Unless they repackage it (unlikely) it works like a dream on my Windows XP system w/ GeForce4. Much much better than it did on the system I ran it on when it came out (Win 98 w/ crappy integrated video)
err, well the name "Freespace" has nothing to do with "free" (free speech nor free beer). It's the name for the transdimensional portal between worlds. Oddly enough, within the game it's referred to as subspace.
You have to read the "intelligence reports" in the game to get this information. And "freespace" sounds a lot cooler than "subspace" for a game title...
An interesting aside -- the original game (commonly referred to as "freespace 1") was released in the US as "Descent: Freespace: The Great War" for two reasons, as I understand it. The "Descent" part was a little bit of a marketing hook -- the developers of Freespace were some of the developers of the original Descent series (I and II), so someone tried to tie the two together, even though there's no relation at all. (From a developers perspective, many of the models for objects in both games use a very similar format).
The second reason why it was not just named "Freespace" was because Microsoft held a trademark on that name for their disk compression software, and I guess they didn't want to tangle with the Redmond lawyers.
BTW if you understand my/. handle, you'll know why this interests me... (conversely, on the freespace boards, I'm known as "penguin" for my other passion)
A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter Miller is a must read for anyone who cares about what happens after "the day after." Like a lot of 1950s science fiction, some details are a little dated now, but the overall message is very relevant today, and not particularly encouraging.
It begins about 600 years after the human race has almost wiped ourselves out with nukes (in the late 20th century, IIRC). Like the dark ages after the fall of Rome, knowledge is preserved in a handful of monastaries, one dedicated to "Saint Isaac Leibowitz." After the Deluge of Fire, Leibowitz hid books from the bookburners (there was a backlash against intellecuals, who were blamed for the war).
The "pound pastrami" references a holy relic, written by the saint himself, discovered in an ancient "Fallout Survival Shelter" by a novice early on in the book.
Sorry, but your information about internet advertising is somewhat dated.
Virtually every ad in the internet space is now CPC (cost-per-click) and CPA (cost-per-action). In the CPC cost model, the advertiser pays per click, some of which makes it to the publisher of the website. With CPA, someone has to perform an "action" (i.e., fill out a credit card application, register on a website, etc.) for the advertiser to pay out.
The cost per impression model -- in awful advertising term, this is CPM ("cost-per-mil," where a mil is 1000) -- reached its peak around the same time as webvan.com did. CPM is a traditional (i.e., print and broadcast) advertising term that doesn't really apply very well to online advertising.
To make a long story short, seeing a banner ad doesn't help (or hurt) anyone. You're chewing up some bandwidth, that's about it.
Last I checked, there was no Local 427 of the Allied Brotherhood of Rocket Scientists and Affiliated Pointy-Heads at CalTech.
I suppose the folks doing this are doing it because they want to, of course... it's very likely that they view this as a once-in-a-lifetime experience. 90 days of messed up sleep is nothing if you're doing what you love.
I'm all for innovation, but seriously, who needs a 300GB hard disks except for pr0n c0lLeCt0R5, warez d00ds and RAID junkies?
Er, people use computers for business, too. So it's not just going to be for video and pr0n and warez, its going to be useful for more mundane stuff like orders being shipped, etc.
And to address the reliability issue, there's no reason why you can't RAID this drive, too... So combine 5 or 6 of them and you've got 1.5TB of storage. This is more convienent than trying to stack 10 or so 160GB drives.
A terabyte isn't that huge a chunk of data anymore. The company I work for generates about 2GB per hour, every hour. With our current drive setup, we can store about 1 week online, then we have to go to tape. It would be useful.
Do you know what software (or firmware) your microwave runs? Or your cell phone, or GPS or smart card? Well, this is/., but I'll bet most people can't.
In all likelyhood, the majority of engineers designing the devices don't even know about it, only the smaller number of software engineers that are porting it.
It would be nice to see it covered (or at least mentioned!) in university curricula, though...
I'm probably not alone in this -- I guess many people of my age (almost 40) have the same problem.
When I was in primary school, we never learned the imperial measurements (aka the English system, or whatever). We learned metric, because by 1980 the country was going to have converted, and there was no point in teaching something that was going to be obsolete in 6 years. As a result, unlike my parents, I never learned by rote how many gills there are to a peck, or more usefully, how many feet are in a mile. I learned something in school that I never used, and was surrounded by measurements that I was never formally taught.
As the previous poster pointed out, President Reagan suspected that metric was a communist/socialist plot against traditional American values and measures, and suppressed all funding for US metrication.
Since I'm not a complete idiot, I've been able to get by, but I still have to think hard about the boiling point of water in degrees F, or the number of yards to a mile. Similarly, although I know how many centimeters there are to a kilometer, I have a tough time visualizing either one, or relating to a weather forcast in Europe (or Canada!)
It's ironic, since the US was one of the first nations to adopt a decimal currency, getting rid of the pounds-shilling-pence-farthing system long ago.
my linux pc IS a single PC... it routes traffic to other machines internally, but that is my own business and no one elses. I only have one machine connected to the internet, but have 6 more connected to that machine.
Good point. I have an identical setup at home (w/ Verizon DSL). I wonder how this is covered under "the letter of the law?"
I played about a month ago (gotta love those C64 emulators...) It's still fun. Not flashy, but it holds your interest. A lot of the jokes (like when something bad happens) have lost their relevance though...
You could also submit them in Adobe Acrobat format (PDF), according to the Rules for Application. Although PDF is not really an "open" format, GhostScript will allow you to generate PDF files.
Well said. Stunning, incredibly detailed graphics can make a game nice to look at, but not necessarily fun to play -- this is, after all, what games are all about... The burden has been transferred from programmers and game designers to the artists, so it still takes a year to put a game out (and it costs $40).
Tempest is a great example of what a game should be like: only 3 controls (a spinner, a fire button, and the rarely-used "superzapper" button); it takes about 5 seconds to learn, but you could play it forever.
I still play Impossible Mission on VICE, but I haven't completed the game since the C64 days...
(George Lucas should also note that this applies to film as well -- special effects cannot turn a weak script into a good movie.)
... provided it doesn't suck, of course. Has anyone ever attempted it?
Anyhow, most of the "known space" novels/shorts are prequels to Ringworld (especially the Beowulf Schaeffer ones)...
Lucifer's Hammer would be cool too, but it's kinda dated now, and that genre's been done to death (Y2K seemed to bring out a rush of "end of civilization" TVMs)
I spent about 5 years (1985-1990) at the US Dept of Health & Human Services, doing simulations and modelling. Virtually all of the work our group did was in Fortran or SAS.
It was all on IBM mainframes, since most of our input data was the entire US decennial census. It's 12 years later now, but I still don't think there are too many PCs that could crunch and massage that amount of data in a reasonable time...
err, well, we have over 100 servers running Linux -- all are RedHat (6.2 and 7.2 mostly), and a few dozen workstations.
Are you a troll? I cannot believe that you could possibly be so misinformed.
A company I worked for a while ago made a barcode scanner that could read different codes. There are lots of standards for bar codes -- not just UPC, some are all numeric, some are alpha, etc.
The problem with "just making it alphanumeric" as some posters have said, is the same problem with any type of data storage. The UPC has essentially "4 bits" per digit (not really bits), plus some checksum stuff. If you went to alphanumeric, there obviously wouldn't be enough bits, and you'd be in the same situation -- all the software would still need to be changed.
The 12 digit UPC code is split into a "manufacturer code" and a "product code," kinda like the IPv4 host and network portions. Bigger manufacturers (e.g., Proctor and Gamble) got more digits for their product codes. IIRC, setting the 1st 6 digits to zero meant a "store-only product," I think -- kinda like a non-routable address in IP.
There are already several variants of the UPC code -- the most common is UPC-12 (12 digits), but there is also UPC-6, a "compressed" form that you see on smaller items (e.g., packs of gum), but is contains the same info as UPC-12 once decoded. But there is also UPC-12 +5, which has 5 extra digits, used for books and magazines primarily; I think part of the ISBN is stored there. And I seem to remember another extension too (UPC-12 +2 ?).
I guess my question is why don't they extend it this way (e.g., make a UPC-12 +10), rather than just adding one digit, which will probably only be good for another 10 years, if we're lucky...
Of course some of the problem might be the space required to store all this, since the UPC has a fairly strict requirement about the size of the code (and the whitespace surrounding it). The 2D "bar" codes mentioned earlier (and used by UPS) could be a solution, but another big advantage to the UPC is the human-readable portion below, so Rosie at Wal-Mart can key in the numbers from your Doritos bag when it fails to scan...
disclaimer: I worked on this software almost 20 years ago, so some of the details are probably wrong...
Slashdot Mirror
Unless they repackage it (unlikely) it works like a dream on my Windows XP system w/ GeForce4. Much much better than it did on the system I ran it on when it came out (Win 98 w/ crappy integrated video)
err, well the name "Freespace" has nothing to do with "free" (free speech nor free beer). It's the name for the transdimensional portal between worlds. Oddly enough, within the game it's referred to as subspace.
You have to read the "intelligence reports" in the game to get this information. And "freespace" sounds a lot cooler than "subspace" for a game title...
An interesting aside -- the original game (commonly referred to as "freespace 1") was released in the US as "Descent: Freespace: The Great War" for two reasons, as I understand it. The "Descent" part was a little bit of a marketing hook -- the developers of Freespace were some of the developers of the original Descent series (I and II), so someone tried to tie the two together, even though there's no relation at all. (From a developers perspective, many of the models for objects in both games use a very similar format).
The second reason why it was not just named "Freespace" was because Microsoft held a trademark on that name for their disk compression software, and I guess they didn't want to tangle with the Redmond lawyers.
BTW if you understand my /. handle, you'll know why this interests me... (conversely, on the freespace boards, I'm known as "penguin" for my other passion)
A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter Miller is a must read for anyone who cares about what happens after "the day after." Like a lot of 1950s science fiction, some details are a little dated now, but the overall message is very relevant today, and not particularly encouraging.
It begins about 600 years after the human race has almost wiped ourselves out with nukes (in the late 20th century, IIRC). Like the dark ages after the fall of Rome, knowledge is preserved in a handful of monastaries, one dedicated to "Saint Isaac Leibowitz." After the Deluge of Fire, Leibowitz hid books from the bookburners (there was a backlash against intellecuals, who were blamed for the war).
The "pound pastrami" references a holy relic, written by the saint himself, discovered in an ancient "Fallout Survival Shelter" by a novice early on in the book.
Sorry, but your information about internet advertising is somewhat dated.
Virtually every ad in the internet space is now CPC (cost-per-click) and CPA (cost-per-action). In the CPC cost model, the advertiser pays per click, some of which makes it to the publisher of the website. With CPA, someone has to perform an "action" (i.e., fill out a credit card application, register on a website, etc.) for the advertiser to pay out.
The cost per impression model -- in awful advertising term, this is CPM ("cost-per-mil," where a mil is 1000) -- reached its peak around the same time as webvan.com did. CPM is a traditional (i.e., print and broadcast) advertising term that doesn't really apply very well to online advertising.
To make a long story short, seeing a banner ad doesn't help (or hurt) anyone. You're chewing up some bandwidth, that's about it.
I did that last week, with my 6-year old son.
He usually goes for more mass, I go for crumple zones and bits that are designed to break away. We're pretty evenly matched (on several levels).
There are some perks to being a Dad -- being able to play Lego any time is one of them.
wow - that link is a fascinating read. Nice to know that so much math computation is potentially broken.
Vaguely reminiscent of the FP errors in the first batch of Pentium chips...
Last I checked, there was no Local 427 of the Allied Brotherhood of Rocket Scientists and Affiliated Pointy-Heads at CalTech.
I suppose the folks doing this are doing it because they want to, of course... it's very likely that they view this as a once-in-a-lifetime experience. 90 days of messed up sleep is nothing if you're doing what you love.
I agree: on 09 Jan 2004 date I will turn 40. Not sure about the time, better ask Mom.
I am not making this up.
Er, people use computers for business, too. So it's not just going to be for video and pr0n and warez, its going to be useful for more mundane stuff like orders being shipped, etc.
And to address the reliability issue, there's no reason why you can't RAID this drive, too... So combine 5 or 6 of them and you've got 1.5TB of storage. This is more convienent than trying to stack 10 or so 160GB drives.
A terabyte isn't that huge a chunk of data anymore. The company I work for generates about 2GB per hour, every hour. With our current drive setup, we can store about 1 week online, then we have to go to tape. It would be useful.
In all likelyhood, the majority of engineers designing the devices don't even know about it, only the smaller number of software engineers that are porting it.
It would be nice to see it covered (or at least mentioned!) in university curricula, though...
Then, odds are you're either one or the other. It's pretty tough to do both well.
I'm probably not alone in this -- I guess many people of my age (almost 40) have the same problem.
When I was in primary school, we never learned the imperial measurements (aka the English system, or whatever). We learned metric, because by 1980 the country was going to have converted, and there was no point in teaching something that was going to be obsolete in 6 years. As a result, unlike my parents, I never learned by rote how many gills there are to a peck, or more usefully, how many feet are in a mile. I learned something in school that I never used, and was surrounded by measurements that I was never formally taught.
As the previous poster pointed out, President Reagan suspected that metric was a communist/socialist plot against traditional American values and measures, and suppressed all funding for US metrication.
Since I'm not a complete idiot, I've been able to get by, but I still have to think hard about the boiling point of water in degrees F, or the number of yards to a mile. Similarly, although I know how many centimeters there are to a kilometer, I have a tough time visualizing either one, or relating to a weather forcast in Europe (or Canada!)
It's ironic, since the US was one of the first nations to adopt a decimal currency, getting rid of the pounds-shilling-pence-farthing system long ago.
Sure, why not.
Should Kazaa be banned?
Maybe
Should linux (because it is an "untrusted" OS) be banned?
Probably not
There is no such thing as a bad tool. Just bad people using tools.
There are also bad people using bad tools.
"Modern" game designers, take note...
I always assumed we would be listening to Strauss...
You could also submit them in Adobe Acrobat format (PDF), according to the Rules for Application. Although PDF is not really an "open" format, GhostScript will allow you to generate PDF files.
Well said. Stunning, incredibly detailed graphics can make a game nice to look at, but not necessarily fun to play -- this is, after all, what games are all about... The burden has been transferred from programmers and game designers to the artists, so it still takes a year to put a game out (and it costs $40).
Tempest is a great example of what a game should be like: only 3 controls (a spinner, a fire button, and the rarely-used "superzapper" button); it takes about 5 seconds to learn, but you could play it forever.
I still play Impossible Mission on VICE, but I haven't completed the game since the C64 days...
(George Lucas should also note that this applies to film as well -- special effects cannot turn a weak script into a good movie.)
Anyhow, most of the "known space" novels/shorts are prequels to Ringworld (especially the Beowulf Schaeffer ones)...
Lucifer's Hammer would be cool too, but it's kinda dated now, and that genre's been done to death (Y2K seemed to bring out a rush of "end of civilization" TVMs)
I spent about 5 years (1985-1990) at the US Dept of Health & Human Services, doing simulations and modelling. Virtually all of the work our group did was in Fortran or SAS.
It was all on IBM mainframes, since most of our input data was the entire US decennial census. It's 12 years later now, but I still don't think there are too many PCs that could crunch and massage that amount of data in a reasonable time...
err, well, we have over 100 servers running Linux -- all are RedHat (6.2 and 7.2 mostly), and a few dozen workstations. Are you a troll? I cannot believe that you could possibly be so misinformed.
OK, I just followed a helpful link that someone else posted Bar code info, and now I remember more and see what I got wrong :-)
instead of UPC-12 and UPC-6, substitute "UPC-A" and "UPC-E"
A company I worked for a while ago made a barcode scanner that could read different codes. There are lots of standards for bar codes -- not just UPC, some are all numeric, some are alpha, etc.
The problem with "just making it alphanumeric" as some posters have said, is the same problem with any type of data storage. The UPC has essentially "4 bits" per digit (not really bits), plus some checksum stuff. If you went to alphanumeric, there obviously wouldn't be enough bits, and you'd be in the same situation -- all the software would still need to be changed.
The 12 digit UPC code is split into a "manufacturer code" and a "product code," kinda like the IPv4 host and network portions. Bigger manufacturers (e.g., Proctor and Gamble) got more digits for their product codes. IIRC, setting the 1st 6 digits to zero meant a "store-only product," I think -- kinda like a non-routable address in IP.
There are already several variants of the UPC code -- the most common is UPC-12 (12 digits), but there is also UPC-6, a "compressed" form that you see on smaller items (e.g., packs of gum), but is contains the same info as UPC-12 once decoded. But there is also UPC-12 +5, which has 5 extra digits, used for books and magazines primarily; I think part of the ISBN is stored there. And I seem to remember another extension too (UPC-12 +2 ?).
I guess my question is why don't they extend it this way (e.g., make a UPC-12 +10), rather than just adding one digit, which will probably only be good for another 10 years, if we're lucky...
Of course some of the problem might be the space required to store all this, since the UPC has a fairly strict requirement about the size of the code (and the whitespace surrounding it). The 2D "bar" codes mentioned earlier (and used by UPS) could be a solution, but another big advantage to the UPC is the human-readable portion below, so Rosie at Wal-Mart can key in the numbers from your Doritos bag when it fails to scan...
disclaimer: I worked on this software almost 20 years ago, so some of the details are probably wrong...