If its *capable* of decent graphics, why don't they make the start area -- everyones first impression of the game -- a showcase of what its capable of?
Given the poor performance of even that, very simple area, I dread to think what a high-end area would do to the game engine; it has a hard enough time rendering simple textures and simple models.
Partly this probably has to do with the idea that every client should get kind of the same user experience, so you can't aim for high-end, partly it's because they don't seem to handle graphics hardware all that well.
I guess that consistency really confuses people.
I tried it on a Mac G4 and on a high-end PC and the performance and appearance was *exactly* the same which was a little disconcerting for some reason.
was that it is a magnet for every sick and twisted loser the trolls around on the Internet. This article, and the articles it links to, should be enough for anyone to understand exactly what kind of person likes second life
Wow, because I thought that the main 'magnet for every sick and twisted loser the trolls around on the Internet' was actually somethingawful.com, the site you link to. Hows that for ironic?
I'd been playing VLB for a while and decided to give There a go.
I don't think I'll be going back to There in a hurry;
Performance of There wasn't as good as VLB. VLB has its freezes and lag and repeat animation sequences but in over a month I'd not seen anything as bad as I experienced in There in my first hour. Not even when VLB servers were being rebooted...
There is far more commercialised than VLB; I'd taken the compass and summoning for granted only to find that in There I had to pay for these... you only get to be able to summon people in There once you are premium. And the compass in There is an addon which premium members have to PAY for seperately. In VLB I am using a GPS add-on to the compass originally developed for There and I am using it for FREE.
After all that time, you still have your eyesight?
I tried it for about an hour and I had a headache... and it nearly made my eyes bleed.
I have never, not since the very early days of 3d games, seen such poor graphics or poor performance.
Or is there some trick to getting decent quality out of it? If so, please tell because I'd gladly give secondlife a secondchance!
I mean, looking at the "screen shots" from secondlife that I see in magazines and on websites I wonder how on earth they got such extremely high quality rendering out of secondlife while on hardware which plays WoW perfectly well, secondlife is like throwback to the '80s.
Or are those "screen shots" pure false advertising?
Among other things, a language which can have *syntax* errors on a file with mixed tabs and spaces would be worthy of an apt-get --purge remove if it wasn't required by xen...
Why bother? dpkg/deb is maintained and does everything that rpm does.
Bzzzzt WRONG!!!
I *prefer* Debian over any RPM based distro I have ever used but to say that dpkg/deb does *everything* that rpm does is simply false.
dpkg/deb fails to do at least one very important thing that rpm does.
rpm maintains a database of, among other things, filesystem ownerships and permissions as well as symlinks.
dpkg/deb manages filesystem ownerships, permissions and symlinks by running commands in the maintainer scripts. It does not maintain *any* database of these objects or properties. I'll give a real-life example...
I once had the misfortune to lose all of the symlinks under/etc
The system was rpm based so it was a relatively simple matter to query the rpm database, extract the info on the symlinks which are created by the package installations and turn this into a script to recreate them.
Had this been a deb based system I would have had to reinstall the packages which may not have been practical; more likely I would have had to troll through all the maintainer scripts thinking my way through their logic to find where they created symlinks. And in many cases they are not simple linear shell scripts!
Once dpkg/deb starts to maintain this kind of data on package installations, *then* you might say that it does everything that rpm does. Not before.
I see people posting saying that hardware detection and initialisation is bound to slow things down, and that is true, but its not the whole story.
Whenever you boot a computer, as opposed to a TV set, there are an awful lot of processes going on. Services start up, various configurations and libraries are loaded up. Lots happens and this lots happening contends for one another for the limited resource of I/O, memory and CPU.
Antivirus scans start happening; if you have AV software which scans DLLs or executables on load this will increase the resource contention significantly.
And at every boot things may be slightly different. For one thing, between last reboot and this a virus could have found its way into the system.
Computers are not exactly finite state machines. Every boot will inevitably differ from the last for oh so many reasons.
Its not like a TV where it only has so many states that it could be in at any time and where things don't change between startups.
If you want instant boots, I suggest sticking with a console and playing games and for math use a calculator.
This is a very good question. But consider: if you wrote a few extra lines of source code to add some feature to GNU grep, for example, and then you distributed your extra code as proprietary, so you have to pay $10 for the privilege of patching it into grep and rebuilding... you can think about the ethical issues, but more importantly in this discussion, what is the legal situation? Is your bit of extra code a derived work of the grep source code?
Thats actually a really pertinent example.
For instance, suppose Novell did something like this so that grep could pattern-match in MS Word documents... something thats not altogether too far-fetched to consider.
All particles move around in a soup of Higgs particles and thus acquire the appearance of being massive due to their interactions with this Higgs-soup.
Oh so the Higgs-soup is kind of like phlogiston or something similar?
I can say, from personal experience, 'magic mushrooms' (in this case (berserkers) fly agaric (amanita muscaria)) would make a most excellent combat or survival drug.
I would not want to get into a confrontational situation while under their influence unless killing people would be OK. Seriously. They make you extremely happy to launch into physical activity. If someone tried to attack you, you would *joyfuly* attack them back. It would feel really great.
They also increase your endurance, speed and reaction times.
The affect does not wear off very rapidly and you can feel the effects for little under a week. You can sleep quite well too.
Oh and vomiting about an hour after ingesting them is *compulsory*. If for some reason you can't vomit, you are in big trouble.
To be honest, I've never read the Wikipedia article on old uncle Al. Maybe I should. I've just studied him (and many other occultists) for about 30 years...
He himself came out with "My enemies pronounce it 'Croulley' hoping to treat me foully, my friends pronounce it 'Crow-ley' to show that I am holy'".
Modern islam has no sense of humor and no perspective.
When I was a kid at school, I once used the epithet 'son of a bitch' to another kid who, as I discovered, was a Muslim.
The phrase was so offensive to him that this started a war. A very serious war.
It turns out that dogs gave the prophet away when he was trying to sneak back into Mecca, so by implying that his mother was a bitch I was implying that he was a dog and hence a betrayer of the prophet. This was enough for him to risk life and limb over.
Thats whay I mean by 'way too seriously'.
It wasn't always this way; google for stories of the mullah Nasruddin. Were he alive today he'd be lynched.
A lovely story by way of example:
Mullah Nasruddin had saved up to buy a new shirt. He went to a tailor's shop, full of excitement. The tailor measured him and said, "Come back in a week, and -- if Allah wills -- your shirt will be ready."
The Mullah contained himself for a week and then went back to the shop. "There has been a delay. But -- if Allah wills -- your shirt will be ready tomorrow."
The following day Nasruddin returned. "I am sorry," said the tailor, "but it is not quite finished. Try tomorrow, and -- if Allah wills -- it will be ready."
"How long will it take," asked the exasperated Nasruddin, "if you leave Allah out of it?"
There was once a king who asked of his wise men and advisors that they provide him with some object which, when he was happy would make him sad and when he was sad would make him happy.
They researched and worked very hard and finally came up with a simple ring.
Inscribed on the ring were the words: "This, too, shall pass".
Then theres the wonderful story of the Opening of the Eye of Horus, as told by that great sage and fool, Aleister Crowley (pronounced to rhyme with 'holy' not 'foully').
I shall paste the whole darn thing into this/. comment, for posterity thereby archiving it for future generations:) mod me off topic if you dare!
1. This is the Book of the Opening of the Eye of Horus, of which the symbol in the profane world is the eye in the triangle, and of which the meaning is Illumination.
2. Thou who readest this doth not read; thou who seeketh shall not attain; thou who understandeth doth not understand. For attainment and understanding cometh only when thou art not thou, yea, when thou art nothing.
3. Once there was a monk, a disciple of that great Magus of our Order whom men name the Buddha which signifieth He Who Is Awake. For men asked the Lord Gotama, Are you a God? And he answered, No. And they asked again, Are you a saint? And he answered again, No. And they asked then, What are you? And he answered: I am awake. Thence is he known as the Buddha, the Awakened One.
4. And the monk, in order to awaken himself, practised the Art of Meditation as taught by Buddha, which in its original form before being distorted by False Imaginings and Elaborations of Theologians, was but this: To look upon all incidents and events and Remember to Say Unto Thine Soul of each: This is transitory.
5. And the monk looked upon all incidents and events, Reminding himself always: This is transitory.
6. And the monk came close to Awakening, and therefore was he in great peril, for The Lord of the Abyss of Hallucinations, whom Buddhists call Mara, the Tempter, cometh quickly to one near Awakening, to hypnotize him again into the Sleep of Fools which is the ordinary consciousness of Men.
7. And Mara did sorely afflict the monk with death of offspring, and insanity of loved ones, and eye-troubles, and slander, and malice, and the great curse of Law Suits, and diverse sufferings, but the monk thought only: This is transitory. And he was closer to Awakening.
8. And Mara, the Lord of the Abyss of Hallucinations, then caused the monk to die and reincarnate as an almost Mindless creature, a Parrot, which flitted from tree to tree deep in the jungle; and Mara thought, Now he has no chance of Awakening.
9. But a brother Monk of the Buddhist order came one day through the jungle, chanting the Teachings, and the Parrot heard, and repeated the one phrase over and over: This is transitory.
10. And Mental Activity began in the Parrot, and the memories of his past life came to him, and the meaning of the teaching, This is transitory; and Mara cursed horribly in frustration, and caused him to die again and reincarnate as an Elephant, even deeper in the jungle and further from the languages of men.
11. And many years passed, and there seemed no chance of Awakening for that soul; but the effects of good karma, like those of bad, continueth forever; and eventually Men came to the jungle, and took the Elephant captive, to sell him to a great Rajah.
12. And the Elephant lived in the courtyard of the Rajah, and many years passed.
13. And another monk of the Buddhist order came to the Rajah, and taught in the courtyard, and his teaching was: This is transitory. And memories awoke in the Elephant, and meaning was understood in the memories, and Awakening again came close.
14. And Mara cursed wrathfully, and caused the Elephant to die; and this time Mara took good care that reincarnation would recur at the furthest possible remove from all chance of Awakening, for Mara caused that the monk be reb
Meanwhile in much of Europe a good chunk of recent history has been frozen into an un-revisable, legally irrefutable image.
I am, of course, talking about the laws against so-called 'holocaust denial' which effectively make it a crime to uncover any historical data which would refute the official story of what happened.
Even if it were a matter of historical fact that, say 5 million Jews were killed in the holocaust instead of 6 million it would, in effect, be illegal to tell the *truth*.
Slashdot Mirror
because we can't guard against the stupidity & greed of other people.
In the case of the USA, isn't this what the 2nd amendment is supposed to be for? You know, the right to keep and bear arms...
Since dpkg maintainer scripts are idempotent, reinstalling all the packages should have been a very straightforward way to get everything back.
:)
;)
Are *supposed* to be idempotent.
But the easiest way to get everything back would have been to restore your backups...
Smartarse
Still, from the perspective of being able to validate the installed state of packages, rpm is miles ahead of deb.
Ok well you know what?
If its *capable* of decent graphics, why don't they make the start area -- everyones first impression of the game -- a showcase of what its capable of?
Given the poor performance of even that, very simple area, I dread to think what a high-end area would do to the game engine; it has a hard enough time rendering simple textures and simple models.
Partly this probably has to do with the idea that every client should get kind of the same user experience, so you can't aim for high-end, partly it's because they don't seem to handle graphics hardware all that well.
I guess that consistency really confuses people.
I tried it on a Mac G4 and on a high-end PC and the performance and appearance was *exactly* the same which was a little disconcerting for some reason.
was that it is a magnet for every sick and twisted loser the trolls around on the Internet. This article, and the articles it links to, should be enough for anyone to understand exactly what kind of person likes second life
Wow, because I thought that the main 'magnet for every sick and twisted loser the trolls around on the Internet' was actually somethingawful.com, the site you link to. Hows that for ironic?
I'd been playing VLB for a while and decided to give There a go.
I don't think I'll be going back to There in a hurry;
Performance of There wasn't as good as VLB. VLB has its freezes and lag and repeat animation sequences but in over a month I'd not seen anything as bad as I experienced in There in my first hour. Not even when VLB servers were being rebooted...
There is far more commercialised than VLB; I'd taken the compass and summoning for granted only to find that in There I had to pay for these... you only get to be able to summon people in There once you are premium. And the compass in There is an addon which premium members have to PAY for seperately. In VLB I am using a GPS add-on to the compass originally developed for There and I am using it for FREE.
...(3.5 years and counting),
After all that time, you still have your eyesight?
I tried it for about an hour and I had a headache... and it nearly made my eyes bleed.
I have never, not since the very early days of 3d games, seen such poor graphics or poor performance.
Or is there some trick to getting decent quality out of it? If so, please tell because I'd gladly give secondlife a secondchance!
I mean, looking at the "screen shots" from secondlife that I see in magazines and on websites I wonder how on earth they got such extremely high quality rendering out of secondlife while on hardware which plays WoW perfectly well, secondlife is like throwback to the '80s.
Or are those "screen shots" pure false advertising?
such as Python
Don't make me laugh, I am eating my breakfast.
Among other things, a language which can have *syntax* errors on a file with mixed tabs and spaces would be worthy of an apt-get --purge remove if it wasn't required by xen...
Why bother? dpkg/deb is maintained and does everything that rpm does.
/etc
Bzzzzt WRONG!!!
I *prefer* Debian over any RPM based distro I have ever used but to say that dpkg/deb does *everything* that rpm does is simply false.
dpkg/deb fails to do at least one very important thing that rpm does.
rpm maintains a database of, among other things, filesystem ownerships and permissions as well as symlinks.
dpkg/deb manages filesystem ownerships, permissions and symlinks by running commands in the maintainer scripts. It does not maintain *any* database of these objects or properties. I'll give a real-life example...
I once had the misfortune to lose all of the symlinks under
The system was rpm based so it was a relatively simple matter to query the rpm database, extract the info on the symlinks which are created by the package installations and turn this into a script to recreate them.
Had this been a deb based system I would have had to reinstall the packages which may not have been practical; more likely I would have had to troll through all the maintainer scripts thinking my way through their logic to find where they created symlinks. And in many cases they are not simple linear shell scripts!
Once dpkg/deb starts to maintain this kind of data on package installations, *then* you might say that it does everything that rpm does. Not before.
This is a classic 'net argument. Long story short, the destruction of currency *with intent to defraud* is illegal.
So destruction of currency with the perhaps misguided but well-intentioned and non-fraudulent intent to destabilise the economy is just fine.
ISPs could always implement a blacklist instead that blocks old versions of Windows...
//
s/old versions of
...established New Zealand as a colony for its most criminal mammals.
Hah! You have it the wrong way round.
Australia was colonised by people to whom it was said "Sod you, your going somewhere else!"
New Zealand was colonised by people by whom it was said "Sod this, I'm going somewhere else!"
I see people posting saying that hardware detection and initialisation is bound to slow things down, and that is true, but its not the whole story.
Whenever you boot a computer, as opposed to a TV set, there are an awful lot of processes going on. Services start up, various configurations and libraries are loaded up. Lots happens and this lots happening contends for one another for the limited resource of I/O, memory and CPU.
Antivirus scans start happening; if you have AV software which scans DLLs or executables on load this will increase the resource contention significantly.
And at every boot things may be slightly different. For one thing, between last reboot and this a virus could have found its way into the system.
Computers are not exactly finite state machines. Every boot will inevitably differ from the last for oh so many reasons.
Its not like a TV where it only has so many states that it could be in at any time and where things don't change between startups.
If you want instant boots, I suggest sticking with a console and playing games and for math use a calculator.
(a) The militia of the United States consists of all able-bodied males at least 17 years of age
So once you exclude the non-able-bodied, obese males you really arn't left with a whole lot...
That's the big problem with the gun debate. There are very few people involved capable of a rational argument.
That applies to almost *any* debate, the handgun debate is not unusual in this regard.
This is a very good question. But consider: if you wrote a few extra lines of source code to add some feature to GNU grep, for example, and then you distributed your extra code as proprietary, so you have to pay $10 for the privilege of patching it into grep and rebuilding... you can think about the ethical issues, but more importantly in this discussion, what is the legal situation? Is your bit of extra code a derived work of the grep source code?
Thats actually a really pertinent example.
For instance, suppose Novell did something like this so that grep could pattern-match in MS Word documents... something thats not altogether too far-fetched to consider.
All particles move around in a soup of Higgs particles and thus acquire the appearance of being massive due to their interactions with this Higgs-soup.
Oh so the Higgs-soup is kind of like phlogiston or something similar?
I'm not sure, its hard to tell isn't it :)
and stuff like magic mushrooms (berserkers)
I can say, from personal experience, 'magic mushrooms' (in this case (berserkers) fly agaric (amanita muscaria)) would make a most excellent combat or survival drug.
I would not want to get into a confrontational situation while under their influence unless killing people would be OK. Seriously. They make you extremely happy to launch into physical activity. If someone tried to attack you, you would *joyfuly* attack them back. It would feel really great.
They also increase your endurance, speed and reaction times.
The affect does not wear off very rapidly and you can feel the effects for little under a week. You can sleep quite well too.
Oh and vomiting about an hour after ingesting them is *compulsory*. If for some reason you can't vomit, you are in big trouble.
But I'd be fascinated to hear a recording of Crowley's voice --- they exist, I believe.
:) Its very interesting hearing the man himself intone "IAO"
They certainly do; I've got some mp3s.
They were recorded on wax cylinders. There is some poetry and some Enochian as well
To be honest, I've never read the Wikipedia article on old uncle Al. Maybe I should. I've just studied him (and many other occultists) for about 30 years...
He himself came out with "My enemies pronounce it 'Croulley' hoping to treat me foully, my friends pronounce it 'Crow-ley' to show that I am holy'".
What we need now is to have clothes with a conductive mesh woven into the cloth!
It doesn't even need to be particularly fine mesh, a couple of inches would probably be enough to draw the current away from the wearer.
Watch the cops eyes widen in disbelief as repeated applications of the 50,000 volts does *nothing* hah!
Modern islam has no sense of humor and no perspective.
When I was a kid at school, I once used the epithet 'son of a bitch' to another kid who, as I discovered, was a Muslim.
The phrase was so offensive to him that this started a war. A very serious war.
It turns out that dogs gave the prophet away when he was trying to sneak back into Mecca, so by implying that his mother was a bitch I was implying that he was a dog and hence a betrayer of the prophet. This was enough for him to risk life and limb over.
Thats whay I mean by 'way too seriously'.
It wasn't always this way; google for stories of the mullah Nasruddin. Were he alive today he'd be lynched.
A lovely story by way of example:
Mullah Nasruddin had saved up to buy a new shirt. He went to a tailor's shop, full of excitement. The tailor measured him and said, "Come back in a week, and -- if Allah wills -- your shirt will be ready."
The Mullah contained himself for a week and then went back to the shop. "There has been a delay. But -- if Allah wills -- your shirt will be ready tomorrow."
The following day Nasruddin returned. "I am sorry," said the tailor, "but it is not quite finished. Try tomorrow, and -- if Allah wills -- it will be ready."
"How long will it take," asked the exasperated Nasruddin, "if you leave Allah out of it?"
There was once a king who asked of his wise men and advisors that they provide him with some object which, when he was happy would make him sad and when he was sad would make him happy.
/. comment, for posterity thereby archiving it for future generations :) mod me off topic if you dare!
They researched and worked very hard and finally came up with a simple ring.
Inscribed on the ring were the words: "This, too, shall pass".
Then theres the wonderful story of the Opening of the Eye of Horus, as told by that great sage and fool, Aleister Crowley (pronounced to rhyme with 'holy' not 'foully').
I shall paste the whole darn thing into this
1. This is the Book of the Opening of the Eye of Horus, of which the symbol in the profane world is the eye in the triangle, and of which the meaning is Illumination.
2. Thou who readest this doth not read; thou who seeketh shall not attain; thou who understandeth doth not understand. For attainment and understanding cometh only when thou art not thou, yea, when thou art nothing.
3. Once there was a monk, a disciple of that great Magus of our Order whom men name the Buddha which signifieth He Who Is Awake. For men asked the Lord Gotama, Are you a God? And he answered, No. And they asked again, Are you a saint? And he answered again, No. And they asked then, What are you? And he answered: I am awake. Thence is he known as the Buddha, the Awakened One.
4. And the monk, in order to awaken himself, practised the Art of Meditation as taught by Buddha, which in its original form before being distorted by False Imaginings and Elaborations of Theologians, was but this: To look upon all incidents and events and Remember to Say Unto Thine Soul of each: This is transitory.
5. And the monk looked upon all incidents and events, Reminding himself always: This is transitory.
6. And the monk came close to Awakening, and therefore was he in great peril, for The Lord of the Abyss of Hallucinations, whom Buddhists call Mara, the Tempter, cometh quickly to one near Awakening, to hypnotize him again into the Sleep of Fools which is the ordinary consciousness of Men.
7. And Mara did sorely afflict the monk with death of offspring, and insanity of loved ones, and eye-troubles, and slander, and malice, and the great curse of Law Suits, and diverse sufferings, but the monk thought only: This is transitory. And he was closer to Awakening.
8. And Mara, the Lord of the Abyss of Hallucinations, then caused the monk to die and reincarnate as an almost Mindless creature, a Parrot, which flitted from tree to tree deep in the jungle; and Mara thought, Now he has no chance of Awakening.
9. But a brother Monk of the Buddhist order came one day through the jungle, chanting the Teachings, and the Parrot heard, and repeated the one phrase over and over: This is transitory.
10. And Mental Activity began in the Parrot, and the memories of his past life came to him, and the meaning of the teaching, This is transitory; and Mara cursed horribly in frustration, and caused him to die again and reincarnate as an Elephant, even deeper in the jungle and further from the languages of men.
11. And many years passed, and there seemed no chance of Awakening for that soul; but the effects of good karma, like those of bad, continueth forever; and eventually Men came to the jungle, and took the Elephant captive, to sell him to a great Rajah.
12. And the Elephant lived in the courtyard of the Rajah, and many years passed.
13. And another monk of the Buddhist order came to the Rajah, and taught in the courtyard, and his teaching was: This is transitory. And memories awoke in the Elephant, and meaning was understood in the memories, and Awakening again came close.
14. And Mara cursed wrathfully, and caused the Elephant to die; and this time Mara took good care that reincarnation would recur at the furthest possible remove from all chance of Awakening, for Mara caused that the monk be reb
Meanwhile in much of Europe a good chunk of recent history has been frozen into an un-revisable, legally irrefutable image.
I am, of course, talking about the laws against so-called 'holocaust denial' which effectively make it a crime to uncover any historical data which would refute the official story of what happened.
Even if it were a matter of historical fact that, say 5 million Jews were killed in the holocaust instead of 6 million it would, in effect, be illegal to tell the *truth*.