I read once (think it was the Salon.com article) that the Cubans hada tendency to fuck their readouts up, i.e. plugging in the patch cable for a normal gov broadcast and what not...
One problem with your theory... the numbers stations broadcasts in the US have been DF'ed (direction finding) to facilities owned and operated by the national security organs of one Uncle Sam.
This Fas.orgpage on the Warrenton Training Center has an interesting suggestion, one which I've never seen before or even considered when I've briefly read about such shortwave stations in the past:
The numbers *aren't* the message anymore.
In other words, the CIA/NSA/DoD/etc. have abandoned using one-time pad encrypted ciphertext spoken aloud (although less sophisticated operations, like Cuban numbers stations, likely still do), but use the vocal numbers as beacon to tune reception of the actual enciphered data: "white noise" that occurs over an otherwise clean transmission, that's probably a digitally-added signal that carries the actual message.
Can anyone with a shortwave receiver who actually has listened to US (not foreign, as I doubt they bother to do this, although the Taiwanese subterfuge mentioned in the NPR broadcast is amusing) numbers station transmissions verify that the "noise" could constitute another encrypted signal?
And they say the NSA has stopped innovating now that everything's gone fiber optic;) Either way, it's an interesting theory...
Well, we did steal (fighting a war to take territory is considered theft, despite the victor's claims to the contrary...) a huge chunk of territory from Mexico in the US-Mexican war in the 19th century...
Hardly. This statement is indicative of the way most Americans completely misunderstand Russian culture and their world outlook.
NATO was formed *before* the Warsaw Pact, the US detonated nuclear devices before the Soviets (and even used them militarily, something the Russians have never done).
Russia fears the West because of the numerous incursions over their long history by European invaders (the Teutons, and more recently the two World Wars). They had horrible, horrible losses to the '41-45 German invasion, so after the war they wanted to ensure this could never, ever, happen again... hence the puppet states along their border and the partitioning of Germany. The Americans couldn't understand their concerns, although ironically enough, Winston Churchill did and even privately agreed to it with Stalin (sort of partitioning the world itself into security zones).
The Soviets were never seriously interested in "World Conquest", any more than America ever has been.
Matt Matthews put together an article for LinuxGames examining the drivers, including benchmarks. I'll go ahead and post his conclusion here for those who like to jump to the end:
These new drivers from NVIDIA are really quite remarkable. While the stability is still not perfect (as noted by crashes of Q3A after changing resolution or graphics settings, as well as other glitches), the performance is fantastic. At first glance, these drivers seems to be nearly as fast (if not faster) than the Windows drivers on comparable hardware. (We'll be taking the time to get some results to see if this is indeed true later this week, so stay tuned.)
But, and as a Linux user I must mention this, the drivers are not open source as with the drivers for 3dfx, ATI, and Matrox cards. Further, they don't use the DRI as developed by Precision Insight and incorporated into XFree86 4.0. Among other things, this means that when XFree86 changes slightly or when a bug is discovered, users of these drivers may be left waiting for NVIDIA to release a fix. While that's not a show-stopping limitation, it is worth noting. Further, the only drivers I've seen so far are for Linux running on Intel/AMD hardware. This leaves out several other groups out that might otherwise be included with open source drivers. Those include users of any of the BSD variants, users of Linux on PowerPC, and users of Linux on Alpha hardware. In theory, all of these can be supported with open source drivers, but for now will be dependent on NVIDIA if they ever want drivers in the first place. Also, from a philosophical point of view, many Linux users may want the drivers to be open source. I know I'd like to see NVIDIA embrace the open source movement, but from a practical point of view I can't deny that, at least with these initial drivers, they're doing well without being open.
As for me personally, I'd rather support a company that provides specifications for use in open drivers (ATI, 3dfx, Matrox), but it is nice to see that instead of snubbing Linux entirely, NVIDIA has bothered to make decent drivers to use for once.
Actually, the Japanese Beast * shows came after the original Canadian/US Beast Wars CGI show, and there are several:
Beast Wars - Japanese-dubbed version of the North American CGI first season
Beast Wars II - Cel-animated series with new Japanese characters
Beast Wars Neo - Yet another original cel-animated series with new characters that picks up the BWII story-line
Beast Wars: Metals - Japanese-dubbed version of the North American 2nd and 3rd seasons of Beast Wars
Japan has now dropped the whole Beast * line (although they may import the current CGI Beast Machines show at a later date) in favor of a return to traditional automobiles in their Transformers: Car Robots series, which pits Cybertrons (Autobots) vs. Destrongers (Metallic beasts, including some from the BW line that were not previously animated). As a bonus (as the new Prime/Convoy in the series is a fire truck), they're reissuing several of the original "Generation 1" figures in Japan, including the original 1984-era Convoy/Optimus Prime.
At first I was puzzled by "middle of the article", but you meant "middle of the first page"... I know I missed something when converting it:/ It's fixed now, thanks!
XFree 4 wasn't used because currently it only supports 3dfx hardware in 3D, and, for the moment, is slower than the traditional 3dfx 3D implementation under Linux. The potential is there for DRI to exceed XFree86 3.3.x's 3D performance, and support for more cards (such as drivers written by the Utah-GLX team) is being added, but for right now XFree 4 benchmarks would be semi-meaningless.
Just some comments on the recent wave of CGI shows:
Beast Wars: Transformers - worthy heir to the Transformers throne, with a suspenseful story arc and unique characterizations for kid vid (particularly the brooding samurai Dinobot)
Beast Machines: Transformers - the season currently airing in the US is pretty much crap, although its picked up in the season airing in Canada right now (realvideo encoded eps are available at TF Extreme)
Starship Troopers - excellent CGI work (best I've seen for a fully computer-animated show), although it doesn't look like it'll be picked up for another year on the Sci-Fi channel unfortunately >:/ However, the company who animated it (Foundation Imaging), is working on a Heavy Gear show set in the same HG universe as Loki's latest port, which should prove interesting...
Nope... that's always been there... its a scaled down and faded version of the original (circa '98) LG logo... in its first incarnation it was unmistakable as an electronic joystick, but now it does rather resemble something more phallic at that low resolution now that you mention it...:/
Mega Man was in the first Marvel vs. Capcom... but now for some inexplicable reason they've dropped him (and War Machine, although Dr. Doom now appears to have most of his old characteristics)... good luck deciphering the whims of Capcom
The CAVE's have been around for a long time at research institutions (I first used one at the Uni of Houston in the summer of 96), and Quake 2 *has* been ported to the system... as to whether you can really get an enjoyable play experience out of it... well
Loki ported Civ: CTP to Linux Alpha and PPC, and Myth 2 to PPC, so hopefully this is the start of a positive trend for other third-party porting companies or internal ports:)
Beta-testing May Be Windows-Only
on
Anarchy Online
·
· Score: 3
As the beta-testing sign-up was announced well before the Linux version was, its not guaranteed that this round of testing will include the Linux client... just a word of warning.
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I read once (think it was the Salon.com article) that the Cubans hada tendency to fuck their readouts up, i.e. plugging in the patch cable for a normal gov broadcast and what not...
Been done.
:)
http://www.fas.org/irp/facility/war renton_c.htm
Well, except for the barging in part... I for one am not about to go busting inside a secured military facility demanding to know what's going on
One problem with your theory... the numbers stations broadcasts in the US have been DF'ed (direction finding) to facilities owned and operated by the national security organs of one Uncle Sam.
This Fas.org page on the Warrenton Training Center has an interesting suggestion, one which I've never seen before or even considered when I've briefly read about such shortwave stations in the past:
;) Either way, it's an interesting theory...
The numbers *aren't* the message anymore.
In other words, the CIA/NSA/DoD/etc. have abandoned using one-time pad encrypted ciphertext spoken aloud (although less sophisticated operations, like Cuban numbers stations, likely still do), but use the vocal numbers as beacon to tune reception of the actual enciphered data: "white noise" that occurs over an otherwise clean transmission, that's probably a digitally-added signal that carries the actual message.
Can anyone with a shortwave receiver who actually has listened to US (not foreign, as I doubt they bother to do this, although the Taiwanese subterfuge mentioned in the NPR broadcast is amusing) numbers station transmissions verify that the "noise" could constitute another encrypted signal?
And they say the NSA has stopped innovating now that everything's gone fiber optic
Yep. Some come from here, an Army/CIA/State Dept./whoever else facility in Virginia. They have a website (WTC.GOV), but it's restricted.
Well, we did steal (fighting a war to take territory is considered theft, despite the victor's claims to the contrary...) a huge chunk of territory from Mexico in the US-Mexican war in the 19th century...
Agressively expansionist?
Hardly. This statement is indicative of the way most Americans completely misunderstand Russian culture and their world outlook.
NATO was formed *before* the Warsaw Pact, the US detonated nuclear devices before the Soviets (and even used them militarily, something the Russians have never done).
Russia fears the West because of the numerous incursions over their long history by European invaders (the Teutons, and more recently the two World Wars). They had horrible, horrible losses to the '41-45 German invasion, so after the war they wanted to ensure this could never, ever, happen again... hence the puppet states along their border and the partitioning of Germany. The Americans couldn't understand their concerns, although ironically enough, Winston Churchill did and even privately agreed to it with Stalin (sort of partitioning the world itself into security zones).
The Soviets were never seriously interested in "World Conquest", any more than America ever has been.
Already being made as a Rogue Spear (the sequel to Rainbow Six) scenario... complete with a briefing by Reno.
I'll see if I can dig up the URL, but it's still in development (and no, it's not an official scenario, heh).
http://www.linuxgames.com/articles /linux3dcards/
"The rest.... is... silence"
:)
Well, he was a multi-faceted character to say the least, heh
- Beast Wars - Japanese-dubbed version of the North American CGI first season
- Beast Wars II - Cel-animated series with new Japanese characters
- Beast Wars Neo - Yet another original cel-animated series with new characters that picks up the BWII story-line
- Beast Wars: Metals - Japanese-dubbed version of the North American 2nd and 3rd seasons of Beast Wars
Japan has now dropped the whole Beast * line (although they may import the current CGI Beast Machines show at a later date) in favor of a return to traditional automobiles in their Transformers: Car Robots series, which pits Cybertrons (Autobots) vs. Destrongers (Metallic beasts, including some from the BW line that were not previously animated). As a bonus (as the new Prime/Convoy in the series is a fire truck), they're reissuing several of the original "Generation 1" figures in Japan, including the original 1984-era Convoy/Optimus Prime.At first I was puzzled by "middle of the article", but you meant "middle of the first page"... I know I missed something when converting it :/
It's fixed now, thanks!
XFree 4 wasn't used because currently it only supports 3dfx hardware in 3D, and, for the moment, is slower than the traditional 3dfx 3D implementation under Linux. The potential is there for DRI to exceed XFree86 3.3.x's 3D performance, and support for more cards (such as drivers written by the Utah-GLX team) is being added, but for right now XFree 4 benchmarks would be semi-meaningless.
However, the company who animated it (Foundation Imaging), is working on a Heavy Gear show set in the same HG universe as Loki's latest port, which should prove interesting...
Nope... that's always been there... its a scaled down and faded version of the original (circa '98) LG logo... in its first incarnation it was unmistakable as an electronic joystick, but now it does rather resemble something more phallic at that low resolution now that you mention it... :/
Craig Mullins (the artist), also did some Myth 2 art for Bungie that made its way into print ads for the game (and the Linux version's CD IIRC).
Check out the Simple DirectMedia Layer, which Loki uses in the vast majority of their ports.
This is the 1999 report, not the one issued today.
Mega Man was in the first Marvel vs. Capcom... but now for some inexplicable reason they've dropped him (and War Machine, although Dr. Doom now appears to have most of his old characteristics)... good luck deciphering the whims of Capcom
Loki's created a newsgroup precisely for this purpose:
news://news.lokigames.com/loki.request
The CAVE's have been around for a long time at research institutions (I first used one at the Uni of Houston in the summer of 96), and Quake 2 *has* been ported to the system... as to whether you can really get an enjoyable play experience out of it... well
http://hoback.ncsa.uiuc.edu/~prajl ich/caveQuake/
Loki ported Civ: CTP to Linux Alpha and PPC, and Myth 2 to PPC, so hopefully this is the start of a positive trend for other third-party porting companies or internal ports :)
As the beta-testing sign-up was announced well before the Linux version was, its not guaranteed that this round of testing will include the Linux client... just a word of warning.
Just because Loki isn't giving the sales figures to the public doesn't mean they aren't giving them to Blizzard/other game publishers under a NDA.