Yeah, the first couple times. But after searching through the damn full pack for another ham for Dupree, I felt like telling him to figure out how the fuck to feed himself for a change!
(It was cool that you could go hunt a deer for food, though.)
U7 came out at a bad time for games. Games were pushing the OS harder and harder, and MSDOS just wasn't up to it. The biggest problem was memory, the famous "640K barrier". Most games used special memory managers to allow much of the game to run in expanded memory (or was it extended? I no longer remember). Some of them did it right (like Doom) and used a standard one that worked well. Unfortunately, U7 decided to either roll their own, or just bought a crappy one. To make matters worse, U7 had the largest below 640k footprint of any game, pretty much requiring that you perform all sorts of wierd DOS tricks just to get the thing to load. (Other games were similar, but U7 was the worst.)
Kids today, who just pop in the CD and are playing twenty minutes later, don't realize how good they have it. I remember fighting with games for days to get them to work.
Yeah, he's half right. It was buggy as hell. Crashed lots. Wierd things happened.
But the game itself was incredible.
The "living world" thing is something no other RPG seems to have gotten right. There is something very cool about showing up to town and having to wait until the store is opened, or being able to follow shopkeepers home to see where they live. And in the writing of all those little subplots, all of these NPCs were actually characters. You could ignore them, of course, but cool none-the-less.
Unfortunately, the interface for actually buying stuff was ghastly, and having to feed your troops was annoying. But the openendedness of it more then made up for it. You could just go wandering about pretty much anywhere if you wanted.
Yes, and Ultima VII was the second greatest. Then they killed the series with super mario avatar.
It is such a shame because no other game has quite made it there. Baldur's Gate was close, but still just didn't have the magic that the first seven Ultima's did. They're one of the few games you can go back and play ten years later.
There is a Linux port here. It is only partially a port in that it uses the original game data files. In other words, you have to be an owner of the DOS version.
There is also a Windows port somewhere. (The original won't run under any version of Windows. They uses a horrendous memory manager that not only made it hell to install under DOS, but makes it impossible to run under any modern OS.)
I don't think either port is very far along. I know that Exult is at the point where you can walk around and talk to NPCs, but the rest is not there yet.
Re:Future Incompatabilities?
on
Intel Roadmap
·
· Score: 2
I certainly would have liked to. In my last upgrade, I figured the 64 Meg of RAM I had was perfectly fine for what I was doing. Too bad the new motherboard I got wouldn't take two 32 Meg SIMMs. None of the new ones do. Sigh...
Hell, even if I wanted to upgrade the memory, it would have been nice for me to have the option of throwing in a new 64 Meg chip to get 128 Meg total for the prce of 64 Meg. Instead, I have to flush what I have.
There's lots of stuff that just doesn't need upgrading. A ISA 100/10 NIC used only for a two machine network? An ISA 56k modem used only as a backup when the DSL goes down? An ISA SCSI card used only for a cheap scanner? Why replace any of those? Oops, I have to replace one. The new motherboards only have two ISA slots.
One thing that is nice about the IDE interface is that it is completely backwards compatible. I've got an old 250 Meg drive that just does fine as a Linux swap partition. Why not? Why flush it? In fact, pretty much every drive I ever bought is still in use. I've got a 250MB, a 500MB, a 2 Gig and now two monster drives. All work great with the new hardware. Wish memory was that easy. I've got around 100 MB of memory that is basically useless to me now.
Re:Future Incompatabilities?
on
Intel Roadmap
·
· Score: 2
Hrrm... We're pretty damn close to that now. I recently had to upgrade because of a fried motherboard. It was an old AT style motherboard. At the time, I decided to upgrade to a K6/2. In the end, I ended up having to buy:
A new case. The old one didn't do ATX.
New memory. I couldn't find an ATX motherboard that took SIMMs.
A new network card. The new boards only have 2 ISA slots, not enough for everything I had.
So a $200 upgrade becomes a $400 upgrade.
Now I have to be honest in that I didn't search very many places to see of an AT board was available, or if I could find an ATX board that took SIMMs, or with three ISA slots.... Partly, though, I didn't look as I recall a news item a year or so ago saying that Microsoft wouldn't "bless" a motherboard with more than two ISA ports. Still, over the last fifteen years of upgrades, I've rarely seen one that was as simple as it was supposed to be when you bought the original. You decide to upgrade one thing, and next thing you know, you've got to replace half the machine.
I've got a desk drawer that is a memory graveyard. I've got some 256k SIMMs, some 1 Meg SIMMs, some 4 Meg SIMMs. Just tossed two 32 Meg SIMMs on the pile the other day. I think I even have an old 2 Meg board up in the attic. (ISA, though I'd bet anything that it wouldn't work in a modern ISA machine.)
Re:What's Your Excuse This Time !?!
on
Netscape 6
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· Score: 2
If you press "Shift-Insert" in Netscape 4.72, it locks completely.
"Shift-Insert" is, of course, the default insert command on all Windows programs, making switching back and forth a pain in the ass.
No program should lock entirely because of a single keystroke.
Unfortunately, I didn't read the article as closely as I should have. I didn't realize that this was Mozilla. I thought it was a separate Netscape version.
Hey, I must be truly 3133t. I used to surf the net from OS/2 2.1...
Seriously, OS/2 has tcp/ip and has had it for a long time. If you don't have "Warp Connect", which is the default LAN install, you have to add it as an add-on. I bet that's what you had.
Browsers were a problem. There was a version of Netscape for it at one point, but I don't think it did Java. I had better luck installing an X Server on OS/2 and running Netscape off of a Unix box.
There is obviously no need to run Windows in a VM unless you want to run some other OS side-by-side with it. While I suppose this could be used to run WinNT and Win9x together, I'm betting that the real reason for this is that there is a demand to run some non-Windows OS along with Windows.
Not to rain on your parade, but until space travel is much cheaper than it is now, no ore is going to get anyone to move. Last I heard, shuttle payloads were about $10,000 a pound.
Other than gemstones, I can't think of any mineral that is even near that expensive. (And gemstone prices are artificially inflated by cartels.) The moon could be solid platinum, and it wouldn't make economic sense to go get it, without reducing the transpart cost by a factor of a thousand.
Don't get me wrong. I want to see people on the moon, and on mars. I just don't see how mining is going to get them there.
Why don't they just use a registration screen and a cookie?
As others have noted, the NY Times does exactly this, and it prevents access without registering and therefore seeing all the main banner pages.
Or they could simply look for a cookie, and if it isn't there, simply throw up a screen saying "Welcome to Ticketmaster!" that then loads the target url after 15 seconds. They wouldn't even need to enforce registration, then. Then only create the cookie in the main page and change that hourly. No one has to change an URL, yet everyone is fully aware that they are entering ticketmaster's site.
How much coding time would that take? How much did their lawyers charge?
Unfortunately, some of those kids might actually be nice kids, despite being the offspring of politicians. Anything that randomly fingers innocent children is not a good thing. You could have had a congresscum as a parent, too.
This whole thing is about making the lives of kids, who are likely already unhappy, even more miserable. Spreading more random misery around isn't going to help.
(Yeah, I know you likely weren't really serious, but I wanted to make the point. We too often forget that we're dealing with real people.)
Re:you make the same mistake!
on
The Mind of God
·
· Score: 1
I like to think that the greeks were geeks, but perhaps I've just been reading too much Katz.
Yes, I was a little too glib...I meant evidence, not proof.
Re:you make the same mistake!
on
The Mind of God
·
· Score: 2
The is a problem with Pascal's wager. It imagines that there are two possibilities. Either God exists, and rewards belief, or that God doesn't exist, and your beliefs don't matter. Pascal then says, you lose nothing if you believe in the latter case, and gain everything in the former case.
The trouble is that we have no idea that those are the only two possibilities. It could be that there is a God, and he punishes those who believe falsely, just because they want to bet on the good horse, and brings nonbelievers who do good works into heaven. In such a case, those taking Pascal's wager are screwed, while those who don't are not.
Since there are an infinite number of theoretical possibilities of what God wants, there's no way you can just "bet" and be sure.
Re:you make the same mistake!
on
The Mind of God
·
· Score: 2
The word "belief" gives a certain level of surety, but not infinite surety. I could be wrong. Unicorns might exist. But until proven wrong, I will continue to believe they do not exist. Until proven wrong, there is no rational reason to believe they exist.
In order to believe in anything (even live Ceolocanths) I must be given proof that such a thing exists.
To take the opposite position is to be completely unable to believe in anything, really. If I find it impossible to disbelieve in unicorns because I have no proof of their nonexistence, then I find it impossible to disbelieve that all of my coworkers are not evil robots masquerading as human, merely because I have no proof. Everything becomes potentionally possible, and I end up being unable to know anything.
"You can't believe [the world is round] because there's no proof of [a flat earth]!"
I think you meant "of a round earth". But anyway, in this case, it is indeed not logical to believe in a round earth until such time as evidence that the earth is round is found. (I would note that such evidence was known to the ancient greeks, BTW).
However, our understanding of gravity is as primitive as our understanding of electromagnetism was 100 years ago.
Exactly. And it would have been idiotic for someone to form a company to build a magnetic disk storage device in 1901.
Again, I'm not saying that no one should try and reproduce this experiment. What I am saying is that it is silly to pretend that we are at the stage where we can even consider building a technology out of it when all we have is one guy who says he did something.
(I'm also saying that it is extremely unlikely anyone will reproduce this, but that's another issue.)
The reason I keep bringing up perpetual motion is that you really don't have any reason why this should be investigated (rather than some other area of physics) other than one guy claiming it works. That is almost identical to the argument 19th century cranks used to give for their perptual motion machines. Given that it contradicts all modern theories of gravitation, there needs to be more than one guy's claim before any real money is spent. Try to reproduce it, sure, but anything beyond that at this stage is a waste.
Saying "our understanding of gravity is primitive" is a cop-out. This seems to excuse any claim that has anything to do with gravity. We certainly do have theories of gravity running around, and this seems to contradict all of them. This contradiction demands a little more evidence than one guy's as-yet unrepeated experiment.
Show a repetition of the experiment. Then start worrying about what to build with it.
Re:you make the same mistake!
on
The Mind of God
·
· Score: 2
"I'll believe otherwise" is not a rational response! You can't believe !P because there's no proof of P!
Let P = Existance of unicorns.
"You can't believe [unicorns don't exist] because there's no proof of [unicorns existing]!"
Slashdot Mirror
(It was cool that you could go hunt a deer for food, though.)
I played the first three on an Apple ][+ with 64k RAM. Those versions are more fun today than half of the games that came out last year.
Kids today, who just pop in the CD and are playing twenty minutes later, don't realize how good they have it. I remember fighting with games for days to get them to work.
But the game itself was incredible.
The "living world" thing is something no other RPG seems to have gotten right. There is something very cool about showing up to town and having to wait until the store is opened, or being able to follow shopkeepers home to see where they live. And in the writing of all those little subplots, all of these NPCs were actually characters. You could ignore them, of course, but cool none-the-less.
Unfortunately, the interface for actually buying stuff was ghastly, and having to feed your troops was annoying. But the openendedness of it more then made up for it. You could just go wandering about pretty much anywhere if you wanted.
It is such a shame because no other game has quite made it there. Baldur's Gate was close, but still just didn't have the magic that the first seven Ultima's did. They're one of the few games you can go back and play ten years later.
There is also a Windows port somewhere. (The original won't run under any version of Windows. They uses a horrendous memory manager that not only made it hell to install under DOS, but makes it impossible to run under any modern OS.)
I don't think either port is very far along. I know that Exult is at the point where you can walk around and talk to NPCs, but the rest is not there yet.
Hell, even if I wanted to upgrade the memory, it would have been nice for me to have the option of throwing in a new 64 Meg chip to get 128 Meg total for the prce of 64 Meg. Instead, I have to flush what I have.
There's lots of stuff that just doesn't need upgrading. A ISA 100/10 NIC used only for a two machine network? An ISA 56k modem used only as a backup when the DSL goes down? An ISA SCSI card used only for a cheap scanner? Why replace any of those? Oops, I have to replace one. The new motherboards only have two ISA slots.
One thing that is nice about the IDE interface is that it is completely backwards compatible. I've got an old 250 Meg drive that just does fine as a Linux swap partition. Why not? Why flush it? In fact, pretty much every drive I ever bought is still in use. I've got a 250MB, a 500MB, a 2 Gig and now two monster drives. All work great with the new hardware. Wish memory was that easy. I've got around 100 MB of memory that is basically useless to me now.
So a $200 upgrade becomes a $400 upgrade.
Now I have to be honest in that I didn't search very many places to see of an AT board was available, or if I could find an ATX board that took SIMMs, or with three ISA slots.... Partly, though, I didn't look as I recall a news item a year or so ago saying that Microsoft wouldn't "bless" a motherboard with more than two ISA ports. Still, over the last fifteen years of upgrades, I've rarely seen one that was as simple as it was supposed to be when you bought the original. You decide to upgrade one thing, and next thing you know, you've got to replace half the machine.
I've got a desk drawer that is a memory graveyard. I've got some 256k SIMMs, some 1 Meg SIMMs, some 4 Meg SIMMs. Just tossed two 32 Meg SIMMs on the pile the other day. I think I even have an old 2 Meg board up in the attic. (ISA, though I'd bet anything that it wouldn't work in a modern ISA machine.)
"Shift-Insert" is, of course, the default insert command on all Windows programs, making switching back and forth a pain in the ass.
No program should lock entirely because of a single keystroke.
Seriously, OS/2 has tcp/ip and has had it for a long time. If you don't have "Warp Connect", which is the default LAN install, you have to add it as an add-on. I bet that's what you had.
Browsers were a problem. There was a version of Netscape for it at one point, but I don't think it did Java. I had better luck installing an X Server on OS/2 and running Netscape off of a Unix box.
And that's a good sign.
I really wish software companies would worry more about stability and less about cool new features.
Other than gemstones, I can't think of any mineral that is even near that expensive. (And gemstone prices are artificially inflated by cartels.) The moon could be solid platinum, and it wouldn't make economic sense to go get it, without reducing the transpart cost by a factor of a thousand.
Don't get me wrong. I want to see people on the moon, and on mars. I just don't see how mining is going to get them there.
As others have noted, the NY Times does exactly this, and it prevents access without registering and therefore seeing all the main banner pages.
Or they could simply look for a cookie, and if it isn't there, simply throw up a screen saying "Welcome to Ticketmaster!" that then loads the target url after 15 seconds. They wouldn't even need to enforce registration, then. Then only create the cookie in the main page and change that hourly. No one has to change an URL, yet everyone is fully aware that they are entering ticketmaster's site.
How much coding time would that take? How much did their lawyers charge?
I certainly agree with the goals, but I dislike the kind of tactics that make innocent people suffer for a cause.
This whole thing is about making the lives of kids, who are likely already unhappy, even more miserable. Spreading more random misery around isn't going to help.
(Yeah, I know you likely weren't really serious, but I wanted to make the point. We too often forget that we're dealing with real people.)
Yes, I was a little too glib...I meant evidence, not proof.
The trouble is that we have no idea that those are the only two possibilities. It could be that there is a God, and he punishes those who believe falsely, just because they want to bet on the good horse, and brings nonbelievers who do good works into heaven. In such a case, those taking Pascal's wager are screwed, while those who don't are not.
Since there are an infinite number of theoretical possibilities of what God wants, there's no way you can just "bet" and be sure.
In order to believe in anything (even live Ceolocanths) I must be given proof that such a thing exists.
To take the opposite position is to be completely unable to believe in anything, really. If I find it impossible to disbelieve in unicorns because I have no proof of their nonexistence, then I find it impossible to disbelieve that all of my coworkers are not evil robots masquerading as human, merely because I have no proof. Everything becomes potentionally possible, and I end up being unable to know anything.
"You can't believe [the world is round] because there's no proof of [a flat earth]!"
I think you meant "of a round earth". But anyway, in this case, it is indeed not logical to believe in a round earth until such time as evidence that the earth is round is found. (I would note that such evidence was known to the ancient greeks, BTW).
Exactly. And it would have been idiotic for someone to form a company to build a magnetic disk storage device in 1901.
Again, I'm not saying that no one should try and reproduce this experiment. What I am saying is that it is silly to pretend that we are at the stage where we can even consider building a technology out of it when all we have is one guy who says he did something.
(I'm also saying that it is extremely unlikely anyone will reproduce this, but that's another issue.)
The reason I keep bringing up perpetual motion is that you really don't have any reason why this should be investigated (rather than some other area of physics) other than one guy claiming it works. That is almost identical to the argument 19th century cranks used to give for their perptual motion machines. Given that it contradicts all modern theories of gravitation, there needs to be more than one guy's claim before any real money is spent. Try to reproduce it, sure, but anything beyond that at this stage is a waste.
Saying "our understanding of gravity is primitive" is a cop-out. This seems to excuse any claim that has anything to do with gravity. We certainly do have theories of gravity running around, and this seems to contradict all of them. This contradiction demands a little more evidence than one guy's as-yet unrepeated experiment.
Show a repetition of the experiment. Then start worrying about what to build with it.
Let P = Existance of unicorns.
"You can't believe [unicorns don't exist] because there's no proof of [unicorns existing]!"
The rest is left to the reader.