Any of the Wing Commander novels are a great light read especially if you are into heroic characters and fleet actions. The entire book series is great reading for any fan of space opera.
Christopher Stasheff, A Wizard in Rhyme series. It was funny and amazing. An english lit professor gets transported to alternate world Europe where spells are cast by rhyming, and where damning someone to hell literally opens a portal and summons a demon. It was a brilliant series. Hillarious to read.
For me the problem with this is the $1500 of games I've invested into the PS3 platform. I was hoping that PS4 would be an upclocked Cell cpu with more cores and faster video so it would enable PS3 games to still run, and be fast enough to emulate PS2 games. If sony drop backwards compatibility altogether I might skip PS4 and go back to PC gaming. There's not much point to buying x86 console hardware if I can buy an i7 and have someone crack the architecture of the console.
I've bought more legitimate games for my PS3 than any other system. Want to know the secret? I pay $25.00-$50 per game. They ship from the UK, from OZGameShop.com There's no DRM, there's no bullshit. I put them in my PS3, they install, and they play. I don't have to be online to use them. I own 26 Playstation 3 games, I even preordered 2 of them and paid full price $70-100. That's more than every other console I own combined. If you try to force me to pay $60-120/game. I will stop buying games again. You will have priced me out of the market. I will prefer to spend my $500 on PC hardware, and crack your software. Because I can't justify YOUR prices. There's a point where buying a game is a good honest deal and I will buy many games. But then there's the point where you're ripping me off blind, and I will stop buying your products. It's your choice really. I pay well above average for the humble bundles as well. My first payment was $35 because I saw the value of what they wanted to sell. I wouldn't own any PS3 games or even a PS3 if I couldn't get the games I want for $25 each. You wouldn't have 29 sales of games, hardware, and controllers without that available. That's about $1200 Sony and it's publishers would be missing. Don't screw over gamers, and we won't screw you over. Stop acting like entitled children. You don't own our money and we don't owe you anything.
and so it begins... the complete elimination of human labor by the upper classes. So once agriculture and mining are completely automated (and they will be, just wait until we have robots to haul off broken/malfunctioning ones for recycle/repair.) and they've automated all manufacturing (see Foxconn in China) How long will it take for people to get fedup with 1% of the population controlling all the resources leaving everyone else with nothing? If food, mineral and energy production can all be automated why should any of us have to work to live? I'm sure someone will come up with some religious/moral BS as to why we should work. There needs to be a societal overhaul if these technologies do end up being viable. Communism didn't work when you had to wait 5 years to get a car, but if that same car can be built in 30 mins by robots, using resources mined by robots, should anyone really have to go without a car?
typical Microsoft... if it doesn't do Office and Windows it's not a product... those morons. Release the product, get it into the market/eating up share first, then add e-mail. It's not exactly hard. That's how Apple have been doing it for years. Make something everyone wants, and force them to adapt their environments to bring it internal. Remember how everyone was going to ban the iPad/iPhone from their offices? then senior management stepped in and DEMANDED those products be supported by internal IT. (Apple has an app for that) and now they're making billions of dollars. Microsoft are morons as usual. Give the people what they want. When they then tell you to add something, add it. If they don't, don't bother.
and what is stopping people from needing an endorsement of a certain percentage of their local electorate? say a minimum 3-5% of the voters in their area on a signed petition before they can stand for election. Oh yeah... that'd make politicians have to actually work to get in touch with their local issues.. can't have that.
Only when it's convenient for someone with money. Your founding fathers were mostly rich landowners, remember that. Every nation was founded under an existing order, and they all had plans to keep their existing orders intact one way or another. Some systems were better than others, but overall every nation on earth has this problem of big money influencing government. No-one is advocating banning speech, only equalising the volume/breadth. Rather than letting money shout out everyone else's view.
It's not censorship, it's giving every person an equal voice. America has always had this problem, they trot out freedom of speech, what they really mean is freedom for my money to trample all over your ability to speak. Who is going to win? the guy who is spending a billion dollars getting his message out to everyone, or the guy who can't scrap together $500 to run a campaign but who actually has the answers to the biggest problems we face? Giving preference to rich people over poor people in politics is basically saying fuck you to every family with disabled children who weren't mega rich before those kids were born. How is someone with a severely disabled child going to have a voice, when they can't work because they are spending all their time looking after their child? Who is giving these people a voice? This is why mental/physical disability is so grossly underfunded worldwide.
Too bad France is an EU member and doesn't have the same thing happen at the EU parliament level. I'm sure the French would be better off without the EU if that's the case.
Why is there no political system anywhere where the campaigns are funded by a flat levy, and ALL levels of government have equal elections where union and private donations, as well as politician's OWN FINANCES are banned from participating? Each politician gets a set amount equal to all the other candidates with which they can campaign with, and MANDATED/paid media time, and BAN private political advertising. Get rid of these douchebag interest groups from politics they have no place. Politicians shouldn't be allowed to pool their money together into party platforms either. If 50 people across electorates want to campaign for the same thing they should have to each spend out of their allowances individually to get their message out, so 50 conservative candidate ads, not 1 expensive ad running all the time for the conservative party. Anyone running against them should have the chance to do the same. This system that currently exists serves only the rich and powerful and the union bosses that are slaves to them. Kill the financial incentive to suck up to the big end of town and to businesses and make the bastards actually serve the public interest. Everyone knows this is the only way to go, it's high time people stood up for it and made it happen.
HDMI IS DVI video signal-wise. However, if you have a Mac Pro, all you should need is a mini display port enabled video card and a mini display port -> HDMI adapter off of ebay. They are like $12.
I own a Mac Pro tower, Apple are definitely pushing away the professionals. Their video pipeline is top quality awesomeness. But... the Xeon based systems are WAAAAY overpriced. Apple want $1050 for 24gb of ram. I bought the same RAM from a normal vender for $300. ECC server ram 1333mhz DDR3 exactly like Apple sells. They sell 7200 RPM 2tb HDDs for $300! $300! You can buy the same high spec drives for $130 from most places. Their machine costs are insane. An ATi 5770 GPU costs $160 the apple equivalent costs $250. Which is about the only component with a reasonable price. Base dual CPU systems are starting at $4199. I can buy dual 6-core Xeons for $2200. I got my Mac Pro at a firesale deal. Apple do NOT release cpu firmware updates. A 2009 Mac Pro can be BIOS flashed into a 2010 Mac Pro and will take the ram/cpu upgrade, the motherboards are identical so for $4500 I can build a mac pro that would normally cost $8299 for any professional to buy. The professionals are getting ripped off blind. No dual CPU motherboard/1000 Watt power supply + case is worth $3800 to make up the difference in cost. Apple is screwing its professional user base. On the software side I am pretty content with how things are going, there is maya, photoshop etc. Final Cut Pro's rewrite was necessary and each new patch will add features to the cocoa rewrite. Apple has just released a new version of their tool without completing it, which is fine considering the massive price drop. Patching will solve Final Cut Pro X, and people are whining about a non-existent problem. FCPX is only bad for an entering professional who doesn't have the last Final Cut Pro copy before it came out.
Motorola Atrix concept is perfect for this. It's not about the phone having 4 cores when you use it as a phone, but about having everything ready to go when you turn the device into Laptop/media centre mode... Universal devices are finally becoming a reality.
The PS3 is not linux, and it sure as hell is not opensource. It might be based on a BSD but I'd doubt it. It's gameOS is pretty closed/locked down unless you pay big $$$ to get the SDK. The Linux support was removed ages ago from the console.
Nvidia linux support is getting fixed by nouveau anyway. They reckon the GTX 5xx/4xx series is already upto the same level as the 2xx/9xxx/8xxx cards for drivers. As more resources get spent implementing opengl features in gallium and less on reverse engineering the cards, feature parity with the closed drivers will be achieved. I reckon in 1-2 years Nvidia card open source support will be at near parity with the closed source drivers.
So basically what this means for Linux, is we're about to lose our nice run of game compatibility. Smart money says.NET support on Linux will become crucial to support next gen games in wine. Also DirectX 11, 12 or 13 support in wine will be needed to support the graphics. The free ride of the Xbox 360 locking all the PC games into DirectX 9 support is about to end.
I am an Australian citizen, and the government should not retain any online data about me. If they don't like that then they can go jump off a cliff. I will not be voting for any political party that supports data retention in the next election.
Because consoles are getting all the ports directx is being held up and Linux/Mac are catching up with wine support for directx. Can already run pretty much everything important except.net 3.5 and games for windows Live.
I think any chance of ports of Blizzard games for Linux died when Blizzard decided to cancel the World of Warcraft port. They had it at a playable state and then decided not to release it. Linux Game Publishing's take on it is available on the net just google for it. It's a real shame. Just one profitable native title on Linux might be enough to get the ball rolling on ports. From what I've heard there's not much sales data available on Linux sales. A company like Blizzard porting/tracking online stats would finally be able to tell us if Linux is a viable gaming market or not. I think Linux should try to get as much of the Mac OSX APIs that games use ported as possible. It might help mac developers make the switch. I'm surprised there's been no effort to approach people like Aspyr Media, who do all the Macintosh ports, to see about getting access to game sourcecode/rights to port games to Linux.
Can we get serious about the Linux desktop already? Gnome's gone off the deep end with gnome shell, and this looks to be no better. Turn GNUStep into a functional Mac OS clone. Take NetworkManager and DBusKit. Implement a systempreferences pane for networking, do the same with pulseaudio for sound, one for video etc. Finish simplewebkit/vespucci so there's a web browser, write a linux port of AdiumX using pidgin's libpurple and gnustep so there's chat. IRC/Mail already exists. Knock up a quick rhythmbox clone so there's itunes-alike functionality, and port over the mplayerOSX gui so there's a good video player with a nice frontend. Suddenly there's a lot less FAIL and a lot more consistency in the Linux Desktop experience. Start porting over the huge pile of open source mac apps that have decent consistent user interfaces. Write a finder knockoff, use gworkspace, or knockoff any number of other file managers. Oh and throw in a dock option for people who want it. Who knows? Adobe might even bother porting CS5 to the new platform if it retains compatibility with macOS libraries/Frameworks. They already have CoreImage/CoreFoundation implemented. None of the existing Linux desktops hold a candle to Mac OSX's gui. As a bonus gnustep already lets you set the menubar up in either macintosh style (top of screen), windows style (per window), or nextstep style (floating menu). Everyone goes home happy and we can all get on with our lives.
Slashdot Mirror
Any of the Wing Commander novels are a great light read especially if you are into heroic characters and fleet actions. The entire book series is great reading for any fan of space opera.
Christopher Stasheff, A Wizard in Rhyme series. It was funny and amazing. An english lit professor gets transported to alternate world Europe where spells are cast by rhyming, and where damning someone to hell literally opens a portal and summons a demon. It was a brilliant series. Hillarious to read.
For me the problem with this is the $1500 of games I've invested into the PS3 platform. I was hoping that PS4 would be an upclocked Cell cpu with more cores and faster video so it would enable PS3 games to still run, and be fast enough to emulate PS2 games. If sony drop backwards compatibility altogether I might skip PS4 and go back to PC gaming. There's not much point to buying x86 console hardware if I can buy an i7 and have someone crack the architecture of the console.
I've bought more legitimate games for my PS3 than any other system. Want to know the secret? I pay $25.00-$50 per game. They ship from the UK, from OZGameShop.com There's no DRM, there's no bullshit. I put them in my PS3, they install, and they play. I don't have to be online to use them. I own 26 Playstation 3 games, I even preordered 2 of them and paid full price $70-100. That's more than every other console I own combined. If you try to force me to pay $60-120/game. I will stop buying games again. You will have priced me out of the market. I will prefer to spend my $500 on PC hardware, and crack your software. Because I can't justify YOUR prices. There's a point where buying a game is a good honest deal and I will buy many games. But then there's the point where you're ripping me off blind, and I will stop buying your products. It's your choice really. I pay well above average for the humble bundles as well. My first payment was $35 because I saw the value of what they wanted to sell. I wouldn't own any PS3 games or even a PS3 if I couldn't get the games I want for $25 each. You wouldn't have 29 sales of games, hardware, and controllers without that available. That's about $1200 Sony and it's publishers would be missing. Don't screw over gamers, and we won't screw you over. Stop acting like entitled children. You don't own our money and we don't owe you anything.
You can't dodge a high tax rate when you're dead. Something to think about.... Americans place too high a value on money.
and so it begins... the complete elimination of human labor by the upper classes. So once agriculture and mining are completely automated (and they will be, just wait until we have robots to haul off broken/malfunctioning ones for recycle/repair.) and they've automated all manufacturing (see Foxconn in China) How long will it take for people to get fedup with 1% of the population controlling all the resources leaving everyone else with nothing? If food, mineral and energy production can all be automated why should any of us have to work to live? I'm sure someone will come up with some religious/moral BS as to why we should work. There needs to be a societal overhaul if these technologies do end up being viable. Communism didn't work when you had to wait 5 years to get a car, but if that same car can be built in 30 mins by robots, using resources mined by robots, should anyone really have to go without a car?
release your awesome hot shit first, and then patch it until the problems disappear...
typical Microsoft... if it doesn't do Office and Windows it's not a product... those morons. Release the product, get it into the market/eating up share first, then add e-mail. It's not exactly hard. That's how Apple have been doing it for years. Make something everyone wants, and force them to adapt their environments to bring it internal. Remember how everyone was going to ban the iPad/iPhone from their offices? then senior management stepped in and DEMANDED those products be supported by internal IT. (Apple has an app for that) and now they're making billions of dollars. Microsoft are morons as usual. Give the people what they want. When they then tell you to add something, add it. If they don't, don't bother.
and what is stopping people from needing an endorsement of a certain percentage of their local electorate? say a minimum 3-5% of the voters in their area on a signed petition before they can stand for election. Oh yeah... that'd make politicians have to actually work to get in touch with their local issues.. can't have that.
Only when it's convenient for someone with money. Your founding fathers were mostly rich landowners, remember that. Every nation was founded under an existing order, and they all had plans to keep their existing orders intact one way or another. Some systems were better than others, but overall every nation on earth has this problem of big money influencing government. No-one is advocating banning speech, only equalising the volume/breadth. Rather than letting money shout out everyone else's view.
It's not censorship, it's giving every person an equal voice. America has always had this problem, they trot out freedom of speech, what they really mean is freedom for my money to trample all over your ability to speak. Who is going to win? the guy who is spending a billion dollars getting his message out to everyone, or the guy who can't scrap together $500 to run a campaign but who actually has the answers to the biggest problems we face? Giving preference to rich people over poor people in politics is basically saying fuck you to every family with disabled children who weren't mega rich before those kids were born. How is someone with a severely disabled child going to have a voice, when they can't work because they are spending all their time looking after their child? Who is giving these people a voice? This is why mental/physical disability is so grossly underfunded worldwide.
Too bad France is an EU member and doesn't have the same thing happen at the EU parliament level. I'm sure the French would be better off without the EU if that's the case.
Why is there no political system anywhere where the campaigns are funded by a flat levy, and ALL levels of government have equal elections where union and private donations, as well as politician's OWN FINANCES are banned from participating? Each politician gets a set amount equal to all the other candidates with which they can campaign with, and MANDATED/paid media time, and BAN private political advertising. Get rid of these douchebag interest groups from politics they have no place. Politicians shouldn't be allowed to pool their money together into party platforms either. If 50 people across electorates want to campaign for the same thing they should have to each spend out of their allowances individually to get their message out, so 50 conservative candidate ads, not 1 expensive ad running all the time for the conservative party. Anyone running against them should have the chance to do the same. This system that currently exists serves only the rich and powerful and the union bosses that are slaves to them. Kill the financial incentive to suck up to the big end of town and to businesses and make the bastards actually serve the public interest. Everyone knows this is the only way to go, it's high time people stood up for it and made it happen.
HDMI IS DVI video signal-wise. However, if you have a Mac Pro, all you should need is a mini display port enabled video card and a mini display port -> HDMI adapter off of ebay. They are like $12.
I own a Mac Pro tower, Apple are definitely pushing away the professionals. Their video pipeline is top quality awesomeness. But... the Xeon based systems are WAAAAY overpriced. Apple want $1050 for 24gb of ram. I bought the same RAM from a normal vender for $300. ECC server ram 1333mhz DDR3 exactly like Apple sells. They sell 7200 RPM 2tb HDDs for $300! $300! You can buy the same high spec drives for $130 from most places. Their machine costs are insane. An ATi 5770 GPU costs $160 the apple equivalent costs $250. Which is about the only component with a reasonable price. Base dual CPU systems are starting at $4199. I can buy dual 6-core Xeons for $2200. I got my Mac Pro at a firesale deal. Apple do NOT release cpu firmware updates. A 2009 Mac Pro can be BIOS flashed into a 2010 Mac Pro and will take the ram/cpu upgrade, the motherboards are identical so for $4500 I can build a mac pro that would normally cost $8299 for any professional to buy. The professionals are getting ripped off blind. No dual CPU motherboard/1000 Watt power supply + case is worth $3800 to make up the difference in cost. Apple is screwing its professional user base. On the software side I am pretty content with how things are going, there is maya, photoshop etc. Final Cut Pro's rewrite was necessary and each new patch will add features to the cocoa rewrite. Apple has just released a new version of their tool without completing it, which is fine considering the massive price drop. Patching will solve Final Cut Pro X, and people are whining about a non-existent problem. FCPX is only bad for an entering professional who doesn't have the last Final Cut Pro copy before it came out.
Motorola Atrix concept is perfect for this. It's not about the phone having 4 cores when you use it as a phone, but about having everything ready to go when you turn the device into Laptop/media centre mode... Universal devices are finally becoming a reality.
The PS3 is not linux, and it sure as hell is not opensource. It might be based on a BSD but I'd doubt it. It's gameOS is pretty closed/locked down unless you pay big $$$ to get the SDK. The Linux support was removed ages ago from the console.
can't you just uninstall gnome-shell and use metacity/compiz? works every time I've tried it.
Nvidia linux support is getting fixed by nouveau anyway. They reckon the GTX 5xx/4xx series is already upto the same level as the 2xx/9xxx/8xxx cards for drivers. As more resources get spent implementing opengl features in gallium and less on reverse engineering the cards, feature parity with the closed drivers will be achieved. I reckon in 1-2 years Nvidia card open source support will be at near parity with the closed source drivers.
So basically what this means for Linux, is we're about to lose our nice run of game compatibility. Smart money says .NET support on Linux will become crucial to support next gen games in wine. Also DirectX 11, 12 or 13 support in wine will be needed to support the graphics. The free ride of the Xbox 360 locking all the PC games into DirectX 9 support is about to end.
Where does Linux fail where BSD succeeds? should be the real question asked.
I am an Australian citizen, and the government should not retain any online data about me. If they don't like that then they can go jump off a cliff. I will not be voting for any political party that supports data retention in the next election.
Because consoles are getting all the ports directx is being held up and Linux/Mac are catching up with wine support for directx. Can already run pretty much everything important except .net 3.5 and games for windows Live.
I think any chance of ports of Blizzard games for Linux died when Blizzard decided to cancel the World of Warcraft port. They had it at a playable state and then decided not to release it. Linux Game Publishing's take on it is available on the net just google for it. It's a real shame. Just one profitable native title on Linux might be enough to get the ball rolling on ports. From what I've heard there's not much sales data available on Linux sales. A company like Blizzard porting/tracking online stats would finally be able to tell us if Linux is a viable gaming market or not. I think Linux should try to get as much of the Mac OSX APIs that games use ported as possible. It might help mac developers make the switch. I'm surprised there's been no effort to approach people like Aspyr Media, who do all the Macintosh ports, to see about getting access to game sourcecode/rights to port games to Linux.
Can we get serious about the Linux desktop already? Gnome's gone off the deep end with gnome shell, and this looks to be no better. Turn GNUStep into a functional Mac OS clone. Take NetworkManager and DBusKit. Implement a systempreferences pane for networking, do the same with pulseaudio for sound, one for video etc. Finish simplewebkit/vespucci so there's a web browser, write a linux port of AdiumX using pidgin's libpurple and gnustep so there's chat. IRC/Mail already exists. Knock up a quick rhythmbox clone so there's itunes-alike functionality, and port over the mplayerOSX gui so there's a good video player with a nice frontend. Suddenly there's a lot less FAIL and a lot more consistency in the Linux Desktop experience. Start porting over the huge pile of open source mac apps that have decent consistent user interfaces. Write a finder knockoff, use gworkspace, or knockoff any number of other file managers. Oh and throw in a dock option for people who want it. Who knows? Adobe might even bother porting CS5 to the new platform if it retains compatibility with macOS libraries/Frameworks. They already have CoreImage/CoreFoundation implemented. None of the existing Linux desktops hold a candle to Mac OSX's gui. As a bonus gnustep already lets you set the menubar up in either macintosh style (top of screen), windows style (per window), or nextstep style (floating menu). Everyone goes home happy and we can all get on with our lives.