I use and love Slackware because I find everything it does easy to understand and therefore easy for me to change as I need. The part I like best about Slackware is its init script setup, it's the only method I've actually come to understand from trying various other distros - and I didn't even need to RTFM to figure it out.
Slackware is fairly basic and just gets out of my way so I can do things the way I want. Thats what I want from an OS and none of the ones you listed (apart from maybe Mandriva as I haven't used it) can do that for me.
I tried playing Descent with a crappy 2-button joystick and it was really bad. I went back to mouse/keyboard using caps,a,z,s,x and d for movement (left, forward, backward, up, down and right).
Did you ever try flying around a level you knew upside-down? It was very wierd/disorentating and I'm guessing thats how it feels for new players since I was flying like a noob. I always loved outrunning Mega missles too (3-way slide), nothing beats sound of a MM lock getting further away...:)
The only game I still play regularly where skill is the major factor is Quake3 and its mods (RA3/CTF etc) but only really good players play that online so expect to get owned for a few weeks even if you can beat all the bots on Nightmare consistently. The randomness factor has really put me off online FPS lately, since every new game seems to come out with 'recoil' and randomly spraying bullets.
Descent was an awesome game and it highlights a problem I see with the game industry, or maybe the game audience.
Because it was *full* 3D in that you could move in any direction no restrictions at all, people had trouble learning to play it. I could easily beat semi-new players 50-0 if I cared to because they couldn't move properly in a 3D space (and my mentor could easily beat me 50-10 if he wanted). I have a demo of me flying rings around someone killing them with flares... Because it was hard to learn how to play people didn't spend time on it and it wasn't as sucessful as other games such as Doom/Quake.
I see this problem in other games too, like Natural Selection, it's a great game but it's very complicated and people don't spend the time learning how to play it. Complicated games will never become as popular as the flavour of the month straight FPS.
Counter-Strike is the most popular game on the internet because it's easy to figure out what to do and it has a low "skill-multiplier" ie its fucked up hitboxes (and spray weapons) add a large amount of randomnes to the game which replaces part of the skill required with pure random luck. Quake3 is pretty easy to figure out, but it has a high skill-multiplier so the newbies hardly get kills. Since they can't get kills they leave and play something like CS because not getting kills isn't much fun.
I definitely agree with your comments about moral/ethical choices.
If I'm playing a game vs a computer then from my point of view there is no immoral or unethical choice because no other human is getting a bad deal, it's only a game.
However if I'm playing something like WoW and my choice is to kill the lowbie in 2 seconds then I have to make an ethical choice to do it or not since it will inconvinience another real-life person. It still doesn't require much thought on my part, if killing them will help me do my current quest (ie keep them from ganking me) then I have no problem with doing it. It's only a game.
The article make it sound like moral/ethical choices are hard, granted in real life things aren't always clear cut but in a game the stakes are so low that it's not worth working yourself up so much that you're having trouble sleeping!
There are new and innovative types of games around. People still like FPS style games and are buying them, when people stop buying them then I'm sure the game makers will find something new for everyone to play.
The number of digits necessary to hold the value 9 is 1
And how (at a transistor level) is the computer going to store and manipulate this digit?
This is like saying a computer can store Hex numbers more efficiently than binary 'cos it takes 16 binary numbers to show the same information as a hex number!
I've used wireless mice at 400+ people lan parties and only once had a clash with someone using a similar mouse that was resolved by "reconnecting" the mouse and receiver.
The range isn't huge and my 4 year old cordless mouse had 3 available channels that it would choose from. Not sure how many channels my new mouse can use but it certainly isn't effected by my flatmate having *exactly the same mouse* 5m away.
Now if someone bought a 27MHz RF jammer along to a lan, I'd have to kick them out for being a fuck-tard.
I watch tv/movies/etc before going to sleep most nights and that means having to control my PC from in bed. I can easily use my Logitech MX-1000 RF mouse from *under* the covers, so my arm doesn't have to get cold.:)
If my receiver is behind my LCD and I use the mouse under a quilt/blanket it has some problems tracking, with the receiver in front of the LCD everything works fine. This is over a distance of about 2 or 3 metres.
I guess it does depend on your definition of "physical barrier". But I'd call a bed sheets and a monitor physical barriers.
I asked my friend about it and heres the url http://www.users.on.net/~jvizard/myne/XPmoboUG/ its a bunch of screenshots that show you want to do and have some instructions on the pics. You might be able to repair an install with it too, probably depends on how bad the problems are.
Actually a friend of mine who knows so much about doing weird things with Windows it's scary, has moved his WinXP install across multiple motherboards with different chipsets (via, sis, nForce and Intel). He wrote a small tutorial with lots of pictures on how to do it and it's not exactly hard - I don't know the link off-hand.
It's all in the preparation, if you don't install Generic IDE/Chipset drivers (Windows is smart enough to use the correct drivers without requiring the generic ones when it installs) Windows can't read from the HDD and obviously fails to boot. Just like if you removed Generic IDE chipset support from your Kernel and tried to boot it on another system it would most likely fail.
The reason "AMD's quality sucks" is because they don't make their own chipsets (anymore at least) and until nVidia got involved with the NF3/4 there were no third parties producing decent chipsets for AMD cpu's.
Intel CPU and Intel Chipset removes a huge number of problems you get from other chipset vendors. And of course Intel don't make chipsets for AMD cpu's.:)
I've dealt with Intel+VIA, AMD+VIA, AMD+nVidia (NF2) and Intel+Intel combinations. The only one that hasn't had weird problems is Intel+Intel.
I haven't had any dealings with an AMD64 yet, but when/if I do it will have an NF4 chipset. My last system upgrade was to a P4-2.6C which at the time was a little better than AMD's offerings (I think, it was a while ago now...) and had the benefit of Intels CSA Gigabit LAN setup.
With the #1 query getting about half a million searches (is that for a 3 month period tho?) I think it would be possible for the users of Slashdot to fix the results of next years Google Zeitgeist.
I propose more articles have a http://www.google.com/search?q=soviet+russia link in 2005, I'm fairly sure it would become the #1 search query.
For ease of use when sharing files between Linux/Windows boxes SMB can't be beaten. Using FTP to listen to MP3's or watch videos or edit documents from a Linux server is a pain since the file(s) need to be copied to the local machine before they can be used.
Using SMB all I have to do is setup Samba on the server, map a network drive on the client and everything on the server shows up as if it was all on my Windows box (throw in a gigabit network and it might as well be as far as speed is concerned).
I help out at a regular (every 6-7weeks) 450 person LAN. Getting all the servers (games, web and ftp with latest patches/tools) ready before the event makes it much easier on everyone.
There are also a number of programs/tools that can help you run a LAN such as "LAN-in-a-box" (the LAN I attend uses a similar web-based system but I can't remember its name... they both allow you to run competitions easily) and HLSW (remote console program for a wide variety of games - doubles as a server browser).
A big whiteboard can also come in handy for organising competitions and getting information to the LANners. A PA system is helpful if you can't yell loud enough.
Currently popular games at this LAN: Call of Duty (and I expect the expansion CoD: United Offensive - but its still new) UT2K4 (Or any other Unreal Tournament) Quake/Quake3 Starcraft/Warcraft (+ different warcraft styles TD/dota etc) Age of Mythology RTCW: Enemy Territory (Excellent *free* as in beer game) Counter-Strike (Still OK in the wee hours with nothing else to do)
I'd suggest setting up your servers with as many different games as possible and change between them as requested/needed. When you change the servers around let people know a different server has just started so they can join and get things going.
I feel lucky that a monitor at 60hz normally looks fine to me. If I look at it out the corner of my eye or under fluro lighting I can see it flickering, but otherwise I'm fine with 60hz monitors.
Re:My experiences with Gmail invitations
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I'd hope they have some sort of "jumper socket" (and a high current cable with standard aligator clips on the end) that can be plugged into to the hood-challenged vehicle to allow a jump start from a normal car.
Most likely the person who finds the hole in an OSS program will be able to write a patch for it since they have access to the code. Anyone who finds a hole in a closed source program can only tell the vendor of that program and hope they produce a patch.
Someone who is good enough to find a hole is probably good enough to fix it. Add to that many of the people who read security mailing lists know their stuff and will check over the patch before installing it and I think the OSS model of hole patching is pretty good.
There has been a lot of talk of what RTOS to use in other comments. I'm wondering why a rover needs to use a real time OS? From my thinking there is a delay of a few minutes with control commands anyway so whats a few milliseconds ontop of that? I don't think things would be happening that fast even for the rovers automatic movements that a second or so of delay in the OS would cause any problems.
Of course in the Slashdot tradition, IANARoboticist so there must be a reason NASA uses a RTOS. Is it becuase they need a small memory footprint and most OSes for embedded systems are small and just happen to be real time? Ie real time is not so much a requirement as a side effect of choosing a small size kernel?
I've read a lot of comments complaining about the colour scheme, check out the pictures of the kitchen. In one the light is purple, in another it is a light green colour.
All lights in that place are colour controllable. I'd guess there is one LED for each colour component. It also says on the site the colours can change and the video's probably show this but I haven't been able to check.
They want low frequency VHF as opposed to Microwaves to cover long distances (think 50-100km). One reason they can't get full speed from the 7MHz is the time it takes a signal to travel that distance, over 30km or so the round trip times start to get significant.
As for mesh networking, yes it would be a better solution however there may be nothing (no towns/houses just rocks and dust) inbetween one end of the link and the other to create that mesh, so its not really a useable solution. Having repeater stations is possible but not cost effective.
User coordination does sound like a problem if it is only 250kb/s shared its still very slow. But its much better than some current outback services where it takes hours to load a single image because the telephone lines can't handle any decent speeds.
If you use "Cable Select" mode on your drives it does matter. In that case the drive at the end of the cable is the master (err Pimp) and the one in the middle is the slave.
Of course I just jumper the drives manually to master or slave becuase thats what I have been doing for years.
First off your trying to compare deaths to injuries. How many people have been killed by mobiles? None that I know of.
Q: How many of the deaths due to auto accidents are preventable by the car manufacturer?
A: None of them, presumably.
Fight club anyone?
A * B = C, if C is less than the cost of recall....
I do believe this happens but not to a large extend but it still shows its possible for car manufacturers to stop more injuries from occuring.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is none of them are Slackware.
I use and love Slackware because I find everything it does easy to understand and therefore easy for me to change as I need. The part I like best about Slackware is its init script setup, it's the only method I've actually come to understand from trying various other distros - and I didn't even need to RTFM to figure it out.
Slackware is fairly basic and just gets out of my way so I can do things the way I want. Thats what I want from an OS and none of the ones you listed (apart from maybe Mandriva as I haven't used it) can do that for me.
You have to give your
I tried playing Descent with a crappy 2-button joystick and it was really bad. I went back to mouse/keyboard using caps,a,z,s,x and d for movement (left, forward, backward, up, down and right).
:)
Did you ever try flying around a level you knew upside-down? It was very wierd/disorentating and I'm guessing thats how it feels for new players since I was flying like a noob. I always loved outrunning Mega missles too (3-way slide), nothing beats sound of a MM lock getting further away...
The only game I still play regularly where skill is the major factor is Quake3 and its mods (RA3/CTF etc) but only really good players play that online so expect to get owned for a few weeks even if you can beat all the bots on Nightmare consistently. The randomness factor has really put me off online FPS lately, since every new game seems to come out with 'recoil' and randomly spraying bullets.
Descent was an awesome game and it highlights a problem I see with the game industry, or maybe the game audience.
Because it was *full* 3D in that you could move in any direction no restrictions at all, people had trouble learning to play it. I could easily beat semi-new players 50-0 if I cared to because they couldn't move properly in a 3D space (and my mentor could easily beat me 50-10 if he wanted). I have a demo of me flying rings around someone killing them with flares... Because it was hard to learn how to play people didn't spend time on it and it wasn't as sucessful as other games such as Doom/Quake.
I see this problem in other games too, like Natural Selection, it's a great game but it's very complicated and people don't spend the time learning how to play it. Complicated games will never become as popular as the flavour of the month straight FPS.
Counter-Strike is the most popular game on the internet because it's easy to figure out what to do and it has a low "skill-multiplier" ie its fucked up hitboxes (and spray weapons) add a large amount of randomnes to the game which replaces part of the skill required with pure random luck. Quake3 is pretty easy to figure out, but it has a high skill-multiplier so the newbies hardly get kills. Since they can't get kills they leave and play something like CS because not getting kills isn't much fun.
I definitely agree with your comments about moral/ethical choices.
If I'm playing a game vs a computer then from my point of view there is no immoral or unethical choice because no other human is getting a bad deal, it's only a game.
However if I'm playing something like WoW and my choice is to kill the lowbie in 2 seconds then I have to make an ethical choice to do it or not since it will inconvinience another real-life person. It still doesn't require much thought on my part, if killing them will help me do my current quest (ie keep them from ganking me) then I have no problem with doing it. It's only a game.
The article make it sound like moral/ethical choices are hard, granted in real life things aren't always clear cut but in a game the stakes are so low that it's not worth working yourself up so much that you're having trouble sleeping!
There are new and innovative types of games around. People still like FPS style games and are buying them, when people stop buying them then I'm sure the game makers will find something new for everyone to play.
And how (at a transistor level) is the computer going to store and manipulate this digit?
This is like saying a computer can store Hex numbers more efficiently than binary 'cos it takes 16 binary numbers to show the same information as a hex number!
Bullshit.
I've used wireless mice at 400+ people lan parties and only once had a clash with someone using a similar mouse that was resolved by "reconnecting" the mouse and receiver.
The range isn't huge and my 4 year old cordless mouse had 3 available channels that it would choose from. Not sure how many channels my new mouse can use but it certainly isn't effected by my flatmate having *exactly the same mouse* 5m away.
Now if someone bought a 27MHz RF jammer along to a lan, I'd have to kick them out for being a fuck-tard.
I watch tv/movies/etc before going to sleep most nights and that means having to control my PC from in bed. I can easily use my Logitech MX-1000 RF mouse from *under* the covers, so my arm doesn't have to get cold. :)
If my receiver is behind my LCD and I use the mouse under a quilt/blanket it has some problems tracking, with the receiver in front of the LCD everything works fine. This is over a distance of about 2 or 3 metres.
I guess it does depend on your definition of "physical barrier". But I'd call a bed sheets and a monitor physical barriers.
I asked my friend about it and heres the url http://www.users.on.net/~jvizard/myne/XPmoboUG/ its a bunch of screenshots that show you want to do and have some instructions on the pics. You might be able to repair an install with it too, probably depends on how bad the problems are.
Actually a friend of mine who knows so much about doing weird things with Windows it's scary, has moved his WinXP install across multiple motherboards with different chipsets (via, sis, nForce and Intel). He wrote a small tutorial with lots of pictures on how to do it and it's not exactly hard - I don't know the link off-hand.
It's all in the preparation, if you don't install Generic IDE/Chipset drivers (Windows is smart enough to use the correct drivers without requiring the generic ones when it installs) Windows can't read from the HDD and obviously fails to boot. Just like if you removed Generic IDE chipset support from your Kernel and tried to boot it on another system it would most likely fail.
The reason "AMD's quality sucks" is because they don't make their own chipsets (anymore at least) and until nVidia got involved with the NF3/4 there were no third parties producing decent chipsets for AMD cpu's.
:)
Intel CPU and Intel Chipset removes a huge number of problems you get from other chipset vendors. And of course Intel don't make chipsets for AMD cpu's.
I've dealt with Intel+VIA, AMD+VIA, AMD+nVidia (NF2) and Intel+Intel combinations. The only one that hasn't had weird problems is Intel+Intel.
I haven't had any dealings with an AMD64 yet, but when/if I do it will have an NF4 chipset. My last system upgrade was to a P4-2.6C which at the time was a little better than AMD's offerings (I think, it was a while ago now...) and had the benefit of Intels CSA Gigabit LAN setup.
With the #1 query getting about half a million searches (is that for a 3 month period tho?) I think it would be possible for the users of Slashdot to fix the results of next years Google Zeitgeist.
I propose more articles have a http://www.google.com/search?q=soviet+russia link in 2005, I'm fairly sure it would become the #1 search query.
For ease of use when sharing files between Linux/Windows boxes SMB can't be beaten. Using FTP to listen to MP3's or watch videos or edit documents from a Linux server is a pain since the file(s) need to be copied to the local machine before they can be used.
Using SMB all I have to do is setup Samba on the server, map a network drive on the client and everything on the server shows up as if it was all on my Windows box (throw in a gigabit network and it might as well be as far as speed is concerned).
I help out at a regular (every 6-7weeks) 450 person LAN. Getting all the servers (games, web and ftp with latest patches/tools) ready before the event makes it much easier on everyone.
There are also a number of programs/tools that can help you run a LAN such as "LAN-in-a-box" (the LAN I attend uses a similar web-based system but I can't remember its name... they both allow you to run competitions easily) and HLSW (remote console program for a wide variety of games - doubles as a server browser).
A big whiteboard can also come in handy for organising competitions and getting information to the LANners. A PA system is helpful if you can't yell loud enough.
Currently popular games at this LAN:
Call of Duty (and I expect the expansion CoD: United Offensive - but its still new)
UT2K4 (Or any other Unreal Tournament)
Quake/Quake3
Starcraft/Warcraft (+ different warcraft styles TD/dota etc)
Age of Mythology
RTCW: Enemy Territory (Excellent *free* as in beer game)
Counter-Strike (Still OK in the wee hours with nothing else to do)
I'd suggest setting up your servers with as many different games as possible and change between them as requested/needed. When you change the servers around let people know a different server has just started so they can join and get things going.
I feel lucky that a monitor at 60hz normally looks fine to me. If I look at it out the corner of my eye or under fluro lighting I can see it flickering, but otherwise I'm fine with 60hz monitors.
mln_necromancer@h-o-t-m-a-i-l.com
Very much appreciated if I could get an invite.
--Mancer
I'd really like to know what would happen if you mix in the Evil Bit.
I'd hope they have some sort of "jumper socket" (and a high current cable with standard aligator clips on the end) that can be plugged into to the hood-challenged vehicle to allow a jump start from a normal car.
An infinite number of monkeys at an infinite number of keyboards....
Most likely the person who finds the hole in an OSS program will be able to write a patch for it since they have access to the code. Anyone who finds a hole in a closed source program can only tell the vendor of that program and hope they produce a patch.
Someone who is good enough to find a hole is probably good enough to fix it. Add to that many of the people who read security mailing lists know their stuff and will check over the patch before installing it and I think the OSS model of hole patching is pretty good.
There has been a lot of talk of what RTOS to use in other comments. I'm wondering why a rover needs to use a real time OS? From my thinking there is a delay of a few minutes with control commands anyway so whats a few milliseconds ontop of that? I don't think things would be happening that fast even for the rovers automatic movements that a second or so of delay in the OS would cause any problems.
Of course in the Slashdot tradition, IANARoboticist so there must be a reason NASA uses a RTOS. Is it becuase they need a small memory footprint and most OSes for embedded systems are small and just happen to be real time? Ie real time is not so much a requirement as a side effect of choosing a small size kernel?
Can someone enlighten me please?
I've read a lot of comments complaining about the colour scheme, check out the pictures of the kitchen. In one the light is purple, in another it is a light green colour.
All lights in that place are colour controllable. I'd guess there is one LED for each colour component. It also says on the site the colours can change and the video's probably show this but I haven't been able to check.
As for mesh networking, yes it would be a better solution however there may be nothing (no towns/houses just rocks and dust) inbetween one end of the link and the other to create that mesh, so its not really a useable solution. Having repeater stations is possible but not cost effective.
User coordination does sound like a problem if it is only 250kb/s shared its still very slow. But its much better than some current outback services where it takes hours to load a single image because the telephone lines can't handle any decent speeds.
If you use "Cable Select" mode on your drives it does matter. In that case the drive at the end of the cable is the master (err Pimp) and the one in the middle is the slave. Of course I just jumper the drives manually to master or slave becuase thats what I have been doing for years.