The mouse you linked to claims to be Linux compatable already. Since it is USB/PS2 I wouldn't doubt that claim as both PS2 and USB HIDs have been supported properly by Linux for some time. -CyberVenom
I played Diddy King Racing by Rare when it came out and finished all the levels I could find. (all the areas, plus space, plus everything again in mirror.) During the ending credits it lists the best times from the guys at Rare on each of the tracks, so in time-trial mode, I wenth through and beat EVERY SINGLE ONE in the hopes that I would unlock an ubersecret. Well, nothing new unlocked. But on the track select screen something that has always caught my eye my is that at the bottom-right, there is space for one more track, and if you move the view around fast enough close to it, you can see the corner of a frame around what appears to be another level. I always wondered if maybe there was a secret there. I never saw any mention of it online though. Maybe GoldenEye wasn't the only Rare game with an ubersecret?
The author of the article seems to have no idea what he is writing about. And the interviewed "virus writer" is as much a hacker as a kindergartener is an Olympic runner. They will both tell you that they excel at what they do, but neither really has a clue.
"malware", "trojans", "worms" and "viruses" are NOT the same thing! Hell, I could "write a trojan" in 10 seconds: just create a PIF linked to "deltree c:/y" Then I send it to all my loser friends and tell them to "click the attachment for my badass screensaver!"
Neither trojans nor malware is capable of propegation. (BTW, malware is a form of trojan) Viruses and worms are. (worms being a form of virus) I would hope that anyone intellegent enough to write a malicious virus would be intellegent enough to keep his mouth shut!
Oh, and non-malicious "trojans"? I wrote one a while back in VB (yes, VB! the language blows, but it happened to be handy and I wasn't going for complexity, reliability, or speed) I installed it on a friend's laptop. It very slowly changed the windows colors (border, desktop, titlebar, etc.) from their default colors into a hideous pink-and-green scheme.;) That was fun. Unfortunately, it also ate all the CPU (VB, is it any wonder?). That is not what I would consider skill.
So, in short, the NYT is trying to tailor a story to fit public opinion and fear, while neglecting to do any serious research into the subject.
Wow! Now that stuff looks like a program I wrote to help my little brother study his spelling words.;) Except mine was written in QB for DOS (circa 1995 I think), although it was still bright and multicolored! (I think I was using VGA mode 0x13)
Ha! That's nothing! I run my system on Debian ludicrous; it's the most bleeding edge distro out there... It's so far ahead of Fedora and even Debian unstable that I already run the secret 2.8 kernel and the KDE4 desktop. It's awesome; all my apps run like 10x faster, and all my games rock! My ping times are lower, my frags are up, and MS Flight Sim runs flawlessly... Heck with the new kernel, even MSVB works right!
LOL, I wish!
Seriously, if you want bleeding edge you usually pay for it in reliability. If you aren't a total hacker-geek wait a week or two and install the new kernel when it makes it into Debian unstable.
Just out of curiosity, do you have a webpage or something that describes the features of these programs? I wrote some lame programs back when I was in school to help some of my teachers, but they were never anything I even tought I could make any money on. (lame stuff like real-time force vector addition sims, etc.)
GW-BASIC Maybe not the most elegant solution, but certainly a reasonable starting point at the end of the microcomputer era. This is how I leared. Of course having an uncle who could also code in BASIC and a father who occasionally dabbled helped too. I still have my old book "Using BASIC" from Que, well worn and loved, which I received for a birthday sometime around 8 or 9. The book itself had some mediocre tutorial value, but the real value was in the quick reference at the back. All of the basic commands' syntax laid out in a simple, easy to follow manner. I had also studied Logo in school, but was frustrated by the inability of the language (at least the subset of the language that the teacher taught us) to handle user interaction with the program. Sure I could make the turtle draw circles and other more complex pictures, but what good is that if I can't read input from a joystick? Today, there may be better starting points than BASIC, especially for learning good coding practice, but I still found BASIC invaluable in teaching the (very simple) usage of variables, loops, conditional statements, pixels, input, and simple logic. The immediate feedback was nice; no need to compile before you knew what was wrong, and a step debugger built into the environment. GW-BASIC was also fairly compatable with most of the programs I found in books and magazines that I received as hand-me-downs or in the DD 001 section of the library, which was nice. Lots of examples. When I outgrew GW-BASIC, my next step was QuickBasic. I was thrilled by the ability to compile.exe files, and by the removal of line numbers. I soon ran into limitiations even here, such as the inability to use mouse input (although oddly enough, it supported lightpen input!). My next step was assembly (of the x86 variety). I explored this first as a means to write QuickBasic libraries to handle mouse input, but later began using it for other small projects in DOS. At this stage, I found the DOS interrupt and BIOS quick reference guides from Que at the local library. These were superb! They had the same quick reference structure I had liked in Using BASIC, but without the rest of the bulky book attached. I also read the articles in Mark Feldman's Game Programmer's Encyclopedia (probably still available online if you google for it,) and I downloaded documentation on DMPI and played a bit with that. My work with assembly and study of demo-making techniques taught me a lot about optimization. Throughout my assembly experimentation I tried several assemblers; TASM was pretty good. MASM was insane. MagicAssember (a freeware project available on the web) was very goot for small.COM TSRs and boot sectors. NASM was the most robust and sensible assembler. I also used the DOS debug command a little. Finally I decided to try C. Microsoft C to be exact. I wanted the ability to write windows programs. I had trouble finding a good reference to use for MSVC, and much banging of head against walls ensued. I still haven't perfected my C, but it has improved a bit. I probably would have done much better with a Borland compiler and a good book. I did a some work with JavaScript, and it was fairly simple at the beginning, but the Browser Wars killed it. Finally I was introduced to the Unix Swiss Army Chainsaw, Perl, and the best computer book I had ever used, the Perl Black Book. Even though it may not be the fastest or cleanest language, it is the most usable language I have programmed in yet. Basic Perl syntax is fairly simple, advanced syntax features are available if you need them, and almost everything you would ever want to do with it short of a GUI is accessable with the built-in functions. If you want more, of course, there is all of CPAN waiting to do your bidding. Don't get me wrong, other languages like C and Assembly are still invaluable in certain cases, but Perl is versetile enough to allow me to do almost anything well enough to get the job done.
The aerodynamics, although an issue, should not be as improtant in this design as in something like SpaceShipOne. The Black Armadillo relies primatily on thrusers for attitude adjustment where SpaceShipOne relies on aerodynamics (in my opinion, this is something that will cause Scaled Composites no end of hadaches once they get high enough that even their "feathered configuration" does not create sufficient drag.)
As far as unstable reentry for the Armadillo, if it proves to be a problem in testing, it could be solved with a drogue chute to keep the general orientation correct until the vehicle is close enough to the ground to need to switch over to powered-landing mode.
I suppose the only way to know for sure of Carmack is on to something or just way out of his league is to wait and watch the fireworks...
I think it will be the private sector that will actually accomplish these things. Take a look at the X-Prize competition for an example. Several teams are ready for suborbital launch this year.
Personally, I can't wait for John Carmack (of id fame) to start working on a moon mission.
Looking at these private people and corporations' budgets, you can see that this sort of thing, if handeled properly, by skilled people, can cost far less than overpriced government programs.
So, I say "Yes, let's go to the moon, but let's fly Jet Blue!"
Personally, I use a trackball. Not a thumb-trackball either; I prefer the whole hand trackballs. At work I have 2-button optical kinsington that works fairly well, but at home I have some weird-ass trackball that I got at the LA computer fair. The thing has a roller-optical system like the ball mice, but runs fairly cleanly, doesn't skip like an optical trackball if I spin it too fast while playing Quake, and has 2 scroll wheels and 3 buttons. One button (left) for my thumb, and two on the right that I can selectively press with my pinky by flexing it at the first or second knuckle (sounds hard, but it is really convienient!), the ring finger runs both scroll wheels (only one at a time, but very fast to move between) and the other two fingers roll the ball (allowing me to do things like jumping, shooting, running, selecting an inventory object, and panning in a complete circle endlessly, all at once, and without stopping to re-center my mouse.);) To top it all, the trackball fits my big hand fairly well. I'm still waiting for Logitech to come out with a corded version of their TrackMan Optical.:(
I own a nice 16:9 HDTV projection CRT made by Phillips. I don't have any problems with burn even after playing lots of games on it. Interestingly, this seems to be because the TV itself is smart enough to shift 4:3 content horizontally a little bit every few minutes to compensate. Works well. As for HDTV/Widescreen format games, I play PS2, and most of tha games ether support 9:16 or don't look too bad stretched. Unfortunately not many support HDTV features. (aside from SOCOM). The best image I ever got was when I plugged my computer into the TV using the built-in 15-pin VGA connector. Winamp plugins look really trippy on a high-definition bigscreen!
I've seen a BSOD on the local access cable channel.
I've seen a BSOD on the ATM at defcon (sorta. Wasn't really blue, but it was a major crash)
The best, though by far was when I went to Target and they had 3 consoles set up side by side. X-Box on the left, PS2 in the center, and GameCube on the right. The PS2 and GameCube were working just fine, demoing Tony Hawk and StarFox I think. The X-Box on the other hand was sitting there at a Black-Screen-Of-Death that was the same as a BSOD only black. (wow! great upgrade, Microsoft! No more Blue Screen of Death!) That really says a lot about the comparative reliability of those three systems. I'm glad Target was kind enough to provide the public with this demonstration: comparison shopping it its best!
Why would I want a 1 cubic centimeter block (with accompanying circuitry and contacts presumably making it a bit larger) that is WORM, when I can have a much thinner SmartMedia or SanDisk that is just as large digitally? The only selling point I can think of is price.
I wonder, in the future, will I be able to buy anything with our new funny colored cash dollars?
It doesn't really matter anyway; we all know the only worthwhile currency on the grey market will be the New Yen specifically because it is not electronic.
The integer comparison differs slightly depending on how much use the application makes of the 64-bit capabilities.
Heat is another area of comparison; the UltraSPARC runs cold by today's standards. It uses passive cooling, and a rather sparse heat sink. I wonder what you could do if you managed to freon cool and overclock these chips?
Better yet, just dump the wireless end and use ethernet routers. You can cut down on all of that "harmless" 2.4Ghz microwave radiation by using CAT5.
Hell, they each have 5 ports, so why not just create one giant cluster? Thow a couple of these in for storage. Oh, and throw a couple of power strips in the box too so you have a place to plug in all those annoying transformers. Then have one 100Mbps uplink cable and one power cable hanging out the side of the cardboard box and tape the box up. Haul the whole pile to your local co-lo, and plug it in. Then advertise to your clients that you run a "1000 node cluster capable of handling 100,000 virtual domains", which you assembled for less than $100,000 and which lives in a discarded appliance box.
Keep in mind that this is a 650Mhz native-64-bit RISC CPU; it can hold its own against PIIIs and Athlons.
The real competition will come as Opteron and Athlon64 go mainstream. Imagine trying to pack one of those and all of the needed cooling into a 1U though.:)
I like RISC.
Why not just lease the hardware so that if the service changes, they have to replace your hardware too, and if the service terminates, they get the hardware back. Like a cable box. How many people complain about pay-per-view cable? (Well, all right, a few do, but not as many as bitch at the RIAA about "Copy-protected" CDs.)
I have had a little experience with the early RAQ series from Cobalt, and personally I didn't like the setup very much. The management GUI was very nice, but most of the software and hardware was non-standard.
I have used the SunFire V100, and have been very pleased with the results. I use the Debian distribution, which fully supports the SPARC architecture and for which patches are released promptly. The initial install was a little tricky, but far easier than installing Debian on a RAQ (which I did once too). Webmin can provide a nice interface for clients to configure things, and qmail/vpopmail/popauth/omail works well as an email solution.
You can buy a new SunFire for less than $1000 too, which is a great price for an UltraSPARC in a 1U form factor.
Some other interesting notes:
I run software RAID1 across 2 IDE drives.
I use the Tulip driver, not the Davicom driver.
I used the Debian boot cd to load SILO, from which point I can load the kernel of my choosing.
If anyoen wants, I may be able to dig up my notes on the exact install procedure I used for this machine.
Slashdot Mirror
The mouse you linked to claims to be Linux compatable already. Since it is USB/PS2 I wouldn't doubt that claim as both PS2 and USB HIDs have been supported properly by Linux for some time.
-CyberVenom
oops. I didn't even see the typo till I posted... "Diddy Kong Racing"
I played Diddy King Racing by Rare when it came out and finished all the levels I could find. (all the areas, plus space, plus everything again in mirror.)
During the ending credits it lists the best times from the guys at Rare on each of the tracks, so in time-trial mode, I wenth through and beat EVERY SINGLE ONE in the hopes that I would unlock an ubersecret.
Well, nothing new unlocked. But on the track select screen something that has always caught my eye my is that at the bottom-right, there is space for one more track, and if you move the view around fast enough close to it, you can see the corner of a frame around what appears to be another level. I always wondered if maybe there was a secret there. I never saw any mention of it online though.
Maybe GoldenEye wasn't the only Rare game with an ubersecret?
-CyberVenom
Sounds like just the kind of new invetion Abyss Creations has been waiting for. ;)
What the hell? Yugi (from Yu-Gi-Oh!) is training Pokemon now!?
The author of the article seems to have no idea what he is writing about. And the interviewed "virus writer" is as much a hacker as a kindergartener is an Olympic runner. They will both tell you that they excel at what they do, but neither really has a clue.
/y" Then I send it to all my loser friends and tell them to "click the attachment for my badass screensaver!"
;) That was fun. Unfortunately, it also ate all the CPU (VB, is it any wonder?). That is not what I would consider skill.
"malware", "trojans", "worms" and "viruses" are NOT the same thing! Hell, I could "write a trojan" in 10 seconds: just create a PIF linked to "deltree c:
Neither trojans nor malware is capable of propegation. (BTW, malware is a form of trojan) Viruses and worms are. (worms being a form of virus) I would hope that anyone intellegent enough to write a malicious virus would be intellegent enough to keep his mouth shut!
Oh, and non-malicious "trojans"? I wrote one a while back in VB (yes, VB! the language blows, but it happened to be handy and I wasn't going for complexity, reliability, or speed) I installed it on a friend's laptop. It very slowly changed the windows colors (border, desktop, titlebar, etc.) from their default colors into a hideous pink-and-green scheme.
So, in short, the NYT is trying to tailor a story to fit public opinion and fear, while neglecting to do any serious research into the subject.
With journalism like this, who needs fiction?
-CyberVenom
Wow! Now that stuff looks like a program I wrote to help my little brother study his spelling words. ;) Except mine was written in QB for DOS (circa 1995 I think), although it was still bright and multicolored! (I think I was using VGA mode 0x13)
Ha! That's nothing! I run my system on Debian ludicrous; it's the most bleeding edge distro out there... It's so far ahead of Fedora and even Debian unstable that I already run the secret 2.8 kernel and the KDE4 desktop. It's awesome; all my apps run like 10x faster, and all my games rock! My ping times are lower, my frags are up, and MS Flight Sim runs flawlessly... Heck with the new kernel, even MSVB works right! LOL, I wish! Seriously, if you want bleeding edge you usually pay for it in reliability. If you aren't a total hacker-geek wait a week or two and install the new kernel when it makes it into Debian unstable.
Just out of curiosity, do you have a webpage or something that describes the features of these programs? I wrote some lame programs back when I was in school to help some of my teachers, but they were never anything I even tought I could make any money on. (lame stuff like real-time force vector addition sims, etc.)
LOL!
how I became a programmer:
.exe files, and by the removal of line numbers. I soon ran into limitiations even here, such as the inability to use mouse input (although oddly enough, it supported lightpen input!). .COM TSRs and boot sectors. NASM was the most robust and sensible assembler. I also used the DOS debug command a little.
GW-BASIC
Maybe not the most elegant solution, but certainly a reasonable starting point at the end of the microcomputer era. This is how I leared. Of course having an uncle who could also code in BASIC and a father who occasionally dabbled helped too. I still have my old book "Using BASIC" from Que, well worn and loved, which I received for a birthday sometime around 8 or 9. The book itself had some mediocre tutorial value, but the real value was in the quick reference at the back. All of the basic commands' syntax laid out in a simple, easy to follow manner.
I had also studied Logo in school, but was frustrated by the inability of the language (at least the subset of the language that the teacher taught us) to handle user interaction with the program. Sure I could make the turtle draw circles and other more complex pictures, but what good is that if I can't read input from a joystick?
Today, there may be better starting points than BASIC, especially for learning good coding practice, but I still found BASIC invaluable in teaching the (very simple) usage of variables, loops, conditional statements, pixels, input, and simple logic. The immediate feedback was nice; no need to compile before you knew what was wrong, and a step debugger built into the environment. GW-BASIC was also fairly compatable with most of the programs I found in books and magazines that I received as hand-me-downs or in the DD 001 section of the library, which was nice. Lots of examples.
When I outgrew GW-BASIC, my next step was QuickBasic. I was thrilled by the ability to compile
My next step was assembly (of the x86 variety). I explored this first as a means to write QuickBasic libraries to handle mouse input, but later began using it for other small projects in DOS. At this stage, I found the DOS interrupt and BIOS quick reference guides from Que at the local library. These were superb! They had the same quick reference structure I had liked in Using BASIC, but without the rest of the bulky book attached. I also read the articles in Mark Feldman's Game Programmer's Encyclopedia (probably still available online if you google for it,) and I downloaded documentation on DMPI and played a bit with that.
My work with assembly and study of demo-making techniques taught me a lot about optimization. Throughout my assembly experimentation I tried several assemblers; TASM was pretty good. MASM was insane. MagicAssember (a freeware project available on the web) was very goot for small
Finally I decided to try C. Microsoft C to be exact. I wanted the ability to write windows programs. I had trouble finding a good reference to use for MSVC, and much banging of head against walls ensued. I still haven't perfected my C, but it has improved a bit. I probably would have done much better with a Borland compiler and a good book.
I did a some work with JavaScript, and it was fairly simple at the beginning, but the Browser Wars killed it.
Finally I was introduced to the Unix Swiss Army Chainsaw, Perl, and the best computer book I had ever used, the Perl Black Book. Even though it may not be the fastest or cleanest language, it is the most usable language I have programmed in yet. Basic Perl syntax is fairly simple, advanced syntax features are available if you need them, and almost everything you would ever want to do with it short of a GUI is accessable with the built-in functions. If you want more, of course, there is all of CPAN waiting to do your bidding.
Don't get me wrong, other languages like C and Assembly are still invaluable in certain cases, but Perl is versetile enough to allow me to do almost anything well enough to get the job done.
The aerodynamics, although an issue, should not be as improtant in this design as in something like SpaceShipOne. The Black Armadillo relies primatily on thrusers for attitude adjustment where SpaceShipOne relies on aerodynamics (in my opinion, this is something that will cause Scaled Composites no end of hadaches once they get high enough that even their "feathered configuration" does not create sufficient drag.)
As far as unstable reentry for the Armadillo, if it proves to be a problem in testing, it could be solved with a drogue chute to keep the general orientation correct until the vehicle is close enough to the ground to need to switch over to powered-landing mode.
I suppose the only way to know for sure of Carmack is on to something or just way out of his league is to wait and watch the fireworks...
I think it will be the private sector that will actually accomplish these things. Take a look at the X-Prize competition for an example. Several teams are ready for suborbital launch this year.
Personally, I can't wait for John Carmack (of id fame) to start working on a moon mission.
Looking at these private people and corporations' budgets, you can see that this sort of thing, if handeled properly, by skilled people, can cost far less than overpriced government programs.
So, I say "Yes, let's go to the moon, but let's fly Jet Blue!"
Oh, right.
"Wait! We need to take your fingerprints before you jump that fence!"
Or if Bush has his way:
"Wait, we need your fingerprints so we can get you a social security card, and a job!"
Personally, I use a trackball. Not a thumb-trackball either; I prefer the whole hand trackballs. At work I have 2-button optical kinsington that works fairly well, but at home I have some weird-ass trackball that I got at the LA computer fair. The thing has a roller-optical system like the ball mice, but runs fairly cleanly, doesn't skip like an optical trackball if I spin it too fast while playing Quake, and has 2 scroll wheels and 3 buttons. One button (left) for my thumb, and two on the right that I can selectively press with my pinky by flexing it at the first or second knuckle (sounds hard, but it is really convienient!), the ring finger runs both scroll wheels (only one at a time, but very fast to move between) and the other two fingers roll the ball (allowing me to do things like jumping, shooting, running, selecting an inventory object, and panning in a complete circle endlessly, all at once, and without stopping to re-center my mouse.) ;) To top it all, the trackball fits my big hand fairly well. I'm still waiting for Logitech to come out with a corded version of their TrackMan Optical. :(
I own a nice 16:9 HDTV projection CRT made by Phillips. I don't have any problems with burn even after playing lots of games on it. Interestingly, this seems to be because the TV itself is smart enough to shift 4:3 content horizontally a little bit every few minutes to compensate. Works well.
As for HDTV/Widescreen format games, I play PS2, and most of tha games ether support 9:16 or don't look too bad stretched. Unfortunately not many support HDTV features. (aside from SOCOM). The best image I ever got was when I plugged my computer into the TV using the built-in 15-pin VGA connector. Winamp plugins look really trippy on a high-definition bigscreen!
Lets see...
I've seen a BSOD on the local access cable channel.
I've seen a BSOD on the ATM at defcon (sorta. Wasn't really blue, but it was a major crash)
The best, though by far was when I went to Target and they had 3 consoles set up side by side. X-Box on the left, PS2 in the center, and GameCube on the right. The PS2 and GameCube were working just fine, demoing Tony Hawk and StarFox I think. The X-Box on the other hand was sitting there at a Black-Screen-Of-Death that was the same as a BSOD only black. (wow! great upgrade, Microsoft! No more Blue Screen of Death!) That really says a lot about the comparative reliability of those three systems. I'm glad Target was kind enough to provide the public with this demonstration: comparison shopping it its best!
Sounds like Google's job requirements. http://www.google.com/jobs/eng/sw.html
Why would I want a 1 cubic centimeter block (with accompanying circuitry and contacts presumably making it a bit larger) that is WORM, when I can have a much thinner SmartMedia or SanDisk that is just as large digitally? The only selling point I can think of is price.
I wonder, in the future, will I be able to buy anything with our new funny colored cash dollars?
It doesn't really matter anyway; we all know the only worthwhile currency on the grey market will be the New Yen specifically because it is not electronic.
The integer comparison differs slightly depending on how much use the application makes of the 64-bit capabilities.
Heat is another area of comparison; the UltraSPARC runs cold by today's standards. It uses passive cooling, and a rather sparse heat sink. I wonder what you could do if you managed to freon cool and overclock these chips?
Better yet, just dump the wireless end and use ethernet routers. You can cut down on all of that "harmless" 2.4Ghz microwave radiation by using CAT5.
Hell, they each have 5 ports, so why not just create one giant cluster? Thow a couple of these in for storage. Oh, and throw a couple of power strips in the box too so you have a place to plug in all those annoying transformers. Then have one 100Mbps uplink cable and one power cable hanging out the side of the cardboard box and tape the box up. Haul the whole pile to your local co-lo, and plug it in. Then advertise to your clients that you run a "1000 node cluster capable of handling 100,000 virtual domains", which you assembled for less than $100,000 and which lives in a discarded appliance box.
Keep in mind that this is a 650Mhz native-64-bit RISC CPU; it can hold its own against PIIIs and Athlons. :)
The real competition will come as Opteron and Athlon64 go mainstream. Imagine trying to pack one of those and all of the needed cooling into a 1U though.
I like RISC.
Why not just lease the hardware so that if the service changes, they have to replace your hardware too, and if the service terminates, they get the hardware back. Like a cable box. How many people complain about pay-per-view cable? (Well, all right, a few do, but not as many as bitch at the RIAA about "Copy-protected" CDs.)
I have had a little experience with the early RAQ series from Cobalt, and personally I didn't like the setup very much. The management GUI was very nice, but most of the software and hardware was non-standard.
I have used the SunFire V100, and have been very pleased with the results. I use the Debian distribution, which fully supports the SPARC architecture and for which patches are released promptly. The initial install was a little tricky, but far easier than installing Debian on a RAQ (which I did once too). Webmin can provide a nice interface for clients to configure things, and qmail/vpopmail/popauth/omail works well as an email solution.
You can buy a new SunFire for less than $1000 too, which is a great price for an UltraSPARC in a 1U form factor.
Some other interesting notes:
I run software RAID1 across 2 IDE drives.
I use the Tulip driver, not the Davicom driver.
I used the Debian boot cd to load SILO, from which point I can load the kernel of my choosing.
If anyoen wants, I may be able to dig up my notes on the exact install procedure I used for this machine.