I agree completely. I can't be bothered with current MMORGS as they are so static. I want to be able to change the (game) world, and see how others have changed it. However there are serious technical and gameplay issues with a dynamic universe:
It's hard enough keeping latency low in a static world - where only minor changes are occuring (players moving, weapons fire and the occasional explosion). If a thousand people were building/changing/demolishing houses, planting/felling trees, digging up roads, erecting giants statues of themselves, etc... it would be nearly impossible to maintain a playable speed. This however is only a temporary problem. Once we all have 100Mbit fibre connections and are connecting to servers with 4x20Ghz CPUs this won't be a problem.
The game has to offer the same level of challenge to all new players. Whether the join at the Beta stage, or after the game's been running for five years. This is difficult with a static world, but if players can shape the world this could be nearly impossible. Resources would get walled off, shops would get destroyed, etc... Great fun for the early adopters, less so for new players.
Dynamic worlds would require much more active maintenance. The company running the game would have to keep a very close eye on the world and play a much more active GM role. If the GM is good then the previous problem could be greatly reduced. However skilled, attentive GMs cost money, especially as, for any sizable game world, you'd require more than one per server.
None of these are insurmountable problems - but it's likely to take a few years, and better home connections before truely dynamic game worlds are available.
Real students don't sleep and wake! They pass out and come to. If you can't sleep through the noise of a few mouse-clicks then you're not nearly drunk enough.
I got a first-class (CompSki) degree from a good university without pulling any work-related all-nighters and drinking enough to drown a small country.
You're going to spend the next forty years working your arse off, at least spend the time you have at college/university having fun. You don't want your fondest memory of university to be the time you spent 36 hours debugging a server!
How tragic is it that people put so much effort in to cheating in va ideo game. Hours spent trying to circumvent anti-cheat mechanisms! Hours spent acheiving the square root of fuck all.
It's not even as if they gain any kind of kudos from doing it. I can understand why people like demo writers will spend days hacking out a visual effect that has no real use. At least they can garner some level of respect from others, if only for their technical skill. By comparision online game cheats are either hated (by gamers) or considered as sad as sad can be (by everyone else).
At least they are sufficently lacking in technical/social skills that I'll never have to work with them.
You can't expect the US to be the "World Leader In Everything [tm]" for ever. Once you get to the top of the pile, there's only one way to go. Rome, the Ottoman Empire, France, the UK - all were top-dogs at some point, but eventually relinquished their position to another country. One day this will happen to the US and China/India/whatever will become the world's predominante power.
Note that this doesn't mean that the US will become a third-world country. Just that the standard of living in the US won't be as good in comparison to other nations. Also the position of technological supremecy which the US currency occupies will be gone.
1) Are the 333MHz/2M CPU modules cheaper now? I'd love to swap out the 360MHz/256k CPU for a big-cache model?
To be honest I don't know as I looked once, saw the cost, and decided against it. The problem is that the 333Mhz/2M was as good as it got for the Ultra 5, so no-one ever disposed of it whilst upgrading their machine.
2) What's the quickest/easiest way to get Mozilla running on Solaris 7? I've been stuck at Nutscrape 4.x, because of some horrid maze of library dependences that I've never been able to figure out. And Solaris 7 because a legacy app I need to use at work never got ported to 8. (Yes, the box is behind a firewall.:)
Bloody hell... I know blastwave.org do their builds on Solaris 8 - so they're out, sunfreeware.com have an old beta (1) build for 2.7 which is less than idea. The best you're likely to get is available at http://www.mozilla.org/releases/ - a binary build of Mozilla 1.4 for Solaris 2.7. Hope this is useful.
I've got an Ultra 5 and a Sparc Station 5!
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Sun Sparc 5 Nostalgia
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· Score: 3, Insightful
I still use my Ultra 5 (the 360Mhz model) as my second desktop machine. Runs Solaris 9, blackbox and an assortment of KDE apps (mostly KMail and Konqueror). It's a bit slow but does the job, plus there are few keyboards that beat the Type 5c. Sadly it will be retired from desktop duty this year but will live on as my home webserver.
My SparcStation 5 (with a mighty 110Mhz microSparc) holds my CVS repository and my MP3s (via NFS and Samba). In order to save money the larger of its two drives (a 36Gb IBM) is a 50pin one that I've duck taped in to the CD bay. Some what dodgy, but I haven't had any problems with it in three years of use. This one runs and old version of Debian (2.2.20) but is safely hidden behind my firewall.
Whilst I could obviously get more powerful machines they do the job, are rock solid (both in hardware and software terms), and cost a total of 140GBP for the two of them. Plus they look a damn site nicer than boring old wintel box.
OK - GTA3 and GTA:VC started out as Sony exclusive titles. This made Rockstar lots of money, and because Rockstar are a business they took it. Being paid only to release games for the most popular console (by a huge margin) is a good deal.
Later on GTA3 and GTA:VC were ported to the PC. This took a lot of work but was worthwhile because the PC is a huge market.
The XBox is 733Mhz PC in a black and green box. Thus porting the game to this platform required relatively little extra work over the PC version. Also the XBox tends to sell to older gamers, who are more likely to want to buy (and be legally allowed to buy) adult titles such as GTA.
The GC architecture is completely different to either the PS2 or the XBox/PC. Whilst it sells in similar numbers to the XBox it is aimed at a younger audience. Older gamers who have GCs usually have at least one of PC/XBox/PS2 as well. Thus it does not make business sense to spend money porting a game (and it would be a big port) to a platform that is unlikely to generate the same level of sales as the currently supported ones.
Just do what most gamers I know did, and buy a PS2 and an XBox as well. That way you get the best of all worlds.
In the UK most players are openly advertised as multi-region. Even Dixons (a big, dumb, high street electronics company - think Circuit City but 100% less technically inclined) put the multi-region 'hacks' on their web site. Given that most people now own TVs that can display NTSC as well as PAL, even people like my mum watch imported DVDs without giving it a second thought.
Well good for your friends, Im so happy their daddy got them jobs
We used the other method - you know, like hard work and being good at our jobs. But don't let little things like facts get in the way of your ad hominem.
Oh well thats ok then, it is after all the health of the financial sector that is paramount.
Without the money generated by the City, the UK would have a GDP per capita in same range as Portugal. Whilst it isn't the only area of wealth generation in Britain, it is certainly a vital one.
hmmm... dont quite know where to start here.
Really? I am shocked.
vrai- you would benefit greatly from the extraction of your naive head from your privately educated english arse sometime in the future...
That's one hell of an assumption - clearly in Evil One's world it is only possible to get a good job through nepotism. Here's a hint, a willingness to work hard and a modicum of talent will get you further than the right school tie.
Errr... whilst the UK economy has serious issues (such as the impending credit bubble crash) it is currently quite strong. None of my friends are unemployed (even the 'resting' actor types have got part-time work that pays the bills) and many of us have recently moved jobs to get better pay/conditions (note that pretty much all were higher rate tax payers before the moves - so it's not like people were escaping from crappy jobs). Certainly in the financial sector all is good - pay is rising, bonuses look promising, and companies are recruiting.
Obviously there are sections of the UK that are poor - Wales, Scotland sans Edinburgh, and utter dives like Hull. However this tends to be due to the abject lack of skilled workers available in these areas. People need to realise that there isn't a great need for unskilled labour these days.
Obviously this won't stop the free PC plan failing. People will simply get up and make a cup of tea whenever the advertising appears. Either that or someone will crack the advertising feed so it can be sent to the background/hidden. Never underestimate how ingenious people can be when it comes to getting something for nothing.
May I suggest BlackBox - minimal but enough features to make it a step up from OpenWin, *very* fast, small (in both memory usage and codebase) and has no nasty dependencies (just needs a C++ compiler and X).
I run it on my Ultra 5 - KDE was as slow as EU reform but Blackbox is nice and responsive.
Given that you let the UK test nuclear weapons on the Australian mainland (as well as assorted islands), I'd say it's a bit late to be worrying about radioactive pollution.
I'm using xmms version 1.2.8 (compiled by blastwave.org) and it runs fine - I haven't had a crash for over a year (though most of that time was with 1.2.7). Most of my CD rips are in VBR (averaging around 256Kb/s) but I have some encoded at 320Kb/s - they all sound good and play without any problems, even on my old 360Mhz Ultra 5. I also run it on a PIII and a 1700XP (both running SuSE 8.2), all of them work perfectly.
If people are having problems then it's likely to be their system that's at fault - not xmms.
With no disrespect intended towards your missus, this does apply to the managers as well as the rest of the staff (especially middle management upwards). It's very much a case of the blind leading the vision impaired.
The whole system is just a way keeping umemployment figures down anyway. The government has no incentive to fire anyone (union member or otherwise) as, like you said, they'd just end up on the dole. I think I might just flee to Canada...
... though they are the worst. Companies like Captia (aka Crapita - responsible for the Congestion Charging debacle), Accenture, Fujitsu (responsible for the billion pound Inland Revenue disaster) and PWc all extract vast amounts of money from the British Taxpayer. In return we receive crap results, delivered late and massively over budget.
Note that when in opposition, the Labour party repeatedly condemned the then Conservative government for allowing this to continue (and rightly so). But as soon as they (Labour) got in to power the back-handers arrived and things got even worse. It's easily as bad as American politians and their 'special interest groups' (read, campaign donations) - only less visible to the general public.
This makes it very unlikely that Linux will ever make headway into the public sector. The UK government (especially the delightful Mr Blair) is in Microsoft's pocket - whenever an IT related decision is to be made, a certain Mr Gates makes a sizable donation to some public sector institution (and probably Blair himself). Plus EDS et al will favour Windows as they lack the talent to build/maintain anything else.
Problem is that's the entire NHS. It is one of the few organisations in the world which has more managers than productive staff (i.e. doctors and nurses). It's got so bad that you could assign a manager to every doctor, nurse and bed - and still have some spare!
Whilst they may be looking at using Linux, to move the whole organisation across (remember that it's the second largest non-military employer in the world) will take years, if not a decade. That's a lot of time for outside interests to derail the whole process.
It's a modification of the Quake engine. How is that not a "mod"? Granted, it had financial backing and a nice pretty box, but a mod is a mod is a mod.
A mod is a modification of a commercial game that uses the original game engine. Counter-Strike, Team Fortress, Desert Combat all use the original game engines but with new rule and graphic sets. They did not change the underlying game code. This is primarily because none of these mods were created by people with access to the engine code.
In comparison Half-life was a huge rewrite of the Quake I engine by a company that had licensed the code. If that's a mod then GTA:VC is a mod of Burnout 2, because they're both built on top of the Renderware graphics engine.
Wait - so you're saying that the WWW was in popular use when you were 11?!? Suddenly I feel very old indeed...
For what it's worth I concur with those who are suggesting that the kid be taught HTML before being let loose with a WYSIWYG editor. I was doing Z80 assembler by age 11 so I think it's safe to say that a children can learn a simple markup language like HTML. Especially as they'll have the joy of starting their HTML career with a largely standards comliant browser base.
When the government steps in to make the parents less overworked - you've got socialism. And as we both know, socialism creates a mediocre society.
... and when the government dicates where people can and can't be at certain times of the day - for the good of society - you've also got socialism. Which, as we both know, creates a mediocre society.
The reason this has occured is because politicians, be they in developing or developed nations, will never solved the problem if it's easier to treat the symptoms. In Thailand the economy is structured such that it is difficult for at least one parent to be at home when their children aren't at school. Fixing this would require either unpopular socialist measures, or difficult restructuring of the economy and labour force. Much easier to simply ban children from being at games cafes late. Of course the kids still won't be with their parents (who are working) but at least the politician has been seen to do something.
I didn't see the article concerning the voting machines but I assume (given that this has been brought up with the ATMs) that they were running some version of WinXP.
Which begs the question - how did they audit them? A full audit has to go all the way down to the metal, otherwise someone could have hidden a backdoor that allows them to alter the results and logs. Hopefully they have fully checked the source code of the compiler used to build OS and software as well, the rumoured backdoor in an early version of Unix is a famous example of why this is necessary.
Regardless of your view on the merits of Open Source Software, it is the only safe and accountable way to build an e-voting system. If even one piece of the system is closed code then you have to assume that it's been comprimised and thus the results have been tampered with.
The democratic process is far too important for security to be left to chance. Either do it properly or don't do it at all.
Most of my XBox, and nearly all my newer PS2 games support 16:9 widescreen. This could be limited to PAL releases, as many have a 60Hz option which would be rather redundant for NTSC versions. The GC has support for 60Hz in places, but I have relatively few GC games that aren't Nintendo in-house, so I can't comment on the wide-screen issue for that machine.
Note that in the UK at least pretty much all new televisions are widescreen (bar crappy 14" portables). As such people would start to get a bit annoyed if games didn't take advantage of this. Certainly games like GTA/VC and FIFA make good use of the extra width to show peripheral vision and more pitch respectively.
The problem is that Mario Kart has a massive legacy to live up to. I remember the first time I played the original, it was utterly unique and to this day the best game I have ever played. We were still playing it right up to last year, when the GBA version (four player!) final eclipsed it.
Personally I found the N64 version to be a huge let down. The graphic were mediocre, and lacked the simplistic charm of the SNES/GBA versions. The battle arenas weren't a patch on the original (block fort aside) and the blurry graphics made four player impossible on all but the biggest TV.
Obviously I'm going to by the new game, after all it's Mario Kart, and I have no doubt it will be better than MK64. However I very much doubt it will be as good as the original or the GBA version. The game mechanics just don't seem to work as well in a true 3D world.
This is where those extra mouse buttons come in handy. I've got one of the original MS Intelli-thingy explorers (basically a rebranded Logitech). It has handy thumb buttons on the side for moving backwards and forwards in a browser. It's even less effort than a mouse gesture.
Yes - for large companies (such as financial institutions) the cost of downtime can be in the ten of millions of dollars per hour range. If a system cannot provide 99.999% uptime (with only scheduled downtime) then it's worse than useless.
Companies don't spend millions on big iron hardware for fun - they do so because they need them.
Right, where we disagree is that you believe that your average traveller is likely to purchase more at duty free if they are advertised at using WiFi. Where-as I believe that people are more likely to purchase items when they are browsing the shops due to a lack of other distractions (which is why few airport terminals have decent video arcades, despite the obvious captive market). If you can convince airlines that you're right then all power to you - but I wouldn't put money on it.
Bear in mind that non-frequent flyers aren't that individually important to airlines. Hence that massive disparity in service between coach and non-coach. There isn't a massive economic incentive to give economy class passengers anything over the bare minimum.
I like to teach interseting stuff to young people (even Brits;)
The beauty of having been the birthplace the world's most important (according to Weber et al) language is that we don't have to waste time learning any other ones. I believe they even teach it in Switzerland these days...
Slashdot Mirror
- It's hard enough keeping latency low in a static world - where only minor changes are occuring (players moving, weapons fire and the occasional explosion). If a thousand people were building/changing/demolishing houses, planting/felling trees, digging up roads, erecting giants statues of themselves, etc
... it would be nearly impossible to maintain a playable speed.
- The game has to offer the same level of challenge to all new players. Whether the join at the Beta stage, or after the game's been running for five years. This is difficult with a static world, but if players can shape the world this could be nearly impossible. Resources would get walled off, shops would get destroyed, etc
... Great fun for the early adopters, less so for new players.
- Dynamic worlds would require much more active maintenance. The company running the game would have to keep a very close eye on the world and play a much more active GM role. If the GM is good then the previous problem could be greatly reduced. However skilled, attentive GMs cost money, especially as, for any sizable game world, you'd require more than one per server.
None of these are insurmountable problems - but it's likely to take a few years, and better home connections before truely dynamic game worlds are available.This however is only a temporary problem. Once we all have 100Mbit fibre connections and are connecting to servers with 4x20Ghz CPUs this won't be a problem.
I got a first-class (CompSki) degree from a good university without pulling any work-related all-nighters and drinking enough to drown a small country.
You're going to spend the next forty years working your arse off, at least spend the time you have at college/university having fun. You don't want your fondest memory of university to be the time you spent 36 hours debugging a server!
It's not even as if they gain any kind of kudos from doing it. I can understand why people like demo writers will spend days hacking out a visual effect that has no real use. At least they can garner some level of respect from others, if only for their technical skill. By comparision online game cheats are either hated (by gamers) or considered as sad as sad can be (by everyone else).
At least they are sufficently lacking in technical/social skills that I'll never have to work with them.
Note that this doesn't mean that the US will become a third-world country. Just that the standard of living in the US won't be as good in comparison to other nations. Also the position of technological supremecy which the US currency occupies will be gone.
My SparcStation 5 (with a mighty 110Mhz microSparc) holds my CVS repository and my MP3s (via NFS and Samba). In order to save money the larger of its two drives (a 36Gb IBM) is a 50pin one that I've duck taped in to the CD bay. Some what dodgy, but I haven't had any problems with it in three years of use. This one runs and old version of Debian (2.2.20) but is safely hidden behind my firewall.
Whilst I could obviously get more powerful machines they do the job, are rock solid (both in hardware and software terms), and cost a total of 140GBP for the two of them. Plus they look a damn site nicer than boring old wintel box.
Later on GTA3 and GTA:VC were ported to the PC. This took a lot of work but was worthwhile because the PC is a huge market.
The XBox is 733Mhz PC in a black and green box. Thus porting the game to this platform required relatively little extra work over the PC version. Also the XBox tends to sell to older gamers, who are more likely to want to buy (and be legally allowed to buy) adult titles such as GTA.
The GC architecture is completely different to either the PS2 or the XBox/PC. Whilst it sells in similar numbers to the XBox it is aimed at a younger audience. Older gamers who have GCs usually have at least one of PC/XBox/PS2 as well. Thus it does not make business sense to spend money porting a game (and it would be a big port) to a platform that is unlikely to generate the same level of sales as the currently supported ones.
Just do what most gamers I know did, and buy a PS2 and an XBox as well. That way you get the best of all worlds.
In the UK most players are openly advertised as multi-region. Even Dixons (a big, dumb, high street electronics company - think Circuit City but 100% less technically inclined) put the multi-region 'hacks' on their web site. Given that most people now own TVs that can display NTSC as well as PAL, even people like my mum watch imported DVDs without giving it a second thought.
We used the other method - you know, like hard work and being good at our jobs. But don't let little things like facts get in the way of your ad hominem.
Without the money generated by the City, the UK would have a GDP per capita in same range as Portugal. Whilst it isn't the only area of wealth generation in Britain, it is certainly a vital one.
Really? I am shocked.
That's one hell of an assumption - clearly in Evil One's world it is only possible to get a good job through nepotism. Here's a hint, a willingness to work hard and a modicum of talent will get you further than the right school tie.
Obviously there are sections of the UK that are poor - Wales, Scotland sans Edinburgh, and utter dives like Hull. However this tends to be due to the abject lack of skilled workers available in these areas. People need to realise that there isn't a great need for unskilled labour these days.
Obviously this won't stop the free PC plan failing. People will simply get up and make a cup of tea whenever the advertising appears. Either that or someone will crack the advertising feed so it can be sent to the background/hidden. Never underestimate how ingenious people can be when it comes to getting something for nothing.
I run it on my Ultra 5 - KDE was as slow as EU reform but Blackbox is nice and responsive.
Given that you let the UK test nuclear weapons on the Australian mainland (as well as assorted islands), I'd say it's a bit late to be worrying about radioactive pollution.
If people are having problems then it's likely to be their system that's at fault - not xmms.
The whole system is just a way keeping umemployment figures down anyway. The government has no incentive to fire anyone (union member or otherwise) as, like you said, they'd just end up on the dole. I think I might just flee to Canada ...
Note that when in opposition, the Labour party repeatedly condemned the then Conservative government for allowing this to continue (and rightly so). But as soon as they (Labour) got in to power the back-handers arrived and things got even worse. It's easily as bad as American politians and their 'special interest groups' (read, campaign donations) - only less visible to the general public.
This makes it very unlikely that Linux will ever make headway into the public sector. The UK government (especially the delightful Mr Blair) is in Microsoft's pocket - whenever an IT related decision is to be made, a certain Mr Gates makes a sizable donation to some public sector institution (and probably Blair himself). Plus EDS et al will favour Windows as they lack the talent to build/maintain anything else.
Whilst they may be looking at using Linux, to move the whole organisation across (remember that it's the second largest non-military employer in the world) will take years, if not a decade. That's a lot of time for outside interests to derail the whole process.
In comparison Half-life was a huge rewrite of the Quake I engine by a company that had licensed the code. If that's a mod then GTA:VC is a mod of Burnout 2, because they're both built on top of the Renderware graphics engine.
For what it's worth I concur with those who are suggesting that the kid be taught HTML before being let loose with a WYSIWYG editor. I was doing Z80 assembler by age 11 so I think it's safe to say that a children can learn a simple markup language like HTML. Especially as they'll have the joy of starting their HTML career with a largely standards comliant browser base.
The reason this has occured is because politicians, be they in developing or developed nations, will never solved the problem if it's easier to treat the symptoms. In Thailand the economy is structured such that it is difficult for at least one parent to be at home when their children aren't at school. Fixing this would require either unpopular socialist measures, or difficult restructuring of the economy and labour force. Much easier to simply ban children from being at games cafes late. Of course the kids still won't be with their parents (who are working) but at least the politician has been seen to do something.
Which begs the question - how did they audit them? A full audit has to go all the way down to the metal, otherwise someone could have hidden a backdoor that allows them to alter the results and logs. Hopefully they have fully checked the source code of the compiler used to build OS and software as well, the rumoured backdoor in an early version of Unix is a famous example of why this is necessary.
Regardless of your view on the merits of Open Source Software, it is the only safe and accountable way to build an e-voting system. If even one piece of the system is closed code then you have to assume that it's been comprimised and thus the results have been tampered with.
The democratic process is far too important for security to be left to chance. Either do it properly or don't do it at all.
Note that in the UK at least pretty much all new televisions are widescreen (bar crappy 14" portables). As such people would start to get a bit annoyed if games didn't take advantage of this. Certainly games like GTA/VC and FIFA make good use of the extra width to show peripheral vision and more pitch respectively.
Personally I found the N64 version to be a huge let down. The graphic were mediocre, and lacked the simplistic charm of the SNES/GBA versions. The battle arenas weren't a patch on the original (block fort aside) and the blurry graphics made four player impossible on all but the biggest TV.
Obviously I'm going to by the new game, after all it's Mario Kart, and I have no doubt it will be better than MK64. However I very much doubt it will be as good as the original or the GBA version. The game mechanics just don't seem to work as well in a true 3D world.
This is where those extra mouse buttons come in handy. I've got one of the original MS Intelli-thingy explorers (basically a rebranded Logitech). It has handy thumb buttons on the side for moving backwards and forwards in a browser. It's even less effort than a mouse gesture.
Companies don't spend millions on big iron hardware for fun - they do so because they need them.
Bear in mind that non-frequent flyers aren't that individually important to airlines. Hence that massive disparity in service between coach and non-coach. There isn't a massive economic incentive to give economy class passengers anything over the bare minimum.
The beauty of having been the birthplace the world's most important (according to Weber et al) language is that we don't have to waste time learning any other ones. I believe they even teach it in Switzerland these days