I'm still using the keyboard that came with my Compaq Presario back in 2001. The media control keys work fine with a little setup in GNOME, and that's a convenience I'll look for in my next keyboard.
I wish the other function keys worked. They show up as a separate device in the USB tree, and aren't trapped as part of the keyboard, for whatever reason.
A friend of mine was called to the scene of an accident where someone had plowed his car into a telephone pole. When they asked what happened, the guy gave him the whole story.
The driver was a psychologist. He sat in a chair all day, listening to people talk about their problems, trying to help them solve it. Apparently, this is very stressful. After work, he sometimes went out and ran down mailboxes. He kept a log of the addresses he'd hit, and always sent a check for more than enough to replace the mailbox. He kept the log in the glove compartment.
The officers checked the glove compartment, and the log was there. They followed up, asking the people on the list if they wanted to press charges. None of them did, so the psychologist got off with a citation for reckless driving.
I vividly remember the last time one of my parents put soap in my mouth. It tasted disgusting, and I later got in trouble for spitting into the toilet.
Why on earth would anyone want to make a diet of it?
You probably didn't break it down into chunks that she (or the reader) could understand. Even if you did, it would take too much space, since the average paper reader doesn't know Windows from computer monitor.
The reporter had probably already committed a lot of time to building the article, and was on a deadline. She didn't have the sense to talk to PR people, and the.NET guy probably parroted the stuff he read on Microsoft's website.
One of the problems with doing games based on historical contexts is that, like it or not, events happened a certain way. No retrying until you win. Purists--and there are a lot of outspoken purists when it comes to religion--hate it when the apparent outcome of a historical event can be changed by human interaction.
However, I can see games being written that take religious values into account, and set the player's goals in line with those values. I'd probably even play a few.
Is it binary operations implemented with semiconductors? Is it the use of a monolithic computation device to perform generic tasks?
Or is it something more nebulous, like the ability for an individual's performance to be improved through the use of a computer? The use of an extremely configurable tool to aid in specific tasks with real-world results?
Well, QuakeWorld servers only sent clients data on entities that are nearby. But the protocol is such that you can have huge numbers of entities constantly moving, and it's not much of an issue, even over 33.6kbps dial-up. (We hadn't exactly hit 56k at the time...the V.90 standard hadn't been finalized, and modems were constantly being marketed as "v.90/KFlex" or "v.90/X2", meaning they supported either the KFlex or X2 standard, neither of which turned out to be completely compatible what we know today as v.90. So 33.6kbps was the least common denominator between the two.)
The Quake engine didn't (and doesn't) support large, open areas well, anyway. On a P75, you could comfortably have areas the equivalent of about 50 yards, cubed. More than that, and traversing the BSP tree for the map became something developers didn't like to think about.
No, the biggest concern in QW when it came to supporting a minimum number of players was the number of starting positions. If there weren't enough multiplayer start positions, telegragging, or the killing of a player by being in the way when another player spawned, became a severe issue. The most notable example in memory for me was an occasion when I accidentally tried to spawn 15 bots in a map with only one start position; it was intended to be a single player map, and the the start position became the source of a veritable fountain of gibs.
The stock Quake server, when running in dedicated mode, supported 16 players. Before the Reaper bot, very few community map developers had any way of getting more than four to six players in a test map at one time, so they developed their maps with that as a target. As a result, there were very few DM maps that comfortably supported more than eight players, and, last I checked, less than a hundred maps designed for as many as 16 players. I remember less than ten maps that could support QuakeWorld's maximum of 64 players. And in practice, even id's server rarely got that many players.
Huh. I didn't realize they wouldn't work in the full version.
Last Friday, I was at a LAN party with between 15 and 20 people playing the BF2 demo. But it still wasn't enough...I'd grown attached to having 30 players on a team, thanks to Battlefield: Desert Combat.
Having 30 bots on the enemy team makes the game a lot more fun. If, for some reason, you have to bail out over the enemy base, make sure you've got your SAW with you; there'll be no shortage of targets.
Since the days when the term "campaign contribution" was first coined, businesses have used government to help shape their environment, allowing them to expand. So, as far as law history goes, this is really nothing new.
With the clash between businesses, copyrights, technology and the consumer, however, we've finally hit a point where a large segment of a voting populace can feel where business policy is pushing against what they want to do. Currently, that populace is indifferent enough for more and more legislation to get passed, but that's not going to continue indefinitly.
During the 60s, a lot of things were illegal, yet widely practiced among the western youth. As those same people became more influential, some of those laws lost potency, either through being repealed, or simply being unenforced. Most notably, laws regulating various sexual behaviors.
More recently, with the VCR, it became easy and cheap to accomplish illegal activities such as record a television program and make copies for your friends. While that's probably still illegal, when was the last time you heard of someone getting in trouble for sharing the taped pilot episode of the latest series on SciFi?
I think we're going to see the same sort of revolution with digital technology and the Internet. As long as the underlying platforms don't become illegal, the activities performed on them will become less illegal. Broadband has already passed the test. Remember when copyright holders cried fowl over high speed internet to the home? To the best of my knowledge, broadband is still legal in all its forms. P2P hasn't been completely tested yet, but it's on the home stretch. And once it passes, any P2P activity that can't effectively be argued against on a moral ground will gradually reach the same level of acceptability as sharing that taped pilot episode.
With the appropriate map, QuakeWorld ran fine with up to 64 players on a machine with less than 128MB of physical RAM, and 2MB of video RAM. So a high number of players shouldn't be an issue in a properly-designed system.
Unless each player is going to have a different skin, you can reuse the same piece of video RAM for a lot of the different player models. Heck, shaders can probably be used to reduce the requirements even further, while enhancing the model's detail level.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm still using the keyboard that came with my Compaq Presario back in 2001. The media control keys work fine with a little setup in GNOME, and that's a convenience I'll look for in my next keyboard.
I wish the other function keys worked. They show up as a separate device in the USB tree, and aren't trapped as part of the keyboard, for whatever reason.
I love the numeric keypad. It's too bad the damn thing has problems with PuTTY.
Here's a story from the other side of the pond.
A friend of mine was called to the scene of an accident where someone had plowed his car into a telephone pole. When they asked what happened, the guy gave him the whole story.
The driver was a psychologist. He sat in a chair all day, listening to people talk about their problems, trying to help them solve it. Apparently, this is very stressful. After work, he sometimes went out and ran down mailboxes. He kept a log of the addresses he'd hit, and always sent a check for more than enough to replace the mailbox. He kept the log in the glove compartment.
The officers checked the glove compartment, and the log was there. They followed up, asking the people on the list if they wanted to press charges. None of them did, so the psychologist got off with a citation for reckless driving.
Most likely, the second post simply reads, "For now."
I vividly remember the last time one of my parents put soap in my mouth. It tasted disgusting, and I later got in trouble for spitting into the toilet.
Why on earth would anyone want to make a diet of it?
My grandparents are different...they get me to fix their scanner, then turn around and print copies of family photos at 300dpi on plain paper.
Print-head-in-printer has been around for a long time. The advance they've made is using photolithography for more of the construction process.
You probably didn't break it down into chunks that she (or the reader) could understand. Even if you did, it would take too much space, since the average paper reader doesn't know Windows from computer monitor.
.NET guy probably parroted the stuff he read on Microsoft's website.
The reporter had probably already committed a lot of time to building the article, and was on a deadline. She didn't have the sense to talk to PR people, and the
I often wish I was old enough to have experienced those days. I feel like I missed out on an exciting period.
I didn't realize anyone here liked SCO UNIX.
(And before someone get's a +3 Funny, Linux doesn't count.)
One of the problems with doing games based on historical contexts is that, like it or not, events happened a certain way. No retrying until you win. Purists--and there are a lot of outspoken purists when it comes to religion--hate it when the apparent outcome of a historical event can be changed by human interaction.
However, I can see games being written that take religious values into account, and set the player's goals in line with those values. I'd probably even play a few.
...What is conventional computing?
Is it binary operations implemented with semiconductors? Is it the use of a monolithic computation device to perform generic tasks?
Or is it something more nebulous, like the ability for an individual's performance to be improved through the use of a computer? The use of an extremely configurable tool to aid in specific tasks with real-world results?
I'm all linux here at the office.
Oh, come one now. Don't tease us.
I take three prescribed medications, and listen to Amiga music. Does that count?
You know very well we've always been at war. And we'll always be at war.
A sumpercomputer? Like this one?
Good point. It's just not the same if you're not looking at the raw MPEG binary data.
with nuances more intricate than any xfree86 config file
Wow. You have no idea how much you've raised my respect for these things. Cognitive dissonance...what a feeling.
Well, QuakeWorld servers only sent clients data on entities that are nearby. But the protocol is such that you can have huge numbers of entities constantly moving, and it's not much of an issue, even over 33.6kbps dial-up. (We hadn't exactly hit 56k at the time...the V.90 standard hadn't been finalized, and modems were constantly being marketed as "v.90/KFlex" or "v.90/X2", meaning they supported either the KFlex or X2 standard, neither of which turned out to be completely compatible what we know today as v.90. So 33.6kbps was the least common denominator between the two.)
The Quake engine didn't (and doesn't) support large, open areas well, anyway. On a P75, you could comfortably have areas the equivalent of about 50 yards, cubed. More than that, and traversing the BSP tree for the map became something developers didn't like to think about.
No, the biggest concern in QW when it came to supporting a minimum number of players was the number of starting positions. If there weren't enough multiplayer start positions, telegragging, or the killing of a player by being in the way when another player spawned, became a severe issue. The most notable example in memory for me was an occasion when I accidentally tried to spawn 15 bots in a map with only one start position; it was intended to be a single player map, and the the start position became the source of a veritable fountain of gibs.
The stock Quake server, when running in dedicated mode, supported 16 players. Before the Reaper bot, very few community map developers had any way of getting more than four to six players in a test map at one time, so they developed their maps with that as a target. As a result, there were very few DM maps that comfortably supported more than eight players, and, last I checked, less than a hundred maps designed for as many as 16 players. I remember less than ten maps that could support QuakeWorld's maximum of 64 players. And in practice, even id's server rarely got that many players.
Huh. I didn't realize they wouldn't work in the full version.
Last Friday, I was at a LAN party with between 15 and 20 people playing the BF2 demo. But it still wasn't enough...I'd grown attached to having 30 players on a team, thanks to Battlefield: Desert Combat.
Having 30 bots on the enemy team makes the game a lot more fun. If, for some reason, you have to bail out over the enemy base, make sure you've got your SAW with you; there'll be no shortage of targets.
Since the days when the term "campaign contribution" was first coined, businesses have used government to help shape their environment, allowing them to expand. So, as far as law history goes, this is really nothing new.
With the clash between businesses, copyrights, technology and the consumer, however, we've finally hit a point where a large segment of a voting populace can feel where business policy is pushing against what they want to do. Currently, that populace is indifferent enough for more and more legislation to get passed, but that's not going to continue indefinitly.
During the 60s, a lot of things were illegal, yet widely practiced among the western youth. As those same people became more influential, some of those laws lost potency, either through being repealed, or simply being unenforced. Most notably, laws regulating various sexual behaviors.
More recently, with the VCR, it became easy and cheap to accomplish illegal activities such as record a television program and make copies for your friends. While that's probably still illegal, when was the last time you heard of someone getting in trouble for sharing the taped pilot episode of the latest series on SciFi?
I think we're going to see the same sort of revolution with digital technology and the Internet. As long as the underlying platforms don't become illegal, the activities performed on them will become less illegal. Broadband has already passed the test. Remember when copyright holders cried fowl over high speed internet to the home? To the best of my knowledge, broadband is still legal in all its forms. P2P hasn't been completely tested yet, but it's on the home stretch. And once it passes, any P2P activity that can't effectively be argued against on a moral ground will gradually reach the same level of acceptability as sharing that taped pilot episode.
You never learned to enjoy playing against 15 skill 0 Reaper Bots in a map designed for 4-8 players, did you?
:)
Crowd control can be fun.
With the appropriate map, QuakeWorld ran fine with up to 64 players on a machine with less than 128MB of physical RAM, and 2MB of video RAM. So a high number of players shouldn't be an issue in a properly-designed system.
Unless each player is going to have a different skin, you can reuse the same piece of video RAM for a lot of the different player models. Heck, shaders can probably be used to reduce the requirements even further, while enhancing the model's detail level.
Worse, they're going to canonize this infamous RvB line:
"Shotgun!"
"Shotgun's Lap!"