That reminds me of an excellent "peace in the Middle East" conference we once ran in History in high school. My group represented Israel, so we went and solicited aid from the United States and the Arab confederation. In exchange for returning the captured areas in Syria and elsewhere, they agreed to let us get rid of the Palestinians. The U.N. also agreed to let us manage our own affairs, so we had the support of all the other parties present.
We then proceeded to pull out paper guns and assassinate the Palestinian delegates, followed by declaring the beginning of a World War III-ish jihad against them. Needless to say the teacher was not impressed and the conference was ended quite abruptly. I was proud of our success, as actually tackling the relatively intractable problems of the Middle East with a bunch of not particularly politically aware or bright students in a generic high school class is quite a bit more difficult and less exciting.
Hardly. You pervert the term in the same way as FDR's 4 Freedoms. "Freedom from fear" is not freedom, no one can make you be afraid except yourself. "Freedom from slavery" on the other hand is more valid as it's complement is typically violence-backed slavery. Freedom is the ability to act however you like or believe anything you want. It cannot be freedom from, it must be freedom to.
Freedom commonly involves risk. Driving at 120mph might well end your life. Smoking too much crack might cause you to OD. But true freedom ignores the consequences, leaving the only arbiter of freedom to the laws of nature and personal preference. Your vision of freedom is boring, imagine if everyone had to avoid doing anything that offended anyone.
The only just restrictions of freedom are those of imposing your will on someone else by force. In any other situation, the person can ignore or avoid you.
In the movie, they can only tell when murder is about to occur - not other violence, rape, copyright infringement, cable theft, or other, lesser crimes. How great would the world be if we didn't have to fear for our lives? It'd be almost as free a world as if there were no spam. We wouldn't have to hide.
Sure but who says it's 100% accurate. The US requires that you prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt - could you guarantee me that up until the minute the suspect points a gun at the victim that he was going to kill him based solely on some previously accurate 'psychics'? I may dream hateful epithets and envision killing someone in my mind. There is nothing wrong with that until I put into action a plan to carry it out.
BTW, Minority Report sucks ass, it's an insult to your intelligence. I watched it on an Imax screen with a 10,000 watt sound system, there's one part in the movie that scared the crap out of me. Not nightmares, or make-you-afraid-of-the-dark scared so much as quiet, quiet, 10,000 watts blaring scared.
Nice non-sequitur. You manage to condemn the movie off-handedly and then follow with what appears to be a compliment, though you really fail to carry through and finish either idea. It's not suprising you don't like the movie as you are the kind of person Spielberg (and presumably P. K. Dick) is trying to fight against.
I've been happily playing with WineX 2.01 since it came out. Regular wine stopped working with 1.4 but $15 to Transgaming later and I was back playing on 95% of servers without any issues.
The BSDs would. There had been people interested in a free BSD for a long time, even before Linux was released, if you look at usenet archives. When the legal problems were happening/problems with 386bsd, a number of them started checking out Linux.
The problem is that it's relatively difficult to Doom online. Since it predates the Quake(world) era, there have been no dedicated servers until recently and even with them, there's several different incompatible versions and a shortage of servers with low pings and people on them. That means you have to know someone who wants to play, deal with all the launchers and stuff involved in setting up a game and so forth. Back in the day, it may have been easier to find a friend and play with them via modem, but most fps gamers don't even have modems anymore.
Additionally, Doom multiplayer is dated. Quakeworld is dominated by split-second reflexes, Doom is even quicker. It's not particularly fun to spawn and be shot instantly with the super shotgun by some guy that's been honing his skills for the last 8 years.
The fact that QW still survives many revisions of Quake later indicates to me that people still like good multiplayer. Had Doom been released with TCP/IP years ago, I think you'd see more continuing interest in it. As it is, the single player is easy to play and has an intensity which few fps have matched. Meanwhile the Quake games, Counter-Strike, etc. have made Doom's multiplayer kinda boring.
I think that you'll see a lot of people playing Doom 3 online if it has even decent multiplayer support (e.g. better maps than Q2 shipped with). Everybody got sick of Q3/UT and will be looking for some good old-fashioned multiplayer when they don't want to play CS and its clones.
They're probably going to do this at some point, it's just a matter of time. Initially they chose the benefits of making it all one app for sharing data more easily between components. But now the complications incurred by having to support every app's preferences and keyboard shortcuts will probably result is us seeing a stripped down browser (mozilla/browser) as well as autonomous mail/news and chat clients post 1.0.
It just takes picking a different chrome file to load when starting the app. All it will really amount to is the same apps just running in separate processes - they all need the same libraries. So they'll end up sharing pages and using a similar amount of ram separated as when they were joined.
Umm, that's what the Mozilla.org t-shirts look like.
A red star with a red dino in the middle all on a black t-shirt. And below the star, the word: Hack, subtitled "this technology could fall into the right hands".
Unfortunately, the only time they're given out is at the developer conferences for $10/a pop (where I got mine).
What I'd like to see is a commemorative CD with the 1.0 releases and source code on it.
At one point Alpha stomped all over the Pentium series clock for clock, as did the other architectures. I'm not informed enough to know for sure, but I think that if SGI, Compaq, etc.'s research funding were still there and they were on a.13 micron process, they could still be winning the performance war. I mean, the Alpha was the performance king for a long time without having a new chip come out for 2 years, for crying out loud. If they hadn't killed it, they could be running EV8 Alpha's at 1.5Ghz+ that stomp all over everything.
However with x86-64, you get twice as many registers, so that's got to help one of the x86's performance bottlenecks.
The guys at the Nvidia petition keep track of a few guys trying to port the drivers to FreeBSD. Unfortunately there haven't been many updates lately and I got tired of waiting and installed Linux till the drivers are ready. Too much fiddling in order to get a Voodoo 5 to work.
For what it's worth I believe they hired one FreeBSD developer to continue supporting the drivers he wrote. Can't remember his name off the top of my head.
Since mpt's (Matthew Thomas) website seems to be down, I'm mirroring his first 9 points here: There are another 5 points that he added today, but weren't in the google cache.
If you're interested in his writings, please check his site after it comes back up from being slashdotted, as he clarifies some points that upset some people.
"Why Free Software usability tends to suck"
I've been having a discussion with someone from IBM about whether it's ever possible for for Free Software to have a nice human interface.
In theory, I think it is possible. But in practice, the vast majority of open-source projects are also volunteer projects; and it seems that the use of volunteers to drive development inevitably leads the interface design to suck. The reasons are many and varied, and maybe one day I'll turn this into a long and heavily-referenced essay. But in the meantime, here's a summary.
1. Dedicated volunteer interface designers appear to be much rarer than their paid counterparts -- and where they do exist, they tend to be less experienced (like yours truly).
2. First corollary: Every contributor to the project tries to take part in the interface design, regardless of how little they know about the subject. And once you have more than one designer, you get inconsistency, both in vision and in detail. The quality of an interface design is inversely proportional to the number of designers.
3. Second corollary: Even when dedicated interface designers are present, they are not heeded as much as they would be in professional projects, precisely because they're dedicated designers and don't have patches to implement their suggestions.
4. Many hackers assume that whatever Microsoft or Apple do is good design, when this is frequently not the case. In imitating the designs of these companies, volunteer projects repeat their mistakes, and ensure that they can never have a better design than the proprietary alternatives.
5. Volunteers hack on stuff which they are interested in, which usually means stuff which they are going to use themselves. Because they are hackers, they are power users, so the interface design ends up too complicated for most people to use.
6. The converse also applies. Many of the little details which improve the interface -- like focusing the appropriate control when a window is opened, or fine-tuning error messages so that they are both helpful and grammatical -- are not exciting or satisfying to work on, so they get fixed slowly (if at all).
7. As in a professional project, in a volunteer project there will be times when the contributors disagree on a design issue. Where contributors are paid to work on something, they have an incentive to carry on even if they disagree with the design. Where volunteers are involved, however, it's much more likely that the project maintainer will agree to add a user preference for the issue in question, in return for the continued efforts of that contributor. The number, obscurity, and triviality of such preferences ends up confusing ordinary users immensely, while everyone is penalized by the resulting bloat and reduced thoroughness of testing.
8. For the same reason -- lack of monetary payment -- many contributors to a volunteer project want to be rewarded with their own fifteen pixels of fame in the interface. This often manifests itself in checkboxes or menu items for features which should be invisible.
9. The practice of releasing early, releasing often frequently causes severe damage to the interface. When a feature is incomplete, buggy, or slow, people get used to the incompleteness, or introduce preferences to cope with the bugginess or slowness. Then when the feature is finished, people complain about the completeness or try to retain the preferences. Similarly, when something has an inefficient design, people get used to the inefficiency, and complain when it becomes efficient. As a result, more user preferences get added, making the interface worse.
Where a project is heavily influenced by a company under commercial pressure to ship a usable product (such as Netscape, Eazel, or Ximian), you'd expect the interface to improve as a result. But in such projects so far, it would appear that the opposite has happened. I think this is partly because the companies involved aren't large enough to employ designers who are both smart and stubborn, and partly because the business model of the companies involves maximizing the revenue (rather than the user satisfaction) gained from the interface.
Heh, I bought my copy several years later for $20 after playing Phantasy Star 2. Definitely worth it, quite possibly the best 8-bit game ever. Some of the Japanese versions go for $100+ these days.
I've beaten all 4 of the real games in the series. Man was that game tough.
Prices are cheap. I remember buying games for the Sega Master System for $40-50 over 12 years ago. Today they're still the same price and the cost of developing games is incredibly higher than it was back then.
Buy 1 or 2 games that you can play for months (like Super Smash Brothers) and the price isn't bad at all.
On the other hand, new consoles are relatively expensive compared to the $100 Nintendos of the 80's but the prices come down eventually.
It's a business, your rights don't extend there. Your rights are protected on your own and government property, but as soon as you step on private property like the bookstore (which may still apply even if it's a public university) they have the right to demand that you change your behavior if you wish to use their services. This is no different than a restaurant that requires formal attire and prohibits smoking.
They may not have the right to make your surrender your property, but they can just as well kick you out of the store until you drop your bag off at home. Don't like the rules, don't go there.
I think Max Payne is a step in the new direction. It had trippy dream sequences, fantastic painted cutscenes, and Matrix-like effects. I was more interested in the impressionist style artwork that they used for the cutscenes than the gameplay.
There may not be official drivers, but there are a number of people creating new drivers by themselves. See x3dfx.com for some of them, or just go to the old 3dfx site.
So far they appear to work ok in Win98, but since they're not certified, I couldn't get them to install properly in XP. Many of the new drivers at least claim to be Directx 8.1 compliant.
The K7S5A is quite nice in my opinion. I've been running mine for a few weeks now without any problems - made the vendor test it for DOA and bought an AMD certified power supply. So far no problems, and I appreciate that I can save my old ram without having to upgrade to DDR. Plus, the onboard sound/network is nice (tho FreeBSD doesn't like either very well).
Contrast that to the multiple Via systems that die, have various crash issues, etc. I specifically refused to buy any Via K7 motherboard regardless of price/people saying "this one will be better". The Sis board delivers adequate performance and great stability so far, I'll take that any day over some high performance crash-ass Via motherboard that has to install special drivers to even approach stability. I expect my computer to never crash, anything less is annoying and unacceptable.
If you want performance why buy Via anyway. Go grab an Nforce board for $20 that performs about the same and gives you kickass sound and networking. Or get a real board like Tiger MP/MPX that simply won't crash.
Slashdot Mirror
That reminds me of an excellent "peace in the Middle East" conference we once ran in History in high school. My group represented Israel, so we went and solicited aid from the United States and the Arab confederation. In exchange for returning the captured areas in Syria and elsewhere, they agreed to let us get rid of the Palestinians. The U.N. also agreed to let us manage our own affairs, so we had the support of all the other parties present.
We then proceeded to pull out paper guns and assassinate the Palestinian delegates, followed by declaring the beginning of a World War III-ish jihad against them. Needless to say the teacher was not impressed and the conference was ended quite abruptly. I was proud of our success, as actually tackling the relatively intractable problems of the Middle East with a bunch of not particularly politically aware or bright students in a generic high school class is quite a bit more difficult and less exciting.
You can use Ctrl - [ as an alternative to Escape in vi. Makes things much nicer.
I would argue that Safety actually *is* freedom.
Hardly. You pervert the term in the same way as FDR's 4 Freedoms. "Freedom from fear" is not freedom, no one can make you be afraid except yourself. "Freedom from slavery" on the other hand is more valid as it's complement is typically violence-backed slavery. Freedom is the ability to act however you like or believe anything you want. It cannot be freedom from, it must be freedom to.
Freedom commonly involves risk. Driving at 120mph might well end your life. Smoking too much crack might cause you to OD. But true freedom ignores the consequences, leaving the only arbiter of freedom to the laws of nature and personal preference. Your vision of freedom is boring, imagine if everyone had to avoid doing anything that offended anyone.
The only just restrictions of freedom are those of imposing your will on someone else by force. In any other situation, the person can ignore or avoid you.
In the movie, they can only tell when murder is about to occur - not other violence, rape, copyright infringement, cable theft, or other, lesser crimes. How great would the world be if we didn't have to fear for our lives? It'd be almost as free a world as if there were no spam. We wouldn't have to hide.
Sure but who says it's 100% accurate. The US requires that you prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt - could you guarantee me that up until the minute the suspect points a gun at the victim that he was going to kill him based solely on some previously accurate 'psychics'? I may dream hateful epithets and envision killing someone in my mind. There is nothing wrong with that until I put into action a plan to carry it out.
BTW, Minority Report sucks ass, it's an insult to your intelligence.
I watched it on an Imax screen with a 10,000 watt sound system, there's one part in the movie that scared the crap out of me. Not nightmares, or make-you-afraid-of-the-dark scared so much as quiet, quiet, 10,000 watts blaring scared.
Nice non-sequitur. You manage to condemn the movie off-handedly and then follow with what appears to be a compliment, though you really fail to carry through and finish either idea. It's not suprising you don't like the movie as you are the kind of person Spielberg (and presumably P. K. Dick) is trying to fight against.
Google cache
A bit slow, but at least it's accessible.
I've been happily playing with WineX 2.01 since it came out. Regular wine stopped working with 1.4 but $15 to Transgaming later and I was back playing on 95% of servers without any issues.
The BSDs would. There had been people interested in a free BSD for a long time, even before Linux was released, if you look at usenet archives. When the legal problems were happening/problems with 386bsd, a number of them started checking out Linux.
The problem is that it's relatively difficult to Doom online. Since it predates the Quake(world) era, there have been no dedicated servers until recently and even with them, there's several different incompatible versions and a shortage of servers with low pings and people on them. That means you have to know someone who wants to play, deal with all the launchers and stuff involved in setting up a game and so forth. Back in the day, it may have been easier to find a friend and play with them via modem, but most fps gamers don't even have modems anymore.
Additionally, Doom multiplayer is dated. Quakeworld is dominated by split-second reflexes, Doom is even quicker. It's not particularly fun to spawn and be shot instantly with the super shotgun by some guy that's been honing his skills for the last 8 years.
The fact that QW still survives many revisions of Quake later indicates to me that people still like good multiplayer. Had Doom been released with TCP/IP years ago, I think you'd see more continuing interest in it. As it is, the single player is easy to play and has an intensity which few fps have matched. Meanwhile the Quake games, Counter-Strike, etc. have made Doom's multiplayer kinda boring.
I think that you'll see a lot of people playing Doom 3 online if it has even decent multiplayer support (e.g. better maps than Q2 shipped with). Everybody got sick of Q3/UT and will be looking for some good old-fashioned multiplayer when they don't want to play CS and its clones.
They're probably going to do this at some point, it's just a matter of time. Initially they chose the benefits of making it all one app for sharing data more easily between components. But now the complications incurred by having to support every app's preferences and keyboard shortcuts will probably result is us seeing a stripped down browser (mozilla/browser) as well as autonomous mail/news and chat clients post 1.0.
It just takes picking a different chrome file to load when starting the app. All it will really amount to is the same apps just running in separate processes - they all need the same libraries. So they'll end up sharing pages and using a similar amount of ram separated as when they were joined.
Umm, that's what the Mozilla.org t-shirts look like.
A red star with a red dino in the middle all on a black t-shirt. And below the star, the word: Hack, subtitled "this technology could fall into the right hands".
Unfortunately, the only time they're given out is at the developer conferences for $10/a pop (where I got mine).
What I'd like to see is a commemorative CD with the 1.0 releases and source code on it.
He couldn't remember who did that voice, so he just put the Micro Machines guy - which happens to be Bobby Rahal, former Indy car driver.
At one point Alpha stomped all over the Pentium series clock for clock, as did the other architectures. I'm not informed enough to know for sure, but I think that if SGI, Compaq, etc.'s research funding were still there and they were on a .13 micron process, they could still be winning the performance war. I mean, the Alpha was the performance king for a long time without having a new chip come out for 2 years, for crying out loud. If they hadn't killed it, they could be running EV8 Alpha's at 1.5Ghz+ that stomp all over everything.
However with x86-64, you get twice as many registers, so that's got to help one of the x86's performance bottlenecks.
The guys at the Nvidia petition keep track of a few guys trying to port the drivers to FreeBSD. Unfortunately there haven't been many updates lately and I got tired of waiting and installed Linux till the drivers are ready. Too much fiddling in order to get a Voodoo 5 to work.
For what it's worth I believe they hired one FreeBSD developer to continue supporting the drivers he wrote. Can't remember his name off the top of my head.
Since mpt's (Matthew Thomas) website seems to be down, I'm mirroring his first 9 points here:
There are another 5 points that he added today, but weren't in the google cache.
If you're interested in his writings, please check his site after it comes back up from being slashdotted, as he clarifies some points that upset some people.
"Why Free Software usability tends to suck"
I've been having a discussion with someone from IBM about whether it's ever possible for for Free Software to have a nice human interface.
In theory, I think it is possible. But in practice, the vast majority of open-source projects are also volunteer projects; and it seems that the use of volunteers to drive development inevitably leads the interface design to suck. The reasons are many and varied, and maybe one day I'll turn this into a long and heavily-referenced essay. But in the meantime, here's a summary.
1. Dedicated volunteer interface designers appear to be much rarer than their paid counterparts -- and where they do exist, they tend to be less experienced (like yours truly).
2. First corollary: Every contributor to the project tries to take part in the interface design, regardless of how little they know about the subject. And once you have more than one designer, you get inconsistency, both in vision and in detail. The quality of an interface design is inversely proportional to the number of designers.
3. Second corollary: Even when dedicated interface designers are present, they are not heeded as much as they would be in professional projects, precisely because they're dedicated designers and don't have patches to implement their suggestions.
4. Many hackers assume that whatever Microsoft or Apple do is good design, when this is frequently not the case. In imitating the designs of these companies, volunteer projects repeat their mistakes, and ensure that they can never have a better design than the proprietary alternatives.
5. Volunteers hack on stuff which they are interested in, which usually means stuff which they are going to use themselves. Because they are hackers, they are power users, so the interface design ends up too complicated for most people to use.
6. The converse also applies. Many of the little details which improve the interface -- like focusing the appropriate control when a window is opened, or fine-tuning error messages so that they are both helpful and grammatical -- are not exciting or satisfying to work on, so they get fixed slowly (if at all).
7. As in a professional project, in a volunteer project there will be times when the contributors disagree on a design issue. Where contributors are paid to work on something, they have an incentive to carry on even if they disagree with the design. Where volunteers are involved, however, it's much more likely that the project maintainer will agree to add a user preference for the issue in question, in return for the continued efforts of that contributor. The number, obscurity, and triviality of such preferences ends up confusing ordinary users immensely, while everyone is penalized by the resulting bloat and reduced thoroughness of testing.
8. For the same reason -- lack of monetary payment -- many contributors to a volunteer project want to be rewarded with their own fifteen pixels of fame in the interface. This often manifests itself in checkboxes or menu items for features which should be invisible.
9. The practice of releasing early, releasing often frequently causes severe damage to the interface. When a feature is incomplete, buggy, or slow, people get used to the incompleteness, or introduce preferences to cope with the bugginess or slowness. Then when the feature is finished, people complain about the completeness or try to retain the preferences. Similarly, when something has an inefficient design, people get used to the inefficiency, and complain when it becomes efficient. As a result, more user preferences get added, making the interface worse.
Where a project is heavily influenced by a company under commercial pressure to ship a usable product (such as Netscape, Eazel, or Ximian), you'd expect the interface to improve as a result. But in such projects so far, it would appear that the opposite has happened. I think this is partly because the companies involved aren't large enough to employ designers who are both smart and stubborn, and partly because the business model of the companies involves maximizing the revenue (rather than the user satisfaction) gained from the interface.
Heh, I bought my copy several years later for $20 after playing Phantasy Star 2. Definitely worth it, quite possibly the best 8-bit game ever. Some of the Japanese versions go for $100+ these days.
I've beaten all 4 of the real games in the series. Man was that game tough.
No, you idiot, he's implying that most free software companies go into software development with a business plan as an afterthought.
MS is insanely profitable. Partly because they paid no taxes the last 2 years.
Prices are cheap. I remember buying games for the Sega Master System for $40-50 over 12 years ago. Today they're still the same price and the cost of developing games is incredibly higher than it was back then.
Buy 1 or 2 games that you can play for months (like Super Smash Brothers) and the price isn't bad at all.
On the other hand, new consoles are relatively expensive compared to the $100 Nintendos of the 80's but the prices come down eventually.
I definitely agree. Not matter what some people may say, I think the whole 22 or so episodes before the end were icing on the cake for those last 4.
My favorite quote: "The tragedy of NERV is it's people". Pretty much sums up the whole series.
It's a business, your rights don't extend there. Your rights are protected on your own and government property, but as soon as you step on private property like the bookstore (which may still apply even if it's a public university) they have the right to demand that you change your behavior if you wish to use their services. This is no different than a restaurant that requires formal attire and prohibits smoking.
They may not have the right to make your surrender your property, but they can just as well kick you out of the store until you drop your bag off at home. Don't like the rules, don't go there.
No bags, no trenchcoats... No Service.
I think Max Payne is a step in the new direction. It had trippy dream sequences, fantastic painted cutscenes, and Matrix-like effects. I was more interested in the impressionist style artwork that they used for the cutscenes than the gameplay.
But the corollary is that 90% of the users each use a different 10% of the features.
There may not be official drivers, but there are a number of people creating new drivers by themselves. See x3dfx.com for some of them, or just go to the old 3dfx site.
So far they appear to work ok in Win98, but since they're not certified, I couldn't get them to install properly in XP. Many of the new drivers at least claim to be Directx 8.1 compliant.
Run cygwin and load the OpenSSH daemon. It's every bit as good as in unix (except for a lack of Windows admin commands).
That should have been: buy an Nforce board for $20 more.
The K7S5A is quite nice in my opinion. I've been running mine for a few weeks now without any problems - made the vendor test it for DOA and bought an AMD certified power supply. So far no problems, and I appreciate that I can save my old ram without having to upgrade to DDR. Plus, the onboard sound/network is nice (tho FreeBSD doesn't like either very well).
Contrast that to the multiple Via systems that die, have various crash issues, etc. I specifically refused to buy any Via K7 motherboard regardless of price/people saying "this one will be better". The Sis board delivers adequate performance and great stability so far, I'll take that any day over some high performance crash-ass Via motherboard that has to install special drivers to even approach stability. I expect my computer to never crash, anything less is annoying and unacceptable.
If you want performance why buy Via anyway. Go grab an Nforce board for $20 that performs about the same and gives you kickass sound and networking. Or get a real board like Tiger MP/MPX that simply won't crash.