Typing the tilde character on a finnish keyboard is just plain stupid. You have to first hold AltGr and press a key to the left to enter, underneath backspace, then release both keys and press space. Insanity!
Ok, I've just finished installing Linux on a fresh hard drive and have spent a few hours editing stuff in/etc using my favourite editor joe. The editor creates backup files everytime it overwrites a file, naming them as the original filename with a tilde appended. I wanted to quickly remove all the backup files so I typed
rm -f *~
But curses, my caffeine-overloaded fingers were too quick to hit that spacebar and I ended up with
rm -f * ~
AARGH! There goes BOTH/etc AND root's home directory. Damn you whoever came up with the finnish keyboard layout!
Hmm, the site appears to currently contain only a scan of a fax, sent today (20041029) by the Norwegian Police, on which the content of the site is deemed the illegal and ordered taken down (I think - I know some swedish but not norwegian). I guess they didn't think the joke was funny, either.
My cousin, who is a volunteer fire fighter, said that they once emptied a CO2 fire extinguisher in a place where there's a small pond nearby. In a few minutes the area immediately around the extinguisher was swarming with mosquitoes. It would seem like finnish mosquitoes are at least quite fond of CO2.
Duke Nukem Forever _is_ available for preloading already! You can preload it from/dev/null and once the game is finished, they'll decrypt it with a xor one-time-pad, using the released game as the key.
Quite true. I have been using computers since I was 5 years old, studied CS at the university and now work as a sysadmin/programmer. I used to code a lot of demoscene stuff in mid-90s but just can't find the inspiration for it anymore. Forcing myself to write code just doesn't work and the result is just a lot bad code that's no use for anything.
Well, I no longer really use computers as a hobby and spend most of my free time tinkering with cars and racing them on circuits. Four-stroke engines and racecar suspension systems are pretty complicated things and in order to fully understand them and improve their performance, a lot of physics and mathematics must be used. Gathering information, applying it to my cars and testing the changes in real life is very exciting.
I still use my computer a lot but now it's more like a tool for me - I use it for communicating with other car enthusiasts, finding information on the net, simulating a car's performance, tuning engine management systems, etc. I even use it for writing assembly code for some small microcontroller-based gadgets I've made for handling some small engine control tasks - just for fun!
I'm a bit miffed about the fact that GT4P doesn't support the Logitech Momo Force (the red one) steering wheel like GT3 did. Sure, it's originally a PC wheel and it just happened to work nicely with several PS2 games but the lack of support on GT4P is still a bit disappointing.
Oh well, the new Driving Force Pro looks very tasty with it's 900 degree turn radius and rack&pinion mechanism so I'll probably have to get one of those to play GT4(P) and use the Momo for the rest..
Kind of reminds me of one of those 'Snakeman show' bits by Yellow Magic Orchestra where a policeman goes knocking on some old guy's door;
Policeman: [Knock, knock] Police! Open the door!
Old guy: Who?
Policeman: [Knock, knock, knock] This is the police! Open up!
Old guy: Who?
{the same goes on for a while, policeman getting increasingly irritated}
Policeman: [BANG, BANG, BANG] POLICE! OPEN THE DOOR! OI! OPEN IT! OI!
Old guy: Police? I'm not a police. ("Keisatsu? Koko wa keisatsu ja nai yo.", or something like that)
{policeman freaks out}
I thought 'Google' was just 'go ogle' with the blankspace removed. I mean - at least in the earlier days, whatever you searched for, you got more than enough porn links in the search results.
Why are they going to play paintball there? If they're aiming for an ultimate CS experience, they should be playing airsoft instead.
Airsoft guns are authentic-looking firearm replicas which shoot 6mm plastic BBs either by using compressed air or gas as propellant. Most electric compressed air guns are have selectable full-/semi-auto operation and gas-operated semiautomatic pistols load a new round by realistically recoiling the slide (which in most guns locks back after the last round is fired). Just about every gun featured on CS is also available as an airsoft gun (the Five-seveN, AWM and Scout are not, AFAIK).
Take a look at these guns which have been reviewed at a popular UK news site. Also, airsoft players tend to aim for ultimate realism in combat gear. Teams such as Team Red Cell or Team 2 Hit 6 display great dedication to their hobby and the photos of them in action may just as well be of actual HRT/SOG operations (note that every pic in which they have their goggles off are posed - eye protection is mandatory during gameplay).
Most games, independent of their length in time, can be described as one team attempting to accomplish an objective ("bomb" a target, seize a hill, clear a building, etc) whereas the other tries to stop them. Pretty much what people do on CS, right? I've also designed and built a "bomb simulator" which mimics the bomb on CS as closely as possible.:)
Oh yeah, close-quarters battle with paintball guns isn't nice - getting shot at a range of less than 10ft makes really nasty big bleeding bruises. Although airsoft BBs do have a greater velocity, their inertia is smaller due to a small mass (0.2g to 0.43g, depends on which you use) and they impact on a smaller area. This makes the hits sting but usually they just slightly break the skin (through a camo BDU, of course). Do note that airsoft guns don't leave paint marks so each player must play honestly and call themselves out if they're hit - people who play in "godmode" are not looked well upon.
In some ways, I do wholeheartedly agree with you but I think you're exaggerating a bit. I don't mind having electric windows, sunroof, central locking or a sound system - they are very handy and, in my opinion, improve the driving experience. I couldn't imagine driving my car without music playing unless I'm on a racetrack.
However, I don't want to have power steering, anti-lock brakes, automatic transmission, traction control or any other gadgets that effect the actual driving itself. I want to be in full control of the car, feel the road on the steering wheel and know exactly how my car is going to behave. Sure, I have to pay a lot more attention while driving to keep the car in control but that's just the way I like it.
Mind you, my car is a Honda CRX which, being an FF, isn't quite comparable to a 911 but it's still an incredibly exciting car drive with it's light and agile chassis and a reasonably powerful engine.
I got involved with the scene back in the 80s as well and don't really like the way demos are going these days either. Still, I'm glad to see that there are new people wanting to join the scene and keeping it alive even if it's not the way it used to be.
But hey, despite the fact that the "mainstream" is coding PC demos these days, the oldskool is still here even if it's not so visible anymore. Just look at Alternative Party, for example.
Learning how to code demos isn't something one can learn in a few weeks, or even years. There are no Learn democoding in 21 days books and lots of things you need to know have to be learned the hard way. There is a reward in the end, though; coding demos can be amazingly fun - so much more than just watching them.
The first thing you'll need to to is learn a programming language and get familiar with it's development tools on your platform of choice, be it Linux, Windows or MacOS. You don't need to master the language as demos do not always need the most advanced features that some languages offer (such as multiple inheritance, etc). At first, writing 'hello world' -programs and such may be quite boring and frustrating but have patience - eventually you'll see that the skills you've learned will prove useful. A final word regarding the language; In the old days all demos were written in pure assembly language but these days C++ is the one most coders use and would be smart choice to learn. A good book on C++ is a way to get started.
Once you're comfortable with the language and it's tools, the next step is to learn more about your computer works. You'll need to know how to control the hardware; graphics card, sound card, timers and such. In modern operating systems this means studying the application programming interfaces (APIs) that the operating system provides. Fortunately, there are plenty of good tutorials that teach how to, for example, display graphics using OpenGL or DirectX. There are also many good libraries (Bass, FMOD, etc) for playing different audio files and you'll find them to be quite useful when adding music to your demo productions. Most people use their own timing system but there are some timeline editors such as Demopaja which may ease the work.
Now that you know the language and how to control your computer, you'll need to know how to code effects. Learning the math behind 3D graphics is quite useful, as is knowing how to manipulate bitmaps with convolution matrices and filters. Don't be afraid of math - it's a very useful tool and a key to understanding how effects really work. The internet is full of information on how to code different effects and functional examples to experiment with. Watch a lot of demos and try to figure out what effects they use and how they are are made. Read magazines, look at pictures in them and try to imagine how they would look animated. Look around when walking in a city or in nature - think of ways how to model things in the real world. Experiment with your code - quite many effects have been found by accident when experimenting. Chat with other demosceners on the net, maybe even meet them in real life at parties. Friendship is an important part of demoscene and discussing ideas with other people will often spring new ones. Code alone doesn't make a demo and you'll need find friends who can make music, paint pictures or create 3d models.
Don't feel overwhelmed by everything that you need to learn and do. If you can find the right frame of mind, you'll endure through the tedious basics of programming - see it as a challenge. After a lot of work, seeing your own effect work is a very gratifying experience. Once you know the basics, the possibilities are endless. Above all, the most important thing is to have fun.
Last summer, a group of men armed with automatic weapons attempted to rob an armored truck carrying cash. While the truck was parked in front of a mall, they pulled their van beside and started forcing the truck open.
The guys with the guns were constantly waving people to stay back. They didn't realize, however, that one of the people had a Nokia 7650 and was snapping photos of them as fast as he could. Those photos then ended up to TV news and several newspapers as they were the only pictures of the perpetrators.
In cases like these it is quite useful that people have a digital camera readily in use.
The Mark II weapon was concealed among the cargo of crated aerial bomb tail vanes loaded 16 July 1944 into the No. 3 hold of the E.A.
Hmm, according to the High Energy Weapons archive, the Mark II, a low-efficiency plutonium implosion type bomb, was only a theoretical design and no units were manufactured. Even if one HAD been manufactured, it would have not been possible as early as July 1944 as large scale production of plutonium was started in mid-December and the explosive-lens design used in implosion type bombs was not finalized until March 1945.
I'm not an expert in acoustics but I'm quite certain that when listening to compressed audio via loudspeakers, the environment will come up with the missing frequencies by resonating to the frequencies present. Sure, most of these resonances are too quiet to be heard but then again, wasn't that the point in the compression anyway?
So what if you're using headphones instead? Some headphones cover the entire ear and allow the sound to be "processed" by the grooves and warps on the outer ear - this may already make up for the missing frequencies. Those earbud-headphones are a completely different thing as they feed the sound right into the ear canal. They are, however, so uncomfortable that I can't see anyone wearing them for periods long enough to damage the hearing.
The point is that in most cases, I don't believe the compression to be harmful to hearing as our environment will provide us the frequencies that we don't get from compressed audio. No-one sits at their computer uninterrupted for days listening to mp3s or playing games and if they do, losing their hearing is not the worst thing that could happen.
In the Finnish Army, if one reports to the base hospital and complains about being tired, they hand out a bag of pills which have 100mg of caffeine each. Came out pretty handy during watch duty.
Sure, caffeine does make it harder to fall asleep but it certainly doesn't make me any more alert.:)
I have a 48x Plextor drive and the accompanying manual states the following;
"Although PlexWriter 48/24/48A has a maximum read speed of 48x, it will be set to 40x by default.
Reading CDs at 48x will shorten the device's lifetime and will produce a higher noise level. Further more at this high speed (9600rpm at 48x), low quality or scratched CDs could explode in the drive."
There's no warning about burning at 48x but I assume the chance of a poor quality CD-R disc exploding while writing is the same as while reading. Cranking the speed up to 52x (10400rpm - faster than top-of-the-line SCSI disks two years ago!) will increase the chances somewhat, I recon.
And yes, the Plextor does sound like a F/A-18 taking off when it spins the disc up to 48x.:)
The first demos I saw on PC were two scrollers which were, if I remember correctly, made by Sorcerers and named INTRO and INTRO2. Both had a big red scroller on black background; the first one had a plain one on the middle of the screen and the second one bounced the text between the bottom and the middle of the screen with a sinetable. Are these the two earlier demos you're referring to or is my memory playing games with me?
I think I downloaded those two demos from BCG-Box (running MBBS back then) with my spiffy new 1200bps modem.:)
Atom, yes. It played some very nice digitized music through the PC speaker - a clip sampled from 'Say A Little Prayer' by Bomb The Bass.
- "That's no OS. It's a text editor!"
- "It's too big to be a text editor!"
- "I have a very bad feeling about this..."
- "Yeah, I think you're right. Full uninstall! Lock in the auxliary swap disk!"
I was diagnosed with a red-green color-blindness of moderate severity during my military service. I just couldn't make out the correct numbers hidden in the test plates with dotted images. However, I have absolutely no problems whatsoever separating 5 and 10 cent coins from one another.
I tried taking the two coins to my hand, shaking them around a bit and then putting them on a table. As soon as I pull my hand from over the coins, I can tell which is the 5 cent one and which is the 10 cent one. I tried this in a few different lighting conditions but the result is always the same.
The spanish euro coins shouldn't be different from finnish ones, so either I was misdiagnosed or the research is inaccurate. As the plates by Dr. Ishihara are supposed to be a very reliable test, I can't place much credibility on the results of the abovementioned research.
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, I've just finished installing Linux on a fresh hard drive and have spent a few hours editing stuff in /etc using my favourite editor joe. The editor creates backup files everytime it overwrites a file, naming them as the original filename with a tilde appended. I wanted to quickly remove all the backup files so I typed
But curses, my caffeine-overloaded fingers were too quick to hit that spacebar and I ended up with AARGH! There goes BOTHHmm, the site appears to currently contain only a scan of a fax, sent today (20041029) by the Norwegian Police, on which the content of the site is deemed the illegal and ordered taken down (I think - I know some swedish but not norwegian). I guess they didn't think the joke was funny, either.
This, of course, is the Mandelbrot set.
My cousin, who is a volunteer fire fighter, said that they once emptied a CO2 fire extinguisher in a place where there's a small pond nearby. In a few minutes the area immediately around the extinguisher was swarming with mosquitoes. It would seem like finnish mosquitoes are at least quite fond of CO2.
Duke Nukem Forever _is_ available for preloading already! You can preload it from /dev/null and once the game is finished, they'll decrypt it with a xor one-time-pad, using the released game as the key.
Quite true. I have been using computers since I was 5 years old, studied CS at the university and now work as a sysadmin/programmer. I used to code a lot of demoscene stuff in mid-90s but just can't find the inspiration for it anymore. Forcing myself to write code just doesn't work and the result is just a lot bad code that's no use for anything. Well, I no longer really use computers as a hobby and spend most of my free time tinkering with cars and racing them on circuits. Four-stroke engines and racecar suspension systems are pretty complicated things and in order to fully understand them and improve their performance, a lot of physics and mathematics must be used. Gathering information, applying it to my cars and testing the changes in real life is very exciting. I still use my computer a lot but now it's more like a tool for me - I use it for communicating with other car enthusiasts, finding information on the net, simulating a car's performance, tuning engine management systems, etc. I even use it for writing assembly code for some small microcontroller-based gadgets I've made for handling some small engine control tasks - just for fun!
It's not the legs the seats kill...
And that's why the (old!) bicycles issued to conscripts by the Finnish Army have gained the nickname "ball breaker".
Oh well, the new Driving Force Pro looks very tasty with it's 900 degree turn radius and rack&pinion mechanism so I'll probably have to get one of those to play GT4(P) and use the Momo for the rest..
Policeman: [Knock, knock] Police! Open the door!
Old guy: Who?
Policeman: [Knock, knock, knock] This is the police! Open up!
Old guy: Who?
{the same goes on for a while, policeman getting increasingly irritated}
Policeman: [BANG, BANG, BANG] POLICE! OPEN THE DOOR! OI! OPEN IT! OI!
Old guy: Police? I'm not a police. ("Keisatsu? Koko wa keisatsu ja nai yo.", or something like that)
{policeman freaks out}
Absolutely hilarious. :)
I thought 'Google' was just 'go ogle' with the blankspace removed. I mean - at least in the earlier days, whatever you searched for, you got more than enough porn links in the search results.
Airsoft guns are authentic-looking firearm replicas which shoot 6mm plastic BBs either by using compressed air or gas as propellant. Most electric compressed air guns are have selectable full-/semi-auto operation and gas-operated semiautomatic pistols load a new round by realistically recoiling the slide (which in most guns locks back after the last round is fired). Just about every gun featured on CS is also available as an airsoft gun (the Five-seveN, AWM and Scout are not, AFAIK).
Take a look at these guns which have been reviewed at a popular UK news site. Also, airsoft players tend to aim for ultimate realism in combat gear. Teams such as Team Red Cell or Team 2 Hit 6 display great dedication to their hobby and the photos of them in action may just as well be of actual HRT/SOG operations (note that every pic in which they have their goggles off are posed - eye protection is mandatory during gameplay).
Most games, independent of their length in time, can be described as one team attempting to accomplish an objective ("bomb" a target, seize a hill, clear a building, etc) whereas the other tries to stop them. Pretty much what people do on CS, right? I've also designed and built a "bomb simulator" which mimics the bomb on CS as closely as possible. :)
Oh yeah, close-quarters battle with paintball guns isn't nice - getting shot at a range of less than 10ft makes really nasty big bleeding bruises. Although airsoft BBs do have a greater velocity, their inertia is smaller due to a small mass (0.2g to 0.43g, depends on which you use) and they impact on a smaller area. This makes the hits sting but usually they just slightly break the skin (through a camo BDU, of course). Do note that airsoft guns don't leave paint marks so each player must play honestly and call themselves out if they're hit - people who play in "godmode" are not looked well upon.
However, I don't want to have power steering, anti-lock brakes, automatic transmission, traction control or any other gadgets that effect the actual driving itself. I want to be in full control of the car, feel the road on the steering wheel and know exactly how my car is going to behave. Sure, I have to pay a lot more attention while driving to keep the car in control but that's just the way I like it.
Mind you, my car is a Honda CRX which, being an FF, isn't quite comparable to a 911 but it's still an incredibly exciting car drive with it's light and agile chassis and a reasonably powerful engine.
But hey, despite the fact that the "mainstream" is coding PC demos these days, the oldskool is still here even if it's not so visible anymore. Just look at Alternative Party, for example.
The first thing you'll need to to is learn a programming language and get familiar with it's development tools on your platform of choice, be it Linux, Windows or MacOS. You don't need to master the language as demos do not always need the most advanced features that some languages offer (such as multiple inheritance, etc). At first, writing 'hello world' -programs and such may be quite boring and frustrating but have patience - eventually you'll see that the skills you've learned will prove useful. A final word regarding the language; In the old days all demos were written in pure assembly language but these days C++ is the one most coders use and would be smart choice to learn. A good book on C++ is a way to get started.
Once you're comfortable with the language and it's tools, the next step is to learn more about your computer works. You'll need to know how to control the hardware; graphics card, sound card, timers and such. In modern operating systems this means studying the application programming interfaces (APIs) that the operating system provides. Fortunately, there are plenty of good tutorials that teach how to, for example, display graphics using OpenGL or DirectX. There are also many good libraries (Bass, FMOD, etc) for playing different audio files and you'll find them to be quite useful when adding music to your demo productions. Most people use their own timing system but there are some timeline editors such as Demopaja which may ease the work.
Now that you know the language and how to control your computer, you'll need to know how to code effects. Learning the math behind 3D graphics is quite useful, as is knowing how to manipulate bitmaps with convolution matrices and filters. Don't be afraid of math - it's a very useful tool and a key to understanding how effects really work. The internet is full of information on how to code different effects and functional examples to experiment with. Watch a lot of demos and try to figure out what effects they use and how they are are made. Read magazines, look at pictures in them and try to imagine how they would look animated. Look around when walking in a city or in nature - think of ways how to model things in the real world. Experiment with your code - quite many effects have been found by accident when experimenting. Chat with other demosceners on the net, maybe even meet them in real life at parties. Friendship is an important part of demoscene and discussing ideas with other people will often spring new ones. Code alone doesn't make a demo and you'll need find friends who can make music, paint pictures or create 3d models.
Don't feel overwhelmed by everything that you need to learn and do. If you can find the right frame of mind, you'll endure through the tedious basics of programming - see it as a challenge. After a lot of work, seeing your own effect work is a very gratifying experience. Once you know the basics, the possibilities are endless. Above all, the most important thing is to have fun.
Some links:
NeHe's OpenGL tutorials
Andy Pike's DX8 tutorials
Bass
FMOD
M0ppi Demopaja
The guys with the guns were constantly waving people to stay back. They didn't realize, however, that one of the people had a Nokia 7650 and was snapping photos of them as fast as he could. Those photos then ended up to TV news and several newspapers as they were the only pictures of the perpetrators.
In cases like these it is quite useful that people have a digital camera readily in use.
From the dd(1) man page in GNU fileutils 4.1:
;)
bs=BYTES
force ibs=BYTES and obs=BYTES
ibs=BYTES
read BYTES bytes at a time
obs=BYTES
write BYTES bytes at a time
I guess the NIST guys just don't bother reading man pages.
Hmm, according to the High Energy Weapons archive, the Mark II, a low-efficiency plutonium implosion type bomb, was only a theoretical design and no units were manufactured. Even if one HAD been manufactured, it would have not been possible as early as July 1944 as large scale production of plutonium was started in mid-December and the explosive-lens design used in implosion type bombs was not finalized until March 1945.
So what if you're using headphones instead? Some headphones cover the entire ear and allow the sound to be "processed" by the grooves and warps on the outer ear - this may already make up for the missing frequencies. Those earbud-headphones are a completely different thing as they feed the sound right into the ear canal. They are, however, so uncomfortable that I can't see anyone wearing them for periods long enough to damage the hearing.
The point is that in most cases, I don't believe the compression to be harmful to hearing as our environment will provide us the frequencies that we don't get from compressed audio. No-one sits at their computer uninterrupted for days listening to mp3s or playing games and if they do, losing their hearing is not the worst thing that could happen.
Sure, caffeine does make it harder to fall asleep but it certainly doesn't make me any more alert. :)
"Although PlexWriter 48/24/48A has a maximum read speed of 48x, it will be set to 40x by default.
Reading CDs at 48x will shorten the device's lifetime and will produce a higher noise level. Further more at this high speed (9600rpm at 48x), low quality or scratched CDs could explode in the drive."
There's no warning about burning at 48x but I assume the chance of a poor quality CD-R disc exploding while writing is the same as while reading. Cranking the speed up to 52x (10400rpm - faster than top-of-the-line SCSI disks two years ago!) will increase the chances somewhat, I recon.
And yes, the Plextor does sound like a F/A-18 taking off when it spins the disc up to 48x. :)
"Albert Einstein remains not just scientifically relevant but a multipurpose icon as well."
Yes indeed - he's used as the icon for all science stories on Slashdot. I'd definately call that multipurpose!
I think I downloaded those two demos from BCG-Box (running MBBS back then) with my spiffy new 1200bps modem. :)
Atom, yes. It played some very nice digitized music through the PC speaker - a clip sampled from 'Say A Little Prayer' by Bomb The Bass.
- "That's no OS. It's a text editor!"
- "It's too big to be a text editor!"
- "I have a very bad feeling about this..."
- "Yeah, I think you're right. Full uninstall! Lock in the auxliary swap disk!"
"Would you like a giraffe?"
I tried taking the two coins to my hand, shaking them around a bit and then putting them on a table. As soon as I pull my hand from over the coins, I can tell which is the 5 cent one and which is the 10 cent one. I tried this in a few different lighting conditions but the result is always the same.
The spanish euro coins shouldn't be different from finnish ones, so either I was misdiagnosed or the research is inaccurate. As the plates by Dr. Ishihara are supposed to be a very reliable test, I can't place much credibility on the results of the abovementioned research.