I think most Windows users (myself included) don't care what hardware they use, as long as it's fast+cheap and all their apps/games run on it. I doubt that a PPC platform would be much faster/cheaper than x86 (even if you did magically manage to port Windows to it at full efficiency), and if it was, Intel/AMD would change so that it wasn't.
To sum up: I'd switch if there was a point. However there doesn't seem to be too many points.
The reason the OSX on x86 discussion came up is because people want the OS they think they want on the hardware they know they like. Asking a bunch of Linux nerds if they want to run the OS they don't like on the hardware they aren't entirely familiar with isn't going to provoke a huge discussion.
Not only that it, apparently it has to be the C drive.
Actually, it's whereever your 'Program Files' directory is configured to be. I had the same thought - after it installed, I realised that it was probably on C:, and that drive has 400MB free, so the index would probably use up too much space (my desktop has 800GB of files), and there was no way of setting it's storage location. Fortunately, after reading your message, I checked and it's installed to D:, where my Program Files dir is set to be.
One of the problems I have with reading books is that I'm so used to using my PC to augment my memory (that is, I use search instead of remembering things), that when I read a book and come across a name, I instinctively want to Ctrl-F it to find the last occurence so I can fill my short-term memory with backstory on that character.
Fortunately, amazon.com has full-text searching that gives you the page number of your query, making finding the last occurance super easy.
While it's most common to do this with ARToolKit, as other posters have mentioned, that shouldn't discourage you from doing the whole thing yourself. It's buckets of fun, I promise.
I recommend zoneedit to all my clients, since it offers full DNS functionality, as well as mail forwarding etc. You can easily turn any domain or sub domain into a dynamic domain, and their control panel is easy-as-pants to use.
A far more polished piece of software is cam2pan, which works wonderfully well in all manner of lighting situations. A far less polished piece of software is freelook (which is a project of mine).
I have to say, I don't understand how people get into so much trouble.
I know what you mean.
I've had a WinXP box DMZed behind a router connected to the internet for two years with nothing but Windows Update (on a daily schedule) to protect it, and it still using IE and Outlook as the primary browser/email client.
I installed a virus scanner and spybot the other day - nothing, beyond cookies and spybot complaining about some standard reg entries, there was no shread of viruses or spyware. I never noticed any unusual activity on the router's blinking lights, and the machine ran perfectly well.
*shrug* - the only people I know who've ever gotten spyware or viruses are people who've not kept Windows updated, hit 'Ok' to things they shouldn't have, or installed something that contained spyware (eg Kazaa, eDonkey). I'm not claiming that Windows update and being smart will give you 100% protection, but it sure does go a loong way.
Most likely your email address is getting used as the return address and little more - the returned mail thing affects everyone to some degree. If you were being used as a spam zombie, you'd probably not notice any change in returned mails, as the zombies generally use someone else's address again as the return addy. I'm fairly sure the return addresses aren't always randomised, as on my domains I see a bucketload of spam all from the same email address, so whoever lives there must be getting a bucketful of bounces.
Still, you really should get an antivirus solution to ease your worries. I use AVG from Grisoft, which is available in a free edition.
Of course, the bounces are plain annoying - when I get ACTUAL bounces from mail I send, I often delete them based on subject line, not realising that the person I was trying to contact is none the wiser. Booo
Although it doesn't claim quite the specs and ease-of-use of the TrackIR, and only works with games supporting mouselook (LOMAC and IL2 being the important ones), I wrote Freelook for people with a standard webcam who feel like trying this form of headtracking out.
For those who can't get the video, it looks like the tracking system is pretty simple (and likely pretty robust) - each cord connecting a velcro glove to the base station is on a pulley (hence the wheel-like things on either side of the station), This gives the system distance data. To get angle data, the cords come out of the base station through joystick-like nozzles.
It mentions it can get 1mm accuracy within a 3m cube - I wonder what the latency is like, or how much 'pull' there is on the gloves (I wonder if future versions could change the amount of pull in order to simulate weight).
Good luck to these guys - it looks like it could actually work well unlike some other alternative-input devices (*cough* P5 glove *cough), and if it works with a PS2 > PC converter, I'll be getting one to muck around with as soon as I can.
Roland seemingly gets a Slashdot link to his trashy Radioland blog once every few days, all by stories he writes himself.
So someone writes original, interesting and informative material, stuff that is truly 'news for nerds', and you bash him for it because he's trying to expand his readership? I mean seriously, talk about tall poppy syndrome.
At a *bare minimum* producing motion that looks as smooth as blurred 24fps requires double that.
The simplest example I give to people who say '24fps is enough' is to tell them to wave their mouse cursor around onscreen as fast as they can. The cursor image is being updated at at least 30fps (more like 60fps), yet you can still see discrete cursor images with gaps between them as opposed to one smoothly-moving cursor.
I'm also seeing some problems with both OmniWeb 4.5 and Safari 1.2.2
hmm, I have now disabled the javascript thinger for Safari users. I ended up being able to replicate the error by visiting the page and hitting refresh five times. How embarassing. I will look into a fix shortly (I'm not suprised it doesn't work though - the JS was written in two hours, so I think it's time for a rejib).
For example, your main menu is totally unusable in Safari 1.2.2 on Mac OS X 10.3.4
That's odd, it works perfectly fine on that exact configuration (Safari 1.2.2 (v125.8) and Firefox) on my 10.3.4 testing machine here, as well as the ones at work. I know it didn't with some versions of Safari that came with 10.3.3, but it did with the earlier versions. A bug report was submitted to the Safari dev team when it was noticed, and they did fix it, so I'm not quite sure what your machine is doing.
While this mod is not for everyone, I've tried to maintain a certain level of paranoia by making the flashlight only attach to your smaller guns (but not the pistol - that would spoil the early early game), and making the cone of projection much smaller than the hand-held flashlight. This leads to situations where you're in a pitch black room, but can only see a very small area, which for some is much more claustrophobic than holding the default wide-angle flashlight. This especially applies when swinging your view around, and catching a glimpse of an enemy, who you are then unable to find as they've run off into the abundant darkness.
Granted, as you can still use the current flashlight it does make things slightly less scary, but Doom3 has plentiful amounts of scariness to spare. Like playing the marine in Alien vs. Predator, I know of several people who still can't play it even using this mod, due to fear.
I've had fairly good experiences with the Unison product.
I am a huge fan of Unison, and I use it to sync all files, bookmarks and settings between my windows laptops and desktops. But it is NOT a backup utility - if you have it set to run at set intervals, and one set of files becomes corrupted, deleted or otherwise changed, Unison will then do the same to all the other files. It does not have rollback.
It's handy for total machine or disk failures, but not so handy if, say, a virus trashes your files and you don't realise until after you've synced those files with everywhere else, or for work situations where someone deleted the wrong directory, renamed the files incorrectly etc etc.
Sure, but if people use computers enough then they sometimes develop their own methods of typing.
Such as myself, I've used computers since I was 4, learnt touch-typing at school, then played a LOT of Quake, and did a lot of stuff that only required one hand on the keyboard. So as as result, my pinkies are dedicated entirely to Ctrl-Alt, Shift and arrow keys, with all letters handled by my remaining three fingers.
As a result, my pinkies are noticably weaker than my other fingers, to the point where it feels really bizarre using them to push on anything
I also hold pens and chopsticks differently to everyone else, but play the piano normally. Details I'm sure you were all DYING to hear.
I had a Seagate 200GB drive die on me - they told me to speak to their Australian distributor (who for all intents and purposes, is their face in the country), which I did. I was given a Word document to fill out and fax in to get an RMA number.
The problem was, the table cells in the Word document weren't wide enough to put any information in, so a WEEK after faxing it off, I got a fax back with all sorts of things saying 'not enough information'. So I spent half an hour to reformat their Word doc all nice and proper, faxed it off... and never heard back
My time is too valuable to spend dealing with crap like that, so I reluctantly ceased being a Seagate customer after many many happy years and moved back to Western Digital. I'd much rather have a 3-year 'good service' warranty than a 5-year 'we hate you' warranty.
I run several catch-alls on my domains for several years, and I've never been spammed at [all]@[domains].com. However, just last week all my domains were hit by an email virus that did a dictionary-based attack. While it was all still caught by my spam filter, my spam filter is client-side, and after downloading 18200 emails, I decided it was time to shut down the catchalls.
The only thing I really had to do was notify my friends, who are long used to typing whatever they want into the username section of the domain, tailored to whatever it is they want (eg boywhowillfixmycomputer@, bikemechanicmanwhowillalsofixmycomputer@ etc).
Slashdot Mirror
Take a look on eBay - you can generally find 7-8" LCD monitors for cars that take S-Video or RCA input. You can get them cheap, take a look: http://listings.ebay.com.au/aw/plistings/category1 4946/index.html?from=R11
(Note that that is an Australian URL).
I think most Windows users (myself included) don't care what hardware they use, as long as it's fast+cheap and all their apps/games run on it. I doubt that a PPC platform would be much faster/cheaper than x86 (even if you did magically manage to port Windows to it at full efficiency), and if it was, Intel/AMD would change so that it wasn't.
To sum up: I'd switch if there was a point. However there doesn't seem to be too many points.
The reason the OSX on x86 discussion came up is because people want the OS they think they want on the hardware they know they like. Asking a bunch of Linux nerds if they want to run the OS they don't like on the hardware they aren't entirely familiar with isn't going to provoke a huge discussion.
It's an IE shell, but so what.
One of the problems I have with reading books is that I'm so used to using my PC to augment my memory (that is, I use search instead of remembering things), that when I read a book and come across a name, I instinctively want to Ctrl-F it to find the last occurence so I can fill my short-term memory with backstory on that character.
Fortunately, amazon.com has full-text searching that gives you the page number of your query, making finding the last occurance super easy.
Now we have this. Awesome++
While it's most common to do this with ARToolKit, as other posters have mentioned, that shouldn't discourage you from doing the whole thing yourself. It's buckets of fun, I promise.
I recommend zoneedit to all my clients, since it offers full DNS functionality, as well as mail forwarding etc. You can easily turn any domain or sub domain into a dynamic domain, and their control panel is easy-as-pants to use.
A far more polished piece of software is cam2pan, which works wonderfully well in all manner of lighting situations. A far less polished piece of software is freelook (which is a project of mine).
I know what you mean.
I've had a WinXP box DMZed behind a router connected to the internet for two years with nothing but Windows Update (on a daily schedule) to protect it, and it still using IE and Outlook as the primary browser/email client.
I installed a virus scanner and spybot the other day - nothing, beyond cookies and spybot complaining about some standard reg entries, there was no shread of viruses or spyware. I never noticed any unusual activity on the router's blinking lights, and the machine ran perfectly well.
*shrug* - the only people I know who've ever gotten spyware or viruses are people who've not kept Windows updated, hit 'Ok' to things they shouldn't have, or installed something that contained spyware (eg Kazaa, eDonkey). I'm not claiming that Windows update and being smart will give you 100% protection, but it sure does go a loong way.
Most likely your email address is getting used as the return address and little more - the returned mail thing affects everyone to some degree. If you were being used as a spam zombie, you'd probably not notice any change in returned mails, as the zombies generally use someone else's address again as the return addy. I'm fairly sure the return addresses aren't always randomised, as on my domains I see a bucketload of spam all from the same email address, so whoever lives there must be getting a bucketful of bounces.
Still, you really should get an antivirus solution to ease your worries. I use AVG from Grisoft, which is available in a free edition.
Of course, the bounces are plain annoying - when I get ACTUAL bounces from mail I send, I often delete them based on subject line, not realising that the person I was trying to contact is none the wiser. Booo
As sent to the editors:
This has already been debunked as being just a LaCie panel in an Apple box. See: http://www.engadget.com/entry/3611729073994828/
Or from the horse's mouth: http://forums.appleinsider.com/showthread.php?s=&p ostid=666014#post666014
Although it doesn't claim quite the specs and ease-of-use of the TrackIR, and only works with games supporting mouselook (LOMAC and IL2 being the important ones), I wrote Freelook for people with a standard webcam who feel like trying this form of headtracking out.
PS It's free.
For those who can't get the video, it looks like the tracking system is pretty simple (and likely pretty robust) - each cord connecting a velcro glove to the base station is on a pulley (hence the wheel-like things on either side of the station), This gives the system distance data. To get angle data, the cords come out of the base station through joystick-like nozzles.
It mentions it can get 1mm accuracy within a 3m cube - I wonder what the latency is like, or how much 'pull' there is on the gloves (I wonder if future versions could change the amount of pull in order to simulate weight).
Good luck to these guys - it looks like it could actually work well unlike some other alternative-input devices (*cough* P5 glove *cough), and if it works with a PS2 > PC converter, I'll be getting one to muck around with as soon as I can.
So someone writes original, interesting and informative material, stuff that is truly 'news for nerds', and you bash him for it because he's trying to expand his readership? I mean seriously, talk about tall poppy syndrome.
The simplest example I give to people who say '24fps is enough' is to tell them to wave their mouse cursor around onscreen as fast as they can. The cursor image is being updated at at least 30fps (more like 60fps), yet you can still see discrete cursor images with gaps between them as opposed to one smoothly-moving cursor.
Thanks. I'm in Melbourne, Australia.
The land where darn Geforce 6800s are so much more expensive than those in America. Boohooohoo.
Not that I
While this mod is not for everyone, I've tried to maintain a certain level of paranoia by making the flashlight only attach to your smaller guns (but not the pistol - that would spoil the early early game), and making the cone of projection much smaller than the hand-held flashlight. This leads to situations where you're in a pitch black room, but can only see a very small area, which for some is much more claustrophobic than holding the default wide-angle flashlight. This especially applies when swinging your view around, and catching a glimpse of an enemy, who you are then unable to find as they've run off into the abundant darkness.
Granted, as you can still use the current flashlight it does make things slightly less scary, but Doom3 has plentiful amounts of scariness to spare. Like playing the marine in Alien vs. Predator, I know of several people who still can't play it even using this mod, due to fear.
Actually, the server is so far holding up fine. I don't think quite so many Slashdot people click on gaming-related links as other stories.
I'm more worried what will happen if visitors go elsewhere on my server, as there are some quite large files there. Oh well :D
If the access logs prove to be interesting, I'll summarise and post them, as I was always curious what it was like to be slashdotted.
I am a huge fan of Unison, and I use it to sync all files, bookmarks and settings between my windows laptops and desktops. But it is NOT a backup utility - if you have it set to run at set intervals, and one set of files becomes corrupted, deleted or otherwise changed, Unison will then do the same to all the other files. It does not have rollback.
It's handy for total machine or disk failures, but not so handy if, say, a virus trashes your files and you don't realise until after you've synced those files with everywhere else, or for work situations where someone deleted the wrong directory, renamed the files incorrectly etc etc.
Such as myself, I've used computers since I was 4, learnt touch-typing at school, then played a LOT of Quake, and did a lot of stuff that only required one hand on the keyboard. So as as result, my pinkies are dedicated entirely to Ctrl-Alt, Shift and arrow keys, with all letters handled by my remaining three fingers.
As a result, my pinkies are noticably weaker than my other fingers, to the point where it feels really bizarre using them to push on anything
I also hold pens and chopsticks differently to everyone else, but play the piano normally. Details I'm sure you were all DYING to hear.
I had a Seagate 200GB drive die on me - they told me to speak to their Australian distributor (who for all intents and purposes, is their face in the country), which I did. I was given a Word document to fill out and fax in to get an RMA number.
The problem was, the table cells in the Word document weren't wide enough to put any information in, so a WEEK after faxing it off, I got a fax back with all sorts of things saying 'not enough information'. So I spent half an hour to reformat their Word doc all nice and proper, faxed it off ... and never heard back
My time is too valuable to spend dealing with crap like that, so I reluctantly ceased being a Seagate customer after many many happy years and moved back to Western Digital. I'd much rather have a 3-year 'good service' warranty than a 5-year 'we hate you' warranty.
I run several catch-alls on my domains for several years, and I've never been spammed at [all]@[domains].com. However, just last week all my domains were hit by an email virus that did a dictionary-based attack. While it was all still caught by my spam filter, my spam filter is client-side, and after downloading 18200 emails, I decided it was time to shut down the catchalls.
The only thing I really had to do was notify my friends, who are long used to typing whatever they want into the username section of the domain, tailored to whatever it is they want (eg boywhowillfixmycomputer@, bikemechanicmanwhowillalsofixmycomputer@ etc).