Tell you what. Take about 5 or 6 images of the same size 32 bit RGBA, keep them fairly simple. Now mathematically blend them together in various ways, such as multiplying, adding, etc. Now look at the result. This causes an effect known as "banding" pretty easily.
Take those same graphics and convert each channel to a float between 0 and 1 and do your blends like that, clamping at 1.0 and 0.0 if necessary. When you convert back to 32 bit color, the image will probably not show the artifacts found in the simply blended version. You can achieve the same results by using a higher precision framebuffer in a 3D card, be it 64 or 128 as some people are suggesting.
While the human eye is only capible of seeing about 10 million colors (I think that's the right number?), 16.7 million plus an alpha channel isn't enough when you do too many blends simply because each blend lowers your precision.
I see a lot of people talking about learning how to code being what it takes to make a successful game. I think those people are missing the point. What makes a good game is the game, not the code used to make the game accessable to the user.
Consider Final Fantasy IX - an awesome game IMO. Look at how it's rendered. Some 3D models, but the field mostly 2D graphics using some tricks to give the impression of being done in 3D. Yeah this is stuff you need to learn to do, but it's trivial compared to the characters, the writing, the artwork, the animations...
Another low-tech game, Myst. The game was a damned HYPERCARD STACK, I learned how to make those in the 7th grade. And yet it was one of the best-selling PC games ever. People making games for the PC only wish they could get those kind of sales on half their offerings.
That's not to say game engine tech is not at all important - far from it. All the creative and artistic talent in the world won't be worth a damn if you don't have the code to make it work. If you are interested in learning how to code engines that's certainly a good thing.
Best place to start is to buy a couple good books. The OpenGL "red book" is a good place to start. If you don't speak linear algebra as a second language, you might want a good math book as well. I also recall a rather specialized book on gomputer 3D geometry focusing on teaching the math using OpenGL code. I don't recall the title or author, but I'm sure someone can dig it up. Go through these things cover to cover. If you get hung up somewhere, ask someone. It's a lot of work but in the end you'll know more math than you ever wanted. But you'll also know 3D graphics inside and out.
Beyond that, all you really need are knowledge of C (or whatever), some basic physics you should likely have learned in high school, and probably some experience with client/server communication over the Internet.
If you want to be a Debian-based distribution...
on
Stormix Bankruptcy
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· Score: 2
...you have to be at least as good as Debian, or nobody will notice you until the Slashdot headline says you're gone.
Consider Corel a moment. Can you really take a distribution seriously that installs a network-connected machine without a root password? If they can't even get such a basic security feature right, what else didn't they do right?
The last version of Stormix I looked at wasn't very impressive either.  I really only looked at the installer and this was back in October, however the install was very choppy and unnatural.  I actually believe Debian's potato installer is more friendly.
I wrote an email to Digital Convergence about CueCat drivers, offering to work with them even though I don't have to (I've proven that I don't in fact have to do so given any of the possible legal claims they could possibly have over me. Neither their shrinkwrap software license nor Copyright nor Trademark nor patent can stop me from doing whatever I want with their hardware..)
Dispite their claim of being interested in working with someone to create an official Linux driver, they're not. I sent a very polite message explaining what I have done and asking them for what I would need to give them their demographics information so that my driver could be distributed without interfering with their business model. They didn't even reply.
I'm busy at work lately, but expect me to return to patch up this driver for release in a few weeks or so if I'm lucky. Their legal department doesn't scare me. They have no intellectual property rights against me to defend, any legal threats would be empty.
Qt 1.x was non-free and anything using it could at best be in contrib. It had compatibility issues with the GPL. When it was clear these issues would not be resolvable, KDE was pulled from Debian.
Qt 2.0/2.1 was free, but still wasn't compatible with the GPL. KDE remained available outside of Debian (which so far as anyone could tell was acceptable if you considered Qt a system library (we didn't, but the argument could be made...))
Qt 2.2 is available under the GPL. Problem resolved in a way nobody really expected was even possible. Anyone for a ski trip in hell? heh
LGPL'd multi-platform framebuffer, OpenGL, window housekeeping, input, sound, networking, and multithreading. Embeds nicely as a static library optimized to include exactly what you need and no more instead of a big shared lib.
In my programming classes in high school, games were verboten on the school machines. Writing or playing them was considered by the school to be grounds for disciplinary action which at the very least would include being no longer allowed access to the lab or library computers. If you were in a class that used the lab computers, you would fail it.
How do I know? I moved too fast for my instructor. I learned everything he had to teach me in a matter of weeks. So he asked me if there was any project I wanted to work on. I told him and he agreed. The assistant principal came to the class one day and happened to notice first that I was using the expensive laser printer instead of the cheap dot matrix printers (needed to so I could read the result - had permission) and then saw me go straight from reading the printout with a highlighter pen to change three lines of code and start testing out this game...
I was pulled out of class right then and spent the next forty minutes listening to this dumbass yell at me how I was going to fail the class, be suspended for a week, etc, etc, etc.. After that point, the instructor just happened to overhear the shouting walking down the hall on his way to lunch... It was all resolved by the week, but I wasn't allowed to work on the game again until next monday. I hear the AP got an earfull from the instructor for screwing with his students without talking to him first.
So what did I learn, besides that administration people suck? Arrays, sorting, pointers, linked lists, text processing, simple 2D graphics, 286 macro assembly, high-speed serial port communications, program overlays and later protected mode programming in DOS, the basics of DLLs, and a little OOP. Did I mention this was first semester Intro to Programming class?
Give them something they enjoy working on and watch their productivity soar. I did all of this on a 16MHz 386. What could someone learn with a Pentium, a 3D card, and an API like SDL which takes the OS-specifics out of video, networking, sound, input management, and window handling? They'd learn how to code, that's for damned sure!
This looks like pretty obvious flamebait, but I'll take it anyway since your subject line was intended to grab my attention - it worked.
Would you please take a few moments to explain what you mean and why you feel this way? If you're serious, I'm curious. Political statistics show that "minorities" tend to favor the Democratic party to the Republican party because of the former's stance on various social issues and programs.
I personally don't much go for the whole "minority" crap because I've been in enough different areas to realize that the exact definition of the term greatly depends on where you are.. Where I currently live, I would say more than half of the people in this particular area are Hispanic or Portugese at a guess (I've not seen data to back that up.) The point is neither of those overly broad and stereotyped groups are minorities right here where I am. Sure there are minority groups here - but those two certainly don't count. At the national level, discrimination based on culture is IMO a political game.
But then, my experience is limited. I'd welcome well-reasoned dissenting opinions.
What you seem to be saying here is that Linux, while cool for a desktop, isn't so cool when you might not even want an OS (since that would be just one more thing that could be exploited and you aptly point out that such exploits are a Very Bad Thing in terms of banks and other such applications..) That doesn't make SOCs or Linux a bad thing, it just means that one or both may be unsuitable for the task at hand. That's fine, if the task isn't one for the 405GP's hardware or for Linux as an OS, it just means that you need another solution.
I think if I could get one of these SOC's (most any of them would do) on a small board with a few ports and connectors attached for notebook type peripherals, with a few of them I'd be set for years with the embedded apps I have in mind! Don't think I'm likely to see such boards real soon in my price range however and I don't have the ability to fabricate them myself.
Granted the PC architecture sucks. Look at IDE! How many more band-aids are we going to see placed over what is essentially a 16-bit interface designed for the 286? How about "standard SVGA"? The closest there was to standard was VESA and everyone reading this should know VESA is useless except when used with DOS real mode - too slow otherwise. Our sound card standard pretty much the SB Pro with Windows Sound System for 16 bit audio - and you can't even depend on that! USB is nice, but then again its implementation is also a band-aid. I could go on, but I think I've made your point for you: the PC, as a platform, sucks.
The other part of your argument... AMD is evil because they make wintel-class chips? I think not. AMD would be out of business if they made some little off-brand CPU architecture. With more than 90% of the intalled base of desktops and workstations running under the PC architecture, you'd be a fool not to consider making hardware for it! Even SGI has been moving their software to the PC platform because there's just more of it out there and they know they can't keep up when it comes to price vs. performance.
I don't know what planet you're from if you consider US$5k for a workstation (even a high-end workstation) "surprisingly inexpensive" either. I can build a pretty damned sweet workstation by any standard for US$3.5k and that's including a monitor better than my current 21" and some very nice (if expensive) input devices. You said it yourself, the PC architecture wasn't planned beyond build something that "works"(?) as cheaply as possible. Until other architectures can deliver as much or more performance at a comparible or lower cost down in the mid- to low-end workstation range as well as the high-end and our respective mothers can still play Solitaire and Minesweeper... The resurgance of unix and unix-like platforms, especially those which are developed portably and openly with such a focus on ease-of-use may as they mature make it easier to throw away the tired PC architecture. That time just ain't here yet. Until then, AMD looks like a mighty promising choice the next time I build a box.
Sure it was a doom knock-off - what FPS isn't to some degree, including those put out by Id Software? Still, these "details" are the differences between doom and quake! I don't know if marathon was actually 3D or not (doom wasn't), but if it actually was it would be vastly superior technologically to doom, even on the PC.
Don't brand support good game on a platform you don't use/like as fanaticism just because you don't care about the differences. I've played with the doom source code and I've been working with the quake source every day since 22 December 1999. The difference in technologies is phenomenal.
(I don't have a mac and have never played marathon, I'm just taking the portion quoted in your message at face value - just as you did..)
While I generally avoid all things microsoft, I've found gamers (who absolutely love the idea of a nearly frictionless mouse that works on any surface and requires so little cleaning and maintenance) report frequently that the cheap cords on the things tend to exhibit "walkman headphones" type problems after awhile. They have a lifetime warranty, but twitch-type games are going to wear out mouse cord after mouse cord like that. Apparently there's no cordless version yet? It'd be kinda popular I think.
I'm ashamed of the lot of you! You're geeks and you've never dismantled a dead rodent? What is the world coming to.
That silly click is the result of the tiny microswitch they use in the mouse. It moves a very short distance and has to both have a long life and provide a solid feel that bounces back. And the little buggers are noisy. Making them silent would be rather expensive, so people haven't really tried for the most part. I recall seeing some that were pretty quiet in "mouse size" (which is smaller than the average microswitch..)
I think 2/3 of the geeks here can attest similar results. In fact, every time someone tries to ask a young woman if she really wants to go into technology, there's someone beating the crap out of a young man for being a geek. I won't speculate which is worse, but the fact is that schools---at least American schools---favor athletics over intellectuals. As I noted in another message, there's no gender gap or sexism there - just different measures to discourage the intelligent from being so.
Arguably I have little room to talk given that the last time I looked I was male, but this so-called gender gap in technology is a joke. YES there are men in this field, there are men in lots of fields. Yes (especially places like irc) anyone known to be female joining an irc channel is going to get a bit of crap from a few of the males there who are young, hormonal, and can't seem to behave themselves. That sort of thing is going to happen anywhere and it doesn't just happen to women because they're women. It happens to people in general because they're not the same. This is a very sad thing, but it happens in every field and everyone is going to face some form of social discrimination at some point, usually over something as pointless as their sex. The same applies for age, nationality, school or experience background, appearance, social class...
While it is true that discrimination happens, this has the feel of someone feeling that someone set out to prove there's inequality for the sexes in technology. Look hard enough for something and you'll find it. This story doesn't deal with schools being harder on female students or employers disregarding apps because of the sex of the applicant.. No, this is a study saying that because there aren't enough females in technology, there aren't enough females in technology. Give me a break! I don't believe in effects causing themselves - especially when it comes to people. As a species, humanity is more stubborn than that. And the half a dozen female geeks I know seem to indicate this to be true. They don't care if the industry is populated by men - geeks are what they are and the "geek lifestyle"(?) is the one they've chosen.
I encourage any woman who wants to go into technology and has even a shred of self-respect to do it. If they meet resistance, keep fighting. I feel I was just about born a geek and I wouldn't let anyone in the world take that away from me - they shouldn't either.
KDE's the one with license issues, not Troll Tech.
That said, Troll Tech was in a perfect position to fix them (3-4 clauses changed in their current license would do it) but they chose not to. As soon as Red Hat agreed to ship KDE, they didn't have to worry anymore in their thoughts. The license issues aren't their problem, but they certainly do profit from nobody beliving KDE has a problem.
Read the actual claims made by myself and some of the other Debian people. Don't rely on Slashdot histeria and rumors as to what we think the problem is. Find out what the problems really are - they're a lot simpler in nature and really very clear.
Sig, we're not talking about a tax for doing business on the net. We're talking about a simple case of mail-order sales tax. For transactions which happen in-state, you simply have to pay the same sales tax you would if the order were placed over the phone. That's all there is to it. Nothing to see here but business as usual, please move along.
First, the above isn't flamebait. It's a valid concern for the way in which some may view any such discovery of microbial life.
Now, I shall offer my (dissenting) opinion:
While it is quite possible to suggest life found on Mars may indeed have come from Earth, its existance on Mars today would have a very profound impact. If it came from Earth, it likely didn't come from a probe. Another post I read above notes that Earth and Mars have collectively traded cosmic objects in the early days of both planets. It is quite likely that microbial life may have gotten started there. Or such may have started on both planets or on Mars and travelled here or.. well, we'll never know for sure, hence your belief there may be such doubts.
What is exciting, however, is that if even microbial life is found on Mars, we will have discovered life on Mars! If it came from Earth, so be it - it is life nonetheless and that says a lot. Such a discovery would mean that on the only two solid planets we have gotten a good look at, we found life on both.
A bit more perspective: Scientists agree that if Earth, one of billions of billions of planets out there contains life, somewhere out there is another planet that contains life. Arguably, a planet whose life is intelligent, possibly as much as or moreso than we are. But the chances are considered to be low considering that the universe seems somewhat hostile to life given that planets like Mars and Venus are extremely common and planets like Jupiter even more.
If there's life on that big red dirtball, those odds of finding more established life out there go up. We think there may be water on Europa, but that's probably several decades from confirmation. Life on Mars may be confirmed before some of the people reading this are out of school.
The scientific community is almost positive we aren't alone. Proving that will be cool. (I believe it's a question of when, not if.) Proving that life is common enough to be found right next door is even better.
With a bunch of open systems, you run the very high chance that you're going to be leaking RFI all over the place. Plus a good cooling system (better than I have here) can cause the machine to run a few degrees cooler than the surrounding room. This is always a good thing. Your cooling solution guarantees that the machine's components will be at the same temperature as the room they're in, if not perhaps a little hotter due to energy/heat transfer and lack of air circulation.
Most newer off-the-shelf computers do not have a CPU fan. My Dell PIII doesn't have a single fan on that chip and you'd think it roasts to death. No way, it's cooler than the P200 sitting next to it that can be heard from the other room. If I shut dow that machine I can barely hear a whisper. So how do the new machines keep from baking themselves? Did Intel stop making ovens instead of CPUs? Certainly not. Intel chips can still get hot enough to fry an egg without proper cooling..! Maybe it's part of their patent or something, eh?
No, the reason is that the little fan that is stuck to the top of that P200 makes a lot of noise. The one in the power supply isn't exactly silent, but compared to the one on the CPU you'd never notice.
What this Dell and a lot of these quiet machines are doing is moving the fan off the CPU and putting it in the back of the case. If you just put a suitable heatsink on the CPU itself with some heat putty and snap a little plastic baffel over the CPU, what happens is that the bigger, higher powered, quieter fan in the back of the case pulls air in side the case under this baffel, over the heatsink, and immediately out the back of the case. This is an extremely efficient design.
The P200 sitting next to it pulls the air already over the heatsink off of it which supposedly adds to the circulation (though in my experience not very much) and pushes it into the middle of the case. Usually airflow is blocked by cables or something, so there's no real unobstructed path for the air to follow. Result? My P200 is quite warm to the touch. My PIII isn't cold to the touch (it's hot in here), but it's not noticably any warmer than the surrounding air temperature. Of course, add a petlier effect plate to that heatshink and watch the temperature of that chip drop below the room temperature.
So I guess the question is, are there any good recommendations for comodity cases with a similar duct design? This plastic Dell case works, but it's not expandable enough for a real geek. Not enough drive bays and the whole thing is plastic and not nearly as sturdy as the average $80 metal case, to say nothing of the nifty CalPC steel cases we all drool over.. =)
I know of it, but I haven't tried it yet. AFAIK it's an interface for a speech synthesizer which I don't have, I just have this huge monitor. Project TuxTalker (a really bad joke for any blind people who used an Apple// way back when and remember Textalker) doesn't provide anything compatible with/dev/mumble yet. Still, it's one more reason to see the KDE license issue resolved, which seems unlikely to me unfortunately.
I don't use Gnome either. I use wmaker. NeXTStep is good for the soul. Seriously though, I got involved with this literally years ago and helped Troll Tech write the QPL in the hopes of fixing this problem so KDE could go into Red Hat and Debian. Red Hat chose to include it despite the fact that they knew the problems weren't fixed, citing "market pressure" as the reason they caved. Debian is a different story. We won't include it until the license says we can. If that takes another three years (which is how long this debacle has gone on now), then that's how long it takes. Debian's very longstanding policy has been that if the license is not clear, we get clarification. If we can't resolve the issue, we don't include the software. This is an essential facet of Debian. You use Debian and you know that we've done everything we can to ensure that there are no nasty legal surprises for you or for us. We can't do that with KDE because of this whole mess.
Slashdot Mirror
Tell you what. Take about 5 or 6 images of the same size 32 bit RGBA, keep them fairly simple. Now mathematically blend them together in various ways, such as multiplying, adding, etc. Now look at the result. This causes an effect known as "banding" pretty easily.
Take those same graphics and convert each channel to a float between 0 and 1 and do your blends like that, clamping at 1.0 and 0.0 if necessary. When you convert back to 32 bit color, the image will probably not show the artifacts found in the simply blended version. You can achieve the same results by using a higher precision framebuffer in a 3D card, be it 64 or 128 as some people are suggesting.
While the human eye is only capible of seeing about 10 million colors (I think that's the right number?), 16.7 million plus an alpha channel isn't enough when you do too many blends simply because each blend lowers your precision.
I see a lot of people talking about learning how to code being what it takes to make a successful game. I think those people are missing the point. What makes a good game is the game, not the code used to make the game accessable to the user.
Consider Final Fantasy IX - an awesome game IMO. Look at how it's rendered. Some 3D models, but the field mostly 2D graphics using some tricks to give the impression of being done in 3D. Yeah this is stuff you need to learn to do, but it's trivial compared to the characters, the writing, the artwork, the animations...
Another low-tech game, Myst. The game was a damned HYPERCARD STACK, I learned how to make those in the 7th grade. And yet it was one of the best-selling PC games ever. People making games for the PC only wish they could get those kind of sales on half their offerings.
That's not to say game engine tech is not at all important - far from it. All the creative and artistic talent in the world won't be worth a damn if you don't have the code to make it work. If you are interested in learning how to code engines that's certainly a good thing.
Best place to start is to buy a couple good books. The OpenGL "red book" is a good place to start. If you don't speak linear algebra as a second language, you might want a good math book as well. I also recall a rather specialized book on gomputer 3D geometry focusing on teaching the math using OpenGL code. I don't recall the title or author, but I'm sure someone can dig it up. Go through these things cover to cover. If you get hung up somewhere, ask someone. It's a lot of work but in the end you'll know more math than you ever wanted. But you'll also know 3D graphics inside and out.
Beyond that, all you really need are knowledge of C (or whatever), some basic physics you should likely have learned in high school, and probably some experience with client/server communication over the Internet.
...you have to be at least as good as Debian, or nobody will notice you until the Slashdot headline says you're gone.
Consider Corel a moment. Can you really take a distribution seriously that installs a network-connected machine without a root password? If they can't even get such a basic security feature right, what else didn't they do right?
The last version of Stormix I looked at wasn't very impressive either.  I really only looked at the installer and this was back in October, however the install was very choppy and unnatural.  I actually believe Debian's potato installer is more friendly.
Dispite their claim of being interested in working with someone to create an official Linux driver, they're not. I sent a very polite message explaining what I have done and asking them for what I would need to give them their demographics information so that my driver could be distributed without interfering with their business model. They didn't even reply.
I'm busy at work lately, but expect me to return to patch up this driver for release in a few weeks or so if I'm lucky. Their legal department doesn't scare me. They have no intellectual property rights against me to defend, any legal threats would be empty.
Qt 2.0/2.1 was free, but still wasn't compatible with the GPL. KDE remained available outside of Debian (which so far as anyone could tell was acceptable if you considered Qt a system library (we didn't, but the argument could be made...))
Qt 2.2 is available under the GPL. Problem resolved in a way nobody really expected was even possible. Anyone for a ski trip in hell? heh
LGPL'd multi-platform framebuffer, OpenGL, window housekeeping, input, sound, networking, and multithreading. Embeds nicely as a static library optimized to include exactly what you need and no more instead of a big shared lib.
How do I know? I moved too fast for my instructor. I learned everything he had to teach me in a matter of weeks. So he asked me if there was any project I wanted to work on. I told him and he agreed. The assistant principal came to the class one day and happened to notice first that I was using the expensive laser printer instead of the cheap dot matrix printers (needed to so I could read the result - had permission) and then saw me go straight from reading the printout with a highlighter pen to change three lines of code and start testing out this game ...
I was pulled out of class right then and spent the next forty minutes listening to this dumbass yell at me how I was going to fail the class, be suspended for a week, etc, etc, etc.. After that point, the instructor just happened to overhear the shouting walking down the hall on his way to lunch... It was all resolved by the week, but I wasn't allowed to work on the game again until next monday. I hear the AP got an earfull from the instructor for screwing with his students without talking to him first.
So what did I learn, besides that administration people suck? Arrays, sorting, pointers, linked lists, text processing, simple 2D graphics, 286 macro assembly, high-speed serial port communications, program overlays and later protected mode programming in DOS, the basics of DLLs, and a little OOP. Did I mention this was first semester Intro to Programming class?
Give them something they enjoy working on and watch their productivity soar. I did all of this on a 16MHz 386. What could someone learn with a Pentium, a 3D card, and an API like SDL which takes the OS-specifics out of video, networking, sound, input management, and window handling? They'd learn how to code, that's for damned sure!
Would you please take a few moments to explain what you mean and why you feel this way? If you're serious, I'm curious. Political statistics show that "minorities" tend to favor the Democratic party to the Republican party because of the former's stance on various social issues and programs.
I personally don't much go for the whole "minority" crap because I've been in enough different areas to realize that the exact definition of the term greatly depends on where you are.. Where I currently live, I would say more than half of the people in this particular area are Hispanic or Portugese at a guess (I've not seen data to back that up.) The point is neither of those overly broad and stereotyped groups are minorities right here where I am. Sure there are minority groups here - but those two certainly don't count. At the national level, discrimination based on culture is IMO a political game.
But then, my experience is limited. I'd welcome well-reasoned dissenting opinions.
Seems you fell for them falling for it. Or something like that. It doesn't have to make sense, don't try to figure it out. =)
I think if I could get one of these SOC's (most any of them would do) on a small board with a few ports and connectors attached for notebook type peripherals, with a few of them I'd be set for years with the embedded apps I have in mind! Don't think I'm likely to see such boards real soon in my price range however and I don't have the ability to fabricate them myself.
The other part of your argument ... AMD is evil because they make wintel-class chips? I think not. AMD would be out of business if they made some little off-brand CPU architecture. With more than 90% of the intalled base of desktops and workstations running under the PC architecture, you'd be a fool not to consider making hardware for it! Even SGI has been moving their software to the PC platform because there's just more of it out there and they know they can't keep up when it comes to price vs. performance.
I don't know what planet you're from if you consider US$5k for a workstation (even a high-end workstation) "surprisingly inexpensive" either. I can build a pretty damned sweet workstation by any standard for US$3.5k and that's including a monitor better than my current 21" and some very nice (if expensive) input devices. You said it yourself, the PC architecture wasn't planned beyond build something that "works"(?) as cheaply as possible. Until other architectures can deliver as much or more performance at a comparible or lower cost down in the mid- to low-end workstation range as well as the high-end and our respective mothers can still play Solitaire and Minesweeper... The resurgance of unix and unix-like platforms, especially those which are developed portably and openly with such a focus on ease-of-use may as they mature make it easier to throw away the tired PC architecture. That time just ain't here yet. Until then, AMD looks like a mighty promising choice the next time I build a box.
Don't brand support good game on a platform you don't use/like as fanaticism just because you don't care about the differences. I've played with the doom source code and I've been working with the quake source every day since 22 December 1999. The difference in technologies is phenomenal.
(I don't have a mac and have never played marathon, I'm just taking the portion quoted in your message at face value - just as you did..)
While I generally avoid all things microsoft, I've found gamers (who absolutely love the idea of a nearly frictionless mouse that works on any surface and requires so little cleaning and maintenance) report frequently that the cheap cords on the things tend to exhibit "walkman headphones" type problems after awhile. They have a lifetime warranty, but twitch-type games are going to wear out mouse cord after mouse cord like that. Apparently there's no cordless version yet? It'd be kinda popular I think.
That silly click is the result of the tiny microswitch they use in the mouse. It moves a very short distance and has to both have a long life and provide a solid feel that bounces back. And the little buggers are noisy. Making them silent would be rather expensive, so people haven't really tried for the most part. I recall seeing some that were pretty quiet in "mouse size" (which is smaller than the average microswitch..)
Boys' dolls just have guns and camo clothing is all.. =p
I think 2/3 of the geeks here can attest similar results. In fact, every time someone tries to ask a young woman if she really wants to go into technology, there's someone beating the crap out of a young man for being a geek. I won't speculate which is worse, but the fact is that schools---at least American schools---favor athletics over intellectuals. As I noted in another message, there's no gender gap or sexism there - just different measures to discourage the intelligent from being so.
While it is true that discrimination happens, this has the feel of someone feeling that someone set out to prove there's inequality for the sexes in technology. Look hard enough for something and you'll find it. This story doesn't deal with schools being harder on female students or employers disregarding apps because of the sex of the applicant.. No, this is a study saying that because there aren't enough females in technology, there aren't enough females in technology. Give me a break! I don't believe in effects causing themselves - especially when it comes to people. As a species, humanity is more stubborn than that. And the half a dozen female geeks I know seem to indicate this to be true. They don't care if the industry is populated by men - geeks are what they are and the "geek lifestyle"(?) is the one they've chosen.
I encourage any woman who wants to go into technology and has even a shred of self-respect to do it. If they meet resistance, keep fighting. I feel I was just about born a geek and I wouldn't let anyone in the world take that away from me - they shouldn't either.
That said, Troll Tech was in a perfect position to fix them (3-4 clauses changed in their current license would do it) but they chose not to. As soon as Red Hat agreed to ship KDE, they didn't have to worry anymore in their thoughts. The license issues aren't their problem, but they certainly do profit from nobody beliving KDE has a problem.
Read the actual claims made by myself and some of the other Debian people. Don't rely on Slashdot histeria and rumors as to what we think the problem is. Find out what the problems really are - they're a lot simpler in nature and really very clear.
Sig, we're not talking about a tax for doing business on the net. We're talking about a simple case of mail-order sales tax. For transactions which happen in-state, you simply have to pay the same sales tax you would if the order were placed over the phone. That's all there is to it. Nothing to see here but business as usual, please move along.
Now, I shall offer my (dissenting) opinion:
While it is quite possible to suggest life found on Mars may indeed have come from Earth, its existance on Mars today would have a very profound impact. If it came from Earth, it likely didn't come from a probe. Another post I read above notes that Earth and Mars have collectively traded cosmic objects in the early days of both planets. It is quite likely that microbial life may have gotten started there. Or such may have started on both planets or on Mars and travelled here or .. well, we'll never know for sure, hence your belief there may be such doubts.
What is exciting, however, is that if even microbial life is found on Mars, we will have discovered life on Mars! If it came from Earth, so be it - it is life nonetheless and that says a lot. Such a discovery would mean that on the only two solid planets we have gotten a good look at, we found life on both.
A bit more perspective: Scientists agree that if Earth, one of billions of billions of planets out there contains life, somewhere out there is another planet that contains life. Arguably, a planet whose life is intelligent, possibly as much as or moreso than we are. But the chances are considered to be low considering that the universe seems somewhat hostile to life given that planets like Mars and Venus are extremely common and planets like Jupiter even more.
If there's life on that big red dirtball, those odds of finding more established life out there go up. We think there may be water on Europa, but that's probably several decades from confirmation. Life on Mars may be confirmed before some of the people reading this are out of school.
The scientific community is almost positive we aren't alone. Proving that will be cool. (I believe it's a question of when, not if.) Proving that life is common enough to be found right next door is even better.
With a bunch of open systems, you run the very high chance that you're going to be leaking RFI all over the place. Plus a good cooling system (better than I have here) can cause the machine to run a few degrees cooler than the surrounding room. This is always a good thing. Your cooling solution guarantees that the machine's components will be at the same temperature as the room they're in, if not perhaps a little hotter due to energy/heat transfer and lack of air circulation.
No, the reason is that the little fan that is stuck to the top of that P200 makes a lot of noise. The one in the power supply isn't exactly silent, but compared to the one on the CPU you'd never notice.
What this Dell and a lot of these quiet machines are doing is moving the fan off the CPU and putting it in the back of the case. If you just put a suitable heatsink on the CPU itself with some heat putty and snap a little plastic baffel over the CPU, what happens is that the bigger, higher powered, quieter fan in the back of the case pulls air in side the case under this baffel, over the heatsink, and immediately out the back of the case. This is an extremely efficient design.
The P200 sitting next to it pulls the air already over the heatsink off of it which supposedly adds to the circulation (though in my experience not very much) and pushes it into the middle of the case. Usually airflow is blocked by cables or something, so there's no real unobstructed path for the air to follow. Result? My P200 is quite warm to the touch. My PIII isn't cold to the touch (it's hot in here), but it's not noticably any warmer than the surrounding air temperature. Of course, add a petlier effect plate to that heatshink and watch the temperature of that chip drop below the room temperature.
So I guess the question is, are there any good recommendations for comodity cases with a similar duct design? This plastic Dell case works, but it's not expandable enough for a real geek. Not enough drive bays and the whole thing is plastic and not nearly as sturdy as the average $80 metal case, to say nothing of the nifty CalPC steel cases we all drool over.. =)
I know of it, but I haven't tried it yet. AFAIK it's an interface for a speech synthesizer which I don't have, I just have this huge monitor. Project TuxTalker (a really bad joke for any blind people who used an Apple // way back when and remember Textalker) doesn't provide anything compatible with /dev/mumble yet. Still, it's one more reason to see the KDE license issue resolved, which seems unlikely to me unfortunately.
I don't use Gnome either. I use wmaker. NeXTStep is good for the soul. Seriously though, I got involved with this literally years ago and helped Troll Tech write the QPL in the hopes of fixing this problem so KDE could go into Red Hat and Debian. Red Hat chose to include it despite the fact that they knew the problems weren't fixed, citing "market pressure" as the reason they caved. Debian is a different story. We won't include it until the license says we can. If that takes another three years (which is how long this debacle has gone on now), then that's how long it takes. Debian's very longstanding policy has been that if the license is not clear, we get clarification. If we can't resolve the issue, we don't include the software. This is an essential facet of Debian. You use Debian and you know that we've done everything we can to ensure that there are no nasty legal surprises for you or for us. We can't do that with KDE because of this whole mess.
I've been involved with this KDE thing for two years now. I helped write the QPL. What the hell have you done, besides flame me with anonymity? Bah.