enough graphics power to render Quake3 anti-aliased at 40FPS
Sounds like an interesting toy, but aren't we twisting the measurements a bit here? Quake 3 came out in 1999. Any modern graphic chip has the graphics power to render Q4 at much faster than 40 FPS. Of course, there's the important question of "do you have the computing power behind the graphics power to make the game playable without lag or stutter on anything but a non-trivial map?", as is "do you have the system resources to get a new map started and get into the game before the other players all have multiple frags ahead of you?". And perhaps the most important question is "at what resolution?". Talking about playing a game anti-aliased at 40FPS but not saying what resolution you are playing at is completely meaningless. While this hardware may be able to 1080p HiDef video, there is an awful good chance that that lame benchmark "spec" is based on a much lower resolution.
I sure hope that this doesn't lead to further hype and dumbing down of video specs. Look for new graphic chips that can run Wolfenstein at 1692 fps or Pong at 31500 fps anti-aliased.
Well, call it a hunch, but we're talking about Linux on a "new" CPU and on custom hardware, including no hard drive, flash memory, and special data in and video out circuitry. I suspect there may be a few changes to "standard" Linux. And just as Linksys had to do when they built routers that used GPL code, this project should be required to release the sources. And users shouldn't have to speculate if anything was changed or what was, it should be available as source. They may not want to do that, but it's the price that they agreed to when they chose to build on GPL code rather than go the much more complex route of completely building their own from scratch.
This little Linux box with it's special video hardware could be a very slick platform to build upon. I certainly hope that, if they don't release the sources on their own (and I rather expect that they just might not play nice), they should be made to do so.
Why is parent being modded down? They're totally right.
Are you new here? You don't just get modded down for being wrong, you get modded down if someone else doesn't like what you say, particularly if it's true.
Will/. ever start defining tla's that it uses? Seems unlikely, given this is far from the first time one has been used with no explanation. The article doesn't bother to ever use the full name of UML either. For what it's worth, after a Google search, I think that this it talking about Unified Modeling Language, but of course I could be wrong. They might even be talking about University of Massachusetts Lowell or User-mode Linux for all I know.
Ain't it great that we have/. to tell us about things like flash drives half the size of a butane lighter? Or that cost only a little more than twice what I've seen other small 4 Gig flash drives go for recently? Now I can be disenchanted with my 2 1/2 inch 4 Gig drive that I just paid $14 for, if only I had this new drive instead, it would be much easier to loose, and I really really need the extra physical space that my drive wastes.
Yea, I see no good reason for this. It's trying to be Linux, but warns you against installing what you want or need for fear of breaking it and wants you to just use the set of applications that they have picked. Many of them are already available compiled to run directly under Windows, so there's not much point in monkeying around with an extra Linux layer and the restrictions of this "special distro" just to run a preselected set of applications. If there is really a reason to support Xp and (ugh) Vista, then the effort may have been better spent by porting more OS apps to the Windows platform rather than doing this.
If you do want Linux and not apps ported to Windows, and want to run both Linux and Windows at once, far better would be to install the free VMware player and install Debian (or your personal choice of the many Linux religions to pick from) and then you really can install and run whatever Linux apps that you want. And, of course, the choice to run Windows under Linux rather than Linux under windows ramains an option for many, although I doubt it would be acceptable to many of the Gamers out there.
I even followed the link and RTFA, but I sure couldn't find anything supporting logic behind the claim that this game is somehow special, a breakthrough, or in any way a big deal. The closest to any logical point I could find is that the game wasn't written for a PC and then ported to consoles. But there have been other FPS games before that started on a console, so that's hardly much of a claim. It might indeed be a good game (or not), but you sure can't make that claim by what was said here.
What? No mention of selling new fancy dual core computers bundled with XP home, which doesn't support multiple cores, effectively wasting half of the expensive computer that the customer bought?
Thing is, he was soliciting campaign donations and writing partisan stuff.
Even if he wasn't doing the above, firing would be quite justified for doing personal things while on the clock and accepting a paycheck. I sure don't want to spend my tax dollars to finance someone else's Internet hobby. And I sure don't want to do it for someone soliciting campaign donations and writing partisan stuff. Heck, maybe this isn't fair enough, can't he be charged with some kind of crime over this?
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So what's the point in running this if we have to pay to RTFA? Supposedly anyone already paying is likely to read it anyway, so the only ones this posting is for is for those who do not already subscribe to the site. In a world where information wants to be free, I hardly see it as appropriate for Slashdot to hype up a pay site. Were there no interesting articles on any free sites today? Or did Slashdot get a payment for posting this advertisement for this pay site? Did paid subscribers to/. also see this ad sneakily disguised as an article (if so I bet they resent it even more than I do).
Perhaps they should have been more philosophical about it.
But at least this will give them a chance to talk to the media, where they can work in the complaint that no one seems to want to hire philosophy students (the only know job seems to become philosophy teachers).
So the problem is, how to read the strange 3 inch Amstrad floppy. And I have to think that another problem that other people who still have an Amstrad laying around in a collection somewhere have, is that they can no longer buy floppy media for it. And we now have the Internet, linking all of us geeky users together. Is there no one out there with an Amstrad that would be willing to accept floppy disks from other users, and read the data and transfer it to other media (most likely 1 CD for hundreds of floppies although other media options come to mind, including have the sender include a small flash drive), and in return the person with the Amstrad gets to keep the diskettes? Clearly the Amstrad would need to transfer data to a more modern system, but that should be a trivial problem to resolve.
This actually isn't as insane or absurd as you wanted it to seem. There are actually products like MagnaView that have very tiny magnetic particles suspended in a solvent, and will clearly image the magnetic information on a mag tape, credit card magnetic stripe or even a floppy disk. And considering that someone has already written a program to play analog audio off of a scan of a vinyl record, extracting the data from a floppy "developed" with MagnaView shouldn't be that hard.
Still,I would suggest tracking down an original Amstrad and just reading the disks. They were not extremely common in the US and might be harder to find here, but were pretty common in Europe. I don't know where the original poster is. Once you can read the data, the next trick would be to get it to an emulator. No problem if the Amstrad has the serial port option, if it does not there are still plenty of ways to get the data to another system, with options including flashing the screen and picking up the data with a webcam, encoding it as audio and capturing it with a soundcard, and even printing it out in a dense binary form and then scanning it back in again.
I believe that Jesus's side kick was a platypus. Two thousand years ago, the Europeans were unfamiliar with the platypus. So a symbol of Easter became an Easter Bunny. But one that brought eggs. And occasionally the bunny was replaced by a duckling, a creature with a duckbill and webbed feet. Had the early Europeans known about this strange Australian mammal, they would have recognized Jesus's sidekick for what he was, and the incorrectly interpreted story of the Easter Bunny would not have spread through the world.
You know, you dismissed my original post by throwing around the term FUD. But I think you misused it. We normally use that term for troublemakers like Micosoft or SCO in their wars against Linux, when the actors know exactly what their position is, but refuse to state it. We say they are out to cause Fear Uncertainty and Doubt and that one reason they do not back up their claims with facts is because the facts are lacking. But my point wasn't that I'm certain that I know there is going to be a pandemic, but rather that in this case there is a lot of Uncertainty and there could be a pandemic. So if you say that there is FUD here, I'll agree that there is a lot of uncertainty and doubt, and there certainly should be some fear.
You say now: "It is clear that this (and similar) viruses are responsible for epidemics" and "These outbreaks have been temporally and geographically limited." Sure, so far limited to localized areas. But the point is that now in a time of outbreak several factors are coming together that make it extremely more likely that the virus will be widespread. That anyone could seriously dismiss this as "but it hasn't happened yet" amazes me.
Could this spread some other way? Sure. Every year a new strain of the flu virus seems to originate in southeast Asia and then spread east to the Americas and then to Europe. It forms small pools and finally seems to die out (it's not recycled to SE Asia), but then next year a new strain starts again in Asia and the process continues. It's important not to dismiss the seriousness of these annual flu strains, they kill thousands to tens of thousands each year. But they are (usually) far from the pandemic that EV71 could be. So while this may also spread with mechanisms similar to the flu, it is alarming to not see people more concerned when this virus is increasing in rural areas that can be expected to make massive imports to Beijing just as hundreds of thousands of world travelers will arrive there, with the potential to carry it to all parts of the globe, and thinking that they are only suffering from the effects of China's pollution.
Your reassurance that this is limited to villages is pretty lame. Unless you want everyone to believe that all of the food that will be consumed at the Olympics will actually be produced in Beijing and not in those remote villages. I expect there to be a serious flow of food, people and viruses between the remote villages and Beijing.
Your discounting of the deadliness of this virus is also not very reassuring. The percentage of deaths of those affected is high enough to cause me concern (perhaps even higher than the death rate of the Spanish Flu.). But that's far from the only problem. Those affected with polio like symptoms and other serious problems are likely to number far greater. And any statement that it is mild in adults should alarm any thoughtful person; how many adults who pick up the virus and only show a "mild" reaction will be likely to carry it back home, rather than wait out an extended stay in China? A "mild in adults but deadly in children and the elderly" virus is just the thing to cause a pandemic.
You hit the nail on the head with the pollution issue. It is likely to be a health issue. And so anyone who does pick up the virus and show "mild" symptoms is even more likely to just attribute it to the pollution and not stay around the polluted city for an extended stay. So the virus spreads, but people can claim "Oh, I though I was just sick from the pollution". Gee, who could have seen this coming?
Yea, the US government are real scum and villains too. Talk about off-topic. But I don't see how this makes China any better. I see very little chance that they will react properly if they find there is a growing problem, based on their past record and the loss of face that any health provisions during the Olympics would cause.
There is FUD, and then there is common sense. Those who just dismiss all problems as the former lack the latter.
So we'll soon have hundreds of thousands of people from all over the world traveling into a very densely populated area with a deadly virus which has no vaccine available (which hardy matters since the people would be unlikely to get vaccinated) and then all roughly at the same time traveling back across the globe. Add to this China's documented sanitary and even pollution problems. And a government with a history of hiding facts that might impact it financially or even just embarrass it. What could go wrong? Lets just pretend we didn't see this coming and act surprised when the pandemic hits.
Are you trying to say that the best way to fight censorship is not more censorship?
I'm not sure at all what you mean by this, the "not" in there is confusing. But censorship in this context would be finding some way to shut up that idiot lawyer. My post made no comment on what I thought the merits of shutting him up are. But choosing to not play into his hands and give him further publicity isn't censorship, it's just common sense.
it's completely asinine that anyone would seriously think this encourages drunk driving, any more than it encourages stabbing people or jumping off of a building, or running from the police, or.......
So is your point that it encourages drunk driving and people stabbing equally? Not that there's anything wrong with that.....
As expected, Jack Thompson is making his usual attention-whoring remarks by comparing GTA IV to the polio virus."
And, as usual, Slashdot is helping him get even more attention. I want to go on record here and now asking Slashdot to pull this story, out of respect for all of the attention-whoring victims that this jerk has already affected.
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds like an interesting toy, but aren't we twisting the measurements a bit here? Quake 3 came out in 1999. Any modern graphic chip has the graphics power to render Q4 at much faster than 40 FPS. Of course, there's the important question of "do you have the computing power behind the graphics power to make the game playable without lag or stutter on anything but a non-trivial map?", as is "do you have the system resources to get a new map started and get into the game before the other players all have multiple frags ahead of you?". And perhaps the most important question is "at what resolution?". Talking about playing a game anti-aliased at 40FPS but not saying what resolution you are playing at is completely meaningless. While this hardware may be able to 1080p HiDef video, there is an awful good chance that that lame benchmark "spec" is based on a much lower resolution.
I sure hope that this doesn't lead to further hype and dumbing down of video specs. Look for new graphic chips that can run Wolfenstein at 1692 fps or Pong at 31500 fps anti-aliased.
Well, call it a hunch, but we're talking about Linux on a "new" CPU and on custom hardware, including no hard drive, flash memory, and special data in and video out circuitry. I suspect there may be a few changes to "standard" Linux. And just as Linksys had to do when they built routers that used GPL code, this project should be required to release the sources. And users shouldn't have to speculate if anything was changed or what was, it should be available as source. They may not want to do that, but it's the price that they agreed to when they chose to build on GPL code rather than go the much more complex route of completely building their own from scratch.
This little Linux box with it's special video hardware could be a very slick platform to build upon. I certainly hope that, if they don't release the sources on their own (and I rather expect that they just might not play nice), they should be made to do so.
Are you new here? You don't just get modded down for being wrong, you get modded down if someone else doesn't like what you say, particularly if it's true.
So the obvious question is, where do I get the source code?
Will /. ever start defining tla's that it uses? Seems unlikely, given this is far from the first time one has been used with no explanation. The article doesn't bother to ever use the full name of UML either. For what it's worth, after a Google search, I think that this it talking about Unified Modeling Language, but of course I could be wrong. They might even be talking about University of Massachusetts Lowell or User-mode Linux for all I know.
Ain't it great that we have /. to tell us about things like flash drives half the size of a butane lighter? Or that cost only a little more than twice what I've seen other small 4 Gig flash drives go for recently? Now I can be disenchanted with my 2 1/2 inch 4 Gig drive that I just paid $14 for, if only I had this new drive instead, it would be much easier to loose, and I really really need the extra physical space that my drive wastes.
If you do want Linux and not apps ported to Windows, and want to run both Linux and Windows at once, far better would be to install the free VMware player and install Debian (or your personal choice of the many Linux religions to pick from) and then you really can install and run whatever Linux apps that you want. And, of course, the choice to run Windows under Linux rather than Linux under windows ramains an option for many, although I doubt it would be acceptable to many of the Gamers out there.
I even followed the link and RTFA, but I sure couldn't find anything supporting logic behind the claim that this game is somehow special, a breakthrough, or in any way a big deal. The closest to any logical point I could find is that the game wasn't written for a PC and then ported to consoles. But there have been other FPS games before that started on a console, so that's hardly much of a claim. It might indeed be a good game (or not), but you sure can't make that claim by what was said here.
What? No mention of selling new fancy dual core computers bundled with XP home, which doesn't support multiple cores, effectively wasting half of the expensive computer that the customer bought?
Even if he wasn't doing the above, firing would be quite justified for doing personal things while on the clock and accepting a paycheck. I sure don't want to spend my tax dollars to finance someone else's Internet hobby. And I sure don't want to do it for someone soliciting campaign donations and writing partisan stuff. Heck, maybe this isn't fair enough, can't he be charged with some kind of crime over this?
I'm a "some fool used the wrong glass" kinda guy.
So what's the point in running this if we have to pay to RTFA? Supposedly anyone already paying is likely to read it anyway, so the only ones this posting is for is for those who do not already subscribe to the site. In a world where information wants to be free, I hardly see it as appropriate for Slashdot to hype up a pay site. Were there no interesting articles on any free sites today? Or did Slashdot get a payment for posting this advertisement for this pay site? Did paid subscribers to /. also see this ad sneakily disguised as an article (if so I bet they resent it even more than I do).
What complete nonsense. Don't rush to take a soldering iron to your motherboard, this is all hype.
So now a photoshopped picture rates mention on /. ?
But at least this will give them a chance to talk to the media, where they can work in the complaint that no one seems to want to hire philosophy students (the only know job seems to become philosophy teachers).
So the problem is, how to read the strange 3 inch Amstrad floppy. And I have to think that another problem that other people who still have an Amstrad laying around in a collection somewhere have, is that they can no longer buy floppy media for it. And we now have the Internet, linking all of us geeky users together. Is there no one out there with an Amstrad that would be willing to accept floppy disks from other users, and read the data and transfer it to other media (most likely 1 CD for hundreds of floppies although other media options come to mind, including have the sender include a small flash drive), and in return the person with the Amstrad gets to keep the diskettes? Clearly the Amstrad would need to transfer data to a more modern system, but that should be a trivial problem to resolve.
This actually isn't as insane or absurd as you wanted it to seem. There are actually products like MagnaView that have very tiny magnetic particles suspended in a solvent, and will clearly image the magnetic information on a mag tape, credit card magnetic stripe or even a floppy disk. And considering that someone has already written a program to play analog audio off of a scan of a vinyl record, extracting the data from a floppy "developed" with MagnaView shouldn't be that hard. Still,I would suggest tracking down an original Amstrad and just reading the disks. They were not extremely common in the US and might be harder to find here, but were pretty common in Europe. I don't know where the original poster is. Once you can read the data, the next trick would be to get it to an emulator. No problem if the Amstrad has the serial port option, if it does not there are still plenty of ways to get the data to another system, with options including flashing the screen and picking up the data with a webcam, encoding it as audio and capturing it with a soundcard, and even printing it out in a dense binary form and then scanning it back in again.
This is, of course, all just theory.
Pay no attention to the government aircraft constantly above your heads. They are only there to study smog.
You say now: "It is clear that this (and similar) viruses are responsible for epidemics" and "These outbreaks have been temporally and geographically limited." Sure, so far limited to localized areas. But the point is that now in a time of outbreak several factors are coming together that make it extremely more likely that the virus will be widespread. That anyone could seriously dismiss this as "but it hasn't happened yet" amazes me.
Could this spread some other way? Sure. Every year a new strain of the flu virus seems to originate in southeast Asia and then spread east to the Americas and then to Europe. It forms small pools and finally seems to die out (it's not recycled to SE Asia), but then next year a new strain starts again in Asia and the process continues. It's important not to dismiss the seriousness of these annual flu strains, they kill thousands to tens of thousands each year. But they are (usually) far from the pandemic that EV71 could be. So while this may also spread with mechanisms similar to the flu, it is alarming to not see people more concerned when this virus is increasing in rural areas that can be expected to make massive imports to Beijing just as hundreds of thousands of world travelers will arrive there, with the potential to carry it to all parts of the globe, and thinking that they are only suffering from the effects of China's pollution.
Your discounting of the deadliness of this virus is also not very reassuring. The percentage of deaths of those affected is high enough to cause me concern (perhaps even higher than the death rate of the Spanish Flu.). But that's far from the only problem. Those affected with polio like symptoms and other serious problems are likely to number far greater. And any statement that it is mild in adults should alarm any thoughtful person; how many adults who pick up the virus and only show a "mild" reaction will be likely to carry it back home, rather than wait out an extended stay in China? A "mild in adults but deadly in children and the elderly" virus is just the thing to cause a pandemic.
You hit the nail on the head with the pollution issue. It is likely to be a health issue. And so anyone who does pick up the virus and show "mild" symptoms is even more likely to just attribute it to the pollution and not stay around the polluted city for an extended stay. So the virus spreads, but people can claim "Oh, I though I was just sick from the pollution". Gee, who could have seen this coming?
Yea, the US government are real scum and villains too. Talk about off-topic. But I don't see how this makes China any better. I see very little chance that they will react properly if they find there is a growing problem, based on their past record and the loss of face that any health provisions during the Olympics would cause.
There is FUD, and then there is common sense. Those who just dismiss all problems as the former lack the latter.
So we'll soon have hundreds of thousands of people from all over the world traveling into a very densely populated area with a deadly virus which has no vaccine available (which hardy matters since the people would be unlikely to get vaccinated) and then all roughly at the same time traveling back across the globe. Add to this China's documented sanitary and even pollution problems. And a government with a history of hiding facts that might impact it financially or even just embarrass it. What could go wrong? Lets just pretend we didn't see this coming and act surprised when the pandemic hits.
I'm not sure at all what you mean by this, the "not" in there is confusing. But censorship in this context would be finding some way to shut up that idiot lawyer. My post made no comment on what I thought the merits of shutting him up are. But choosing to not play into his hands and give him further publicity isn't censorship, it's just common sense.
So is your point that it encourages drunk driving and people stabbing equally? Not that there's anything wrong with that .....
And, as usual, Slashdot is helping him get even more attention. I want to go on record here and now asking Slashdot to pull this story, out of respect for all of the attention-whoring victims that this jerk has already affected.