While a considerable bit of the Mozilla effort is directed by Netscape (which operates as its own department for the most part), part of the reason for that is that many of the biggest contributors from outside Netscape were hired to work as full-time contributors. That's probably a good thing in the long run since those people will have more time to code and get to take advantage of the AOL's resources. Quite a few of them work afterhours on Mozilla, for which I doubt they are paid. And really there's only 1 real branch of Mozilla - the development version eventually stabilizes into a release, and the Netscape commercial release is not significantly divergent from the Mozilla release it is based on.
Mozilla is easily the most complex open source application bar none. That discourages casual contributors from getting into the core code without a significant time investment. Additionally, it wasn't until Mozilla 0.81 or so that Mozilla started becoming really useable, thereby making it a more interesting target for contributors. There are definitely barriers to outsider participation, but they do get overcome by persistent enough people. The same situation exists with Open Office, where the an even larger majority of code comes from Sun, however they've stated that the community is invaluable in providing QA and bug reports.
As for AOL's agenda, what does it matter. Thus far, they've supported Mozilla's goal of making the web standards compliant and provided an excellent browser. If they ever deviate from that plan, the code is there for interested parties to work with. I doubt that the community could provide anywhere near the kind of manpower commitment that AOL has funded for the last 5 years. Be thankful that their goals jive with the geek populations'.
Yahoo uses FreeBSD on all their unix desktops (to minimize the number of different types of systems they maintain). I have no idea how many of their people are using FreeBSD over Windows, but it was enough to make a port of Yahoo Messenger to FreeBSD worthwhile.
My only issue is that XP doesn't like to do NAT (aka share it's internet connection) for more than one network at a time (802.11b and 100Base-T). I've fought with it before without satisfaction, so I'll probably just replace all the 100Base-T with wireless.
You could just run your 100base connector out to the hub and then to a wireless access point. May cost more than wireless PCI cards, but why subject yourself to the speed penalty for computers that aren't moved around.
Make sure the agp ratio is set to 2/3. You can probably choose to run at 2/3 or 1/1. If you're at 1/1 you're running the card at 100mhz instead of the spec'ed 66mhz and the card can't handle that.
Other things to try which you may have done already: Set:
Options NVAGP "0" to disable AGP. Run distributed.net or some other stress tester overnight (preferrably 2 copies at once to maximize context switching and cause OS crashes quickly) to ensure you aren't having some sort of cpu heat related issue. If it's not the video card, it has to be some other aspect of the setup. Your most likely culprit is heat, followed by a bad or inadequate power supply.
The junk postal mail receive takes us time to throw away -- and time is money. If we recycle it, it costs our local recycling center money to transport it. We pay taxes for that. That is money.
You pay a fixed amount to have a certain amount of trash collected, which the junk mail is unlikely to exceed. So, only the trash company has a legitimate claim to damages for snail mail. Additionally, there is no assurance that you would make money with your time. And most of all, by contacting the Direct Marketing Association, it is possible to opt out of 90% of junk snail mail.
Heck, pretty much anything that anybody does that we aren't *in favor* of will somehow inconvenience us and cost us money. The kid next door downloaded pr0n slows down my cable modem -- is he *stealing* from me?
That's a ridiculous statement. The kid next door has paid for his service - to the cable company. If you aren't satisfied with the service, complain to them and ask to have him shut off. Unless they guarantee you a minimum amount of bandwidth, they aren't obligated to do provide you with anything - you can quit if you don't like it.
Get real people. It doesn't cost you much money to download less that 1k messages. Especially if you have a *free* email account like yahoo, excite or hotmail. If you are careful about who you distribute your email too you can reduce a lot of your spam.
Guess what, it costs us ISPs a decent amount of money to deal with spam. If some customer stops checking his account, we get to hold his spam for him till he comes back wasting disk space. We also get to field calls from people who are pissed off at seeing porn emails in their box. And worst of all, you sometimes get that flagrant spammer who tries to send 50,000+ messages to your customers with bad return addresses - making you waste 2-3 hours of paid time cleaning out the queue so that the real messages get delivered promptly.
A final note - the one that will probably make this post be labelled as "flamebait" - how can we advocate stealing from the RIAA in the form of trading copyrighted music but have *zero* tolerance of spammers who are little more than a tiny annoyance in our lives?
Because most slashdot users are hypocrites and the file trading issue is somewhat complicated by the fact that it can be used for legal purposes even though most of the traffic is illegal.
Unsolicited spam however is black and white - abuse of my property is wrong no matter how little cost it incurs. To put it another way, would you mind if a neighbor walked through your yard everyday? Maybe not, but you would have a right to complain. And you'd probably consider taking action if 50 neighbors were doing it on a regular basis.
Glide got pushed after glQuake came out. It was basically glQuake that sold the original generation of voodoo cards. All the other games that came out at the time took advantage of the install base that Quake generated and targetted Glide because 3dfx was the only company with a 3D accelerator on the market. At the time I got my Voodoo 1, there were only like 3 games that used it including Quake. The other thing to remember is that Glide worked in DOS as the last of the DOS mode games were coming out.
Later, as Direct3D got better and there started to be useful 3d accelerators like the Riva and TNT, companies started writing multiple renderers for both Glide and Direct3D. That was a small part of what killed 3dfx - their drivers for everything other than Glide sucked. They took a long time to get multitexture support in D3D (which gave a 100% boost in games that supported it), and even longer (post-Voodoo 3 launch) to get a full OpenGL driver out the door which helped some games and the professional market.
Potentially, this game may work on some other more advanced card further down the line. I guess we won't know till somebody hacks the game and tries to enable the feature on a Radeon. Then again, the Geforce 4 uses the same architecture as the Geforce 3 so they're probably lying.
Not that I care that much, but Dillo is not a modern browser. It may have been developed recently, but it lacks a lot of stuff any modern browser should have - CSS support, javascript, SSL. They chose to be quick by writing in C and being non-portable (to windows at least), whereas Mozilla for example virtualized everything in order to allow applications to be built, more portability, and possibly better maintainability. Dillo is a sorta browser, it's really only at the level of an unpolished Netscape 3: capable of displaying basic pages but not anything very complicated.
Opera is a lot better, but they're having to rewrite their rendering engine in order to support DOM1 & 2 better. We'll have to see how they perform once that's done. Can't say I like Opera's interface much either - especially on Linux but on the whole it's a pretty decent browser.
You might try getting a version of w3m or links with image support compiled in. They'll still run in a terminal, but they render images inline.
Expecting modern browsers to run on a computer that old is pretty ridiculous. Older browsers had much simpler parsing routines because they didn't have to support CSS, DHTML, or any of the other new technologies. And, as time goes on it's more worthwhile to do things quickly/maintainably than to squeeze out the last bit of performance for an increasingly smaller number of slower computers
It's quite doubtful he's doing it primarily to increase Microsoft's business. I'd guess rather, that he's buying immortality. When all is said and done, Bill is gonna die and then what's going to matter to him - Microsoft's stock price? What he cares about is that people will go hey Bill Gates put eleventy-billion dollars into various charities or hey, there's the Gates museum of technology.
FWIW, Bill has said that his son won't get much. Virtually everything goes to charity when he dies.
He's following the Carnegie model which has worked quite well. Carnegie amassed his fortune then checked everything out in a few days and he began donating to charity. Carnegie's name got plastered on numerous concert halls, libraries, etc. and lots of useful buildings got built that help society. All in accord with Carnegie's belief that his talents for making money were to amass wealth and spend it in worthwhile ways.
What would you expect Bill to do anyway? If he's going to give people PC's, it's to be expected they're going to run Windows since that's his company and he thinks it's the greatest thing ever.
Well, GTK is already ugly and bad enough on any desktop. I thought Mozilla could look better, but then I saw the test builds with GTK. But I believe you can use QT widgets for Mozilla if you compile it differently. No idea if Mozilla just wraps the functions so that it would be an easy switch or if you'd have to change all the GTK calls to QT ones.
Mozilla does use native widgets in many cases. Try firing up the classic theme under XP to see what I mean. The same will come to Linux eventually, with GTK pulldowns, scrollbars, checkboxes, etc. Those aren't in yet because the code had stability issues, but it will presumably return some day.
Re:How is Magic On-line doing?
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Layoffs at WotC
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· Score: 2
Wizards has a vested interest in selling new cards, so they constantly have to release new expansions. But I hardly see this as something to be scorned, because otherwise tournament play stagnates as dominant deck types emerge and people stick to them for years. Players want to see new cards in order to allow them to build a deck that does something new or to play sealed deck tournaments with cards they haven't seen 50 times before.
As it is, Wizards does a pretty good job with the expansions. The last few years has produced sets with higher overall quality and more interesting mechanics than when I first started playing in '95. And no one's stopping you from using those old cards to play games, but it's understandable that they aren't valid in most tournament formats. Even though I own virtually all the old stuff, it was kind of ridiculous when you had to buy $1000 worth of cards to be highly competitive and there is a shortage of those cards for sale. I mostly play formats like 1.5 where you can use your old crap but don't have to buy many new cards or update your deck that often.
Besides, Magic is better playing for fun than adhering to some tournament standard. Just go grab your deck and play a group game or something. And when your opponent plays some new, weird card from the latest expansion that you've never seen before, I think that's pretty cool. The most fun I had was seeing all the crazy cards I didn't know existed.
First off, Doom ][ outsold the original Doom by a fair amount. And the actual numbers for Doom ][ are something in the neighborhood of 1.8 million copies (Myst has sold more than 5 million copies and the Sims more than 6). As the first link states, lots of people got the Doom demo, but since you had to mail order Doom when it first came out sales were not that high.
Secondly, at the time Doom came out (1993) there were quite a few machines that could run it. Even measly 386 DX's could and it ran quite well on my 486 DX 33. By the time Doom ][ came out a year later with the same engine and only slightly more cpu intensive maps, virtually everyone could play it.
Quake on the other hand had mediocre single player compared to Doom, graphics that were technically superior and cool but looked like crap till people had 3d cards with 16 bit color and high res, and required a Pentium 100 or better to run well at a time when Pentium systems were significantly more expensive than 486's.
Also, much like how the first Doom episode was easily distributed via BBS's and floppy disks, the first episode of Quake was sold on CD for $5 and was also downloadable off the Internet, so some people may never have bought anything more.
The last thing is that Doom had numerous 3rd party addons, map packs, editors, Final Doom and everything else that further drove the Doom craze. Everybody and their brother was playing Doom, getting extra Doom levels, etc. Quake sold less copies, mapping was more difficult, etc. so there were fewer people creating maps and there was only the one official addon pack. Frankly, Quake single player wasn't that fun compared to Doom. Quake 2's single player focus still didn't help, it's got a horrible single player aspect.
I had pretty good luck with Win 98. I just grabbed 98lite and did the stripped down install and used it for nothing but games. Pared with a dual boot or second machine it works well enough. And you can get away with less ram and have better dos support than XP since you boot it, play a game and shutdown.
Currently I use a Gentoo system. While it doesn't play a whole lot of games, it does do Counter-Strike adequately well and Warcraft III quite passably under Wine X. The only complaint is that mouse support is a little shaky turning more than 90% and Transgaming has difficulties getting CS past the cheat detection. And my Win 98 box took a dive in the middle of a War 3 game and now won't start.
Compared to the months of frustration of trying to get Linux games and 3D working under FreeBSD, it's been a walk in the park. While not as simple as Windows, the effort's been worth it for me not to have to run 2 machines thru the KVM switch. Once you get things up and running, just leave it alone and play.
The shipping release of Win 95 was probably the worst OS Microsoft ever put out (I never saw Windows 3.0). While they did fix a lot of bugs with OSR 2, that release was never made available unless you purchased a new computer and OSR 1 (Win 95A) fixed like 0 bugs. Meanwhile if you bought Win 95 when it first came out, it was liable to have Explorer corrupt itself so thoroughly you couldn't even start the computer, make the icons lose their image and not be fixable, and a horrible TCP/IP dialup stack that tended to corrupt itself. It was on an order of days before you could expect to see one of these problems, whereas Win 98 generally degrades much more gracefully over a period of months and stays fairly useable for quite a while.
The only fix at the time was to wipe the OS and install a copy of OSR 2 from someone else's new computer. And even against OSR 2 Win 98 was a bit better, especially if you made the mistake of integrating IE on Win 95 causing it to explode in a giant ball of flame.
Win 98 was not great, but it generally got the job done...for a while, back when your only other choices were NT 4 with crappy game support and Red Hat = 5.2.
The most awful part of the Jabba scene was that he didn't look like Jabba. Since Jabba ended up being about the same size as the actor in the fur coat, he's way too small. And not lounging in his chair he seems really out of place.
I have the same complaint with the dancing alien in Jabba's palace. They took what was an amusing scene and replaced the 70's-ish music and human actor with a crappy CGI alien that's too obviously computer generated, dancing to stupid music...
Mark Hamill apparently was quoted way back in '82 with saying that if George Lucas could replace actors with digital characters he would.
Mozilla is licensed sort of similarly (the MPL gives Netscape special rights to the code)
No it doesn't. That's the NPL which Netscape only used in the very beginning of the project, everything they have released since then is under the MPL which is quite tolerable and grants no special rights.
While the letter of the GPL doesn't prevent dual licensing, it's not really in the GPL spirit, which is that the original author of a piece of code doesn't have special rights that others don't have.
So, would you rather have Sun throw a couple of developers at OpenOffice or a whole crowd of them funded by corporate licenses of Star Office? What's going on is clear to all contributors and if Sun ever decides to stop work or close their code base the GPL sources are there for you to continue with.
Actually, if you throw WineX on there, the game support is about equal. And you get a few necessary goodies like Counter-Strike that you can't play on the Mac. Thus far, I've had good luck with WineX. Warcraft III runs exceptionally well (even with 2.01) except for being a bit slower and having some mouse pointer issues that are likely resolved with this release.
Even so, a fast PC can make up for the emulation slowdown, and I'd rather deal with a few nusances every once in a while than a big nusance like Windows. WineX probably wouldn't be a good choice for a casual user who wouldn't want to worry about tweaking things and having to look at the message boards to make sure his next purchase will work, but it's fine for a geek like me.
On the whole, I can play most of the games I want like Q1/2, CS, and War3 competitively and that's all I'm looking for.
You can now do this in Mozilla too as of version of 1.1 It's under View -> Message Body As, which lets you render messages as html, text, or html without font changes & images.
I'm still using the trusty old Sound Blaster 16 (non -PnP) that I bought back in '93 in my Windows PC. When I bought a new box without PCI slots I just kept it in the older PC. I figure it's still got a number of years left in it.
I've also got an old external 1x SCSI cdrom that I trot out from time to time. Works fine as an extra mp3 drive so I don't have to swap disks as often.
One could argue that since he sought to be a Libertarian that he didn't want to see laws passed. The problem certainly is that everyone feels that the government can fix a problem that it should. By creating gridlock, you force coalition forming and cooperation so that all sides must be partially appeased for bills to pass.
It's unfortunate that many congressmen don't work for the betterment of the country, but reelection is the name of the game. Likewise, power play politics are necessary. The lessons of the young Republican majority back in 1994 are enough to demonstrate that. They arrived fresh and motivated to do things different (welfare reform, balance the budget, make congress subject to the general public's laws) and because they failed to play the political game well enough (or overplayed), they lost the momentum necessary to cut through the bureaucracy and get things done. Gradually, they bucked up and rejoined the political process and began playing the game the same way as everybody else.
There are only a few ways to address these problems: term limits, campaign finance reform, limiting federal powers. It is necessary to get new thinkers in who are more interested in ideas than the way that Washington works. Likewise, decentralizing power puts control closer to the citizens affected, reduces abuse, and simply means less government control of our lives.
The problem is that every one of those is counter to what will get you elected. And with the critical mass of entrenched congressman, you would need a significant public movement to see such change. And striking laws from the books, doing less with government, and making people solve their own problems gets few people into office. Accepting term limits curbs the representative's ability to get the legislation you want passed and removes power from people who assumed their office because they wanted that power.
Politics should not be a business one can spend their life doing. Politicians should have go back to the real world every now and then for a breath of fresh air and to have contact with the people they are making laws for. The entrenchment of power leads to people who have to think inside the box, rather than what the box should be. Bring politics to a local level where the ordinary guy has nearly as much ability to argue his points as the government official.
Slashdot Mirror
While a considerable bit of the Mozilla effort is directed by Netscape (which operates as its own department for the most part), part of the reason for that is that many of the biggest contributors from outside Netscape were hired to work as full-time contributors. That's probably a good thing in the long run since those people will have more time to code and get to take advantage of the AOL's resources. Quite a few of them work afterhours on Mozilla, for which I doubt they are paid. And really there's only 1 real branch of Mozilla - the development version eventually stabilizes into a release, and the Netscape commercial release is not significantly divergent from the Mozilla release it is based on.
Mozilla is easily the most complex open source application bar none. That discourages casual contributors from getting into the core code without a significant time investment. Additionally, it wasn't until Mozilla 0.81 or so that Mozilla started becoming really useable, thereby making it a more interesting target for contributors. There are definitely barriers to outsider participation, but they do get overcome by persistent enough people. The same situation exists with Open Office, where the an even larger majority of code comes from Sun, however they've stated that the community is invaluable in providing QA and bug reports.
As for AOL's agenda, what does it matter. Thus far, they've supported Mozilla's goal of making the web standards compliant and provided an excellent browser. If they ever deviate from that plan, the code is there for interested parties to work with. I doubt that the community could provide anywhere near the kind of manpower commitment that AOL has funded for the last 5 years. Be thankful that their goals jive with the geek populations'.
Yahoo uses FreeBSD on all their unix desktops (to minimize the number of different types of systems they maintain). I have no idea how many of their people are using FreeBSD over Windows, but it was enough to make a port of Yahoo Messenger to FreeBSD worthwhile.
My only issue is that XP doesn't like to do NAT (aka share it's internet connection) for more than one network at a time (802.11b and 100Base-T). I've fought with it before without satisfaction, so I'll probably just replace all the 100Base-T with wireless.
You could just run your 100base connector out to the hub and then to a wireless access point. May cost more than wireless PCI cards, but why subject yourself to the speed penalty for computers that aren't moved around.
Bravo. Way to tell it like it is.
Now if only we could mod everyone else down and you up.
What the other guy said. It should be a Bios option, probably in the advanced chipset settings section.
Make sure the agp ratio is set to 2/3. You can probably choose to run at 2/3 or 1/1. If you're at 1/1 you're running the card at 100mhz instead of the spec'ed 66mhz and the card can't handle that.
Other things to try which you may have done already:
Set:
Options NVAGP "0"
to disable AGP.
Run distributed.net or some other stress tester overnight (preferrably 2 copies at once to maximize context switching and cause OS crashes quickly) to ensure you aren't having some sort of cpu heat related issue. If it's not the video card, it has to be some other aspect of the setup. Your most likely culprit is heat, followed by a bad or inadequate power supply.
What a poor troll.
The junk postal mail receive takes us time to throw away -- and time is money. If we recycle it, it costs our local recycling center money to transport it. We pay taxes for that. That is money.
You pay a fixed amount to have a certain amount of trash collected, which the junk mail is unlikely to exceed. So, only the trash company has a legitimate claim to damages for snail mail. Additionally, there is no assurance that you would make money with your time. And most of all, by contacting the Direct Marketing Association, it is possible to opt out of 90% of junk snail mail.
Heck, pretty much anything that anybody does that we aren't *in favor* of will somehow inconvenience us and cost us money. The kid next door downloaded pr0n slows down my cable modem -- is he *stealing* from me?
That's a ridiculous statement. The kid next door has paid for his service - to the cable company. If you aren't satisfied with the service, complain to them and ask to have him shut off. Unless they guarantee you a minimum amount of bandwidth, they aren't obligated to do provide you with anything - you can quit if you don't like it.
Get real people. It doesn't cost you much money to download less that 1k messages. Especially if you have a *free* email account like yahoo, excite or hotmail. If you are careful about who you distribute your email too you can reduce a lot of your spam.
Guess what, it costs us ISPs a decent amount of money to deal with spam. If some customer stops checking his account, we get to hold his spam for him till he comes back wasting disk space. We also get to field calls from people who are pissed off at seeing porn emails in their box. And worst of all, you sometimes get that flagrant spammer who tries to send 50,000+ messages to your customers with bad return addresses - making you waste 2-3 hours of paid time cleaning out the queue so that the real messages get delivered promptly.
A final note - the one that will probably make this post be labelled as "flamebait" - how can we advocate stealing from the RIAA in the form of trading copyrighted music but have *zero* tolerance of spammers who are little more than a tiny annoyance in our lives?
Because most slashdot users are hypocrites and the file trading issue is somewhat complicated by the fact that it can be used for legal purposes even though most of the traffic is illegal.
Unsolicited spam however is black and white - abuse of my property is wrong no matter how little cost it incurs. To put it another way, would you mind if a neighbor walked through your yard everyday? Maybe not, but you would have a right to complain. And you'd probably consider taking action if 50 neighbors were doing it on a regular basis.
Glide got pushed after glQuake came out. It was basically glQuake that sold the original generation of voodoo cards. All the other games that came out at the time took advantage of the install base that Quake generated and targetted Glide because 3dfx was the only company with a 3D accelerator on the market. At the time I got my Voodoo 1, there were only like 3 games that used it including Quake. The other thing to remember is that Glide worked in DOS as the last of the DOS mode games were coming out.
Later, as Direct3D got better and there started to be useful 3d accelerators like the Riva and TNT, companies started writing multiple renderers for both Glide and Direct3D. That was a small part of what killed 3dfx - their drivers for everything other than Glide sucked. They took a long time to get multitexture support in D3D (which gave a 100% boost in games that supported it), and even longer (post-Voodoo 3 launch) to get a full OpenGL driver out the door which helped some games and the professional market.
Potentially, this game may work on some other more advanced card further down the line. I guess we won't know till somebody hacks the game and tries to enable the feature on a Radeon. Then again, the Geforce 4 uses the same architecture as the Geforce 3 so they're probably lying.
Not that I care that much, but Dillo is not a modern browser. It may have been developed recently, but it lacks a lot of stuff any modern browser should have - CSS support, javascript, SSL. They chose to be quick by writing in C and being non-portable (to windows at least), whereas Mozilla for example virtualized everything in order to allow applications to be built, more portability, and possibly better maintainability. Dillo is a sorta browser, it's really only at the level of an unpolished Netscape 3: capable of displaying basic pages but not anything very complicated.
Opera is a lot better, but they're having to rewrite their rendering engine in order to support DOM1 & 2 better. We'll have to see how they perform once that's done. Can't say I like Opera's interface much either - especially on Linux but on the whole it's a pretty decent browser.
You might try getting a version of w3m or links with image support compiled in. They'll still run in a terminal, but they render images inline.
Expecting modern browsers to run on a computer that old is pretty ridiculous. Older browsers had much simpler parsing routines because they didn't have to support CSS, DHTML, or any of the other new technologies. And, as time goes on it's more worthwhile to do things quickly/maintainably than to squeeze out the last bit of performance for an increasingly smaller number of slower computers
Then you should check out this parody to appreciate what a badass gaming platform the Mac is (may need to right click and save as).
It's quite doubtful he's doing it primarily to increase Microsoft's business. I'd guess rather, that he's buying immortality. When all is said and done, Bill is gonna die and then what's going to matter to him - Microsoft's stock price? What he cares about is that people will go hey Bill Gates put eleventy-billion dollars into various charities or hey, there's the Gates museum of technology.
FWIW, Bill has said that his son won't get much. Virtually everything goes to charity when he dies.
He's following the Carnegie model which has worked quite well. Carnegie amassed his fortune then checked everything out in a few days and he began donating to charity. Carnegie's name got plastered on numerous concert halls, libraries, etc. and lots of useful buildings got built that help society. All in accord with Carnegie's belief that his talents for making money were to amass wealth and spend it in worthwhile ways.
What would you expect Bill to do anyway? If he's going to give people PC's, it's to be expected they're going to run Windows since that's his company and he thinks it's the greatest thing ever.
Well, GTK is already ugly and bad enough on any desktop. I thought Mozilla could look better, but then I saw the test builds with GTK. But I believe you can use QT widgets for Mozilla if you compile it differently. No idea if Mozilla just wraps the functions so that it would be an easy switch or if you'd have to change all the GTK calls to QT ones.
Mozilla does use native widgets in many cases. Try firing up the classic theme under XP to see what I mean. The same will come to Linux eventually, with GTK pulldowns, scrollbars, checkboxes, etc. Those aren't in yet because the code had stability issues, but it will presumably return some day.
Wizards has a vested interest in selling new cards, so they constantly have to release new expansions. But I hardly see this as something to be scorned, because otherwise tournament play stagnates as dominant deck types emerge and people stick to them for years. Players want to see new cards in order to allow them to build a deck that does something new or to play sealed deck tournaments with cards they haven't seen 50 times before.
As it is, Wizards does a pretty good job with the expansions. The last few years has produced sets with higher overall quality and more interesting mechanics than when I first started playing in '95. And no one's stopping you from using those old cards to play games, but it's understandable that they aren't valid in most tournament formats. Even though I own virtually all the old stuff, it was kind of ridiculous when you had to buy $1000 worth of cards to be highly competitive and there is a shortage of those cards for sale. I mostly play formats like 1.5 where you can use your old crap but don't have to buy many new cards or update your deck that often.
Besides, Magic is better playing for fun than adhering to some tournament standard. Just go grab your deck and play a group game or something. And when your opponent plays some new, weird card from the latest expansion that you've never seen before, I think that's pretty cool. The most fun I had was seeing all the crazy cards I didn't know existed.
First off, Doom ][ outsold the original Doom by a fair amount. And the actual numbers for Doom ][ are something in the neighborhood of 1.8 million copies (Myst has sold more than 5 million copies and the Sims more than 6). As the first link states, lots of people got the Doom demo, but since you had to mail order Doom when it first came out sales were not that high.
Secondly, at the time Doom came out (1993) there were quite a few machines that could run it. Even measly 386 DX's could and it ran quite well on my 486 DX 33. By the time Doom ][ came out a year later with the same engine and only slightly more cpu intensive maps, virtually everyone could play it.
Quake on the other hand had mediocre single player compared to Doom, graphics that were technically superior and cool but looked like crap till people had 3d cards with 16 bit color and high res, and required a Pentium 100 or better to run well at a time when Pentium systems were significantly more expensive than 486's.
Also, much like how the first Doom episode was easily distributed via BBS's and floppy disks, the first episode of Quake was sold on CD for $5 and was also downloadable off the Internet, so some people may never have bought anything more.
The last thing is that Doom had numerous 3rd party addons, map packs, editors, Final Doom and everything else that further drove the Doom craze. Everybody and their brother was playing Doom, getting extra Doom levels, etc. Quake sold less copies, mapping was more difficult, etc. so there were fewer people creating maps and there was only the one official addon pack. Frankly, Quake single player wasn't that fun compared to Doom. Quake 2's single player focus still didn't help, it's got a horrible single player aspect.
I had pretty good luck with Win 98. I just grabbed 98lite and did the stripped down install and used it for nothing but games. Pared with a dual boot or second machine it works well enough. And you can get away with less ram and have better dos support than XP since you boot it, play a game and shutdown.
Currently I use a Gentoo system. While it doesn't play a whole lot of games, it does do Counter-Strike adequately well and Warcraft III quite passably under Wine X. The only complaint is that mouse support is a little shaky turning more than 90% and Transgaming has difficulties getting CS past the cheat detection. And my Win 98 box took a dive in the middle of a War 3 game and now won't start.
Compared to the months of frustration of trying to get Linux games and 3D working under FreeBSD, it's been a walk in the park. While not as simple as Windows, the effort's been worth it for me not to have to run 2 machines thru the KVM switch. Once you get things up and running, just leave it alone and play.
The shipping release of Win 95 was probably the worst OS Microsoft ever put out (I never saw Windows 3.0). While they did fix a lot of bugs with OSR 2, that release was never made available unless you purchased a new computer and OSR 1 (Win 95A) fixed like 0 bugs. Meanwhile if you bought Win 95 when it first came out, it was liable to have Explorer corrupt itself so thoroughly you couldn't even start the computer, make the icons lose their image and not be fixable, and a horrible TCP/IP dialup stack that tended to corrupt itself. It was on an order of days before you could expect to see one of these problems, whereas Win 98 generally degrades much more gracefully over a period of months and stays fairly useable for quite a while.
The only fix at the time was to wipe the OS and install a copy of OSR 2 from someone else's new computer. And even against OSR 2 Win 98 was a bit better, especially if you made the mistake of integrating IE on Win 95 causing it to explode in a giant ball of flame.
Win 98 was not great, but it generally got the job done...for a while, back when your only other choices were NT 4 with crappy game support and Red Hat = 5.2.
The most awful part of the Jabba scene was that he didn't look like Jabba. Since Jabba ended up being about the same size as the actor in the fur coat, he's way too small. And not lounging in his chair he seems really out of place.
I have the same complaint with the dancing alien in Jabba's palace. They took what was an amusing scene and replaced the 70's-ish music and human actor with a crappy CGI alien that's too obviously computer generated, dancing to stupid music...
Mark Hamill apparently was quoted way back in '82 with saying that if George Lucas could replace actors with digital characters he would.
Mozilla is licensed sort of similarly (the MPL gives Netscape special rights to the code)
No it doesn't. That's the NPL which Netscape only used in the very beginning of the project, everything they have released since then is under the MPL which is quite tolerable and grants no special rights.
While the letter of the GPL doesn't prevent dual licensing, it's not really in the GPL spirit, which is that the original author of a piece of code doesn't have special rights that others don't have.
So, would you rather have Sun throw a couple of developers at OpenOffice or a whole crowd of them funded by corporate licenses of Star Office? What's going on is clear to all contributors and if Sun ever decides to stop work or close their code base the GPL sources are there for you to continue with.
Actually, if you throw WineX on there, the game support is about equal. And you get a few necessary goodies like Counter-Strike that you can't play on the Mac. Thus far, I've had good luck with WineX. Warcraft III runs exceptionally well (even with 2.01) except for being a bit slower and having some mouse pointer issues that are likely resolved with this release.
Even so, a fast PC can make up for the emulation slowdown, and I'd rather deal with a few nusances every once in a while than a big nusance like Windows. WineX probably wouldn't be a good choice for a casual user who wouldn't want to worry about tweaking things and having to look at the message boards to make sure his next purchase will work, but it's fine for a geek like me.
On the whole, I can play most of the games I want like Q1/2, CS, and War3 competitively and that's all I'm looking for.
1) I can turn off the html in the mail folders
You can now do this in Mozilla too as of version of 1.1 It's under View -> Message Body As, which lets you render messages as html, text, or html without font changes & images.
For anybody that's interested in trying out the multiplayer, I have a server running at:
deskstar.101freeway.com
for at least the rest of the weekend.
I'm still using the trusty old Sound Blaster 16 (non -PnP) that I bought back in '93 in my Windows PC. When I bought a new box without PCI slots I just kept it in the older PC. I figure it's still got a number of years left in it.
I've also got an old external 1x SCSI cdrom that I trot out from time to time. Works fine as an extra mp3 drive so I don't have to swap disks as often.
One could argue that since he sought to be a Libertarian that he didn't want to see laws passed. The problem certainly is that everyone feels that the government can fix a problem that it should. By creating gridlock, you force coalition forming and cooperation so that all sides must be partially appeased for bills to pass.
It's unfortunate that many congressmen don't work for the betterment of the country, but reelection is the name of the game. Likewise, power play politics are necessary. The lessons of the young Republican majority back in 1994 are enough to demonstrate that. They arrived fresh and motivated to do things different (welfare reform, balance the budget, make congress subject to the general public's laws) and because they failed to play the political game well enough (or overplayed), they lost the momentum necessary to cut through the bureaucracy and get things done. Gradually, they bucked up and rejoined the political process and began playing the game the same way as everybody else.
There are only a few ways to address these problems: term limits, campaign finance reform, limiting federal powers. It is necessary to get new thinkers in who are more interested in ideas than the way that Washington works. Likewise, decentralizing power puts control closer to the citizens affected, reduces abuse, and simply means less government control of our lives.
The problem is that every one of those is counter to what will get you elected. And with the critical mass of entrenched congressman, you would need a significant public movement to see such change. And striking laws from the books, doing less with government, and making people solve their own problems gets few people into office. Accepting term limits curbs the representative's ability to get the legislation you want passed and removes power from people who assumed their office because they wanted that power.
Politics should not be a business one can spend their life doing. Politicians should have go back to the real world every now and then for a breath of fresh air and to have contact with the people they are making laws for. The entrenchment of power leads to people who have to think inside the box, rather than what the box should be. Bring politics to a local level where the ordinary guy has nearly as much ability to argue his points as the government official.