I use the pocketpc version to play Sam and Max on the train:)
I only have a 256mb CF card tho, but I just use the MP3 compression.
- Ender
Lead Monkey Wrangler,
ScummVM
Not really sure about these reporting standards...
on
The Beast of Brussels
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
If you read the related article about the series (IT Myths Update), check out the last paragraph.
Now, I find it more than a little disapointing that they say they 'have a feeling it might be true'. What person writing IT articles doesn't even know basic computer history?
Surely at least SOMEONE at a tech-based news site has heard of Grace Hopper?!? Although most people might remember her for Cobol, almost any book or show on computer history mentions her famous conversation with Howard Aiken after finding a moth stuck in a relay of the Mark II.
Sheesh, either that or they are really strapped for ideas. Mentioning what should be known as one of the most fateful incidents, by one of the most famous people working on one of the most famous computers, as a 'possible truth' is a really bad way to hype a series, IMHO.
The first thing to realise is that the NIPC is no longer an entity. What you really want to call is Homeland Security (dhs.gov under Threats and Protection).
The second thing to realise is that although Charter's 'frontline' staff don't want to hear about it, get in touch with ANY sysadmin there and I guarantee the shit will hit the fan. It's all about actually getting hold of somebody who might actually give a shit about their companies servers. Something Cliff Stoll details very well in that excellent book plugged earlier:)
Google is a good start, and although often somewhat outdated, the list of NOCs at neither is useful (http://puck.nether.net/netops/)
BitTorrent really allows clients to pump the maximum from their upstream and downstream - however I've seen my ISP be as responsive as a./'ed site when something popular comes out on P2P clients... What do you think of trackers providing clients with seed/peer's located closed by network geography?
I personally think of BitTorrent as P2P's Akamai, except open-source. However one thing I have always seen Akamai excel at is using IX peering to reduce load on the ISPs own down/upstream link. I would love to be able to prefer the WAIX, for example, over a possibly equally fast source that is outside of peering and more local resources.
As other people have mentioned, this episode *was* put together as a 'lost episode' on video. Tom Baker, so missing pieces aside it's -good-, and the VHS also came with a copy of the actual script.
People have also mentioned it's kind of a crossover between Dr. Who and Dirk.
Something cute I noticed however was the way the prelude fits it into the 5 Doctors story where he is 'scooped' from punting down the thames with romana.
That episode was made after Shada was abandoned, so they simply borrowed a piece of the unaired episode for it (as Tom was sick)... this footage is actually shown in sequence in the 'lost episode' vhs of course.
The prelude to this episode however tries to heal that little plot hole, which I thought was cute and at least showed somebody with knowledge of the series worked on this.
Source code is available in BuildEngine.zip or from another Build engine tree. You can recompile and make your own engine.[o/obj]
This is mostly a licensing thing, I believe, as the Build engine itself isn't under the GPL while the Duke3D game-specific wrappers, gamecode, etc are.
Actually, no,.cab files used by InstallShield are not -microsoft-.cab files, so cabextract will not work.
That said, I could probably whip up an extractor for it pretty quickly. Except I don't own a copy of NWN, and have no idea what InstallShield version/settings they are using.
There is absolutely no reason that this can't be done. Hey BioWare, send me a copy (heck, send me a sample.cab with the same settings) and I'll whip a native linux installer up for you:)
One of the first proper ARGs was The Beast, an AI marketing kinda game run out of Microsoft (although we had no idea until the very end, it was all very secretive).
I remember getting a really disturbing phonecall at 2am in the morning (the dialling software didn't take timezones into account:) near the end of the game, from an insane Teddy Bear. It was supposed to be a prompt to recognise the sound and revisit one of the earlier game sites as new information was posted there, but it just creeped the hell out of me.
But then again, that's one of the biggest lures of this genre - getting faxs, phonecalls, e-mails... without breaking 'the illusion of the reality'. Eg, a game which - like The Beast - is set in the future has a hard time of keeping the players immersed without accidently breaking the 'immersion' by slipping up regarding methods of communication. That's why the Internet is great for this, as it can be considered a medium that will exist for quite some time - thus providing a base for all kinds of fanciful immersion storylines.
Majestic ran into two problems - one was that is failed miserably at keeping the player immersed. Contact from the game was simply too obvious, there -was- no chance to get spooked. Also it was badly paced.
I'm on the team that build and runs Collective Detective, mentioned in the BBC article (I havn't read the nytimes article). We beat TerraQuest for one of the same reasons Majestic sucked - nobody took into account the Collective factor, that people will play together for fun as opposed to playing alone to win a set goal or prize.
This particually threw Majestic off because they were not adapting to the play of the users. The Beast adapted it's pace, and threw in new elements just to keep players busy and distracted. Majestic just kind of idled, and TerraQuest threw in the towel. It's a new Genre so the main problem is, I think, the lack of previous work to help base something on.
Of course, it also shows that commercialised games are going to run into problems in this regard. The Beast was a small "black ops" group kept under tight secrery at Microsoft. People ran into it just on word of mouth, and because the team was small (two to four people most of the time) there was a lot of freedom to quickly adapt. Majestic, and to an extent TerraQuest, did not have the ability to adapt quickly enough to stay alive. Because, I believe, partly of "Developer Bloat" and partly because the strict commercial structures governed by marketing stiffle this kind of behavior in a conventional environment.
That's why there are several different groupsaround dedicated to reverse engineering old games and rewriting them so people can actually -play- them... and usually on a stupid number of platforms, from PCs to Consoles and PDAs.
Not to mention places like VOGONs (Very Old Games On New Systems) which itself exists just to help people find ways to run said older games on newer OS's (mostly w2k mind you).
I just wish more companies would support efforts like this and release some source to older games OTHER than FPSes. I really appretiate the release of source from ID and everyone else, it's great learning material. But it would be nice if other genre developers also were intrested in preserving their 'art'.
ScummVM, my project, recently obtained the Beneath a Steel Sky source-code from the authors and we're now working off support for that. The difference in this case is that the engine -is- almost pure x86 assembly, so it would be rather a waste of time to GPL... for anything useful to be done, it would need to be mostly reverse engineered anyway. So this just makes it easier for us to do so dirty-room with commented assembly. Releasing it to a small dedicated group may be more appropriate in cases like this, to prevent splintering and stagnation, until the reimplementation is truely started.
Standard Disclaimer: It's 8:45am, I havn't had any coffee yet. Any spelling or grammatical errors are henceforth claimed as artistic license. It's art, damn it!
At least there's a Jaycar in Northbridge for generic electronics stuff, even if it isn't surplus. A few years ago Jaycar used to also carry odd surplus stuff in their mail-order catalogs.. not recently tho:(
I really get sick of people with the assumption that -everyone- has a credit card. Strangely, they almost always seem to be americans who forget that the rest of the world is somehow on another mystical plane of existance.
Forgetting my own personal Third and Fourth rules of MMOG Game Development ("multicontinental server deployment? Good luck" and "Lag is Everywhere") for a second, Credit Cards are nowhere near thrown around as widely in many countries.
Although they are very useful for online purchases, do no assume they are as omnipresent in the majorify of the world, versus the major population centers of America.
Not to mention the large number of kids under-18 who would be intrested in playing and whose parents are not cooperative in letting them use their credit card to sign up. And I'm not actually aware of any country other than America that allows under-18's even to get prepaid Visa/Mastercards... quite a few won't even allow a secondary+ card of a parent/guardian to be issued to a minor - anyone know otherwise?
Same thing happened to me, with a Toshiba. The keyboard made it out fine tho, just the LCD was destroyed horribly. And the harddrive is slowly failing - annoyingly the only partition that still works is my small W2K partition - the linux stuff is all trashed:p
DreamPark and gaming
on
Ask Larry Niven
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I've generally found that most people recognise RingWorld, but few people have heard of my favorite series - Dream Park (it's very hard to find).
Gaming technology, although holography isn't at the stage yet, is constantly moving towards more realism. And trends in online gaming and MMORPG's are setting the mentality. However what are your opinions on the social feasibility of something like DP ever becoming a reality, given the rapid movement away from traditional GMs and social non-computer RPG'ing? Would people just prefer to stay at home fully virtual rather than participating in an event with other actual physical people?
And there are many regional IXes, besides things like the AUSBONE. WAIX, the Western Australian IX, is a good example of this done fairly well. Almost every ISP with a presence in the state has a presence, as well as several other big transport providers (Singtel, Comindico, etc).
There are a few main problems with Australian peering. First, certain big, nasty corporations profit too much from providing rip-off transit services by refusing to peer with IXs. Secondly, said companies have really stupidly designed broadband solutions involving tunneling most traffic interstate -before- providing endpoint connectivity. Thus local peering is impossible thanks to stupid design. Minus one for incentive.
The second issue is one that this will hopefully help address - BGP size. Unfortunatly, Australian BGP feeds are notoriously poluted thanks to various hacks and tricks in our national transit networks. This causes everyone a headache, as keeping a full BGP feed on a router (for both routing -and- accounting puposes) is expensive. Route tables are pretty memory hungry, and most backbone infrastructure is still driven by Cisco routers. Extra ram is not cheap, assuming you have the grunt to hold the table anyway.
The third problem is consumer oriented. Australian ISPs -have- to make money currently because Transit is expensive here. Even with this change, transit will still be far more expensive than in most other places in the world. While solutions to this are being worked on (new links and companies trying to bypass the traditional monopolies), this means Australian consumers are almost always traffic capped and either shaped or billed after a 3-6gb allowance.
It's not 1gb, but it's still a pain. Now, the problem is that in Western Australia we are lucky. Most ISPs give free access to the WAIX for their customers. This is fast and a major cost cutter for everybody. The IX has a lot of excellent resources - mirrors abound for everything.
However this does not happen in most other states. Or to a limited extent. Part of this is the age-old ingress/egress problem (just because a traceroute going OUT, eg a http -request- goes via a IX, the charged incoming data usually won't) presenting both confusion and billing problems. This leads to the second part, where most IXs, eg AusBone, do -not have a well maintained list of freely peered resources available-.
Billing is a pain for ISPs in other states as it's very hard to tell if something is freely available, and providing this as a marketing ploy (technically IXes are good... netadmins will be happy, finance may be happy - but given the outlay for ram for BGP, etc, -somebody- has to convince marketing it's a good idea:) is difficult at best. The WAIX has several fairly well maintained lists of resources, many which local ISPs list on their websites. This provides user incentive.
AND A MAJOR GROWTH POINT. Users, if provided with a list of resources available at a freely exchanging peering point, are more likely to try and convince their providers to participate. It's simply.
... and that is pretty much Australian Internet Exchanges 101... from my uneducated point of view of course:)
Load of crap, I doubt anybody is spamming slashdot for a book this old.
It is simply the BEST look at the insides and development of NT around. The article on Paul's site is dry and doesn't even remotely express the truth behind NT.
For example, ShowStopper reveils the amount of disgust the NT team (or at least Daves side) -really- felt towards Win16 compatability. The canned articles says how 'easy it was' and what a 'good idea' it was.
Show stopper explains how rejected it REALLY was from most of the team and how much of a complete and utter headache it was to implement the Windows 'personality'.
The articles linked are not bad when talking about the latest version of Windows, but it's very much preaching and definatly doesn't tell much about how NT started out and it's effect on Microsoft as a whole.
The whole GUI thing was actually pretty much a laugh to the DEC people Dave dragged over with him, and the practice of 'eating dogfood' at Microsoft was really first imposed by Dave himself. And there's intresting background on the IBM/MS OS/2 debacle (Windows NT was originally going to be OS/2 NT!) and how Windows very nearly didn't have anything approaching usable graphics until Michael Abrash himself came in with his 'new trick' that actually allowed NT to show graphics at a usable rate and was the first step to removing the console.
Anyway, I don't want to do a book review here, let's just say that the above articles are far too preachy, the book shows the REAL story and I recommend it. And I'm sure that's why the other three people have plugged it also:)
I first remember looking at the site and reading about this project at least four years ago. While it's something going ahead, and four years is probably an acceptable time for developing the technology to create such a world (the technology has been demonstrated at various trade shows many times).... I can't help but wonder what/if the final result will look like.
I could easily manage a production plauged by the same problems as Duke Nukem Forever - constantly changing base platforms to keep up with advances in technology. And given the huge leap in CG capabilities over the last four years, I also have to wonder how the Rama team has dealt with it. Hmm, a interview with Morgan's crew would be intresting:)
This depends on whether they follow the.mil registration RFC (1956) - if not, then that's what you get for violating RFCs!
Just having access to an admin interface does not imply it's automatic. All registrations should still have to be accepted by the hostmaster first. As the RFC says, security implications are not discussed:)
Seriously, you just have to take a look at EBay prices of classic LucasArts/Films/Games games before and after ScummVM supports them. Also look at how quickly the LEC store and Amazon start selling out of packs when ScummVM releases a new version.
They're being incredibly naive. ScummVM is selling games for them... it may bump up the piracy a little bit, but they are still overall selling more copies of their classics than ever before.
Seriously, I can probably talk about this now the site has been announced. The original 'proposal' from LucasArts to deal with our 'problem', was (this was suggested to us about 7 months ago) to be hosted by 'their upcoming mod site' - what is now known as LucasFiles..
This would apparantly have solved the legal issues they have with us (which they have never really explained or clarified except in vauge terms).
But basically, all LucasFiles is supposed to be is a host for FPS mods. Big whoop. The LucasFiles people didn't want us (I gather), and the whole idea was completely torpedoed when I pointed out that moving from SourceForge would require work on their part - eg, we'd need equivilant services like CVS ecetra.
Anyway. It was suggested, it never worked.
As for sharing technical details, the last time I asked their response was "We're not intrested in doing so at this time, maybe we can discuss it MUCH (their verbal emphisis) later."
Slashdot Mirror
Of course you could just read the ScummVM irc logs and see the link. I think Q posted it in the forums too. :P
- Ender
ScummVM Project Leader
I use the pocketpc version to play Sam and Max on the train :)
I only have a 256mb CF card tho, but I just use the MP3 compression.
- Ender
Lead Monkey Wrangler,
ScummVM
If you read the related article about the series (IT Myths Update), check out the last paragraph.
Now, I find it more than a little disapointing that they say they 'have a feeling it might be true'. What person writing IT articles doesn't even know basic computer history?
Surely at least SOMEONE at a tech-based news site has heard of Grace Hopper?!? Although most people might remember her for Cobol, almost any book or show on computer history mentions her famous conversation with Howard Aiken after finding a moth stuck in a relay of the Mark II.
Sheesh, either that or they are really strapped for ideas. Mentioning what should be known as one of the most fateful incidents, by one of the most famous people working on one of the most famous computers, as a 'possible truth' is a really bad way to hype a series, IMHO.
The first thing to realise is that the NIPC is no longer an entity. What you really want to call is Homeland Security (dhs.gov under Threats and Protection). The second thing to realise is that although Charter's 'frontline' staff don't want to hear about it, get in touch with ANY sysadmin there and I guarantee the shit will hit the fan. It's all about actually getting hold of somebody who might actually give a shit about their companies servers. Something Cliff Stoll details very well in that excellent book plugged earlier :)
Google is a good start, and although often somewhat outdated, the list of NOCs at neither is useful (http://puck.nether.net/netops/)
BitTorrent really allows clients to pump the maximum from their upstream and downstream - however I've seen my ISP be as responsive as a ./'ed site when something popular comes out on P2P clients... What do you think of trackers providing clients with seed/peer's located closed by network geography?
I personally think of BitTorrent as P2P's Akamai, except open-source. However one thing I have always seen Akamai excel at is using IX peering to reduce load on the ISPs own down/upstream link. I would love to be able to prefer the WAIX, for example, over a possibly equally fast source that is outside of peering and more local resources.
As other people have mentioned, this episode *was* put together as a 'lost episode' on video. Tom Baker, so missing pieces aside it's -good-, and the VHS also came with a copy of the actual script.
People have also mentioned it's kind of a crossover between Dr. Who and Dirk.
Something cute I noticed however was the way the prelude fits it into the 5 Doctors story where he is 'scooped' from punting down the thames with romana.
That episode was made after Shada was abandoned, so they simply borrowed a piece of the unaired episode for it (as Tom was sick)... this footage is actually shown in sequence in the 'lost episode' vhs of course.
The prelude to this episode however tries to heal that little plot hole, which I thought was cute and at least showed somebody with knowledge of the series worked on this.
Source code is available in BuildEngine.zip or from another Build engine tree. You can recompile and make your own engine.[o/obj]
This is mostly a licensing thing, I believe, as the Build engine itself isn't under the GPL while the Duke3D game-specific wrappers, gamecode, etc are.
And as a note, no, ScummVM will -not- be adding support for Duke3d. :)
I'm sure somebody would ask eventually. If I do do any Duke3D stuff myself, news will probably be posted on my other site - www.quakesrc.org
Ahem.
- Ender,
MIA Head Monkey, ScummVM
Dead Founder/Webmaster, QuakeSRC
There's nothing to stop them linking to an 'unsupported 3rd party installer' tho, right?
Actually, no, .cab files used by InstallShield are not -microsoft- .cab files, so cabextract will not work.
.cab with the same settings) and I'll whip a native linux installer up for you :)
That said, I could probably whip up an extractor for it pretty quickly. Except I don't own a copy of NWN, and have no idea what InstallShield version/settings they are using.
There is absolutely no reason that this can't be done. Hey BioWare, send me a copy (heck, send me a sample
One of the first proper ARGs was The Beast, an AI marketing kinda game run out of Microsoft (although we had no idea until the very end, it was all very secretive).
:) near the end of the game, from an insane Teddy Bear. It was supposed to be a prompt to recognise the sound and revisit one of the earlier game sites as new information was posted there, but it just creeped the hell out of me.
I remember getting a really disturbing phonecall at 2am in the morning (the dialling software didn't take timezones into account
But then again, that's one of the biggest lures of this genre - getting faxs, phonecalls, e-mails... without breaking 'the illusion of the reality'. Eg, a game which - like The Beast - is set in the future has a hard time of keeping the players immersed without accidently breaking the 'immersion' by slipping up regarding methods of communication. That's why the Internet is great for this, as it can be considered a medium that will exist for quite some time - thus providing a base for all kinds of fanciful immersion storylines.
Majestic ran into two problems - one was that is failed miserably at keeping the player immersed. Contact from the game was simply too obvious, there -was- no chance to get spooked. Also it was badly paced.
I'm on the team that build and runs Collective Detective, mentioned in the BBC article (I havn't read the nytimes article). We beat TerraQuest for one of the same reasons Majestic sucked - nobody took into account the Collective factor, that people will play together for fun as opposed to playing alone to win a set goal or prize.
This particually threw Majestic off because they were not adapting to the play of the users. The Beast adapted it's pace, and threw in new elements just to keep players busy and distracted. Majestic just kind of idled, and TerraQuest threw in the towel. It's a new Genre so the main problem is, I think, the lack of previous work to help base something on.
Of course, it also shows that commercialised games are going to run into problems in this regard. The Beast was a small "black ops" group kept under tight secrery at Microsoft. People ran into it just on word of mouth, and because the team was small (two to four people most of the time) there was a lot of freedom to quickly adapt. Majestic, and to an extent TerraQuest, did not have the ability to adapt quickly enough to stay alive. Because, I believe, partly of "Developer Bloat" and partly because the strict commercial structures governed by marketing stiffle this kind of behavior in a conventional environment.
- Ender
Developer Dude, Collective Detective
Vogons should be vogons.zetafleet.com, not .org!
That's why there are several different groups around dedicated to reverse engineering old games and rewriting them so people can actually -play- them... and usually on a stupid number of platforms, from PCs to Consoles and PDAs.
Not to mention places like VOGONs (Very Old Games On New Systems) which itself exists just to help people find ways to run said older games on newer OS's (mostly w2k mind you).
I just wish more companies would support efforts like this and release some source to older games OTHER than FPSes. I really appretiate the release of source from ID and everyone else, it's great learning material. But it would be nice if other genre developers also were intrested in preserving their 'art'.
ScummVM, my project, recently obtained the Beneath a Steel Sky source-code from the authors and we're now working off support for that. The difference in this case is that the engine -is- almost pure x86 assembly, so it would be rather a waste of time to GPL... for anything useful to be done, it would need to be mostly reverse engineered anyway. So this just makes it easier for us to do so dirty-room with commented assembly. Releasing it to a small dedicated group may be more appropriate in cases like this, to prevent splintering and stagnation, until the reimplementation is truely started.
Anyway.
- Ender
Boss Monkey: ScummVM
Founder: QuakeSrc
Standard Disclaimer: It's 8:45am, I havn't had any coffee yet. Any spelling or grammatical errors are henceforth claimed as artistic license. It's art, damn it!
At least there's a Jaycar in Northbridge for generic electronics stuff, even if it isn't surplus. A few years ago Jaycar used to also carry odd surplus stuff in their mail-order catalogs.. not recently tho :(
This Active place sounds great, I wanna go. *g*
I really get sick of people with the assumption that -everyone- has a credit card. Strangely, they almost always seem to be americans who forget that the rest of the world is somehow on another mystical plane of existance.
Forgetting my own personal Third and Fourth rules of MMOG Game Development ("multicontinental server deployment? Good luck" and "Lag is Everywhere") for a second, Credit Cards are nowhere near thrown around as widely in many countries.
Although they are very useful for online purchases, do no assume they are as omnipresent in the majorify of the world, versus the major population centers of America.
Not to mention the large number of kids under-18 who would be intrested in playing and whose parents are not cooperative in letting them use their credit card to sign up. And I'm not actually aware of any country other than America that allows under-18's even to get prepaid Visa/Mastercards... quite a few won't even allow a secondary+ card of a parent/guardian to be issued to a minor - anyone know otherwise?
Same thing happened to me, with a Toshiba. The keyboard made it out fine tho, just the LCD was destroyed horribly. And the harddrive is slowly failing - annoyingly the only partition that still works is my small W2K partition - the linux stuff is all trashed :p
I've generally found that most people recognise RingWorld, but few people have heard of my favorite series - Dream Park (it's very hard to find).
Gaming technology, although holography isn't at the stage yet, is constantly moving towards more realism. And trends in online gaming and MMORPG's are setting the mentality. However what are your opinions on the social feasibility of something like DP ever becoming a reality, given the rapid movement away from traditional GMs and social non-computer RPG'ing? Would people just prefer to stay at home fully virtual rather than participating in an event with other actual physical people?
Oops, yeah. :)
It with my birthday yesterday, brain isn't up to speed on the difference between a day and a month yet. *g*
And there are many regional IXes, besides things like the AUSBONE. WAIX, the Western Australian IX, is a good example of this done fairly well. Almost every ISP with a presence in the state has a presence, as well as several other big transport providers (Singtel, Comindico, etc).
:) is difficult at best. The WAIX has several fairly well maintained lists of resources, many which local ISPs list on their websites. This provides user incentive.
... and that is pretty much Australian Internet Exchanges 101... from my uneducated point of view of course :)
There are a few main problems with Australian peering. First, certain big, nasty corporations profit too much from providing rip-off transit services by refusing to peer with IXs. Secondly, said companies have really stupidly designed broadband solutions involving tunneling most traffic interstate -before- providing endpoint connectivity. Thus local peering is impossible thanks to stupid design. Minus one for incentive.
The second issue is one that this will hopefully help address - BGP size. Unfortunatly, Australian BGP feeds are notoriously poluted thanks to various hacks and tricks in our national transit networks. This causes everyone a headache, as keeping a full BGP feed on a router (for both routing -and- accounting puposes) is expensive. Route tables are pretty memory hungry, and most backbone infrastructure is still driven by Cisco routers. Extra ram is not cheap, assuming you have the grunt to hold the table anyway.
The third problem is consumer oriented. Australian ISPs -have- to make money currently because Transit is expensive here. Even with this change, transit will still be far more expensive than in most other places in the world. While solutions to this are being worked on (new links and companies trying to bypass the traditional monopolies), this means Australian consumers are almost always traffic capped and either shaped or billed after a 3-6gb allowance.
It's not 1gb, but it's still a pain. Now, the problem is that in Western Australia we are lucky. Most ISPs give free access to the WAIX for their customers. This is fast and a major cost cutter for everybody. The IX has a lot of excellent resources - mirrors abound for everything.
However this does not happen in most other states. Or to a limited extent. Part of this is the age-old ingress/egress problem (just because a traceroute going OUT, eg a http -request- goes via a IX, the charged incoming data usually won't) presenting both confusion and billing problems. This leads to the second part, where most IXs, eg AusBone, do -not have a well maintained list of freely peered resources available-.
Billing is a pain for ISPs in other states as it's very hard to tell if something is freely available, and providing this as a marketing ploy (technically IXes are good... netadmins will be happy, finance may be happy - but given the outlay for ram for BGP, etc, -somebody- has to convince marketing it's a good idea
AND A MAJOR GROWTH POINT. Users, if provided with a list of resources available at a freely exchanging peering point, are more likely to try and convince their providers to participate. It's simply.
Load of crap, I doubt anybody is spamming slashdot for a book this old.
:)
It is simply the BEST look at the insides and development of NT around. The article on Paul's site is dry and doesn't even remotely express the truth behind NT.
For example, ShowStopper reveils the amount of disgust the NT team (or at least Daves side) -really- felt towards Win16 compatability. The canned articles says how 'easy it was' and what a 'good idea' it was.
Show stopper explains how rejected it REALLY was from most of the team and how much of a complete and utter headache it was to implement the Windows 'personality'.
The articles linked are not bad when talking about the latest version of Windows, but it's very much preaching and definatly doesn't tell much about how NT started out and it's effect on Microsoft as a whole.
The whole GUI thing was actually pretty much a laugh to the DEC people Dave dragged over with him, and the practice of 'eating dogfood' at Microsoft was really first imposed by Dave himself. And there's intresting background on the IBM/MS OS/2 debacle (Windows NT was originally going to be OS/2 NT!) and how Windows very nearly didn't have anything approaching usable graphics until Michael Abrash himself came in with his 'new trick' that actually allowed NT to show graphics at a usable rate and was the first step to removing the console.
Anyway, I don't want to do a book review here, let's just say that the above articles are far too preachy, the book shows the REAL story and I recommend it. And I'm sure that's why the other three people have plugged it also
I first remember looking at the site and reading about this project at least four years ago. While it's something going ahead, and four years is probably an acceptable time for developing the technology to create such a world (the technology has been demonstrated at various trade shows many times).... I can't help but wonder what/if the final result will look like.
:)
I could easily manage a production plauged by the same problems as Duke Nukem Forever - constantly changing base platforms to keep up with advances in technology. And given the huge leap in CG capabilities over the last four years, I also have to wonder how the Rama team has dealt with it. Hmm, a interview with Morgan's crew would be intresting
This depends on whether they follow the .mil registration RFC (1956) - if not, then that's what you get for violating RFCs!
Just having access to an admin interface does not imply it's automatic. All registrations should still have to be accepted by the hostmaster first. As the RFC says, security implications are not discussed :)
Well, I warned them. :P
Seriously, you just have to take a look at EBay prices of classic LucasArts/Films/Games games before and after ScummVM supports them. Also look at how quickly the LEC store and Amazon start selling out of packs when ScummVM releases a new version.
They're being incredibly naive. ScummVM is selling games for them... it may bump up the piracy a little bit, but they are still overall selling more copies of their classics than ever before.
You know as well as I how many times LEC's 'concept' for the site changed, Jake :)
:)
:)
This particular discussion was in the middle of one of those wonderful "but why can't we do this?" phases. You remember those?
- Ender
ender@scummvm.org
luser, lucasfiles.com
channel founder, #scummvm
hahahaahahaha. Yeah, right. Ahem. Pesimism mode, off. :)
Seriously, I can probably talk about this now the site has been announced. The original 'proposal' from LucasArts to deal with our 'problem', was (this was suggested to us about 7 months ago) to be hosted by 'their upcoming mod site' - what is now known as LucasFiles..
This would apparantly have solved the legal issues they have with us (which they have never really explained or clarified except in vauge terms).
But basically, all LucasFiles is supposed to be is a host for FPS mods. Big whoop. The LucasFiles people didn't want us (I gather), and the whole idea was completely torpedoed when I pointed out that moving from SourceForge would require work on their part - eg, we'd need equivilant services like CVS ecetra.
Anyway. It was suggested, it never worked.
As for sharing technical details, the last time I asked their response was "We're not intrested in doing so at this time, maybe we can discuss it MUCH (their verbal emphisis) later."
- Ender
Head Monkey Wrangler,
ScummVM