I know one way or the other was being worked on at one time, I think it was WINE on Cygwin. The goal was to be able to run an app in WINE and Win32 side by side to make any differences obvious. I don't recall if it got anywhere, nor do I care to look.
I believe this is why most forums now use BBCode or some derivative of it. Using HTML-like tags but with enough difference to be easily distinguished ([ and ] vs. < and >) and then sanitizing the HTML tags in to the proper codes is a good way to do it. You not only totally elminate XSS attacks (as long as you remember to HTML-sanitize BEFORE doing the BBCode parsing), but you also add the ability for people to just simply paste in HTML code and have it display as code, rather than having to remember to convert with >, <, and whatever else.
I agree that the tracks look better in GT4, there's no question about that, so graphically GT4 probably takes the win overall. Something that you kinda brought up when mentioning PGR3 is that Forza and GT4 are both sims (where PGR is an arcadey sim, it's realistic enough to feel good, but loose enough to allow impossible tricks that look cool), so personally I tend towards Forza because the tracks are modelled much more accurately and the physics are just amazing. If you've ever watched the episode of Top Gear where Clarkson drives Laguna Seca in GT4 and then tries it in a real car (it's easily found on Google Video), you'll see many areas where GT4 lacks in track modelling, and IMO Forza gets those parts right. In my opinion this is more important for this particular genre than graphics, so just like I did back in the early days of Xbox if I want amazing graphics I just go to PGR.
Physics are a bit harder for me to judge, because I've only actually driven one of the vehicles in Forza (Mustang GT) and other than that, the Ram, and a few of the shitboxes that don't even belong in a racing game, I haven't driven much of the selection from GT4 either, but I think the Ram does not respond realistically in GT4 (Way too much understeer...I've taken a Hemi Ram 2500 4x4, just like the game's vehicle, through some crazy stuff without the total loss of control that I get in GT4) and the Mustang is minutely better in Forza than GT, though both do an excellent job. The other POS rides from GT4 that I've driven aren't even worth comparing, and like I said before don't even belong in a racing game. I think they were just put in so that they could claim GT4 has eleventy billion vehicles, even if only 90 or so are actually worth a crap.
There's also that total lack of a damage model in GT4 that really bothers me, since I've been playing games with damageable licensed vehicles since I was playing on a Pentium 2 (Midtown Madness), so the ability to run full speed in to a wall, back up, and take off again with no consequences is totally unacceptable. The invisible walls in the rally levels are also a nuisance, since I'm used to being able to cut corners in RalliSport 2.
As for the car models, obviously the photo mode in GT4 takes the cake. No one in their right mind would challenge that, but it's really not a fair comparison, since it doesn't have to actually render that at 30/60FPS, just once.
I don't know. GT4 does a damn good job, it just left me disappointed in many ways. It tries to be too much at once, and thus fails to completely deliver where it counts. It basically seems to me like they took GT3, made it pretty, slightly improved the physics, and called it a new game. They should have delayed it until multiplayer was working and bargained harder to get licensing for damage.
Personally I just have less to bitch about with Forza. I wish there was a decent controller for it (the wheel implementation on Xbox is a joke. 900 degree wheels with proper force feedback are basically impossible) and they could have spent more time on the graphics, but other than that I've loved it.
I really hope GT5 delivers where GT4 lacked. Forza 2 is probably going to be released around the same time as the PS3 (no one really still believes that it'll launch this Spring do they?) so it should be interesting. If the Cell is as good as Sony claims, and if they manage to make it decent to program for (I've heard the SPEs are beastly, even compared to the already tricky Emotion Engine), it should allow for some really cool tricks that the more general purpose architecture of the 360 won't permit as easily.
Bah, I'm off in to speculation now. Whatever, I'm going to fire up GTA:SA and toss realism out the window when I roll a cop car down a hill 37 times over and drive away. It's just pure fun, and it's enough to keep me busy until some hard information about the next generation of racing sims comes out. Debate based on wild-ass guesses and promo vids that almost certainly weren't actual code on real hardware (*cough* PS3 anything *cough*) is pointless. Hell, Nintendo might figure out some way to make the Revolution's controller the next big thing for driving sims, who knows....
I can't argue with most of your post, but GT4 v. Forza is one part that I can. First thing, the GT4 did not do 1080i. The PS2 hardware simply is not capable of rendering 1920x1080 with the detail level of GT4. It rendered to a lower resolution and scaled up. I don't know the exact numbers, but the rumors I've heard have placed it around 1366x540, stretched to width and line doubled to height. Also, notice how you can see three distinct zones on the display during replays, with the middle zone that contains your car being the high quality part and the rest noticably lower grade. Just another one of the tricks employed to get GT4 to run on the PS2.
Vehicle appearance goes both ways. I think that most vehicles look better in Forza, but my favorite, the GNX, looks considerably better in GT4, particularly around the headlights.
I do wish that Forza had been released with support for more than 480p, but just like the PS2, the Xbox really couldn't run games at those resolutions. Some later EA games used 720p, but the only real 3D game I saw using 1080i was the first Matrix game. Some of the arcade collections also supported it, but those aren't really worth comparing.
Bingo. It's not the SUVs, it's the jackasses who think they need a SUV, and then think that they actually know how to properly drive a taller, heavier vehicle.
SUVs have been around for years, much taller, heavier, and more crash prone than today's models (Compare a fullsize Blazer to an Expedition, for example) but SUV's didn't become "evil" until the last decade, when everybody and their mother decided that station wagons and minivans weren't for them.
I believe that people should be required to prove that they can handle a large vehicle at it's limits before they're allowed to drive it on public roads. Since that will never happen, I just wish that everybody would take their vehicle out to an empty parking lot and push it to the limit, so they can learn how it reacts and how to handle it. Most rollovers are caused by the idiot driver freaking out and cranking the wheel hard, which causes the vehicle to skid, and as soon as it leaves the road it digs in to the dirt and rolls. If these people knew their vehicles better, they wouldn't have done that.
"No, I am alluding to the fact that antilock brakes keep you from skidding which increases your likelihood of flipping your car which is much more fatal than skidding into something."
They keep you from skidding FORWARD. Rollovers occur sideways. Once you're sideways, ABS is irrelevant.
I know this from personal experience, having rolled a pickup truck on the highway and put my ATV on two wheels more times than I can count.
Of course if you have enough legos to care, you certainly have hundreds of the existing studded Technics blocks, as well as the small studded pegs, both of which can be used to interface studded hardware to studless.
Anyways, there is good reason to drop the studs. Technics by design attach together quite firmly. In fact I've rarely had a Technics-only creation fall apart unless I was doing something stupid with it, like sending it rolling down the stairs. On the other hand, the studded bricks are generally trivial to break apart (with the exception of the large thin panels, which don't like to come apart even with the remover tool....)
"Home directories have nothing to do with trashing the OS's files, as they have always been separate from other content even on systems (MS-DOS, pre-Win95 Windows) without the concept of home directories." No, they have everything to do with that. If you restrict the user's capability to modify the contents of "system" areas of the hard drive, you must give them a section which is theirs that they can do what they want with. Thus, the home directory.
There's also the whole thing about storing different settings for different users in a multiuser environment. Once again, what better place than the user's own directory.
Personally I like the UNIX way of doing things where you are not treated like a moron and are given a default view of the root fo your home directory, rather than the Windows way of showing you a subdirectory of your home, "My Documents", and having multiple structures of hidden folders within the main home directory.
Are you only trying Closed Captioning or have you also tried the DVD player's subtitle feature? It might be subtitled and just called closed captioned on the box thanks to some marketroid.
"They yanked the feature of truly customized folders in 98 from Windows XP. What? You mean I get to pay for less features? How about removing ones I don't want, like the broken search and indexing..."
I agree up to the part where you claimed 98's search was more functional. I don't think any Windows search can even remotely be considered functional. 98 had the advantage of generally smaller hard drives compared to those dealt with by XP, but if you're searching based solely on filename I believe NTFS has a major advantage over FAT, thus 98 would lag behind.
"I don't really use the home directory feature (Documents and Settings), and I understand it's even worse on Linux."
Worse? How do you think that a UNIX-like OS, which is where home directories made their real mark, does it worse than an OS that's had it's entire multiuser system halfassed on?
Home directories or whatever your OS of choice calls them are a necessity of a multiuser OS, and multiuser OSes are a requirement for a secure environment. Remember the fun of Windows Me or earlier where any user could totally fuck the entire system just by randomly deciding some files didn't look right (not the strangest story I've heard....)
No, the code is governed by the MPL or GPL. An icon being included with it can hardly be considered linking, so even if the icon were GPL (which is absurd, as the GPL really isn't good for content), it's merely being rendered within the IE window, not linked with the code, so there is no legal issue as long as Microsoft has the permission of the copyright holder on that particular icon.
If they created their own icon and just used the style of the Firefox icon, I think they're totally in the clear.
Of course this has been said a few other times by eleventy different posters.
"I don't understand why so many people struggle with this..."
They don't. It's a calculated move, because if the first post reaches at least a 2, it'll be seen by well over 90% of the Slashdot populace who click on the article. This means that any replies will be quite high on the page as well, so they will be more visible.
"My NF4 board is OK, but one of the LAN ports has already failed" Just out of curiousity, what level of failure are we talking about here?
I had major problems with large downloads on my nForce4 GigE port (A8N-SLI Deluxe) forcing me to use the Marvell GigE port instead, and a friend with the same board shared these problems. It turned out it was the nVidia "ActiveArmor" firewall screwing things up. I just didn't install it after a format and I haven't had problems since. I had my friend uninstall it from his, and he has not seen any trouble either.
Of course, if you're referring to a total port failure, I have no idea what it may be, but just remember that nVidia does not make the PHY interfaces for the LAN ports, they just make the controller circuitry. A totally dead port could be a fried PHY chip, which in the case of my motherboard both of them are Marvell parts.
"Doesn't Ford have a similar situation with Cummins, the makers of the diesel engines that go in Dodge trucks?"
Not that I know of. Ford works with International/Navistar on the Powerstroke engine which has been the standard in Ford's diesel trucks for quite a long time. They use either Powerstroke or Cat motors in their big trucks, and Powerstroke alone in the smaller ones.
Cummins is also by no means limited to Dodge. They also make larger motors for RVs, heavy trucks, and machinery.
To round out the bunch, GM's "Duramax" is basically an Isuzu product, though it's far better than the old Detroit Diesel-designed 6.2L.
I have to disagree. I personally have an Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe, and a friend of mine has the ASRock that is the topic of this thread. Both boards perform within negligable amounts of each other at stock settings, with the ASRock's only deficiencies being in extreme overclocking, where it just can't deliver the voltage needed for stable operation. On a budget board such as the ASRock, a lack of overclocking capability can be excused.
There have been a few Mac/PC cross-platform video cards over the years, but all of these have accomplished this by having two BIOSes, one for Open Firmware and one for the PC BIOS.
With the Intel Macs, at least in the dev kits, it is just a matter of drivers, and the current builds have at least partially functional ATI drivers. No nVidia drivers yet though...
A surprisingly large number of hotspots I've used have had UPnP enabled, so with a client like Azureus which speaks UPnP, it works just fine.
Of course there were all homebrew hotspots, basically a owner of a restauraunt plugged a WiFi router in to his broadband, so it probably does not apply to anything that was being professionally administered.
I don't think the grandparent poster understands private tracker security. Every private tracker I've ever used handles everything by IP, not some arbitrary tag embedded in the torrent file. You log in to the tracker via HTTP and it "OKs" that IP for an X amount of time.
It makes things interesting for users of larger trackers who try to access them from public internet behind a NAT router, since you can end up with two users of the same tracker unknowingly sharing the same outside IP, and from the tracker's perspective they are then treated as the same user.
Hook it up behind a NAT box and you'll be safe as long as it's not in the DMZ.
This is the approach I use when installing off my original release 2K3 server discs, since apparently the internal firewall is not enabled by default so it gets nuked before it's even done installing if it's unprotected.
Hard drive windowing was done in a homebrew fashion back in the late '90s/early '00s when casemodding was just making it big.
Hell, there's a 20GB Western Digital with an acrylic window sitting on my floor right now, as a result of my roommate getting bored last year after he upgraded the drive in his Xbox. It still worked until he stepped on it.
Slashdot Mirror
I know one way or the other was being worked on at one time, I think it was WINE on Cygwin. The goal was to be able to run an app in WINE and Win32 side by side to make any differences obvious. I don't recall if it got anywhere, nor do I care to look.
You win the WOOSH! award for having the joke that flew right over the most people's heads in a long time.....
Congratulations. I haven't seen this many people totally miss a joke in years.
I believe this is why most forums now use BBCode or some derivative of it. Using HTML-like tags but with enough difference to be easily distinguished ([ and ] vs. < and >) and then sanitizing the HTML tags in to the proper codes is a good way to do it. You not only totally elminate XSS attacks (as long as you remember to HTML-sanitize BEFORE doing the BBCode parsing), but you also add the ability for people to just simply paste in HTML code and have it display as code, rather than having to remember to convert with >, <, and whatever else.
I agree that the tracks look better in GT4, there's no question about that, so graphically GT4 probably takes the win overall. Something that you kinda brought up when mentioning PGR3 is that Forza and GT4 are both sims (where PGR is an arcadey sim, it's realistic enough to feel good, but loose enough to allow impossible tricks that look cool), so personally I tend towards Forza because the tracks are modelled much more accurately and the physics are just amazing. If you've ever watched the episode of Top Gear where Clarkson drives Laguna Seca in GT4 and then tries it in a real car (it's easily found on Google Video), you'll see many areas where GT4 lacks in track modelling, and IMO Forza gets those parts right. In my opinion this is more important for this particular genre than graphics, so just like I did back in the early days of Xbox if I want amazing graphics I just go to PGR.
Physics are a bit harder for me to judge, because I've only actually driven one of the vehicles in Forza (Mustang GT) and other than that, the Ram, and a few of the shitboxes that don't even belong in a racing game, I haven't driven much of the selection from GT4 either, but I think the Ram does not respond realistically in GT4 (Way too much understeer...I've taken a Hemi Ram 2500 4x4, just like the game's vehicle, through some crazy stuff without the total loss of control that I get in GT4) and the Mustang is minutely better in Forza than GT, though both do an excellent job. The other POS rides from GT4 that I've driven aren't even worth comparing, and like I said before don't even belong in a racing game. I think they were just put in so that they could claim GT4 has eleventy billion vehicles, even if only 90 or so are actually worth a crap.
There's also that total lack of a damage model in GT4 that really bothers me, since I've been playing games with damageable licensed vehicles since I was playing on a Pentium 2 (Midtown Madness), so the ability to run full speed in to a wall, back up, and take off again with no consequences is totally unacceptable. The invisible walls in the rally levels are also a nuisance, since I'm used to being able to cut corners in RalliSport 2.
As for the car models, obviously the photo mode in GT4 takes the cake. No one in their right mind would challenge that, but it's really not a fair comparison, since it doesn't have to actually render that at 30/60FPS, just once.
I don't know. GT4 does a damn good job, it just left me disappointed in many ways. It tries to be too much at once, and thus fails to completely deliver where it counts. It basically seems to me like they took GT3, made it pretty, slightly improved the physics, and called it a new game. They should have delayed it until multiplayer was working and bargained harder to get licensing for damage.
Personally I just have less to bitch about with Forza. I wish there was a decent controller for it (the wheel implementation on Xbox is a joke. 900 degree wheels with proper force feedback are basically impossible) and they could have spent more time on the graphics, but other than that I've loved it.
I really hope GT5 delivers where GT4 lacked. Forza 2 is probably going to be released around the same time as the PS3 (no one really still believes that it'll launch this Spring do they?) so it should be interesting. If the Cell is as good as Sony claims, and if they manage to make it decent to program for (I've heard the SPEs are beastly, even compared to the already tricky Emotion Engine), it should allow for some really cool tricks that the more general purpose architecture of the 360 won't permit as easily.
Bah, I'm off in to speculation now. Whatever, I'm going to fire up GTA:SA and toss realism out the window when I roll a cop car down a hill 37 times over and drive away. It's just pure fun, and it's enough to keep me busy until some hard information about the next generation of racing sims comes out. Debate based on wild-ass guesses and promo vids that almost certainly weren't actual code on real hardware (*cough* PS3 anything *cough*) is pointless. Hell, Nintendo might figure out some way to make the Revolution's controller the next big thing for driving sims, who knows....
I can't argue with most of your post, but GT4 v. Forza is one part that I can. First thing, the GT4 did not do 1080i. The PS2 hardware simply is not capable of rendering 1920x1080 with the detail level of GT4. It rendered to a lower resolution and scaled up. I don't know the exact numbers, but the rumors I've heard have placed it around 1366x540, stretched to width and line doubled to height. Also, notice how you can see three distinct zones on the display during replays, with the middle zone that contains your car being the high quality part and the rest noticably lower grade. Just another one of the tricks employed to get GT4 to run on the PS2.
Vehicle appearance goes both ways. I think that most vehicles look better in Forza, but my favorite, the GNX, looks considerably better in GT4, particularly around the headlights.
I do wish that Forza had been released with support for more than 480p, but just like the PS2, the Xbox really couldn't run games at those resolutions. Some later EA games used 720p, but the only real 3D game I saw using 1080i was the first Matrix game. Some of the arcade collections also supported it, but those aren't really worth comparing.
This is effectively the Pentium 5. The NetBurst architecture of the P4 is dead, and this is taking over.
Bingo. It's not the SUVs, it's the jackasses who think they need a SUV, and then think that they actually know how to properly drive a taller, heavier vehicle.
SUVs have been around for years, much taller, heavier, and more crash prone than today's models (Compare a fullsize Blazer to an Expedition, for example) but SUV's didn't become "evil" until the last decade, when everybody and their mother decided that station wagons and minivans weren't for them.
I believe that people should be required to prove that they can handle a large vehicle at it's limits before they're allowed to drive it on public roads. Since that will never happen, I just wish that everybody would take their vehicle out to an empty parking lot and push it to the limit, so they can learn how it reacts and how to handle it. Most rollovers are caused by the idiot driver freaking out and cranking the wheel hard, which causes the vehicle to skid, and as soon as it leaves the road it digs in to the dirt and rolls. If these people knew their vehicles better, they wouldn't have done that.
"No, I am alluding to the fact that antilock brakes keep you from skidding which increases your likelihood of flipping your car which is much more fatal than skidding into something."
They keep you from skidding FORWARD. Rollovers occur sideways. Once you're sideways, ABS is irrelevant.
I know this from personal experience, having rolled a pickup truck on the highway and put my ATV on two wheels more times than I can count.
Of course if you have enough legos to care, you certainly have hundreds of the existing studded Technics blocks, as well as the small studded pegs, both of which can be used to interface studded hardware to studless.
Anyways, there is good reason to drop the studs. Technics by design attach together quite firmly. In fact I've rarely had a Technics-only creation fall apart unless I was doing something stupid with it, like sending it rolling down the stairs. On the other hand, the studded bricks are generally trivial to break apart (with the exception of the large thin panels, which don't like to come apart even with the remover tool....)
"Home directories have nothing to do with trashing the OS's files, as they have always been separate from other content even on systems (MS-DOS, pre-Win95 Windows) without the concept of home directories."
No, they have everything to do with that. If you restrict the user's capability to modify the contents of "system" areas of the hard drive, you must give them a section which is theirs that they can do what they want with. Thus, the home directory.
There's also the whole thing about storing different settings for different users in a multiuser environment. Once again, what better place than the user's own directory.
Personally I like the UNIX way of doing things where you are not treated like a moron and are given a default view of the root fo your home directory, rather than the Windows way of showing you a subdirectory of your home, "My Documents", and having multiple structures of hidden folders within the main home directory.
Are you only trying Closed Captioning or have you also tried the DVD player's subtitle feature? It might be subtitled and just called closed captioned on the box thanks to some marketroid.
"They yanked the feature of truly customized folders in 98 from Windows XP. What? You mean I get to pay for less features? How about removing ones I don't want, like the broken search and indexing..."
I agree up to the part where you claimed 98's search was more functional. I don't think any Windows search can even remotely be considered functional. 98 had the advantage of generally smaller hard drives compared to those dealt with by XP, but if you're searching based solely on filename I believe NTFS has a major advantage over FAT, thus 98 would lag behind.
"I don't really use the home directory feature (Documents and Settings), and I understand it's even worse on Linux."
Worse? How do you think that a UNIX-like OS, which is where home directories made their real mark, does it worse than an OS that's had it's entire multiuser system halfassed on?
Home directories or whatever your OS of choice calls them are a necessity of a multiuser OS, and multiuser OSes are a requirement for a secure environment. Remember the fun of Windows Me or earlier where any user could totally fuck the entire system just by randomly deciding some files didn't look right (not the strangest story I've heard....)
That's Cairo. Chicago was Win98.
No, the code is governed by the MPL or GPL. An icon being included with it can hardly be considered linking, so even if the icon were GPL (which is absurd, as the GPL really isn't good for content), it's merely being rendered within the IE window, not linked with the code, so there is no legal issue as long as Microsoft has the permission of the copyright holder on that particular icon.
If they created their own icon and just used the style of the Firefox icon, I think they're totally in the clear.
Of course this has been said a few other times by eleventy different posters.
-1 Redundant
It was posted here a day or so after it reached digg, this is just the dupe.
"I don't understand why so many people struggle with this..."
They don't. It's a calculated move, because if the first post reaches at least a 2, it'll be seen by well over 90% of the Slashdot populace who click on the article. This means that any replies will be quite high on the page as well, so they will be more visible.
"My NF4 board is OK, but one of the LAN ports has already failed"
Just out of curiousity, what level of failure are we talking about here?
I had major problems with large downloads on my nForce4 GigE port (A8N-SLI Deluxe) forcing me to use the Marvell GigE port instead, and a friend with the same board shared these problems. It turned out it was the nVidia "ActiveArmor" firewall screwing things up. I just didn't install it after a format and I haven't had problems since. I had my friend uninstall it from his, and he has not seen any trouble either.
Of course, if you're referring to a total port failure, I have no idea what it may be, but just remember that nVidia does not make the PHY interfaces for the LAN ports, they just make the controller circuitry. A totally dead port could be a fried PHY chip, which in the case of my motherboard both of them are Marvell parts.
"Doesn't Ford have a similar situation with Cummins, the makers of the diesel engines that go in Dodge trucks?"
Not that I know of. Ford works with International/Navistar on the Powerstroke engine which has been the standard in Ford's diesel trucks for quite a long time. They use either Powerstroke or Cat motors in their big trucks, and Powerstroke alone in the smaller ones.
Cummins is also by no means limited to Dodge. They also make larger motors for RVs, heavy trucks, and machinery.
To round out the bunch, GM's "Duramax" is basically an Isuzu product, though it's far better than the old Detroit Diesel-designed 6.2L.
I have to disagree. I personally have an Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe, and a friend of mine has the ASRock that is the topic of this thread. Both boards perform within negligable amounts of each other at stock settings, with the ASRock's only deficiencies being in extreme overclocking, where it just can't deliver the voltage needed for stable operation. On a budget board such as the ASRock, a lack of overclocking capability can be excused.
Bingo, we have a winner.
There have been a few Mac/PC cross-platform video cards over the years, but all of these have accomplished this by having two BIOSes, one for Open Firmware and one for the PC BIOS.
With the Intel Macs, at least in the dev kits, it is just a matter of drivers, and the current builds have at least partially functional ATI drivers. No nVidia drivers yet though...
A surprisingly large number of hotspots I've used have had UPnP enabled, so with a client like Azureus which speaks UPnP, it works just fine.
Of course there were all homebrew hotspots, basically a owner of a restauraunt plugged a WiFi router in to his broadband, so it probably does not apply to anything that was being professionally administered.
I don't think the grandparent poster understands private tracker security. Every private tracker I've ever used handles everything by IP, not some arbitrary tag embedded in the torrent file. You log in to the tracker via HTTP and it "OKs" that IP for an X amount of time.
It makes things interesting for users of larger trackers who try to access them from public internet behind a NAT router, since you can end up with two users of the same tracker unknowingly sharing the same outside IP, and from the tracker's perspective they are then treated as the same user.
Hook it up behind a NAT box and you'll be safe as long as it's not in the DMZ.
This is the approach I use when installing off my original release 2K3 server discs, since apparently the internal firewall is not enabled by default so it gets nuked before it's even done installing if it's unprotected.
Hard drive windowing was done in a homebrew fashion back in the late '90s/early '00s when casemodding was just making it big.
Hell, there's a 20GB Western Digital with an acrylic window sitting on my floor right now, as a result of my roommate getting bored last year after he upgraded the drive in his Xbox. It still worked until he stepped on it.
No, AIM has not always had server-side lists. That came around 2000 IIRC.