Unfortunately, I can't remember the name of it, but I played a graphical Mud at one point, which I'm fairly sure was before Meridian 59 came out. It was free, though, and quite primitive graphically - I believe it was more of a graphical extension to a normal Mud of some sort than a completely new thing.
Meanwhile, text-based Muds haven't gone away. For example (plug time!) Dartmud has been around for over 10 years now, featuring fully skill-based system, many races, crafting, guilds, questing, magic, exploration, and the occasional comet wiping out vast tracts of land.
(dartmud.com 2525, also see their website for more details.
I have a success story, on RH8.
I have a TwinMOS "Mobile Disk", plugged it in to my
box, and it was automatically detected. I had to mount it manually (" mount/dev/sdb1/mnt/disk "), and it worked perfectly. (Ok, it did take me 10 minutes to realise that I should mount sdb1, not sdb - I blame lack of sleep).
Seems weird that it would work less easily under RH9.
My girlfriend had a pen-shaped mouse for a while, (wrist problems), and I'd imagine signing would be much more "natural" with one of those. Neat idea, though...
Oddly enough, here (Melbourne, Victoria, Australia), we have that choice. This has been available for around 6 months now, but I'm not sure it's had a huge impact yet (in other words, I haven't been bothered to compare prices between the different supply companies... ).
Oddly enough, in Australia it is possible to get whole-season box sets of Farscape for around $AUS 125 (about $US 80) - there are only 4 or 6 discs in the set (can't remember now, and it's at home).
Of course, they're Region 4, you'd need to have a multi-region player to see them. Places like Atlantic DVD and EZY DVD ship internationally.
(as if it wasn't obvious, when DVD region-encoding got created, all the major countries were assigned, then Region 4 was created as the "Arse End of the World" zone. There are far fewer releases in R4 than for the other zones. Australians (and probably New Zealanders) pretty much have to have multi-region players.)
What the heck sites are you going to that 30% don't render in Opera ? Exaggerate much ?
I use Opera 6 under Linux, 7 under Win98, and rarely come across a page that has a problem these days, and usually have 20-80 tabs open (particularly in the Linux version, after I go on a "surfing frenzy":-).
As for tabbed browsing, oddly enough, I prefer the Opera 6 interface for that, and the "Open link in background" feature is one of the main reasons I use Opera. There's nothing quite like opening 5-10 results from a Google search in the background, for example, then reading through them to find the useful ones - in Mozilla opening a window in a new tab takes focus to that tab too, so you have to keep clicking back and forth to the Google search tab.
"Bartog" is very cool - also known as "Bartok" and "Warthog" (I learned it as Bartok). Very evil game by the time you're playing at 4am and have rules for every suit, number and colour, and massive extra penalties for getting anything wrong. My favourite rule to add is the Librarian rule - when a certain type of card (e.g. Aces, Threes, Clubs) is played, whoever played it can only say "Ook" and "Eek" until someone else plays that type of card.
And for the more rules-lawyerly types, there's a game called "Nomic". It's like Bartok (make up rules turn by turn) without a deck of cards involved. Oddly enough, I've never played it, but I read about it while following links from various Bartok sites (and some people I knew used to play it).
Weird.
Anyway, in case anyone is wondering, the article is quite interesting - apparently the typical Linux gamer uses Gentoo or Slackware distributions, NVidia or high-end Radeon graphics card, and doesn't care how their sound is generated as long as they have some.
On the other hand, Australia is about the same size, but much less densely populated, and yet the majority of people and places are covered by GSM networks, we have mobile number portability, and (this is the bit that boggles me every time I read about it) we only pay for making calls, not receiving them.
There's nothing at starryskies.com (yes, I read (skimmed) the article) to say where you can view this asteroid from. I wish these astronomy sites would remember that it's possible to view the night sky from Down Under too...
While on the subject of terminology, here's another usage that would be quite likely trip up people going to/from the USA. In the USA, I believe the term "professor" is used as the title for anyone with a Ph.D, who is working in a teaching position of any sort. In other systems (for example, the more UK-derived one in Australia), Professor is a very senior member of a Faculty - usually a Faculty will have only one or two Professors, then a few Associate Professors, then everyone else is a Lecturer of some grade. Ok, I suppose it's time to stray back from off-topic land:->
TheNumberSix writes : Actually, this reminds me of a demographics company called Claritas that sells demographics assignment services based on where you live. (Try it for yourself here [claritas.com].)
Before anyone outside the USA wastes their time clicking - US-only, it wants your "5 digit ZIP code".
(of course, it could be fun to make one up and see what happens...)
UnknownSoldier wrote : You've never worked on a big project, where compiling takes between 30 minutes and 1 hour have you? (And yes, this is WITH precompiled headers) Compiling is CPU bound, not I/O bound (say like linking.)
Heh, that's not big, big is a Cobol-and-4-other-languages monstrosity that I babysit, where a complete build takes 12-16 hours. Of course, it's running on an HP Unix machine, where the CPUs are only around 200 Mhz.
In any normal/. article, there are always Frist Posts, trolls, and the usual array of off-topic regular/. jokes.
Now someone posts an open invitation to go berserk, and I haven't (in the first 60-odd replies) seen a single Natalie Portman, hot grits, AYB or beowulf cluster. At least someone managed to sneak in an "In Soviet Russia".
This is one of the key differences between the Australian and US university systems, then. Our academics are underpaid (when compared both to non-academic IT jobs in Australia, and especially to academics in other countries), over-worked (student numbers are increasing, academics are required to do more teaching and yet keep up their research load), and highly stressed (very few are in permanent roles).
Unfortunately, our extremely short-sighted governments continue to cut university funding.
No wonder there's a "brain drain" of Aussie students at the post-graduate and PhD level.
Humour aside, the spammers are already adapting
to simple string filtering - a lot of the spam I
get these days (all HTML, of course) uses my name
inside comments in the middle of any words likely
to be filtered, e.g. En(!-- name here)large your pe(!-- name here)nis.
(except with angle brackets instead of parentheses, of course, I can't seem to find a way to get the angle brackets to appear properly... )
David.
Open standards in car electronics ?
on
Cars for Tinkerers?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I thought most car electronics used proprietary systems that can't easily be tinkered with - thus mechanics have to fork over big money to get the necessary diagnostic equipment.
Errr, please do pay attention to the article - it's talking about Australia, thus it has nothing to do with the RIAA or (thank goodness!) Hilary Rosen. Of course, we have ARIA and APRA, and our own bunch of idiots to deal with...
It took a long time to finally allow "parallel importation" of music & books, for example (allowing companies other than the main distributor to sell them in Australia), and they whined and moaned about how Australian artists would be worse off. IMHO, if the artists are any good, they're going to earn money anyway, and the sort of acts ARIA/APRA would try to prop up don't deserve the money.
It may be true that screen resolution can't be
changed through KDE, but it can be done without rebooting or running XConfigurator - use Ctrl-Alt-Keypad"+" or Ctrl-Alt-Keypad"-". They will cycle through the resolutions defined for your current display depth.
Of course, you can't currently change display depth "on the fly", but that's an X Window System limitation - I'm sure that'll be fixed one day too (XFree86 5 ? 6 ?).
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately, I can't remember the name of it, but I played a graphical Mud at one point, which I'm fairly sure was before Meridian 59 came out. It was free, though, and quite primitive graphically - I believe it was more of a graphical extension to a normal Mud of some sort than a completely new thing.
Meanwhile, text-based Muds haven't gone away. For example (plug time!) Dartmud has been around for over 10 years now, featuring fully skill-based system, many races, crafting, guilds, questing, magic, exploration, and the occasional comet wiping out vast tracts of land. (dartmud.com 2525, also see their website for more details.
David.
I have a success story, on RH8. I have a TwinMOS "Mobile Disk", plugged it in to my box, and it was automatically detected. I had to mount it manually (" mount
Seems weird that it would work less easily under RH9.
David.
My girlfriend had a pen-shaped mouse for a while, (wrist problems), and I'd imagine signing would be much more "natural" with one of those. Neat idea, though ...
David.
Surely that'd be "Hey, I can see my house from here".
David.
I expect they're an order of magnitude more expensive than a normal wheelchair - in fact, probably around the same price range as a Segway.
David.
Oddly enough, here (Melbourne, Victoria, Australia), we have that choice. This has been available for around 6 months now, but I'm not sure it's had a huge impact yet (in other words, I haven't been bothered to compare prices between the different supply companies ... ).
David.
Oddly enough, in Australia it is possible to get whole-season box sets of Farscape for around $AUS 125 (about $US 80) - there are only 4 or 6 discs in the set (can't remember now, and it's at home). Of course, they're Region 4, you'd need to have a multi-region player to see them. Places like Atlantic DVD and EZY DVD ship internationally.
(as if it wasn't obvious, when DVD region-encoding got created, all the major countries were assigned, then Region 4 was created as the "Arse End of the World" zone. There are far fewer releases in R4 than for the other zones. Australians (and probably New Zealanders) pretty much have to have multi-region players.)
David.
I thought they were all in India these days.
What the heck sites are you going to that 30% don't render in Opera ? Exaggerate much ?
:-).
I use Opera 6 under Linux, 7 under Win98, and rarely come across a page that has a problem these days, and usually have 20-80 tabs open (particularly in the Linux version, after I go on a "surfing frenzy"
As for tabbed browsing, oddly enough, I prefer the Opera 6 interface for that, and the "Open link in background" feature is one of the main reasons I use Opera. There's nothing quite like opening 5-10 results from a Google search in the background, for example, then reading through them to find the useful ones - in Mozilla opening a window in a new tab takes focus to that tab too, so you have to keep clicking back and forth to the Google search tab.
David.
"Bartog" is very cool - also known as "Bartok" and "Warthog" (I learned it as Bartok). Very evil game by the time you're playing at 4am and have rules for every suit, number and colour, and massive extra penalties for getting anything wrong. My favourite rule to add is the Librarian rule - when a certain type of card (e.g. Aces, Threes, Clubs) is played, whoever played it can only say "Ook" and "Eek" until someone else plays that type of card.
And for the more rules-lawyerly types, there's a game called "Nomic". It's like Bartok (make up rules turn by turn) without a deck of cards involved. Oddly enough, I've never played it, but I read about it while following links from various Bartok sites (and some people I knew used to play it).
David.
Weird.
Anyway, in case anyone is wondering, the article is quite interesting - apparently the typical Linux gamer uses Gentoo or Slackware distributions, NVidia or high-end Radeon graphics card, and doesn't care how their sound is generated as long as they have some.
David.
Paraphrasing what 6hill wrote : ... [c]omes highly recommended despite its US-centric name.
... completely unlike the worldwide appeal of the name "Scientific American".
American Scientist
David.
On the other hand, Australia is about the same size, but much less densely populated, and yet the majority of people and places are covered by GSM networks, we have mobile number portability, and (this is the bit that boggles me every time I read about it) we only pay for making calls, not receiving them.
David.
There's nothing at starryskies.com (yes, I read (skimmed) the article) to say where you can view this asteroid from. I wish these astronomy sites would remember that it's possible to view the night sky from Down Under too ...
David (in Melbourne).
While on the subject of terminology, here's another usage that would be quite likely trip up people going to/from the USA. In the USA, I believe the term "professor" is used as the title for anyone with a Ph.D, who is working in a teaching position of any sort. In other systems (for example, the more UK-derived one in Australia), Professor is a very senior member of a Faculty - usually a Faculty will have only one or two Professors, then a few Associate Professors, then everyone else is a Lecturer of some grade. Ok, I suppose it's time to stray back from off-topic land :->
David.
TheNumberSix writes :
...)
Actually, this reminds me of a demographics company called Claritas that sells demographics assignment services based on where you live. (Try it for yourself here [claritas.com].)
Before anyone outside the USA wastes their time clicking - US-only, it wants your "5 digit ZIP code".
(of course, it could be fun to make one up and see what happens
David.
UnknownSoldier wrote : You've never worked on a big project, where compiling takes between 30 minutes and 1 hour have you? (And yes, this is WITH precompiled headers) Compiling is CPU bound, not I/O bound (say like linking.)
Heh, that's not big, big is a Cobol-and-4-other-languages monstrosity that I babysit, where a complete build takes 12-16 hours. Of course, it's running on an HP Unix machine, where the CPUs are only around 200 Mhz.
David.
In any normal /. article, there are always Frist Posts, trolls, and the usual array of off-topic regular /. jokes.
Now someone posts an open invitation to go berserk, and I haven't (in the first 60-odd replies) seen a single Natalie Portman, hot grits, AYB or beowulf cluster. At least someone managed to sneak in an "In Soviet Russia".
Weird, huh.
David.
This is one of the key differences between the Australian and US university systems, then. Our academics are underpaid (when compared both to non-academic IT jobs in Australia, and especially to academics in other countries), over-worked (student numbers are increasing, academics are required to do more teaching and yet keep up their research load), and highly stressed (very few are in permanent roles).
Unfortunately, our extremely short-sighted governments continue to cut university funding.
No wonder there's a "brain drain" of Aussie students at the post-graduate and PhD level.
David.
Humour aside, the spammers are already adapting to simple string filtering - a lot of the spam I get these days (all HTML, of course) uses my name inside comments in the middle of any words likely to be filtered, e.g.
... )
En(!-- name here)large your pe(!-- name here)nis.
(except with angle brackets instead of parentheses, of course, I can't seem to find a way to get the angle brackets to appear properly
David.
I thought most car electronics used proprietary systems that can't easily be tinkered with - thus mechanics have to fork over big money to get the necessary diagnostic equipment.
David.
Errr, please do pay attention to the article - it's talking about Australia, thus it has nothing to do with the RIAA or (thank goodness!) Hilary Rosen. Of course, we have ARIA and APRA, and our own bunch of idiots to deal with ...
It took a long time to finally allow "parallel importation" of music & books, for example (allowing companies other than the main distributor to sell them in Australia), and they whined and moaned about how Australian artists would be worse off. IMHO, if the artists are any good, they're going to earn money anyway, and the sort of acts ARIA/APRA would try to prop up don't deserve the money.
David.
> Well, the sudden surge of traffic to .au will probably cause the satellites to melt.
It's mostly cables under the Pacific, actually. If it suddenly seems a little hotter than usual in Hawaii, blame the slashdotting of Australia.
David.
$10.99 ? The article is talking about Australia, new CDs are $30-$32 here. (Which is about $US 16-17, at the current exchange rate).
David.
It may be true that screen resolution can't be changed through KDE, but it can be done without rebooting or running XConfigurator - use Ctrl-Alt-Keypad"+" or Ctrl-Alt-Keypad"-". They will cycle through the resolutions defined for your current display depth.
Of course, you can't currently change display depth "on the fly", but that's an X Window System limitation - I'm sure that'll be fixed one day too (XFree86 5 ? 6 ?).
David.