I wouldn't be so sure of claiming that Java is not dangerous. The only viruses I have seen on this machine lately are Java viruses that Norton thankfully detects. Without a virus scanner running, my machine would have been owned by visiting just a few sites. That a JVM would load automatically in the background and try to run viruses without me even knowing is a huge potential security risk, and one that is very much more a fault of mozilla than Java as mozilla just decides to run the code. At least give me a prompt to allow execution or deny it.
I expect that would cross the line of States Rights. Perhaps they could enforce it for interstate transportation, but within my state I think there would be a fight against such a thing.
Yeah, because dissent will get you far in todays political climate. Didn't you see the congressman on Farenheit 911 state very plainly that for the most part they don't even get to read and analyze what bills they are voting in? The Patriot Act is so fucking unpatriotic that George and Tom are still rolling in their graves. 200 years ago we went to war over such intrusions into our private lives and yet now we idly sit by and watch as slowly but surely the bill of rights becomes eroded with each new act of congress.
Think it is any small mystery that the government wants less people to own guns and certainly less people to carry them on their person? Why do you think militias, you know, those little civilian armies, you know, the ones that originally fought for our revolution, why the fuck do you think want them to only really have small arms and certainly no automatic weapons, bombs, grenades, or anything of power? The very real posibility that the people may one day get fed up with all these bullshit laws is precisely the reason that the federal government wants to ultimately have everything under wraps. Whatever happened to Taxation without Representation? Ask yourself honestly, who is being represented within the federal government? Who does congress typically side with? Who funded the media blitzes that got these cadidates seats within our government?
The political climate in this country is so stifling it makes me wonder how people can call themselves public servents when they have become so entirely self serving. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. You should never trust any reigning power, including the president and his bought and sold republican congress. The people need a voice and that voice is drowning out in the politics of corporate america and the rethoric of an unwinnable war on terrorism. By coaxing the public into a constant state of fear, we have created a public opinion that our rights are not nearly as important as our safety. According to Mr. Franklin, we now deserve neither safety nor rights and will be given neither in this sad pursuit.
I think the James Madison quote in my sig speaks best about the current political environment. Remember, Madison and Jefferson both wanted no American to trust the federal government and left the flexibility in our constitution to tear down our government if need be and erect something in its place. As it happened with the original Articles of the Confederation, which basically gavae the federal government no authority, it was realized that such an arrangement would not work for a great many reasons, including the need for a single currency. Thus 10 years or so later, the Constitution was born and signed into law.
As long as people keep voting for a party that does paltry little to represent their voters and their voters' rights, then American will continue along this sombre path of imperialism, corruption, world manipulation, and war all in the name of protecting our "freedoms."
The next time you go to vote for someone, ask yourself, who does this candidate represent? If you can't put yourself into that picture, well then, who the hell can you vote for?
I hope your state does indeed fight this and my state as well, but unfortunately I'm sure that with the threat of removal of precious federal funding, most states will do as they have always done and bend over. Good thing you voted for those state reps right?
Not on my 900mhz box. Visual Boy Advance is slooooow. I would recommend an older PSX with a Pro Action Replay. Plays most games flawlessly unless of course there is mod protection, but I'm pretty sure there are gameshark codes to work around this, which convieniently the pro action replay will take as well.
I'd love to run VBA, but alas, its too slow. Maybe at low res its ok, but I like my GBA games interpolated on a big screen.
Re:Woohoo!
on
Gaming Hacks
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· Score: 2, Informative
Also....
If you look around on bittorrent sites like torrentspy.com, you will often find whole ROM collections listed. The SNES, Genesis, and NES collections weigh in at 6 gigs total. Granted there are many duplicate ROMs due to various rips coming up with different checksums, so you will see like 3 versions of Super Metroid, all virtually 100% identical save for a few bits. The Good series of ROM tools has an excellent database of probably 99% of all known ROMs.
There are literally hundreds of good translations out there, so in a way, you could probably spend a good portion of the rest of your life reliving the 8 and 16 bit days playing good games that you would have never had the chance to as a child.
Some great emus out there are ZSNES, SNES9X (I prefer ZSNES myself for speed and smoothness), Gens (simply awesome!), FCEUltra, and a few of the Gameboy color emus out there are pretty decent. A few of the GBA emus out there are really pretty faithful, but still have some timing issues and tend to slow down pretty good when there are lots of huge sprites all over the place. You need a pretty smoking CPU to emulate the GBA for the most part as it stands, but somewhere around 1ghz will emulate just about everything out there, including the PSX, though why you would want to emulate a PSX when you can buy one for so cheap these days is beyond me. Its not hard to amass a collection of nearly every PSX game out there, all ripe for the burning.
I'll shut up now.
If I pulled a hundred things off the shelf, but get too frustrated with the lines, I'm going to abandon the cart.
Do you really do this? How much more time do you waste to go back and try again? Seriously if you have already invested even 15 minutes and the wait is 20 minutes (a long wait) and your drive was say 10 minutes, you have already wasted 35-40 minutes and accomplished nothing, only to leave and come back. So, you have wasted at least 80 minutes out of the two trips where if you stayed you could have only wasted 55 minutes and saved yourself nearly a half an hour of frustration.
sure, that makes sense... most states don't even give the death penalty for killing a person... so you're giving the molester the incentive for killing the kid instead of letting him/her go.
Fuck that. A whole lot of kids get raped and then murdered. The person that is thinking about doing such a thing is not really thinking about jail sentences or the law. They are sick and are clearly beyond good and evil. Kill the fuckers!
How much is this going to cost tax payers? Seriously. If this were a tribal society or even america 100 years ago they would have just killed the perpetrator. Someone that cannot stop themselves from their own inclinations needs to be taken out. I'm sorry but with certain crimes there should be little recourse. A $.35 bullet is really cheap considering the tens of thousands we waste housing these monsters and then paying someone to watch their every movement. If you want to rape or molest a child or a baby you can get up to 15 years in prison. That is roughly half a million alone just to house them. Imagine what half a million in scholarships could give a poor community. Imagine how much benefit hundreds of people could see from half a million versus one predator who by his actions has given up his rights to be a part of our society. We would have hung people like this on the spot 100 years ago and why shouldn't we continue to do so? What about the families and the kids whose lives have been destroyed? What recourse do they have? The satisfaction that the man that raped their little 9 year old gets to walk in 10-15 years and potentially ravage some other child along the way?
I don't know where the Navy's new FA/18s stand with respect to the above.
I believe that apart from having a better powerplant configuration as well as better avionics, the F-18 Super Hornets are probably still within the realm of the F-16s handling. The F-16 was easily the most advanced fighter of its time, basically amounting to a flying dart with vast aerodynamic instabilities that only a computer could realistically keep under control. The real advances in aerodynamics are in vectored thrust, something the F-22 has ability in. The russians were the first to pioneer this along with true air to air look-down-shoot-down capabilities. The helmet mounted sight is still something a good deal of american pilots would love to have.
That being said, the true limits of performance in modern fighters is the human controlling the plane. Very few people can withstand 9 negative Gs for very long without the immediate blacking out that it causes. Thus, while planes may be able to turn past 9gs of force, no human could withstand the pressures. The next real step in aviation is to remove the humans from the cockpit and then, perhaps, war will become nearly remote control. Unmanned planes may never totally replace manned planes, but when they start out performing their human based counterparts, it will be awfully hard to send humans in to a task they will become increasing less suited for.
With avionics being upgraded, modern fighter planes will likely exist for years along with the likes of the F-14 and F-15 for a long time to come. Take the F-14 for example. It still remains at its critical role of fleet defender and is the only plane really capable of firing the Phoenix missile at a range of what 80nm or so. It can begin tracking multiple targets at nearly 110nm if I remember correctly. It is also capable of engaging and tracking up to 5 individual targets, firing upon each of them all at once if it so chooses. (Forgive inconsistencies, I know it is at least 5) The real revolution going on in fighters these days is in their avionics. When a plane like the F-22 can fly in without being detected on radar and engage in multiple targets at once you have something that is nearly invincible and the superior air power of the United States is what will keep it a world superpower for many years to come, that is, unless the nukes start flying into space.
I'm not a big fan of RTS for the most part, except for maybe homeworld and dungeon keeper 2 (was this the first to introduce 1st person shooting?), however, that being said, Total Anihilation is one of the best games I've ever played period. I don't even think starcraft can compare from the little that I've played of it. The technology is awesome (create minerals from energy for instance) and the weapons get more and more powerful to the point where you have tactical nuclear weapons. Then the fun really starts. A game that truly lives up to its name in form and function!
Definately worth checking out. I don't know if you'll need the CDs to play the open source engine, but either way, you should definately check out what TA was like because very rarely does a game of such greatness ever come around.
You should just have someone solder it for you. It would probably cost like $50 or so to take it to a shop and have them resolder the traces. Seriously. Don't even think about trying it as your first job because you will likely end up getting too much solder everywhere and the part will become useless, and a repair all the more costly (if possible). Find some geeky friends that mod X-Boxen and have them look at it. I bet you know someone that would do it for a bag of grass or a night of drinking or something along those lines. Just don't try to do it yourself, especially if you have never soldered before in your life. Its like asking "I've never tried it before, but how do I rebuild my tranny?" Not really recommended without proper tools, knowledge and experience.
I've been reading slashdot since, oh, probably 1997 or so. I've been using the net before the WWW even came around. 1992 or so is when I started I think. I'd probably have a much lower UID #, but I never really started to posting to slashdot until much more recently. Once I realized that I could sort comments based upon scores automatically, I was hooked. Quite honestly, I don't know why I never got a user ID earlier, since it gives you a lot more options.
Any UID # below 200,000 has been here for a long time, much like yourself. I haven't seen many 3 digit UIDs in a while. I haven't seen many 4 digit UIDs either for what its worth. I wonder how long it will be until Slashdot breaks a million registered users. I keep seeing numbers in the high 800k range, so I know its getting closer.
For the guy that I replied to: I was really just joking, cuz I thought it was hillarious you actually bit the bait, and for the guy that responded: Nice to meet you.
have you ever used windows 2000 for more than 5 minutes on a 128 meg system? I have and even running more than one app at once is PAINFUL. Opening programs is painful too as te system swaps out. Sure Windows 95 could boot on a 4 meg system (I've seen it happen), but it took so freaking long to get anything up and running that it was really kind of useless. Maybe if you ran word all the time or something and never had anything else running like even a virus scanner (Norton 2k3 takes up 15 megs or so alone). I'm just saying that it wouldn't be the best user experience. Even W2K on a 256 meg box feels kind pudgy after a while.
Yeah DK2 was a great game. I play Homeworld all the time too. Need to find a copy of Catyclysm (sp?) one of these days to see how it was. Haven't seen a torrent floating around lately.
I tried Total Annihilation but found it too confusing at first. Too many options. I prefer more simple RTS games.
I also play Ultima VII from time to time as well as Fallout a lot. System Shock 1 & 2 are really great, as well as the Underworld games (my favorites maybe) and so of course is Half-Life. I wanted to like the new Privateer remake, but it just didn't feel right and the text boxes are misaligned with the graphics and annoyances like that. Maybe I'll have to get the original working in Windows 200 one of these days.
I'll quit boring you now though!
Yeah it makes me wonder how much Dell actually paid for installling Windows. They did PAY for the OEM license didn't they?!?! How the hell can Micro$oft charge the average consumer $200 (retail mind you) for a copy of XP home, while at the same time basically giving it away for free if you buy a whole new computer for $100 more. Surely that PC cost Dell at least $200-250 to build. They gotta get profit somewhere in that, so the XP license can't really be more than $50 or so. I forget what corporate XP licensing goes for, but when you start paying $500-1000 a seat per year for just an OS and Office Suite and maybe an exchange server, it tends to add up quite a bit.
How many of us would be happy with an extra grand in pay a year, or maybe health insurance or something. The cost of software has to start going down instead of consistently climbing. I remember when OS/2 cost like $100 for a personal license or something. It may have even been like $80 or something, I forget. This was in 1995, 10 years ago. How many other goods have doubled in the last 10 years in cost? Gas does not count!
Man, I'll quit rambling.
1. Design linux distribution that mimics the look and feel of another profitable operating system as well as offering similarily poor security charachteristics. 2. ?!?!? 3. Profit.
Also to add to your comment. When you use su, it is all too easy to forget that you are in a root shell and type a command by accident. rm -r is a dangerous thing when you don't realize what path you are on, etc.
With sudo, you at least have to type sudo which at least forces you to realize what you are doing maybe bad. It is like having an override button. The system won't let you do something that may be dangerous, but you can always force it to do so if you choose.
Also logging such actions are definately preffered, especially in a multi-user environment where different people may have administrative access to the machine.
I'll gladly admit that I run as root on a fairly regular basis, actually using su to do things like irc and such (irc servers ban root accounts typically), but you must realize that 90% of what I would go to a command line for in Linux is to perform some administrative task, which lately has amounted to occaisionally manually running apt-get update and apt-get install (I've been too lazy lately to add it to the crontabs) as well as keeping a top console up so I can monitor the box.
The boxes just keep running and doing their file and print sharing services without any real need for human intervention. Here's to hoping that Windows may eventually reach that point of install and forget that so many other NOS's have enjoyed for many years. Like the Netware box that was literally walled in and wasn't discovered until years later when the company (or was it a school) decided to remodel. The box hadn't been touched or maintained in literally years, because it just WORKED.
Anyways, I'll quit rambling now.
It takes 4-5 minutes to boot Windows 98 on anything. I don't think I've seen it come up faster than 4 minutes on any machine I've ever used it with. Hell, Windows 2000 on average takes 5 minutes to boot on a 1ghz machine with 256 megs of RAM. Getting the desktop to be usable takes a few more minutes. Fortunately, I rarely every reboot. You can't like go get a coffee or something, or use the restroom when your computer is rebooting?
For what its worth, my linux boxes all stay up for weeks at a time, only ever really rebooting when the power fails which happens from time to time. (Maybe once a month or so for a few seconds)
Good thing we have journalling file systems these days. I shudder to think about using FAT again.
I play Dungeon Keeper 2 all the time. Never played the first one, but I was under the impression that number 2 just improved on the originals formula. The graphics are still pretty ok too even in this day and age.
I don't know about Black and White. I got way to bored with it after I realized that I would have to train my creature for hours and hours and I found it kinda hard to be evil. Aparantly constantly destroying villages didn't make me evil enough for some reason.
Magic Carpet was such a beautiful game. Very few games have the terramorphing that MC had. It was so neat to just see the landscape dynamically change in front of you as you played, and getting off the ground and flying added so much depth to the game, especially when FPS were already starting to become stale commonplace cliches.
So is the original DK worth checking out? I heard that they eventually released a 3D engine for it as some sort of patch or upgrade.
Molyneux essentially has been making the same games since Populus. Whether they have become any better or worse is really a matter of opinion, though I certainly prefer the Dungeon Keeper style interface to the incredibly retarted scheme in Black and White.
Open mosix looks awesome and would totally do what I would want a cluster to do for me, but I only have 1 linux box running right now and all of my client programs are mostly in Windows. Even if I eventually throw another NIX box on the net, it would be to act as a firewall, then maybe I could get some benefits, but my current fileserver/slimserver is a 500mhz PIII that I devote to slimserver, as it takes up a good 50% of the CPU alone just to transcode one stream. I could probably do better in gentoo, but well, debian just works so easily out of the box. I had it up in 2 hours and serving MP3s in about another hour after I got my hard drives to recognize.
No, we need windows clustering. Think about it. You could utilize all the PCs in your cube farm for a job and the people using the clients would hardly know the difference because their CPUs are running at 10% whilst displaying the single instance of Excel or whatever the hell they have running. That other 90% could be actively doing something for the company or you or whoever.
When all these devices start running in parallel, a lot of interesting oppurtunities start opening up. Maybe your cell phone could devote a few cycles to the network while sitting there idle. Maybe your TV could fire up its processor and do some things while you sleep. Your whole house could become a beowulf cluster. Maybe. One day.
Dual processors and better yet, dual dual-core processors are definately a step in a better direction for now.
Big iron realized that parallel applications needed parallel processors a long time ago. It is really nice to see that PCs are finally starting to catch up to high speed computing.
I was just thinking this today as I was watching my desktop grind to a halt as my CPU became maxed out with all the audio encoding I was doing. My file server and a few clients are just sitting around wasting cycled while I could be using them for one off tasks like encoding 20 gigs of wav files along with rendering and such. My desktop is a Windows 2000 machine, and as far as I know, there isn't a way to distribute tasks across the network on such an OS, but, imagine if you could.
I know you could whip up some distributed linux stuff, but any box around here running linux is busy doing something as it is and the programs I mostly use on the client end are all windows based......
For example you could queue up a bunch of tasks and leave it for the network to process. Gentoo offers something similar with distcc, where you can do your compiling across multiple machines. Neat. Considering how long it took me to compile a Gentoo system from scratch the last time, I'd say this might be a necessary tool for some people. Especially developers constantly working with large builds.
While I think parallel processors and more RAM may be in the not so distant future for me, it would still be super cool to find ways to maximize idle processors connected to my network. I don't know about sharing the CPU with the rest of the world as in a "the net is the computer" scheme, but if I could just some tasks offloaded from my main workstation it would be a great benefit.
You are pretty right about the 8% cpu usage. Right now I have a couple of machines pretty much idling away, while I'm still waiting for these ogg files to encode at 3x realtime on a 1ghz machine.
Perhaps you american guys should focus on eating less garbage like McDonalds...
I know this was modded as a troll (and it really is), but troll or not, it is true. Americans are some of the fattest people on the planet. Just go to a Walmart and take a rough percentage. Around here in fatland Pittsburgh, I usually average about 40-50% of people being overweight. Convieniently for them the local Walmarts all have McDonalds so they can fatten up after buying cheap crap that was made in china all the while being surrounded by the american flag. Remember, the Walmart logo is a bastardization of the flag with the red, white, and blue and the stars. Isn't the free market grand?
For the record, something like 1 in 5 or 2 in 5 kids are obese in the United States. Don't have the actual statistic, but it is somewhere between 20 and 25% if not worse already. The generations seem to increase in fat percentages.
Also, I used to be fat myself. I weight about 170 lbs on a good day and when I graduated high school I weighed 250 lbs. It took a good year to lose the weight, but after I did, I swore off ever eating at places like McDonalds. I'm now vegetarian (can't give up cheese), and I am probably 100x healthier than I would have been had I stayed with the heart attack diet.
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I wouldn't be so sure of claiming that Java is not dangerous. The only viruses I have seen on this machine lately are Java viruses that Norton thankfully detects. Without a virus scanner running, my machine would have been owned by visiting just a few sites. That a JVM would load automatically in the background and try to run viruses without me even knowing is a huge potential security risk, and one that is very much more a fault of mozilla than Java as mozilla just decides to run the code. At least give me a prompt to allow execution or deny it.
I expect that would cross the line of States Rights. Perhaps they could enforce it for interstate transportation, but within my state I think there would be a fight against such a thing.
Yeah, because dissent will get you far in todays political climate. Didn't you see the congressman on Farenheit 911 state very plainly that for the most part they don't even get to read and analyze what bills they are voting in? The Patriot Act is so fucking unpatriotic that George and Tom are still rolling in their graves. 200 years ago we went to war over such intrusions into our private lives and yet now we idly sit by and watch as slowly but surely the bill of rights becomes eroded with each new act of congress.
Think it is any small mystery that the government wants less people to own guns and certainly less people to carry them on their person? Why do you think militias, you know, those little civilian armies, you know, the ones that originally fought for our revolution, why the fuck do you think want them to only really have small arms and certainly no automatic weapons, bombs, grenades, or anything of power? The very real posibility that the people may one day get fed up with all these bullshit laws is precisely the reason that the federal government wants to ultimately have everything under wraps. Whatever happened to Taxation without Representation? Ask yourself honestly, who is being represented within the federal government? Who does congress typically side with? Who funded the media blitzes that got these cadidates seats within our government?
The political climate in this country is so stifling it makes me wonder how people can call themselves public servents when they have become so entirely self serving. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. You should never trust any reigning power, including the president and his bought and sold republican congress. The people need a voice and that voice is drowning out in the politics of corporate america and the rethoric of an unwinnable war on terrorism. By coaxing the public into a constant state of fear, we have created a public opinion that our rights are not nearly as important as our safety. According to Mr. Franklin, we now deserve neither safety nor rights and will be given neither in this sad pursuit.
I think the James Madison quote in my sig speaks best about the current political environment. Remember, Madison and Jefferson both wanted no American to trust the federal government and left the flexibility in our constitution to tear down our government if need be and erect something in its place. As it happened with the original Articles of the Confederation, which basically gavae the federal government no authority, it was realized that such an arrangement would not work for a great many reasons, including the need for a single currency. Thus 10 years or so later, the Constitution was born and signed into law.
As long as people keep voting for a party that does paltry little to represent their voters and their voters' rights, then American will continue along this sombre path of imperialism, corruption, world manipulation, and war all in the name of protecting our "freedoms."
The next time you go to vote for someone, ask yourself, who does this candidate represent? If you can't put yourself into that picture, well then, who the hell can you vote for?
I hope your state does indeed fight this and my state as well, but unfortunately I'm sure that with the threat of removal of precious federal funding, most states will do as they have always done and bend over. Good thing you voted for those state reps right?
Not on my 900mhz box. Visual Boy Advance is slooooow. I would recommend an older PSX with a Pro Action Replay. Plays most games flawlessly unless of course there is mod protection, but I'm pretty sure there are gameshark codes to work around this, which convieniently the pro action replay will take as well.
I'd love to run VBA, but alas, its too slow. Maybe at low res its ok, but I like my GBA games interpolated on a big screen.
Also.... If you look around on bittorrent sites like torrentspy.com, you will often find whole ROM collections listed. The SNES, Genesis, and NES collections weigh in at 6 gigs total. Granted there are many duplicate ROMs due to various rips coming up with different checksums, so you will see like 3 versions of Super Metroid, all virtually 100% identical save for a few bits. The Good series of ROM tools has an excellent database of probably 99% of all known ROMs. There are literally hundreds of good translations out there, so in a way, you could probably spend a good portion of the rest of your life reliving the 8 and 16 bit days playing good games that you would have never had the chance to as a child. Some great emus out there are ZSNES, SNES9X (I prefer ZSNES myself for speed and smoothness), Gens (simply awesome!), FCEUltra, and a few of the Gameboy color emus out there are pretty decent. A few of the GBA emus out there are really pretty faithful, but still have some timing issues and tend to slow down pretty good when there are lots of huge sprites all over the place. You need a pretty smoking CPU to emulate the GBA for the most part as it stands, but somewhere around 1ghz will emulate just about everything out there, including the PSX, though why you would want to emulate a PSX when you can buy one for so cheap these days is beyond me. Its not hard to amass a collection of nearly every PSX game out there, all ripe for the burning. I'll shut up now.
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Clearly 96 processors just isn't enough!
Not a very good product endorsement if you ask me.
If I pulled a hundred things off the shelf, but get too frustrated with the lines, I'm going to abandon the cart.
Do you really do this? How much more time do you waste to go back and try again? Seriously if you have already invested even 15 minutes and the wait is 20 minutes (a long wait) and your drive was say 10 minutes, you have already wasted 35-40 minutes and accomplished nothing, only to leave and come back. So, you have wasted at least 80 minutes out of the two trips where if you stayed you could have only wasted 55 minutes and saved yourself nearly a half an hour of frustration.
Which makes more sense?
sure, that makes sense... most states don't even give the death penalty for killing a person... so you're giving the molester the incentive for killing the kid instead of letting him/her go. Fuck that. A whole lot of kids get raped and then murdered. The person that is thinking about doing such a thing is not really thinking about jail sentences or the law. They are sick and are clearly beyond good and evil. Kill the fuckers!
How much is this going to cost tax payers? Seriously. If this were a tribal society or even america 100 years ago they would have just killed the perpetrator. Someone that cannot stop themselves from their own inclinations needs to be taken out. I'm sorry but with certain crimes there should be little recourse. A $.35 bullet is really cheap considering the tens of thousands we waste housing these monsters and then paying someone to watch their every movement. If you want to rape or molest a child or a baby you can get up to 15 years in prison. That is roughly half a million alone just to house them. Imagine what half a million in scholarships could give a poor community. Imagine how much benefit hundreds of people could see from half a million versus one predator who by his actions has given up his rights to be a part of our society. We would have hung people like this on the spot 100 years ago and why shouldn't we continue to do so? What about the families and the kids whose lives have been destroyed? What recourse do they have? The satisfaction that the man that raped their little 9 year old gets to walk in 10-15 years and potentially ravage some other child along the way?
Sad. Vigalante justice never seemed so appealing.
I don't know where the Navy's new FA/18s stand with respect to the above.
I believe that apart from having a better powerplant configuration as well as better avionics, the F-18 Super Hornets are probably still within the realm of the F-16s handling. The F-16 was easily the most advanced fighter of its time, basically amounting to a flying dart with vast aerodynamic instabilities that only a computer could realistically keep under control. The real advances in aerodynamics are in vectored thrust, something the F-22 has ability in. The russians were the first to pioneer this along with true air to air look-down-shoot-down capabilities. The helmet mounted sight is still something a good deal of american pilots would love to have.
That being said, the true limits of performance in modern fighters is the human controlling the plane. Very few people can withstand 9 negative Gs for very long without the immediate blacking out that it causes. Thus, while planes may be able to turn past 9gs of force, no human could withstand the pressures. The next real step in aviation is to remove the humans from the cockpit and then, perhaps, war will become nearly remote control. Unmanned planes may never totally replace manned planes, but when they start out performing their human based counterparts, it will be awfully hard to send humans in to a task they will become increasing less suited for.
With avionics being upgraded, modern fighter planes will likely exist for years along with the likes of the F-14 and F-15 for a long time to come. Take the F-14 for example. It still remains at its critical role of fleet defender and is the only plane really capable of firing the Phoenix missile at a range of what 80nm or so. It can begin tracking multiple targets at nearly 110nm if I remember correctly. It is also capable of engaging and tracking up to 5 individual targets, firing upon each of them all at once if it so chooses. (Forgive inconsistencies, I know it is at least 5) The real revolution going on in fighters these days is in their avionics. When a plane like the F-22 can fly in without being detected on radar and engage in multiple targets at once you have something that is nearly invincible and the superior air power of the United States is what will keep it a world superpower for many years to come, that is, unless the nukes start flying into space.
I'm not a big fan of RTS for the most part, except for maybe homeworld and dungeon keeper 2 (was this the first to introduce 1st person shooting?), however, that being said, Total Anihilation is one of the best games I've ever played period. I don't even think starcraft can compare from the little that I've played of it. The technology is awesome (create minerals from energy for instance) and the weapons get more and more powerful to the point where you have tactical nuclear weapons. Then the fun really starts. A game that truly lives up to its name in form and function!
Definately worth checking out. I don't know if you'll need the CDs to play the open source engine, but either way, you should definately check out what TA was like because very rarely does a game of such greatness ever come around.
You should just have someone solder it for you. It would probably cost like $50 or so to take it to a shop and have them resolder the traces. Seriously. Don't even think about trying it as your first job because you will likely end up getting too much solder everywhere and the part will become useless, and a repair all the more costly (if possible). Find some geeky friends that mod X-Boxen and have them look at it. I bet you know someone that would do it for a bag of grass or a night of drinking or something along those lines. Just don't try to do it yourself, especially if you have never soldered before in your life. Its like asking "I've never tried it before, but how do I rebuild my tranny?" Not really recommended without proper tools, knowledge and experience.
I've been reading slashdot since, oh, probably 1997 or so. I've been using the net before the WWW even came around. 1992 or so is when I started I think. I'd probably have a much lower UID #, but I never really started to posting to slashdot until much more recently. Once I realized that I could sort comments based upon scores automatically, I was hooked. Quite honestly, I don't know why I never got a user ID earlier, since it gives you a lot more options.
:)
Any UID # below 200,000 has been here for a long time, much like yourself. I haven't seen many 3 digit UIDs in a while. I haven't seen many 4 digit UIDs either for what its worth. I wonder how long it will be until Slashdot breaks a million registered users. I keep seeing numbers in the high 800k range, so I know its getting closer.
For the guy that I replied to: I was really just joking, cuz I thought it was hillarious you actually bit the bait, and for the guy that responded: Nice to meet you.
That said, have a great fucking day!
*bows*
Dude, you just bought the oldest troll in the book!
You're new here, aren't you?
have you ever used windows 2000 for more than 5 minutes on a 128 meg system? I have and even running more than one app at once is PAINFUL. Opening programs is painful too as te system swaps out. Sure Windows 95 could boot on a 4 meg system (I've seen it happen), but it took so freaking long to get anything up and running that it was really kind of useless. Maybe if you ran word all the time or something and never had anything else running like even a virus scanner (Norton 2k3 takes up 15 megs or so alone). I'm just saying that it wouldn't be the best user experience. Even W2K on a 256 meg box feels kind pudgy after a while.
Yeah DK2 was a great game. I play Homeworld all the time too. Need to find a copy of Catyclysm (sp?) one of these days to see how it was. Haven't seen a torrent floating around lately. I tried Total Annihilation but found it too confusing at first. Too many options. I prefer more simple RTS games. I also play Ultima VII from time to time as well as Fallout a lot. System Shock 1 & 2 are really great, as well as the Underworld games (my favorites maybe) and so of course is Half-Life. I wanted to like the new Privateer remake, but it just didn't feel right and the text boxes are misaligned with the graphics and annoyances like that. Maybe I'll have to get the original working in Windows 200 one of these days. I'll quit boring you now though!
Yeah it makes me wonder how much Dell actually paid for installling Windows. They did PAY for the OEM license didn't they?!?! How the hell can Micro$oft charge the average consumer $200 (retail mind you) for a copy of XP home, while at the same time basically giving it away for free if you buy a whole new computer for $100 more. Surely that PC cost Dell at least $200-250 to build. They gotta get profit somewhere in that, so the XP license can't really be more than $50 or so. I forget what corporate XP licensing goes for, but when you start paying $500-1000 a seat per year for just an OS and Office Suite and maybe an exchange server, it tends to add up quite a bit. How many of us would be happy with an extra grand in pay a year, or maybe health insurance or something. The cost of software has to start going down instead of consistently climbing. I remember when OS/2 cost like $100 for a personal license or something. It may have even been like $80 or something, I forget. This was in 1995, 10 years ago. How many other goods have doubled in the last 10 years in cost? Gas does not count! Man, I'll quit rambling.
1. Design linux distribution that mimics the look and feel of another profitable operating system as well as offering similarily poor security charachteristics.
2. ?!?!?
3. Profit.
Only M$ knows the answer to part 2.
Also to add to your comment. When you use su, it is all too easy to forget that you are in a root shell and type a command by accident. rm -r is a dangerous thing when you don't realize what path you are on, etc. With sudo, you at least have to type sudo which at least forces you to realize what you are doing maybe bad. It is like having an override button. The system won't let you do something that may be dangerous, but you can always force it to do so if you choose. Also logging such actions are definately preffered, especially in a multi-user environment where different people may have administrative access to the machine. I'll gladly admit that I run as root on a fairly regular basis, actually using su to do things like irc and such (irc servers ban root accounts typically), but you must realize that 90% of what I would go to a command line for in Linux is to perform some administrative task, which lately has amounted to occaisionally manually running apt-get update and apt-get install (I've been too lazy lately to add it to the crontabs) as well as keeping a top console up so I can monitor the box. The boxes just keep running and doing their file and print sharing services without any real need for human intervention. Here's to hoping that Windows may eventually reach that point of install and forget that so many other NOS's have enjoyed for many years. Like the Netware box that was literally walled in and wasn't discovered until years later when the company (or was it a school) decided to remodel. The box hadn't been touched or maintained in literally years, because it just WORKED. Anyways, I'll quit rambling now.
and it takes 4-5 minutes to boot Windows 98.
It takes 4-5 minutes to boot Windows 98 on anything. I don't think I've seen it come up faster than 4 minutes on any machine I've ever used it with. Hell, Windows 2000 on average takes 5 minutes to boot on a 1ghz machine with 256 megs of RAM. Getting the desktop to be usable takes a few more minutes. Fortunately, I rarely every reboot. You can't like go get a coffee or something, or use the restroom when your computer is rebooting?
For what its worth, my linux boxes all stay up for weeks at a time, only ever really rebooting when the power fails which happens from time to time. (Maybe once a month or so for a few seconds)
Good thing we have journalling file systems these days. I shudder to think about using FAT again.
I play Dungeon Keeper 2 all the time. Never played the first one, but I was under the impression that number 2 just improved on the originals formula. The graphics are still pretty ok too even in this day and age.
I don't know about Black and White. I got way to bored with it after I realized that I would have to train my creature for hours and hours and I found it kinda hard to be evil. Aparantly constantly destroying villages didn't make me evil enough for some reason.
Magic Carpet was such a beautiful game. Very few games have the terramorphing that MC had. It was so neat to just see the landscape dynamically change in front of you as you played, and getting off the ground and flying added so much depth to the game, especially when FPS were already starting to become stale commonplace cliches.
So is the original DK worth checking out? I heard that they eventually released a 3D engine for it as some sort of patch or upgrade.
Molyneux essentially has been making the same games since Populus. Whether they have become any better or worse is really a matter of opinion, though I certainly prefer the Dungeon Keeper style interface to the incredibly retarted scheme in Black and White.
The only reason you posted this comment was to work in the phrase "niggar", which makes you look blatently racist and like a bad speller.
You're no Dave Chapelle, that's for damn sure.
And next week.... And then a year from now....
Open mosix looks awesome and would totally do what I would want a cluster to do for me, but I only have 1 linux box running right now and all of my client programs are mostly in Windows. Even if I eventually throw another NIX box on the net, it would be to act as a firewall, then maybe I could get some benefits, but my current fileserver/slimserver is a 500mhz PIII that I devote to slimserver, as it takes up a good 50% of the CPU alone just to transcode one stream. I could probably do better in gentoo, but well, debian just works so easily out of the box. I had it up in 2 hours and serving MP3s in about another hour after I got my hard drives to recognize. No, we need windows clustering. Think about it. You could utilize all the PCs in your cube farm for a job and the people using the clients would hardly know the difference because their CPUs are running at 10% whilst displaying the single instance of Excel or whatever the hell they have running. That other 90% could be actively doing something for the company or you or whoever. When all these devices start running in parallel, a lot of interesting oppurtunities start opening up. Maybe your cell phone could devote a few cycles to the network while sitting there idle. Maybe your TV could fire up its processor and do some things while you sleep. Your whole house could become a beowulf cluster. Maybe. One day. Dual processors and better yet, dual dual-core processors are definately a step in a better direction for now. Big iron realized that parallel applications needed parallel processors a long time ago. It is really nice to see that PCs are finally starting to catch up to high speed computing.
I was just thinking this today as I was watching my desktop grind to a halt as my CPU became maxed out with all the audio encoding I was doing. My file server and a few clients are just sitting around wasting cycled while I could be using them for one off tasks like encoding 20 gigs of wav files along with rendering and such. My desktop is a Windows 2000 machine, and as far as I know, there isn't a way to distribute tasks across the network on such an OS, but, imagine if you could. I know you could whip up some distributed linux stuff, but any box around here running linux is busy doing something as it is and the programs I mostly use on the client end are all windows based...... For example you could queue up a bunch of tasks and leave it for the network to process. Gentoo offers something similar with distcc, where you can do your compiling across multiple machines. Neat. Considering how long it took me to compile a Gentoo system from scratch the last time, I'd say this might be a necessary tool for some people. Especially developers constantly working with large builds. While I think parallel processors and more RAM may be in the not so distant future for me, it would still be super cool to find ways to maximize idle processors connected to my network. I don't know about sharing the CPU with the rest of the world as in a "the net is the computer" scheme, but if I could just some tasks offloaded from my main workstation it would be a great benefit. You are pretty right about the 8% cpu usage. Right now I have a couple of machines pretty much idling away, while I'm still waiting for these ogg files to encode at 3x realtime on a 1ghz machine.
Perhaps you american guys should focus on eating less garbage like McDonalds...
I know this was modded as a troll (and it really is), but troll or not, it is true. Americans are some of the fattest people on the planet. Just go to a Walmart and take a rough percentage. Around here in fatland Pittsburgh, I usually average about 40-50% of people being overweight. Convieniently for them the local Walmarts all have McDonalds so they can fatten up after buying cheap crap that was made in china all the while being surrounded by the american flag. Remember, the Walmart logo is a bastardization of the flag with the red, white, and blue and the stars. Isn't the free market grand?
For the record, something like 1 in 5 or 2 in 5 kids are obese in the United States. Don't have the actual statistic, but it is somewhere between 20 and 25% if not worse already. The generations seem to increase in fat percentages.
Also, I used to be fat myself. I weight about 170 lbs on a good day and when I graduated high school I weighed 250 lbs. It took a good year to lose the weight, but after I did, I swore off ever eating at places like McDonalds. I'm now vegetarian (can't give up cheese), and I am probably 100x healthier than I would have been had I stayed with the heart attack diet.
You are what you eat.