That is one of the things that surprises me; one of the reasons I was initially in favor of him was I remembered that he voted to ban gun confiscations during national emergency, while Clinton voted against the ban; seeing this, A person would think I should be a Clinton hater, because she actively campaigned for and supported a law that would, in your words, allow them to "personally come and take their guns". Well, I am a Clinton hater. but she is out in the open; no one, especially not a gun owner, would trust her for a flat second on any 2nd amendment issues. Obama doesn't seem to be popping up in the radar on this issue. Besides, your argument that the president doesn't have that sort of power is specious; Bush has proven over the last 7 years that the presidency is able to get away with anything without worrying about congress.
Gods I hate to do this. I'm going to be modded offtopic, and it's going to be justified. But it is also very much on-topic, depending on how you look at it. Tradition, however, insists that/. readers mod me down. Ahh. here goes. It looks like Obama is gonna win the democratic nomination, unless something very bizarre happens. in 1998, Obama stated that he would Ban the sale or transfer of all forms of semi-automatic weapons. that includes about half the shotguns, more than half of the pistols, and a fairly good chunk of the rifles in the U.S. There are also some quotes about putting in "thousands" of intelligence assets at the state & local level. I look around at the social networking sites, and see that no one seems to be mentioning this; this freaks me out to the core, and when something like this topic comes along that mentions it, I can't help but take the opportunity to mention it.
I liked SimEarth. and SimLife was interesting. They were both games that suffered from, IMO, insufficiently advanced standard PC's; SimEarth would be pretty cool on a modern system with modern graphics, and SimLife... well, it wouldn't have become spore, but I could see it becoming a pretty cool game. SimAnt was just too confusing, but I could see it being a decent RTS.
Looks pretty interesting; Something I would want to have a good 10 hours of sleep and a free day before taking a crack at it. I read over the site cursorily and didn't see the answer to the BIG question; is there a DirectX 10 for win2k? Give us that, and someone at Microsoft release the we-finished-it-but-decided-not-to-release-it 64-bit CPU patch for Win2k, and Life will be pretty darn awesome.
or it could have been because you were on a "Graphics Workstation", not just a regular "workstation". took me forever to figure out what everyone was talking about. I'm a semi-pro CGI guy, and I'm getting a kick out of... sorry, wrong board. It's getting really weird in the world of CGI; most of the major, and some of the Minor graphics apps are letting you make use of your GPU during rendering; these cards HAVE to be designed with that in mind. But I'll admit I don't get it. outside of rendering, most Major & Minor apps don't really need more horsepower than you get in a mid-level gaming card with good OpenGL compliance. And most rendering is via farm, anyway. I would be happy to be educated by someone who is more than semi-pro and know the answer.
The only way to get the fun of gaming that you got with 1st ed. AD&D or Classic D&D, is to play 1st ed. AD&D or Classic D&D. there really isn't a way for a computer game to come close. The only experience I've had similar is online gaming via lejendary.com , using the Lejendary Rules game system that Mr. Gygax has kindly supplied us. Planescape: Torment will sort of hit you in a similar spot, also.
Note: if you treated the 2nd edition AD&D books as sourcebooks, they were OK to add to a 1st ed game. It also wasn't hard to transition to "Dangerous Dimensions", oops, I meant "Dangerous Journeys", or "Dark Conspiracy" if you were a LONG time player and weren't surprised at having Aliens or Gunfighters or Waffen SS show up mid-game.
Out of curiosity, why are you running Vista on your older laptop? After pretty extensive poking around, I've come up with only 2 reasons that sound sane to me. Reason no. 1 is if you have a Tablet systems; I've had this proved to me, Vista Really rocks for Tablet systems, lots & lots of support built in. Reason no. 2 is a little less clear, but I can see it; if you've got a fast multicore system with 2GB+ of RAM and a Blazing fast Video Card, Vista w/ Aero is pretty, and there are enough free resources that things won't ALWAYS be slower than if you were running on Win2k/XP. According to Microsoft, 2GB is the point where their new Memory Management system kicks in and sometimes outperforms XP. They very carefully do not mention Win2k, of course. So, is it the novelty for you? or does it actually do something better than the OS you were presumably using before you switched?
Well, actually. you can. Microsoft bought VirtualPC from Connectix(?) a few years back; they now give it away. So just to make sure I wasn't hallucinating, I just popped up a DOS 6.22 window with Masters of Magic, a Win98SE window with Starcraft, and for giggles a Debian window running Americas Army. All run fine, simultaneously. Of course, this is on Win2k. and Americas Army didn't have a great frame rate. but thats probably because the machine only has 1gb of ram and a Geforce4 MX 4000 card. It also works on XP. I've had my XP-MCE Core Duo / Nvidia 7300 Laptop running 6 simultaneous "Alien Armageddon" games. Vista....wouldn't even think about trying it.
Could be like some of the satellite setups; use your phone for upload, TV for download. Most of the VHS/FM internet tests I've seen are really more similar to the way that sat TV works right now, they send out signals, you can choose which one you get, but there isn't really effective two-way communication. My biggest question, and one that googling doesn't want to answer, is what exactly are we talking about in bandwidth, here? TTBOMK, a HDTV VHS broadcast has about 25mbs data; thats a pretty respectable chunk, but how many users is that going to be split up for? obviously there is a hard limit to how many of those streams are going to be broadcast. Is it really going to be broadband, in other words? that, and the return communication aspect do not seem to adequately explained anywhere.
I'm vaguely remembering a conversation I had when I was in the Navy, but from what I remember, the USS Enterprise was over engineered to have 8 reactors when they knew only 4-6 were really necessary because they had some thoughts of mounting energy weapons. since the Enterprise was drawn up in the late 50's I'm not sure whether to doubt it or not.
soft RAID 5. I've got lots of old systems laying around; while I don't have them all up right now, In the recent past I've had 4 AMD 200mhz systems with 4x2gb IDE drives each (about 6gb storage), and a dual p-120 with 7x4gb SCSI (about 24gb). I use them on my home renderfarm; they don't add a LOT of speed to the renders, but they do help. plus it gives me places to plug in my non-USB printers, scanners, etc. and it's always good to have some really reliable storage; I do network backups to the SCSI machine on critical work folders.
Holy crap. I had no idea. I don't know HOW I had no idea, I mean, I'm a frikkin' admin for one of Gary Gygax's online forums, I've played since the pamphlets, why didn't I know about hackmaster? it sounds like the 1st edition-with-select-dragon-articles plus maybe-one-or-two-2nd-edition (and of course some judges guild & etc stuff thrown in to be interesting) that my games evolved into. If I'd known about it, I would have bought a copy for my kid so he would keep his grubby paws off my originals. But noooooo I have to find out at the same time as the report that they lost the license to make it in August of 2007.
I think you have the solution; I'm surprised as hell no one is doing this. Change it a little, though. Take a Aluminum disc that physically resembles a vinyl LP, and use a relatively powerful laser, or heck, you could use a mechanical scribe, to burn or scratch (well, I think "mill" is the correct term) in the digital signal; then encase it in glass a couple millimeters thick. A little napkin math shows me you could store, mechanically, about 150-300MB per disc without much problem; a Laser process could take that as high as 10GB or so. Either leave it raw or use a lossless codec. Building a optical player would be simple and cheap, the discs would be cheap as hell, and would likely last 10,000 years without much problem. Even the writer would be pretty cheap, the most expensive part would be the glass coating process. We have obvious evidence all around us that people will pay ridiculous amounts for "Audiophile" quality recordings, I think the things would sell pretty well. I wouldn't mind having a direct-from-the-negative, lasts forever, PERFECT copy of Star Wars, myself, even if it did require me to change the disc 10 times. Hey! consider this "prior art", I release this idea into the public domain, yada yada.
I'm sort of curious, you copy your other file types straight to SD, why not the.pdbs? I've never had any problems with it.
As for the original question, Forget the specialized hardware, get a Palm TX. I've had mine for about 1.5 years, works perfectly, comes with a wide variety of free or pay eReader software, built in WiFi so you can pop over to the Baen Free library or a ebook store whenever you like (most state library systems have free eBook & audiobook downloads for library card holders, BTW), hundreds of free applications & games, great MP3 player, great portable video player, emulators available for damn near everything you can imagine, great support for audio books. I bought the entire discworld series from the palm store and over the last month I've read the first 12 on the palm; I like it better than in paper format, it's just easier. And, best of all, it's a lot cheaper; I've seen TX's as cheap as $190, the kindle is $399. Disclaimer: I do not work for Palm, and i know this sounds like a sales pitch. I'm just really impressed with how overall useful the TX is. The only thing it's lacking IMO is the ability to dual-boot to Debian, and Palm refuses to keep it's Cellphone connection feature current; unless you are on T-mobile and have a older model bluetooth phone, you probably won't be able to use your TX as the better-than-an-iPhone device it really should be.
to the best of my knowledge, there is no legal way to get CS3 to work on win2k; the keyword "SWAMP" will lead you to a version of CS3 that has no problems with Win2k. Hypothetically, of course.
Thats not going to happen, probably. There was a version released for win2k, but it only operated within the Microsoft Reader Environment. It's therefore feasible, but I don't know of anyone currently working on the problem.
hI. I'm from the Win2k underground. We've managed to patch all the crippleware that "insists" on XP so that it runs (better, of course) on Win2k. Just look around via Google, or ask on the win2k usenet groups. The only things you can't do with Win2k PRO at this point: Run a circa 2003-2004 hyperthreading CPU well. It'll run ok, but not well. Run a 64-bit CPU well. They limited 64-bit support to only high-end server versions of win2k. "Two Worlds" is presenting problems. We are still working on it.
I've got a 386DX-40 w/32MB that runs Win98SE no problems; I've got a 486DX-120 system w/96MB that runs Win2k with no problems, it was my file server/RAID system for years. If you don't try to run games, you can get a lot of good use out of older hardware.
Sorry, have to say...so? people are different, and have different abilities; anyone who claims otherwise is just living in a fantasy world. The average person will NOT be able to beat Kasparov in a chess match, no matter ho hard they work at mastering chess, because he has an inate ability. The Average person will not be able to play guitar at the level of Stevy ray Vaughn or Hendrix or Chet Atkins or Merle Travis, because they had inate ability. The Average person will not be able to paint at the level of Da Vinci or Renoir, because they had inate ability. I've seen this most often personally in Martial Arts; some people just have "IT", whatever it is, and progress faster than harder working students no matter how hard they work.
Reallllllyyy? All it takes is motivation and persistence? so you take any 10 random people off the street, offer them $10 million to the one that is the best guitarist after the end of one month, and at the end of that month the one with the most determination and persistence will win? What if they are equally motivated? will they play at exactly the same skill level? or is it possible, just maybe, that some people have a thing called "musical ability" in a greater amount than others?
Heretic! The New Truth(tm) tells us that all are equal; anyone can be as good at Theoretical Physics as Einstein, Play a Guitar like Hendrix, or paint a masterpiece, just so long as they try hard enough! If they can't, it's their parents, school, societies (etc) fault.
Although We currently have a shining example in the whitehouse that you do not have to be "smart" or "have a high IQ" to be President, there are still icons of Old Thought that need to be taken down; the next time you hear a so-called "Gifted Musician" playing music, tell all those around you that 'anyone could play that good, if they had that equipment and practiced"; the next time someone is waxing poetical about a...well, a poet... loudly tell your children "I could write that sort of thing if I hadn't decided to be a car salesman instead!".
The only thing that is currently stopping the world from being filled to the brim with animated pr0n, or general animated amateur productions, is that mo-cap is expensive; Lightwave, Vue, Poser all have the ability to import mocap data and do generally realistic images. If this is under $500, I'll get it, and a few thousand others will also, for personal animation hobbies. if it costs a little more than that, it probably won't make that big of an impact.
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That is one of the things that surprises me; one of the reasons I was initially in favor of him was I remembered that he voted to ban gun confiscations during national emergency, while Clinton voted against the ban; seeing this, A person would think I should be a Clinton hater, because she actively campaigned for and supported a law that would, in your words, allow them to "personally come and take their guns".
Well, I am a Clinton hater. but she is out in the open; no one, especially not a gun owner, would trust her for a flat second on any 2nd amendment issues. Obama doesn't seem to be popping up in the radar on this issue.
Besides, your argument that the president doesn't have that sort of power is specious; Bush has proven over the last 7 years that the presidency is able to get away with anything without worrying about congress.
Gods I hate to do this. I'm going to be modded offtopic, and it's going to be justified. But it is also very much on-topic, depending on how you look at it. Tradition, however, insists that /. readers mod me down.
Ahh. here goes.
It looks like Obama is gonna win the democratic nomination, unless something very bizarre happens.
in 1998, Obama stated that he would Ban the sale or transfer of all forms of semi-automatic weapons. that includes about half the shotguns, more than half of the pistols, and a fairly good chunk of the rifles in the U.S. There are also some quotes about putting in "thousands" of intelligence assets at the state & local level.
I look around at the social networking sites, and see that no one seems to be mentioning this; this freaks me out to the core, and when something like this topic comes along that mentions it, I can't help but take the opportunity to mention it.
I liked SimEarth. and SimLife was interesting. They were both games that suffered from, IMO, insufficiently advanced standard PC's; SimEarth would be pretty cool on a modern system with modern graphics, and SimLife... well, it wouldn't have become spore, but I could see it becoming a pretty cool game.
SimAnt was just too confusing, but I could see it being a decent RTS.
Looks pretty interesting; Something I would want to have a good 10 hours of sleep and a free day before taking a crack at it.
I read over the site cursorily and didn't see the answer to the BIG question; is there a DirectX 10 for win2k?
Give us that, and someone at Microsoft release the we-finished-it-but-decided-not-to-release-it 64-bit CPU patch for Win2k, and Life will be pretty darn awesome.
or it could have been because you were on a "Graphics Workstation", not just a regular "workstation". took me forever to figure out what everyone was talking about.
I'm a semi-pro CGI guy, and I'm getting a kick out of...
sorry, wrong board.
It's getting really weird in the world of CGI; most of the major, and some of the Minor graphics apps are letting you make use of your GPU during rendering; these cards HAVE to be designed with that in mind.
But I'll admit I don't get it. outside of rendering, most Major & Minor apps don't really need more horsepower than you get in a mid-level gaming card with good OpenGL compliance. And most rendering is via farm, anyway.
I would be happy to be educated by someone who is more than semi-pro and know the answer.
The only way to get the fun of gaming that you got with 1st ed. AD&D or Classic D&D, is to play 1st ed. AD&D or Classic D&D. there really isn't a way for a computer game to come close. The only experience I've had similar is online gaming via lejendary.com , using the Lejendary Rules game system that Mr. Gygax has kindly supplied us.
Planescape: Torment will sort of hit you in a similar spot, also.
Note: if you treated the 2nd edition AD&D books as sourcebooks, they were OK to add to a 1st ed game. It also wasn't hard to transition to "Dangerous Dimensions", oops, I meant "Dangerous Journeys", or "Dark Conspiracy" if you were a LONG time player and weren't surprised at having Aliens or Gunfighters or Waffen SS show up mid-game.
Out of curiosity, why are you running Vista on your older laptop?
After pretty extensive poking around, I've come up with only 2 reasons that sound sane to me. Reason no. 1 is if you have a Tablet systems; I've had this proved to me, Vista Really rocks for Tablet systems, lots & lots of support built in.
Reason no. 2 is a little less clear, but I can see it; if you've got a fast multicore system with 2GB+ of RAM and a Blazing fast Video Card, Vista w/ Aero is pretty, and there are enough free resources that things won't ALWAYS be slower than if you were running on Win2k/XP. According to Microsoft, 2GB is the point where their new Memory Management system kicks in and sometimes outperforms XP. They very carefully do not mention Win2k, of course.
So, is it the novelty for you? or does it actually do something better than the OS you were presumably using before you switched?
Well, actually. you can.
Microsoft bought VirtualPC from Connectix(?) a few years back; they now give it away. So just to make sure I wasn't hallucinating, I just popped up a DOS 6.22 window with Masters of Magic, a Win98SE window with Starcraft, and for giggles a Debian window running Americas Army. All run fine, simultaneously.
Of course, this is on Win2k. and Americas Army didn't have a great frame rate. but thats probably because the machine only has 1gb of ram and a Geforce4 MX 4000 card.
It also works on XP. I've had my XP-MCE Core Duo / Nvidia 7300 Laptop running 6 simultaneous "Alien Armageddon" games.
Vista....wouldn't even think about trying it.
Could be like some of the satellite setups; use your phone for upload, TV for download. Most of the VHS/FM internet tests I've seen are really more similar to the way that sat TV works right now, they send out signals, you can choose which one you get, but there isn't really effective two-way communication.
My biggest question, and one that googling doesn't want to answer, is what exactly are we talking about in bandwidth, here?
TTBOMK, a HDTV VHS broadcast has about 25mbs data; thats a pretty respectable chunk, but how many users is that going to be split up for? obviously there is a hard limit to how many of those streams are going to be broadcast.
Is it really going to be broadband, in other words? that, and the return communication aspect do not seem to adequately explained anywhere.
I'm vaguely remembering a conversation I had when I was in the Navy, but from what I remember, the USS Enterprise was over engineered to have 8 reactors when they knew only 4-6 were really necessary because they had some thoughts of mounting energy weapons. since the Enterprise was drawn up in the late 50's I'm not sure whether to doubt it or not.
without going into too much detail, I have to say you are wrong on that point.
Any other "operation sundevil" survivors out there?
So, you are saying the war is being led by relatively sane people who know a lessor evil when they see one? whats your point?
Hopefully the RIAA will be next. Sure they seem to be shooting themselves in the foot a lot lately, but they still need to be wiped out.
soft RAID 5.
I've got lots of old systems laying around; while I don't have them all up right now, In the recent past I've had 4 AMD 200mhz systems with 4x2gb IDE drives each (about 6gb storage), and a dual p-120 with 7x4gb SCSI (about 24gb). I use them on my home renderfarm; they don't add a LOT of speed to the renders, but they do help. plus it gives me places to plug in my non-USB printers, scanners, etc.
and it's always good to have some really reliable storage; I do network backups to the SCSI machine on critical work folders.
Holy crap.
I had no idea. I don't know HOW I had no idea, I mean, I'm a frikkin' admin for one of Gary Gygax's online forums, I've played since the pamphlets, why didn't I know about hackmaster? it sounds like the 1st edition-with-select-dragon-articles plus maybe-one-or-two-2nd-edition (and of course some judges guild & etc stuff thrown in to be interesting) that my games evolved into.
If I'd known about it, I would have bought a copy for my kid so he would keep his grubby paws off my originals. But noooooo I have to find out at the same time as the report that they lost the license to make it in August of 2007.
I think you have the solution; I'm surprised as hell no one is doing this.
Change it a little, though. Take a Aluminum disc that physically resembles a vinyl LP, and use a relatively powerful laser, or heck, you could use a mechanical scribe, to burn or scratch (well, I think "mill" is the correct term) in the digital signal; then encase it in glass a couple millimeters thick. A little napkin math shows me you could store, mechanically, about 150-300MB per disc without much problem; a Laser process could take that as high as 10GB or so. Either leave it raw or use a lossless codec.
Building a optical player would be simple and cheap, the discs would be cheap as hell, and would likely last 10,000 years without much problem. Even the writer would be pretty cheap, the most expensive part would be the glass coating process.
We have obvious evidence all around us that people will pay ridiculous amounts for "Audiophile" quality recordings, I think the things would sell pretty well. I wouldn't mind having a direct-from-the-negative, lasts forever, PERFECT copy of Star Wars, myself, even if it did require me to change the disc 10 times.
Hey! consider this "prior art", I release this idea into the public domain, yada yada.
I'm sort of curious, you copy your other file types straight to SD, why not the .pdbs? I've never had any problems with it.
As for the original question, Forget the specialized hardware, get a Palm TX. I've had mine for about 1.5 years, works perfectly, comes with a wide variety of free or pay eReader software, built in WiFi so you can pop over to the Baen Free library or a ebook store whenever you like (most state library systems have free eBook & audiobook downloads for library card holders, BTW), hundreds of free applications & games, great MP3 player, great portable video player, emulators available for damn near everything you can imagine, great support for audio books.
I bought the entire discworld series from the palm store and over the last month I've read the first 12 on the palm; I like it better than in paper format, it's just easier.
And, best of all, it's a lot cheaper; I've seen TX's as cheap as $190, the kindle is $399.
Disclaimer: I do not work for Palm, and i know this sounds like a sales pitch. I'm just really impressed with how overall useful the TX is. The only thing it's lacking IMO is the ability to dual-boot to Debian, and Palm refuses to keep it's Cellphone connection feature current; unless you are on T-mobile and have a older model bluetooth phone, you probably won't be able to use your TX as the better-than-an-iPhone device it really should be.
to the best of my knowledge, there is no legal way to get CS3 to work on win2k; the keyword "SWAMP" will lead you to a version of CS3 that has no problems with Win2k.
Hypothetically, of course.
Thats not going to happen, probably. There was a version released for win2k, but it only operated within the Microsoft Reader Environment.
It's therefore feasible, but I don't know of anyone currently working on the problem.
hI.
I'm from the Win2k underground.
We've managed to patch all the crippleware that "insists" on XP so that it runs (better, of course) on Win2k.
Just look around via Google, or ask on the win2k usenet groups.
The only things you can't do with Win2k PRO at this point:
Run a circa 2003-2004 hyperthreading CPU well. It'll run ok, but not well.
Run a 64-bit CPU well. They limited 64-bit support to only high-end server versions of win2k.
"Two Worlds" is presenting problems. We are still working on it.
I've got a 386DX-40 w/32MB that runs Win98SE no problems; I've got a 486DX-120 system w/96MB that runs Win2k with no problems, it was my file server/RAID system for years.
If you don't try to run games, you can get a lot of good use out of older hardware.
Sorry, have to say...so?
people are different, and have different abilities; anyone who claims otherwise is just living in a fantasy world.
The average person will NOT be able to beat Kasparov in a chess match, no matter ho hard they work at mastering chess, because he has an inate ability.
The Average person will not be able to play guitar at the level of Stevy ray Vaughn or Hendrix or Chet Atkins or Merle Travis, because they had inate ability.
The Average person will not be able to paint at the level of Da Vinci or Renoir, because they had inate ability.
I've seen this most often personally in Martial Arts; some people just have "IT", whatever it is, and progress faster than harder working students no matter how hard they work.
Reallllllyyy?
All it takes is motivation and persistence?
so you take any 10 random people off the street, offer them $10 million to the one that is the best guitarist after the end of one month, and at the end of that month the one with the most determination and persistence will win?
What if they are equally motivated? will they play at exactly the same skill level?
or is it possible, just maybe, that some people have a thing called "musical ability" in a greater amount than others?
Heretic!
The New Truth(tm) tells us that all are equal; anyone can be as good at Theoretical Physics as Einstein, Play a Guitar like Hendrix, or paint a masterpiece, just so long as they try hard enough! If they can't, it's their parents, school, societies (etc) fault.
Although We currently have a shining example in the whitehouse that you do not have to be "smart" or "have a high IQ" to be President, there are still icons of Old Thought that need to be taken down; the next time you hear a so-called "Gifted Musician" playing music, tell all those around you that 'anyone could play that good, if they had that equipment and practiced"; the next time someone is waxing poetical about a...well, a poet... loudly tell your children "I could write that sort of thing if I hadn't decided to be a car salesman instead!".
The only thing that is currently stopping the world from being filled to the brim with animated pr0n, or general animated amateur productions, is that mo-cap is expensive; Lightwave, Vue, Poser all have the ability to import mocap data and do generally realistic images.
If this is under $500, I'll get it, and a few thousand others will also, for personal animation hobbies. if it costs a little more than that, it probably won't make that big of an impact.