldn't get paid. You should buy the games while you have the chance if you really want it.
Nothing like the hipocracy when you have one person saying one thing and another person saying something different. Indeed on Slashdot all people must be part of a group mind, except people already blame Slashdotters of groupthink.
Slashdot is a good example of how you can never please all of the people all of the time, no matter what you do someone will blame you of having a bias against something. Must be why people who go to the trouble to set these kinds of things up burn out so quick.
I guess this means we're not going to get Kohan: Ariman's Gift for Linux/FreeBSD. This is a real shame since I love Kohan: Immortal Soverigns so much.
Hmm, reread the Service agreement and FAQ as part of this. Apparently ComCast DOES offer a service for multiple computers. You can buy additional IP addresses for the low low price of $7/month/each. But here's the real kicker: you can have up to 2 additional IP addresses. If you have more than 3 machines you are SOL I guess. This is smelling more and more like a hoax now.
You know, that might actually work...if the MAC address were stored in the IP packet.
Sheesh, I've seen MAC filtering mentioned 5 times already on this article. Maybe everyone should take a look at The anatomy of an IP packet.
As everybody else is wondering: how do they plan to ferret out NAT users? Go to everyone's home and count the number of computers? ComCast used to be such a nice service, it's a shame what they're doing to it. Lets count the ways they've made the service worse recently:
Still, even with all of these indiscresions, I'm inclined not to believe this story as is. There doesn't appear to be much actual evidence (has anyone been flagged for having a NAT yet?) to support the claims. Also, did the co-worker quit because the job is nigh-impossible? My hoax sense is tingling...
Ironically, yes the Amish hhave a website. Go figure.
or if fewer than 85% of the TV households in a market are able to receive digital TV signals off the air
The law will be pushed back unless there is a price revolution in the digital TV industry soon. People don't upgrade their TVs very often and the vast majority of TV's currently on the market are not equipped with anything like a digital reciever. Very few people have converter boxes (I've never even seen them for sale at Wal-Mart or anywhere else John and Jane shop.)
I suspect the only way to get people to switch is to start turning some of their favorite TV shows over to digital only, and no TV station wants to do that because they'd lose viewers.
Of course I also think the US Treasury should just stop printing $1 bills and start handing out those gold coins everytime someone asks for more ones. The reason these things are failing is because nobody has the balls to say "no, you cannot do it the old inferior way, you have to do it this way, it's for the best, really!".
Why do you think material doesn't apply to the HTML? Look at how it's defined:
one copy of the information ("Materials")
Materials are defined as a copy of the information, HTML is information, even the legal notice is information. Annoyingly they did not define what information is, so I have to use the general definition.
An RPN calculator? Back when I used to play with Scheme in school (Scheme is the toy version of Lisp), I noticed that anything with a stack based logic was natural in Scheme. The C implementation was considerably less elegant in the end.
I think you're overestimating DivX. Even under FreeBSD (which isn't renown for it's Multimedia) I can run DivX great with a PII-400. Granted my Video card (a G200) supports Xv so I don't have to do the YUV->RGB conversions (which is a big time saver).
Not that you're going to be using the modem a lot when watching DivX files. If you get a real modem (not a winmodem) the cpu requirements are really quite modest, especially for anything that has a 3 digit Mhz rating. I never observed my system with USB stuff running, so I don't have any comment on it, other than I'm not surprised that it's kind of a pig considering that Intel invented it...
I certainly don't agree with your last statement. I'm not a big 3D shooter fan (more of an RTS, Roguelike, and turn based person myself), so my current hardware is more than sufficent for any games I want to play. Memory is something of an issue, but when you can buy 256MB for less than a meal at a good restaruant that isn't a valid excuse anymore.
I wouldn't buy any I86 machine slower than a Ghz today, because the saving aren't worth it. Just get the processor that has the most bang for the buck and be happy. Apparently that's somewhere around 1.4Ghz according to the article. I also think some people pay too much for their video cards these days, but that's a topic for a different thread.
Wow, I never knew Intel made the PII-100. I assume you mean pre-MMX Pentium 100, a machine class I remember fondly (er, well, kind of fondly)
Um, speak for youself. I use vim because I can get the most done with the fewest keystrokes, not out of some weird sence of nostalga, that and Emacs took up too much memory on my original system (I had to exit out of the editor to free up enough memory for the compiler). These days with vim the size argument is pretty much moot (there's not a lot of difference at times), but I've become more efficent with vi like editors so I stay with it.
I don't think that matters for trademark.
This is the second time someone has come out and said that Calculators ruined their long divison ability. I just have to ask: is this really such a bad thing? It's not like long divison is really that hard to learn later in life (it's learning the multiplication tables, forward and backward, that's the real struggle), and I can count on one hand the number of times I've had to work out a long divison problem by hand since grade school.
Long division is in many ways a waste of time in grade school (especially considering how long it takes to teach it to kids). The only real advantage I see to it is that it helps kids learn how to handle long complex tedious procedures (especially since you have to do a LOT of long division in grade school). If you really need the skill later in life it's not that hard to pick up (for someone who already has experiance with complex procedures).
Note, the above assumes you can already do simple division (IE, you know that 56 / 7 == 8). I recommend never letting kids look at a calculator until they have the multiplications tables (at least up to 10) memorzied fully.
Of course this is just my opinion, I could be wrong.
Actually, if you chopped flint handaxes 8 hours a day you would probably have a much worse case of C-T than typists. I remember the first cases of C-T were from factoryworkers who had to hammer in some nails, a job that required them to swing a hammer for 8 hours a day, they would get C-T after only a few months on the job (before they were replaced with heartless robots that could do the job 10x faster despite the loud objections from the worker's union...)
I'm not sure you could get buy with $1000 for a cheap desktop PC (remember to pay for the power supply, case, motherboard, etc...) with a DVD writer and bundled software (including a consumer OS!). Too many people on Slashdot only count up the cheap components cost when they build a system (although if you install Linux on it the OS cost will be less (perhaps $0), but you won't have the nifty bundled photo manipulation and video software). Oh, and given Apple's track record (which I'm admittedly a little spotty on at times), the hardware will be of at least average (of not better) quality on average. This is stark constrast to the average $1000 PC that uses only the crappiest hardware slave labor can build most of the time.
Because they are a rip off. Since they are marketed now for the high end "power user" who supposedly has money to burn, they jack the price up to outragous levels. There's also the cost of licensing the various technologies (you wouldn't want those nasty pirates out there to get ahold of HDTV now would you?) and finally there is merely the economies of scale at work here. HDTV hasn't sold particularly well in the states (gee, it adds $500 to the cost of the set so I can see a couple of shows I never watch in extra clarity? Sign me up! Oh, and we're still not entirely sure if we're going to keep the scheme that doesn't work very well in the city either...OH! and your local cable provider won't support it either, and you can forget about VHS tapes and pretty much all DVD players...).
This will teach them for dragging their feet on High Definition Television!
Honestly I think people have blown this problem completely out of proportion. From my experiance, the screen is a little bit dark and somewhat difficult to use in dark (or rapidly strobing, like in a car driving through a forest) light conditions, but it's certainly not the 1000W required pitch black monstrosoty that everybody makes it out to be.
I don't think the FF sequels really ARE sequels to a large degree. Most of the games have different characters, worlds, game systems, etc... so that it is more like Square is putting out different RPGs each time with the same name. Granted there are some simliarties between each game (Sid, Airships, etc...), but they really have less in common with each other than most (II, III, IV...) games. It would be like Doom II where all of the enemies were different and you weren't a space marine, but you were still blowing up things to save the world.
Heck, if you want StileProject off the net, all you have to do is get a Slashdot writeup on it.
Actually this reminds me of a local news broadcast (we're hard hitting!) on "the terror of filth on the web" where they had screenshots of the StileProject up and said "We aren't going to give out the URL because it might increase his hits". It reminded me of the old Simpson's line:
Cheif Wiggum (to Ralph): What IS your fascination with my forbidden closet of mystery?
Very few public schools are research intensive.
Really? Back when I was in college the professors ALL had research projects on the side. It seems that part of being a tenured professor is that you have to do research and get yourself published, etc...
Now most undergrads aren't doing research, mostly because the system isn't set up for them to be researchers. Many (especially in the engineering and CS degress) barely have enough time to finish their homework/projects/work in the evening, much less do exaustive research in some new field. Post graduate students naturally have plenty of research projects.
Still, one thing that became painfully obvious after awhile is just how much money it takes to run a school, and how little of it there was to go around. I'm not surprised in the least to find them looking for more things to sell.
That mystery unit looks suspiciously like a Game Boy to me. I think Woz was enjoying a bit of Tetris. :)
Amen to that. It seems like every time I go online the only thing I find is a bunch of Big Gay Hunters games set on fastest. Nobody seems to want to do anything other than just build a bunch of units and rush. That's why I usually play with friends (on normal mode with speed set at normal or merely fast). It lends to a much more strategic game overall.