I'm sure you still remember Barren Realms Elite and Solar Realms Elite? Well, the guy who made those branched out into web based games a while back that still mostly capture the feel of the BBS games despite being HTMl based.
Check out Echelon Games for both of them. Be careful, just like BRE and SRE they are very addictive.
Of course you run into nameing problems. 4Dwm is what SGI uses as the window manager on its Irix systems, fortunatly it is not a true 4D windowmanager, or I'd have to replace my brain with one from a 4 dimentional being (and they're hard to find!) just to use it.:)
The problem is that it doesn't always work. For some reason when my school recently upgraded half of their modems, I stopped getting connect speed messages from the modem (CONNECT instead of CONNECT ) about half of the time (go figure). I don't know what causes this, but I suspect there is some sort of communication that used to go on between the modems that doesn't anymore. And no my modem isn't broken, my roommate has the exact same problem with his modem.
If you want to know how that got started, there is an excellent report at The Gamer's Realm. I highly recommend this to anyone who was told that D&D was "evil" or "satanic" in their youth.
I don't know how other universities get around this, but here at tech nobody uses their SSN for anything, they use their student ID. Of course 99% of the time the student ID is their SSN (since the SSN is the default student ID for every student). The university even has a way to change your student number if you don't want to use your SSN, but most students don't bother because it is a huge hassle to do so.
In my opinion, this is almost as bad as requiring everyone to use their SSNs, since the hassle involved with changing your Studnet number usually far outweighs the percieved benefit for the students, plus the government can't do anything because they don't regulate Virginia Tech student ID numbers.
The only good news I have is that most teachers are pretty good about not posting your entire ID anywhere (usually just the last 4 digits) so it is slightly harder to get someone's ID/SSN number.
I always figured they were more or less like CRTs today when you shove 1000s of watts through them (IE by phaser fire). Of course 90% of Star Trek injuries could be prevented with a simple 50 cent fuse...
You are a troll by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 29, @12:36 EDT (#) PNG's compress better than GIF's (5% to 25%) in almost every other case PNGs compress better in *only* one case: 256 colors. 128 colors GIF and 256/PNG are about the same, everything less GIF performs better. There's a vast difference between having an honest to god alpha channel and a simple transparent color. PNG's/do/ still compress better, No way! A PNG with a full alpha channel never compresses nearly as good as a "transparent" GIF, except for pathological cases. and an alpha'd PNG image will look antialiased against whatever background you put it against,The same can be done with alpha'd GIFs. There really is no difference between GIF/PNG in a'aliasing Images to the background. PNG can do it in the File Data, it can be done to GIFs after decoding. Of course there is a difference between full alpha and a single transparent color, but that was not the point.
Try this experiment some time: Create a GIF image with an anti-alised edge on a white background and put that on a web page with a black background. that ghosting around the edge of the GIF is the reason you want a true alpha channel. Sadly most browsers still don't support the alpha channel on PNG (it's not like the format is undocumented or particularly difficult to work with or anything!).
Sure, last time I looked at virus checkers (fprot for DOS), they had a "heuristic" mode that checked for virus like activity. This was faster and was supposed to be able to catch "virus like activity" such as writing to the boot sector of the disk and code with lots of unnecessary jmps (designed to fool virus checkers). Unfortunatly these techniques are not 100% foolproof and a carefully written virus can get around them. I never noticed any slowdown from using fprot, but I was running cheezy DOS programs on a P75, so speed wasn't an issue.
Fortunatly, virus checking got infinitely easier when I switched to Unix.:)
You have a lot more faith in the integrity of our government than most people on Slashdot. Many of the people here see a government bent on controlling every aspect of our lives "for our protection", while our protection (and rights) seems to take a back seat to the policical agenda of the FBI, Congress, or anyone else who can afford to bribe^H^H^H^H^Hgive soft money to these people.
The most recent example that comes to my mind are the McCarthy era commie witchhunts, although there are other much less publicized and more recent examples.
Just put yourself between a politician and his money if you want to see this for yourself.
If you're still worried about this, go to your local animal rights group meeting and ask yourself if anyone there looks like they could bioengineer a deadly virus. Usually these groups consist of hippies and nature nuts, not hardboiled mad scientests. Besides, how would you develop a deadly virus without hurting any animals (and with little or no access to gene splicing equiptment)?
Granted, there are some pretty deadly viruses in the world already, but nothing that is going to "erase the earth of humans" by a long shot, at least not in the hands of hippies. Government military types (and jihad types who are in league with some govenments) on the other hand...
Probablly because alltheweb is indexing EVERY page it comes across, even those "Hello, I'm so and so and I love cats..." pages that most search engines thankfully ignore. It even had my webpage in there, which is a first for search engines.
These beasts are built specifically for serving and high uptimes. They support a lot of stuff not normally available on your standard PC, like hot swappable Power suppiles (triply redundant), hot swappable Disks (and I'm not talking about something where you have to unscrew the drive from the mounting bracket and whatnot while the computer is running--the drives are actually mounted on sleds similar to external RAID and JBOD racks). There is also a diagnostics port on the back to help you administer and diagnose problems with the hardware.
There are other, less obvious benefits to the 1400 as well. Unlike most PC cases on the market, the 1400 was designed with airflow in mind, and can easily handle the heat of 4 Xenons, 6 SCSI HD, 7 PCI cards and even the lowly ISA card without a problem. Surprisingly these machines are quite quiet, due to a thick layer of insulation on the inside of the case.
Finally, the case is designed to be rack-mounted, although it is a little on the long side.
You mean emotions like disgust at having paid $6 to see the movie?:)
I do agree with you though, the people who are willing to find and download the entire movie are probably the ones who saw it on day 1.
I don't agree that everone who downloaded it was disappointed with the poor quality/emotional feel of the video and then went to see it on the big screen. It seems more likely to me that they were disappointed in the movie itself and didn't go to see it on the big screen.
One of the letters on d.net expressed concern that the way the database is set up, there is no way to determine which keys were faked by this person. My question is: Aren't the keys being checked in a sequental fashion? Couldn't we backup the counter a couple of days (or however long this person has been doing this) and simply repeat the last few days of work to be sure we don't miss the winning keys? Losing a few days isn't really going to hurt a project that has been running for almost 2 years now, and it will do wonders to dispel the worries people have that all of their work may be for nothing.
I think they're talking about Appletalk, which is what a lot of Mac people use for home networking. You'd be amazed how many people still have Appletalk networks set up (my old High school computer lab is still 20 or so Mac Pluses hooked to a single Mac II printserver (hooked to 4 Imagewriters!)) with Appletalk over serial cables.
Probabally not as easily as you think. Laying cable is prohibitivly expensive, so the barriers to entry in the cable industry are quite high. This is why many local cable companies have effective monopolies in their areas. So far the only real competition comes from the Digital satellite people, but look how much legisation the local TV stations and cable companies managed to get passed against them. In my area, they are not shy about advertising the effects of this legislation either (YOUR LOCAL TV RECEPTION WILL BE TERRIBLE IF YOU GO WITH THE GODLESS EVIL SATELLITE COMPANIES! YOUR CABLE COMPANY LOVES YOU! SUBMIT!)
The problem is LOTS of people (especially in the Linux camp) release broken fonts. Mkfontdir (under FreeBSD and IRIX) needs the entire fontstring embedded in the font file itself in order to work, not just the name of the font. What I've done is created a new driectory of these broken fonts where I can go through and create the fonts.dir by hand. For examples of broken fonts, check out fonts.themes.org.
That's pretty unlikely considering how SGI has made such overt leanings towards Linux and x86 architecture in addition the thier MIPS line. SGI just doesn't have a reason to make anything with Amiga written on it. Neither does Sun.
Hmm, that's still pretty annoying. The problem is that the human eye is atracted to movement, so when I am trying read a page with a flashing logo, my eye keeps getting drawn to the advertisement.
There have actually been user interface studies done on web sites, and when people are trying to read the content on a web site they will tend to put their hand over flashing banners (I guess they don't know about the esc trick) so they can finish reading the page.
BTW those kinds of banners are doubly annying in that even if you want to read the banner, you have to wait for the rest of the text to appear (which can be annoying even if you aren't impatient:). Long ago I promised myself that I would never click though a site that used animated GIFs to advertise, and it has worked quite well so far (although I don't get a chance to click through very often...).
Um, hot water gets deposited back into the environment with all kinds of power plants, not just Nuclear ones. Coal burning, Gas burning, Geothermal, they all dump hot water back into the environment (or let it turn to steam, depending on the design). The only ones that don't are Windmills (which have very limited usefulness), Hydroelectric (which also mess up spawning patterns of fish), Solar (dang near useless unless you live in the desert), and Hydrodynamic (which havn't been built yet AFAIK). There might be some other types that don't dump hot water, but they're not practical (or at least not in use).
>Also please note that PNG cannot do animations (yet).
This is a good thing IMHO. GIF animations are almost as annoying as the dreaded BLINK tag. Just imagine a web without annoying flashing banners assaulting your eyes (at least until the page completely loads and you can hit escape).
The problem is that a LOT of people don't use modern browsers. Just look through the access logs at some site to see how many times Netscape 3 (or even 2!) appear. Not to mention IE3 and a lot of wierd browsers that may or my not (probabally not) support png.
People still use GIF because it is supported by ALL graphical browsers, and when you are dealing with 2k files, the compression difference doesn't count for much.
I noticed something the Moral Majority left out of their analysis. The major plot point of the South Park movie was demonizing the Moral Majority. Normally they are quick to classify any criticism as evil in itself, whereas they dwelled on the overt language, sexual, and violent elements in the movie.
I didn't agree with them on one point. They make many references to casting Jesus as the part of the female anatomy, but I never made that assumption. Is Jesus the only wise sage you can seek out in the world?
Sequent mananged to clear out some bottlenecks with their NUMA architecture, but their systems are still bus based. Even though the bus is large, they will not be able to push as much data as say a SGI Origin class machine (with cache coherent NUMA and a Hypercube topology instead of a bus topology)
More information is available on SGI's NUMA page, still more info available here
Disclaimer: I work for SGI, but I believe in everything I say.
Yeah, but how much energy do you expend typing on a normal keyboard? Not much I'd wager. Plus you have the added weight of all those magnets to carry around.
Besides, aren't laptops hard enough to type on as it is?
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sure you still remember Barren Realms Elite and Solar Realms Elite? Well, the guy who made those branched out into web based games a while back that still mostly capture the feel of the BBS games despite being HTMl based.
Check out Echelon Games for both of them. Be careful, just like BRE and SRE they are very addictive.
Of course you run into nameing problems. :)
4Dwm is what SGI uses as the window manager on its Irix systems, fortunatly it is not a true 4D windowmanager, or I'd have to replace my brain with one from a 4 dimentional being (and they're hard to find!) just to use it.
The problem is that it doesn't always work. For some reason when my school recently upgraded half of their modems, I stopped getting connect speed messages from the modem (CONNECT instead of CONNECT ) about half of the time (go figure). I don't know what causes this, but I suspect there is some sort of communication that used to go on between the modems that doesn't anymore.
And no my modem isn't broken, my roommate has the exact same problem with his modem.
If you want to know how that got started, there is an excellent report at The Gamer's Realm. I highly recommend this to anyone who was told that D&D was "evil" or "satanic" in their youth.
BTW Patricia Pulling died earlier this year IIRC.
I don't know how other universities get around this, but here at tech nobody uses their SSN for anything, they use their student ID. Of course 99% of the time the student ID is their SSN (since the SSN is the default student ID for every student). The university even has a way to change your student number if you don't want to use your SSN, but most students don't bother because it is a huge hassle to do so.
In my opinion, this is almost as bad as requiring everyone to use their SSNs, since the hassle involved with changing your Studnet number usually far outweighs the percieved benefit for the students, plus the government can't do anything because they don't regulate Virginia Tech student ID numbers.
The only good news I have is that most teachers are pretty good about not posting your entire ID anywhere (usually just the last 4 digits) so it is slightly harder to get someone's ID/SSN number.
I always figured they were more or less like CRTs today when you shove 1000s of watts through them (IE by phaser fire). Of course 90% of Star Trek injuries could be prevented with a simple 50 cent fuse...
You are a troll by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 29, @12:36 EDT (#) PNG's compress better than GIF's (5% to 25%) in almost every other case PNGs compress better in *only* one case: 256 colors. 128 colors GIF and 256/PNG are about the same, everything less GIF performs better. There's a vast difference between having an honest to god alpha channel and a simple transparent color. PNG's /do/ still compress better, No way! A PNG with a full alpha channel never compresses nearly as good as a "transparent" GIF, except for pathological cases. and an alpha'd PNG image will look antialiased against whatever background you put it against,The same can be done with alpha'd GIFs. There really is no difference between GIF/PNG in a'aliasing Images to the background. PNG can do it in the File Data, it can be done to GIFs after decoding. Of course there is a difference between full alpha and a single transparent color, but that was not the point.
Try this experiment some time: Create a GIF image with an anti-alised edge on a white background and put that on a web page with a black background. that ghosting around the edge of the GIF is the reason you want a true alpha channel. Sadly most browsers still don't support the alpha channel on PNG (it's not like the format is undocumented or particularly difficult to work with or anything!).
Sure, last time I looked at virus checkers (fprot for DOS), they had a "heuristic" mode that checked for virus like activity. This was faster and was supposed to be able to catch "virus like activity" such as writing to the boot sector of the disk and code with lots of unnecessary jmps (designed to fool virus checkers). Unfortunatly these techniques are not 100% foolproof and a carefully written virus can get around them. I never noticed any slowdown from using fprot, but I was running cheezy DOS programs on a P75, so speed wasn't an issue.
:)
Fortunatly, virus checking got infinitely easier when I switched to Unix.
You have a lot more faith in the integrity of our government than most people on Slashdot. Many of the people here see a government bent on controlling every aspect of our lives "for our protection", while our protection (and rights) seems to take a back seat to the policical agenda of the FBI, Congress, or anyone else who can afford to bribe^H^H^H^H^Hgive soft money to these people.
The most recent example that comes to my mind are the McCarthy era commie witchhunts, although there are other much less publicized and more recent examples.
Just put yourself between a politician and his money if you want to see this for yourself.
That's an urban legend.
If you're still worried about this, go to your local animal rights group meeting and ask yourself if anyone there looks like they could bioengineer a deadly virus. Usually these groups consist of hippies and nature nuts, not hardboiled mad scientests. Besides, how would you develop a deadly virus without hurting any animals (and with little or no access to gene splicing equiptment)?
Granted, there are some pretty deadly viruses in the world already, but nothing that is going to "erase the earth of humans" by a long shot, at least not in the hands of hippies. Government military types (and jihad types who are in league with some govenments) on the other hand...
Probablly because alltheweb is indexing EVERY page it comes across, even those "Hello, I'm so and so and I love cats..." pages that most search engines thankfully ignore. It even had my webpage in there, which is a first for search engines.
These beasts are built specifically for serving and high uptimes. They support a lot of stuff not normally available on your standard PC, like hot swappable Power suppiles (triply redundant), hot swappable Disks (and I'm not talking about something where you have to unscrew the drive from the mounting bracket and whatnot while the computer is running--the drives are actually mounted on sleds similar to external RAID and JBOD racks). There is also a diagnostics port on the back to help you administer and diagnose problems with the hardware.
There are other, less obvious benefits to the 1400 as well. Unlike most PC cases on the market, the 1400 was designed with airflow in mind, and can easily handle the heat of 4 Xenons, 6 SCSI HD, 7 PCI cards and even the lowly ISA card without a problem. Surprisingly these machines are quite quiet, due to a thick layer of insulation on the inside of the case.
Finally, the case is designed to be rack-mounted, although it is a little on the long side.
You mean emotions like disgust at having paid $6 to see the movie? :)
I do agree with you though, the people who are willing to find and download the entire movie are probably the ones who saw it on day 1.
I don't agree that everone who downloaded it was disappointed with the poor quality/emotional feel of the video and then went to see it on the big screen. It seems more likely to me that they were disappointed in the movie itself and didn't go to see it on the big screen.
One of the letters on d.net expressed concern that the way the database is set up, there is no way to determine which keys were faked by this person. My question is: Aren't the keys being checked in a sequental fashion? Couldn't we backup the counter a couple of days (or however long this person has been doing this) and simply repeat the last few days of work to be sure we don't miss the winning keys? Losing a few days isn't really going to hurt a project that has been running for almost 2 years now, and it will do wonders to dispel the worries people have that all of their work may be for nothing.
I think they're talking about Appletalk, which is what a lot of Mac people use for home networking. You'd be amazed how many people still have Appletalk networks set up (my old High school computer lab is still 20 or so Mac Pluses hooked to a single Mac II printserver (hooked to 4 Imagewriters!)) with Appletalk over serial cables.
Probabally not as easily as you think. Laying cable is prohibitivly expensive, so the barriers to entry in the cable industry are quite high. This is why many local cable companies have effective monopolies in their areas. So far the only real competition comes from the Digital satellite people, but look how much legisation the local TV stations and cable companies managed to get passed against them. In my area, they are not shy about advertising the effects of this legislation either (YOUR LOCAL TV RECEPTION WILL BE TERRIBLE IF YOU GO WITH THE GODLESS EVIL SATELLITE COMPANIES! YOUR CABLE COMPANY LOVES YOU! SUBMIT!)
The problem is LOTS of people (especially in the Linux camp) release broken fonts. Mkfontdir (under FreeBSD and IRIX) needs the entire fontstring embedded in the font file itself in order to work, not just the name of the font. What I've done is created a new driectory of these broken fonts where I can go through and create the fonts.dir by hand. For examples of broken fonts, check out fonts.themes.org.
That's pretty unlikely considering how SGI has made such overt leanings towards Linux and x86 architecture in addition the thier MIPS line. SGI just doesn't have a reason to make anything with Amiga written on it. Neither does Sun.
Hmm, that's still pretty annoying. The problem is that the human eye is atracted to movement, so when I am trying read a page with a flashing logo, my eye keeps getting drawn to the advertisement.
:). Long ago I promised myself that I would never click though a site that used animated GIFs to advertise, and it has worked quite well so far (although I don't get a chance to click through very often...).
There have actually been user interface studies done on web sites, and when people are trying to read the content on a web site they will tend to put their hand over flashing banners (I guess they don't know about the esc trick) so they can finish reading the page.
BTW those kinds of banners are doubly annying in that even if you want to read the banner, you have to wait for the rest of the text to appear (which can be annoying even if you aren't impatient
Um, hot water gets deposited back into the environment with all kinds of power plants, not just Nuclear ones. Coal burning, Gas burning, Geothermal, they all dump hot water back into the environment (or let it turn to steam, depending on the design). The only ones that don't are Windmills (which have very limited usefulness), Hydroelectric (which also mess up spawning patterns of fish), Solar (dang near useless unless you live in the desert), and Hydrodynamic (which havn't been built yet AFAIK). There might be some other types that don't dump hot water, but they're not practical (or at least not in use).
>Also please note that PNG cannot do animations (yet).
This is a good thing IMHO. GIF animations are almost as annoying as the dreaded BLINK tag. Just imagine a web without annoying flashing banners assaulting your eyes (at least until the page completely loads and you can hit escape).
The problem is that a LOT of people don't use modern browsers. Just look through the access logs at some site to see how many times Netscape 3 (or even 2!) appear. Not to mention IE3 and a lot of wierd browsers that may or my not (probabally not) support png.
People still use GIF because it is supported by ALL graphical browsers, and when you are dealing with 2k files, the compression difference doesn't count for much.
I noticed something the Moral Majority left out of their analysis. The major plot point of the South Park movie was demonizing the Moral Majority. Normally they are quick to classify any criticism as evil in itself, whereas they dwelled on the overt language, sexual, and violent elements in the movie.
I didn't agree with them on one point. They make many references to casting Jesus as the part of the female anatomy, but I never made that assumption. Is Jesus the only wise sage you can seek out in the world?
Sequent mananged to clear out some bottlenecks with their NUMA architecture, but their systems are still bus based. Even though the bus is large, they will not be able to push as much data as say a SGI Origin class machine (with cache coherent NUMA and a Hypercube topology instead of a bus topology)
More information is available on SGI's NUMA page, still more info available here
Disclaimer: I work for SGI, but I believe in everything I say.
Yeah, but how much energy do you expend typing on a normal keyboard? Not much I'd wager. Plus you have the added weight of all those magnets to carry around.
Besides, aren't laptops hard enough to type on as it is?