A mouse can be just as dangerous as a bullet or a bomb.'
(Said by Lamar Smith, R-Tex.)
Makes me embarrassed to live in Texas.
Seriously, what are these morons thinking? And what kind of morons do they think we are?
So, how many people could you kill with a mouse if you flew it into a high rise building?
How many people would be killed when a mouse is detonated in front of a building in OKC?
Yes, it's a metaphor, but it's a remarkably studid one. Yes, let's give somebody life in prision because he hacked www.hot-wet-sluts.com. Uh-huh. Even hacking www.yahoo.com, www.cnn.com or even www.whitehouse.gov, how does that even begin to compare to killing people?
Maybe somebody needs to introduce these guys to the business end of a keyboard...
... took root only in the early 1990's ...
on
NYTimes Looks at Warez
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Although the warez scene took root only in the early 1990's, piracy has expanded rapidly, particularly in the last five years.
Um, no.
The `warez scene' was alive and well long before that. Back before the Internet explosion, warez was traded via BBS's, and by people bringing boxes full of floppies to their friends houses who had copy parties. Or they'd borrow a school's computer lab (rows of Apple II's) and set every one copying...
It seems that the NYT thinks that the warez scene needs the Internet to `take root' in. Not at all -- it'll root in anything it can, be it face to face meetings, BBS's, the Internet, or whatever comes next.
Bullshit. Any such games are produced by companies with no-talent animators, actors and/or art directors.
... or by people who have a game engine that can really do amazing stuff, and know how to use it. One example of a game that did it very well -- and did it quite some time ago (in the game world, anyways) was Starsiege. It had *excellent* (quality graphics, anyways -- story was kind of weak) in game movies, rendered with the game engine. And occasionally they'd do pre-rendered stuff, and it was crap in comparison.
For a game like Age of Empires, with no 3D game engine, that's not much of an option, but for something like Deus Ex, it works wonderfully.
Again, if done poorly. I offer Diablo II offhand as a counterexample.
Blizzard has been an exception. They do a very nice job on their cutscenes -- even nice enough that they warrant the DVD included with the Collector's Editions.
But you'll notice that they're animated. So far, most the live action cut-scenes that I've seen lately have been crap. (`Red Alert 2' did a pretty good job, however -- far better than `Tiberian Sun'.) Not just that the acting and actors were crap, but the compression they've used is usually very noticable.
Speaking of Blizzard, Warcraft III...
Warcraft III seems to use a pre-rendered intro (and possibly endgame), and in-game-engine cinematics. The intro you see once, the in-game-engine cinematics you see every single mission. And the in-game-engine cinematics are just perfect for the story.
Warcraft III also fits on one CD. You don't think that would happen if they used pre-rendered cinematics between every mission, do you?
Yes, we have. And it's gotten to the point where games that have cut-scenes generated using the game's own graphics engine are MUCH better than those pre-rendered. Even when they hire actors and film an elaborate mini-movie into the cut-scenes, the compression needed to stuff them into part of a CD totally ruins it. That, and the `switch' from the game's beautiful in-game graphics to the pre-rendered graphics really takes away from the effect.
Are you listening, game developers?
ANIMATE YOUR CUT-SCENES WITH THE GAME'S OWN GRAPHICS ENGINE WHENEVER POSSIBLE!
but the art form hasn't really been tried
Sure it has. The demo scene has been around for decades. First they were doing 3D w/o graphics hardware assistance at all on 286's, then 386's, 486's, 586's, Amiga's, etc. Nowadays, the demo scene seems much smaller, but they do use the 3D graphics cards to make much more elaborate demos. Funny, however -- they don't *seem* that much more impressive than they did. (I've probably just been jaded by modern games. And I'm probably not the only one, which might explain the smaller demo scene.)
... effectively doubling the amount of hard drive space needed per game;
So what? With 120GB drives on sale at Fry's for $109 (the link is good as of 06/14/02, not sure how long it'll stay good), you can afford to do full installs AND include a disk image. Even if your game has 4 CD's at 700 MB each and takes 3 GB installed, that's only 1/20th of your disk -- about $6 worth for your $40
Yes, it's obscene how large games are getting, and how much space they take. But then again, it's also obscene how large disks are getting and how cheap they are:)
(And yes, these are 5400 RPM drives. So what? They can still do 20 MB/s quite easily. And yes, they're IDE, but for a computer for playing games, that's just fine.)
People seem to like stealing these things ...
on
Trek Prop Collecting
·
· Score: 2
Apparantly, somebody stole the captain's chair from the Enterprise E bridge set of the upcoming Star Trek: Nemesis film during production.
Wonder how long before THAT one shows up on Ebay...
Yup. And any second/eon now, another interrupt will be generated, and the current state of the Universe will be saved in a hardware context, to be replaced by another Universe.
Either that, or it'll just be discarded. Depends on the inner workings of the Universal CPU.
I put this in the previous/. article mentioned in this article -- it still seems relevant, so I'm including it again...
An official response to this... by dougmc on Tuesday April 09, @03:05PM (#3311828)
This has been discussed in the Austin, TX `cable' mailing list, and this was added by Peter Gregg, who's a manager of some sort at the local TW office --
This was something that was mentioned in passing months and months ago. We immediately screamed and didn't hear another word. I would be very surprised if this were accurate. There would need to be a whole new polling infrastructure on the network as well as billing interfaces not to mention all of the legal stuff that would need to be done. I will forward the article to corp and see what kind of response I get. I would guess that as long as another ISP were on our pipe, then they would have to abide by the agreement also. At any rate, I will try to get a better answer for you as soon as I can. Don't freak out until then.....lol.
Don't CD burners already add a unique (unique to the burner) to each CD they burn? I've heard this before, but never saw any concrete evidence. Anybody got a link for me?
Presumably, such a unique ID would allow you to link a CDR to the recorder that created it.
Re:Slashdot must pay really well!
on
Disconnecting
·
· Score: 2
Oh, I think something just clicked. It's a business expense, with Slashdot being the business. Not coming out of your own pocket. That makes a bit more sense. Still, it seems rather wasteful.
Slashdot must pay really well!
on
Disconnecting
·
· Score: 2
... but I never got around to disconnecting from Earthlink or from AOL, which I've been on for years, clinging to the hope that with more than 25 million subscribers, something would eventually happen there that would be interesting enough to write about.
You just kept paying *two* ISPs $10-$25 per month for years on the off chance that something interesting would happen?
You must have more money than I do (either that, or less sense...)
The biggest reason I can see is to help cut down on spam. If people try spamming through RR, the recipient will KNOW it came from a RR server, and know where to complain.
That's what the
X-Complaints-To: abuse@rr.com
header is for. It's added by most(?) ISPs nowadays, including TWRR. The only reason I can see for TWRR to change the Organization: header is `branding' -- to put their name on your post. As if they owned it or something.
And I waited until the Sims were on sale and bought it for $30 (actually, I didn't have to wait very long. Things usually go on sale when brand new, and then much later as they hit the bargain bin, which will probably take a LONG time for the Sims.)
I just deprived the software company of $9.98 (either your math or my math doesn't quite add up, but that's ok.) Does that make me only 47% better than somebody who copied it?
Or, even worse -- suppose I had decided that I didn't want the Sims at all? Then I've deprived the software company of $18.97 of revenue. That makes me exactly as bad as a pirate, doesn't it?
Well, yeah, you're right in your myopic worldview. For the rest of us that exist in the real world, we realize that maybe, JUST MAYBE you might consider the best Unix the one that runs really well on a many processor box for a medical database or bank transactions or high-end webserver or one of many many many uses for big iron...
That's only one possible use of a `good' *nix.
As for which one is `the best', that's a very tough question -- there's so many variables. Ultimately, it boils down to which is the best for this one application. If this one application involved a 100 cpu box, Solaris will probably beat Linux. If it's a desktop PC (and sitting on somebody's desk), Linux has a very good chance of being better.
You could have working examples of both boxes for under $500 total.
(don't know about tru64.)
I hear that OSX requries a big honking Mac, so that's going to cost you more:)
There hasn't been a PC port of AIX for quite some time, as far as I know.
As far as *nix's go, once you know one, you're well on your way to learning them all. By itself, Linux on a resume doesn't mean too much, but if you know Linux, a few hours playing with a Sun will teach you enough to add `Solaris' to that resume...
Even if it wasn't porn, I imagine that Sony could be sued for leaving the billboards *in*, as that would be a copyright violation (the billboards are copywrited, after all.)
At least such a suit would have *some* merit -- unlike the current suit.
And no, it wasn't `canon'. Firestar didn't even seem to exist (in the Marvel comic world) until this cartoon was created. (Iceman, of course, was an X-man.)
It was entertaining, though. There's a new Spiderman cartoon out there, where he's on some other planet or something. Not nearly as entertaining.
This has been discussed in the Austin, TX `cable' mailing list, and this was added by Peter Gregg, who's a manager of some sort at the local TW office --
This was something that was mentioned in passing months and months ago.
We immediately screamed and didn't hear another word. I would be very
surprised if this were accurate. There would need to be a whole new
polling infrastructure on the network as well as billing interfaces not
to mention all of the legal stuff that would need to be done. I will
forward the article to corp and see what kind of response I get. I
would guess that as long as another ISP were on our pipe, then they
would have to abide by the agreement also. At any rate, I will try to
get a better answer for you as soon as I can. Don't freak out until
then.....lol.
Yeah right! Last I checked 95% of the spam I received came from yahoo.com
Actually, 95% (though I doubt that figure) of your spam CLAIMS to be from yahoo.com. Reading the headers gives a different story...
In short, they stick Yahoo with the bounces, and with many of the knee-jerk reactions to the spam.
I get maybe 40 spams/day. Many of these do have From: addresses from yahoo.com. And less than 1% of those actually came from yahoo.com -- the rest were forged. And the (less than) 1% that did come from Yahoo were people mucking around with the mailing lists, trying to use them for spam.
It wasn't there when I started my reply. Remember, we're talking about a period of mere minutes here. Your correction came in only 11 minutes before I pushed for the final time.
Slashdot Mirror
Makes me embarrassed to live in Texas.
Seriously, what are these morons thinking? And what kind of morons do they think we are?
So, how many people could you kill with a mouse if you flew it into a high rise building?
How many people would be killed when a mouse is detonated in front of a building in OKC?
Yes, it's a metaphor, but it's a remarkably studid one. Yes, let's give somebody life in prision because he hacked www.hot-wet-sluts.com. Uh-huh. Even hacking www.yahoo.com, www.cnn.com or even www.whitehouse.gov, how does that even begin to compare to killing people?
Maybe somebody needs to introduce these guys to the business end of a keyboard ...
The `warez scene' was alive and well long before that. Back before the Internet explosion, warez was traded via BBS's, and by people bringing boxes full of floppies to their friends houses who had copy parties. Or they'd borrow a school's computer lab (rows of Apple II's) and set every one copying ...
It seems that the NYT thinks that the warez scene needs the Internet to `take root' in. Not at all -- it'll root in anything it can, be it face to face meetings, BBS's, the Internet, or whatever comes next.
For a game like Age of Empires, with no 3D game engine, that's not much of an option, but for something like Deus Ex, it works wonderfully.
Blizzard has been an exception. They do a very nice job on their cutscenes -- even nice enough that they warrant the DVD included with the Collector's Editions.But you'll notice that they're animated. So far, most the live action cut-scenes that I've seen lately have been crap. (`Red Alert 2' did a pretty good job, however -- far better than `Tiberian Sun'.) Not just that the acting and actors were crap, but the compression they've used is usually very noticable.
Warcraft III seems to use a pre-rendered intro (and possibly endgame), and in-game-engine cinematics. The intro you see once, the in-game-engine cinematics you see every single mission. And the in-game-engine cinematics are just perfect for the story.Warcraft III also fits on one CD. You don't think that would happen if they used pre-rendered cinematics between every mission, do you?
Are you listening, game developers?
ANIMATE YOUR CUT-SCENES WITH THE GAME'S OWN GRAPHICS ENGINE WHENEVER POSSIBLE!
Sure it has. The demo scene has been around for decades. First they were doing 3D w/o graphics hardware assistance at all on 286's, then 386's, 486's, 586's, Amiga's, etc. Nowadays, the demo scene seems much smaller, but they do use the 3D graphics cards to make much more elaborate demos. Funny, however -- they don't *seem* that much more impressive than they did. (I've probably just been jaded by modern games. And I'm probably not the only one, which might explain the smaller demo scene.)ATA/33. ATA/66 and ATA/100 are limited to 137 GB. ATA/133 extends the limit by at least a few orders of magnitude.
There's several references to it everywhere, here's another.
Yes, it's obscene how large games are getting, and how much space they take. But then again, it's also obscene how large disks are getting and how cheap they are :)
(And yes, these are 5400 RPM drives. So what? They can still do 20 MB/s quite easily. And yes, they're IDE, but for a computer for playing games, that's just fine.)
Wonder how long before THAT one shows up on Ebay ...
Either that, or it'll just be discarded. Depends on the inner workings of the Universal CPU.
Presumably, such a unique ID would allow you to link a CDR to the recorder that created it.
Oh, I think something just clicked. It's a business expense, with Slashdot being the business. Not coming out of your own pocket. That makes a bit more sense. Still, it seems rather wasteful.
You must have more money than I do (either that, or less sense ...)
I just deprived the software company of $9.98 (either your math or my math doesn't quite add up, but that's ok.) Does that make me only 47% better than somebody who copied it?
Or, even worse -- suppose I had decided that I didn't want the Sims at all? Then I've deprived the software company of $18.97 of revenue. That makes me exactly as bad as a pirate, doesn't it?
As for which one is `the best', that's a very tough question -- there's so many variables. Ultimately, it boils down to which is the best for this one application. If this one application involved a 100 cpu box, Solaris will probably beat Linux. If it's a desktop PC (and sitting on somebody's desk), Linux has a very good chance of being better.
Ditto for HP 735's and similar boxes.
You could have working examples of both boxes for under $500 total.
(don't know about tru64.)
I hear that OSX requries a big honking Mac, so that's going to cost you more :)
There hasn't been a PC port of AIX for quite some time, as far as I know.
As far as *nix's go, once you know one, you're well on your way to learning them all. By itself, Linux on a resume doesn't mean too much, but if you know Linux, a few hours playing with a Sun will teach you enough to add `Solaris' to that resume ...
At least such a suit would have *some* merit -- unlike the current suit.
And no, it wasn't `canon'. Firestar didn't even seem to exist (in the Marvel comic world) until this cartoon was created. (Iceman, of course, was an X-man.)
It was entertaining, though. There's a new Spiderman cartoon out there, where he's on some other planet or something. Not nearly as entertaining.
Go search on google for `personal luxury submarine' and you'll find around 423 ads ...
Damn spammers!
Of course, the web site didn't say so in so many words, but at the time, not a single one had been built yet :)
In short, they stick Yahoo with the bounces, and with many of the knee-jerk reactions to the spam.
I get maybe 40 spams/day. Many of these do have From: addresses from yahoo.com. And less than 1% of those actually came from yahoo.com -- the rest were forged. And the (less than) 1% that did come from Yahoo were people mucking around with the mailing lists, trying to use them for spam.
It wasn't there when I started my reply. Remember, we're talking about a period of mere minutes here. Your correction came in only 11 minutes before I pushed for the final time.