How about this... Some people just like the way Amiga OS is set up.
It makes more sense than Unix does sometimes, and it is more clean and efficient than Windows.
I know, I know, sensible, clean, efficient, small, and fast are things people no longer expect from an OS now days, but AmigaOS has always delivered on those promises.
It's a shame it had to fall so far behind the technical curve, because for all of it's weaknesses, AmigaOS is still unparalleled by any modern operating system when it comes to it's real strengths.
Perhaps AmigaOS will never be popular again, but I for one have every intention of giving the new AmigaOS a try.
You guys simply have to sell the idea to game developers.
And THEN they have to buy the games when they come out. That is the hard part, considering a large porting of the free software culture is of the opinion that they shouldn't have to pay for software.
Developers would probably support the market more if they felt they could make money doing it, but many large developers who have given it a serious effort later said they've seen very little if any return on their investment.
Linux might be fine if you like the top of the top First Person Shooters (and occassionally a port of something popular over a year later), but what if you like something less than mainstream?
For instance while all of my friends were getting absorbed in Half-Life 2 or World of Warcraft I was left out because everytime I went to the store to pick up a copy of WoW (and to a lesser degree, HL2) the stores were out of stock.
While looking for something to play I managed to stumble upon a gem that caught me totally off guard.
I noticed Pirates! on the shelf. After reaading the back I realized it was a remake of the old C64, Mac, Amiga, and PC title and I had to buy it, even though I hadn't heard that they were remaking it.
I can honestly say it was not a waste! The game captures so much of the feel of the original while still being made modern. They haven't overlaiden it with stupid features, nor have they made it full of some lame linear storyline.
A good game, and certainly not one I'd expect to find ported to Linux, or even Mac. I just can't see it being popular enough with most people to justify it. Still, games like this are the reason I play PC games at all. As for the top first person shooters, blah. Sure I play them sometimes, but it would take more than that to get me to ditch my Windows box as my primary gaming machine.
"blog" - Supposed to be short for Web Log - why wasn't WOG choosen just as easily?
Blog annoys me, but what REALLY annoys me is the untech savvy trying to tell me what a BLOG is, when they didn't even know it was supposed to be short for "Web Log".
My web-server logs traffic. That's a web-log, too. Why isn't it a blog? Because the word "Blog" is stupid, that's why.
Actually, it seems to work really well on very modern machines with XP, but I still don't use it much simply because in most cases I've found it's just as easy to save all of my work and shut down. Though I rarely even do that.
After reading the article, I'd say he's basically bashing new jargon because he doesn't see a need for it.
I would say most of what he sites is pretty silly, but "Scalable?"
I can't think of a better word to describe something as highly functional as scalable, even if sometimes it applies to things it really shouldn't matter for.
But we'll take for instance a simple peer to peer file sharing network. Some file sharing networks simply don't scale well to thousands of users, or hundreds of thousands but work really well for a few dozen. So knowing weather or not something like this is scalable enough to demonstrate to a small office, then deploy company wide. Knowing something like that REALLY WILL save you some heartache later one.
Or how about rendering engines? Some scale DOWN as well as up. A good scalalbe engine means software will drop features on low end hardware, and take advantage of more on newer hardware.
Some jargon is useful.
But others are just annoying. I still hate the term "BLOG". We already has sufficient terms to describe most post and forum sites, but the term BLOG implies a specific type and now sites that aren't really blogs are being called blogs by the internet newcomers who don't know any better.
You know what bothers me about hearing this these days in regards to EA?
I heard this same thing in the early 90's from coders who used to work for EA back in the 80's but left to start their own companies.
Many of EA's great early works of classic gaming history were coded by people who have long since left. I can't remember WHO said it, but I believe (though I may be wrong) it was either someone from the Bard's Tale (Interplay) or Starflight (Binary Systems) development teams that said something to the effect "EA likes to find stary eyed young programmers with big dreams of success and lure them into slavery with empty promises." (My parahprase since it's been so long.)
I wish I knew who said it and what exactly they said but since it was in a print magazine long ago I haven't been able to find reference to it now days.
Apparently this isn't new for EA. If I remember someone in the 90's saying it about EA from when they worked there in the 80's, I wouldn't have any reason to believe they are any better today.
After reading the news post, the article, all the comments, and even watching the video, I tried very hard to imagine the many possible ways something interesting could come of this.
Halo 2 sold around 2 million units over the course of 2 years, since many stores have been taking pre-orders for the game since it's announcement, and here locally NOBODY was able to pick up the game without a preorder.
Therefore, a good portion (perhaps most) of those 2.38 million units were ALREADY BOUGHT before the release.
Compare that to WoW, which almost no store was pushing preorders for, and which almost nobody around here can get because none of the stores have it in stock.
In fact, I have been looking for WoW since it's release and only saw it one time. I didn't buy it because I took it for granted it would be there later on. (It wasn't).
I'm about ready to just break down and buy it online.
Maybe it's time everybody get off of their OS Religious High Horse and finally admited that an OS is only as stable and secure as the user who is administering it.
My Windows XP machine is solid and secure. My FreeBSD machine is solid and secure. My Windows ME machine -- well -- it runs, and it's quarenteened so I suppose in some ways it's secure.
Right now I'm installing Gentoo on a box so I'm going to see where this goes, but I am going into it with full realization that no OS is perfect, nor is it perfectly secure. This means that I'm going to take security as seriously with this machine as I do the rest of them.
Having the source to an OS doesn't make it more secure if you don't read (or understand) every line of it.
Why people think OSS is automatically more secure is something I never have really understood. There is some added comfort in knowing that most holes will be discovered and fixed promptly, but even that is an assumption one shouldn't bank on.
Well, I could hardly argue with THAT. I was simply pointing out that at least as far as video applications are concerned (games esspecially) we're much farther because of GPUs than we would be if we were relying on processing power alone, even if CPUs had managed to make it to the 10 ghz mark. Besides, Mhz never really was a very precise indicator of processing power anyway.
Actually, what I think he meant was that his Processor doesn't have to be 10 ghz to do what it is doing now BECAUSE it has that $400 video card with it's own included T&L processing capabilities.
In fact, some of the things modern video cards are doing today are done as well as they are BECAUSE CPUs aren't general purpose processors. They may have specific purposes, but they're much better at doing those things than general purpose processors ever could be.
That Jeri Ellsworth chick is already selling exactly such a device through the home shopping channel. It's got Impossible Mission and Summer Games and other old chestnuts built in, and looks quite hackable too.
I think one thing almost nobody is paying attention to is that Commodore didn't own ANY of the titles that made the machine so popular.
Commodore was their own worst enemy, and more importantly the worst enemy of their engineers. Commodore employed some really bright minds whose hands and feet were bound every inch of the way down the financial drain.
Everything Commodore engineers ever did right was completely overturned by the suits, and every bit of income was pissed away giving bonuses and pay increases to company officials.
This company purchasing the Commodore name is just getting a name. The technologies are obsolete. The engineers (both hardware and software) have moved on to bigger and better things. And the Amiga is no longer party of the Commodore family.
The software that everyone remembers (and in some cases loved) never belonged to Commodore and the few bits that once did no longer do.
Having said all that, what EXACTLY is it that this company wants to do with the name other than exploit it?
If they plan on using it as a market label in the same way that Atari is being exploited, then maybe it's not an overall bad move as long as they have real marketable products to sell under that name. If not, then I suppose we'll just watch Commodore die again, won't we?
It's not that I don't think this is cool, because I can see all kinds of uses for this sort of thing.
But my question is this...
Are there any uses for high speed video capture that existing technologies weren't already well suited for, or is this just a cheaper and more readily available option?
Remember, you are in physical proximity; your license plate number could be recorded.
That's very true, but technically there's still a very gray area when it comes to wireless internet access. On the one hand, it could be argued that simply connecting to a wireless network isn't doing anything wrong. It's what you do once there that matters. On the other hand, most people would probably be up to no good. Though many are just curious.
You also shouldn't forget that SOME software automatically connects to the strongest nearby wap without any intervention from the user. If you drive by and your system tries to connect momentarily, but then you drive out of range before anything happens it could hardly be said that you've broken any laws. At least not YET anyway.
Besides, there isn't much point in "trying to catch someone snooping". If they fear war drivers snooping they need to close up their networks.
Thats why they'd be pissed, at the very least they would cut off your service.
I think you missed the point. They can't cut his service, because they aren't providing it. What he means is that the CABLE companies might come after him because he is reselling the bandwidth he is getting from his DSL provider.
One reason they might do this is because they would be afraid that he might set some kind of example that their cable customers might expect they could get away with. After the cable company THEN has their own customers doing this, they are forced with the decision of either allowing it themselves, or cutting off their customers. That would be sending business to the competition.
What you do with your bandwidth, as long as it doesn't violate terms of service, is your business, not that of your local cable company.
However, would your neighbors be willing to pay?
In my neighborhood, I can count no less than 9 unprotected networks. Most of them are all on the default linksys channel of 6 with the default SSID of "linksys". That can sometimes make them difficult to use since they tend to interfere. Some of them are configured well enough to be usable but are still not protected.
I've found that in the rare events that my internet connection goes down, I've been able to easily just use a neighbor's. I'd feel worse about doing it if it weren't for the fact that it's so common, but it's very common.
A friend and I drove around town one night with a laptop and a wireless 802.11g card and we kept finding Netgear and Linksys routers all night.
Most of them had the default passwords. It's very scary, really.
The scary ones are the ones who know enough to make serious changes to their configuration, but still don't have the sense to change their passwords.
Slashdot Mirror
Why does quantum computing threaten present encryption?
Because the potential to try every possible key at once could exist in a sufficiently advanced Quantum Computer.
Someone needs to write a Encryption routine that uses the source text as the key. THAT will really show 'em!
How about this... Some people just like the way Amiga OS is set up.
It makes more sense than Unix does sometimes, and it is more clean and efficient than Windows.
I know, I know, sensible, clean, efficient, small, and fast are things people no longer expect from an OS now days, but AmigaOS has always delivered on those promises.
It's a shame it had to fall so far behind the technical curve, because for all of it's weaknesses, AmigaOS is still unparalleled by any modern operating system when it comes to it's real strengths.
Perhaps AmigaOS will never be popular again, but I for one have every intention of giving the new AmigaOS a try.
"We don't anticipating changing anything significantly from what we are currently doing'..."
So in other words it's business as usual for EA?
You guys simply have to sell the idea to game developers.
And THEN they have to buy the games when they come out. That is the hard part, considering a large porting of the free software culture is of the opinion that they shouldn't have to pay for software.
Developers would probably support the market more if they felt they could make money doing it, but many large developers who have given it a serious effort later said they've seen very little if any return on their investment.
So...
Linux might be fine if you like the top of the top First Person Shooters (and occassionally a port of something popular over a year later), but what if you like something less than mainstream?
For instance while all of my friends were getting absorbed in Half-Life 2 or World of Warcraft I was left out because everytime I went to the store to pick up a copy of WoW (and to a lesser degree, HL2) the stores were out of stock.
While looking for something to play I managed to stumble upon a gem that caught me totally off guard.
I noticed Pirates! on the shelf. After reaading the back I realized it was a remake of the old C64, Mac, Amiga, and PC title and I had to buy it, even though I hadn't heard that they were remaking it.
I can honestly say it was not a waste! The game captures so much of the feel of the original while still being made modern. They haven't overlaiden it with stupid features, nor have they made it full of some lame linear storyline.
A good game, and certainly not one I'd expect to find ported to Linux, or even Mac. I just can't see it being popular enough with most people to justify it. Still, games like this are the reason I play PC games at all. As for the top first person shooters, blah. Sure I play them sometimes, but it would take more than that to get me to ditch my Windows box as my primary gaming machine.
"blog" - Supposed to be short for Web Log - why wasn't WOG choosen just as easily?
Blog annoys me, but what REALLY annoys me is the untech savvy trying to tell me what a BLOG is, when they didn't even know it was supposed to be short for "Web Log".
My web-server logs traffic. That's a web-log, too. Why isn't it a blog? Because the word "Blog" is stupid, that's why.
Have these been solved in more recent machines?
Actually, it seems to work really well on very modern machines with XP, but I still don't use it much simply because in most cases I've found it's just as easy to save all of my work and shut down. Though I rarely even do that.
After reading the article, I'd say he's basically bashing new jargon because he doesn't see a need for it.
... uh... blah.
I would say most of what he sites is pretty silly, but "Scalable?"
I can't think of a better word to describe something as highly functional as scalable, even if sometimes it applies to things it really shouldn't matter for.
But we'll take for instance a simple peer to peer file sharing network. Some file sharing networks simply don't scale well to thousands of users, or hundreds of thousands but work really well for a few dozen. So knowing weather or not something like this is scalable enough to demonstrate to a small office, then deploy company wide. Knowing something like that REALLY WILL save you some heartache later one.
Or how about rendering engines? Some scale DOWN as well as up. A good scalalbe engine means software will drop features on low end hardware, and take advantage of more on newer hardware.
Some jargon is useful.
But others are just annoying. I still hate the term "BLOG". We already has sufficient terms to describe most post and forum sites, but the term BLOG implies a specific type and now sites that aren't really blogs are being called blogs by the internet newcomers who don't know any better.
So
Why would I want one of those?
It says right at the bottom of the page in the footnotes that you should not eat it.
(Seriously, it does, see for yourself!)
You know what bothers me about hearing this these days in regards to EA?
I heard this same thing in the early 90's from coders who used to work for EA back in the 80's but left to start their own companies.
Many of EA's great early works of classic gaming history were coded by people who have long since left. I can't remember WHO said it, but I believe (though I may be wrong) it was either someone from the Bard's Tale (Interplay) or Starflight (Binary Systems) development teams that said something to the effect "EA likes to find stary eyed young programmers with big dreams of success and lure them into slavery with empty promises." (My parahprase since it's been so long.)
I wish I knew who said it and what exactly they said but since it was in a print magazine long ago I haven't been able to find reference to it now days.
Apparently this isn't new for EA. If I remember someone in the 90's saying it about EA from when they worked there in the 80's, I wouldn't have any reason to believe they are any better today.
Dredged up by the Tsunami, huh?
So is that what happened to Terry's Frog?
After reading the news post, the article, all the comments, and even watching the video, I tried very hard to imagine the many possible ways something interesting could come of this.
I finally just decided that this story is stupid.
I wouldn't trust those figures.
Halo 2 sold around 2 million units over the course of 2 years, since many stores have been taking pre-orders for the game since it's announcement, and here locally NOBODY was able to pick up the game without a preorder.
Therefore, a good portion (perhaps most) of those 2.38 million units were ALREADY BOUGHT before the release.
Compare that to WoW, which almost no store was pushing preorders for, and which almost nobody around here can get because none of the stores have it in stock.
In fact, I have been looking for WoW since it's release and only saw it one time. I didn't buy it because I took it for granted it would be there later on. (It wasn't).
I'm about ready to just break down and buy it online.
Maybe it's time everybody get off of their OS Religious High Horse and finally admited that an OS is only as stable and secure as the user who is administering it.
My Windows XP machine is solid and secure. My FreeBSD machine is solid and secure. My Windows ME machine -- well -- it runs, and it's quarenteened so I suppose in some ways it's secure.
Right now I'm installing Gentoo on a box so I'm going to see where this goes, but I am going into it with full realization that no OS is perfect, nor is it perfectly secure. This means that I'm going to take security as seriously with this machine as I do the rest of them.
Having the source to an OS doesn't make it more secure if you don't read (or understand) every line of it.
Why people think OSS is automatically more secure is something I never have really understood. There is some added comfort in knowing that most holes will be discovered and fixed promptly, but even that is an assumption one shouldn't bank on.
Well, I could hardly argue with THAT. I was simply pointing out that at least as far as video applications are concerned (games esspecially) we're much farther because of GPUs than we would be if we were relying on processing power alone, even if CPUs had managed to make it to the 10 ghz mark. Besides, Mhz never really was a very precise indicator of processing power anyway.
Actually, what I think he meant was that his Processor doesn't have to be 10 ghz to do what it is doing now BECAUSE it has that $400 video card with it's own included T&L processing capabilities.
In fact, some of the things modern video cards are doing today are done as well as they are BECAUSE CPUs aren't general purpose processors. They may have specific purposes, but they're much better at doing those things than general purpose processors ever could be.
Judging by the link you posted, I wouldn't say either -R or +R are more supported.
There was one brand that didn't support any +R (Toshiba) and one brand that didn't support -R (Aspire). Big deal.
That list isn't very large though and I wouldn't base anything on what I saw there.
That Jeri Ellsworth chick is already selling exactly such a device through the home shopping channel. It's got Impossible Mission and Summer Games and other old chestnuts built in, and looks quite hackable too.
I think one thing almost nobody is paying attention to is that Commodore didn't own ANY of the titles that made the machine so popular.
Commodore was their own worst enemy, and more importantly the worst enemy of their engineers. Commodore employed some really bright minds whose hands and feet were bound every inch of the way down the financial drain.
Everything Commodore engineers ever did right was completely overturned by the suits, and every bit of income was pissed away giving bonuses and pay increases to company officials.
This company purchasing the Commodore name is just getting a name. The technologies are obsolete. The engineers (both hardware and software) have moved on to bigger and better things. And the Amiga is no longer party of the Commodore family.
The software that everyone remembers (and in some cases loved) never belonged to Commodore and the few bits that once did no longer do.
Having said all that, what EXACTLY is it that this company wants to do with the name other than exploit it?
If they plan on using it as a market label in the same way that Atari is being exploited, then maybe it's not an overall bad move as long as they have real marketable products to sell under that name. If not, then I suppose we'll just watch Commodore die again, won't we?
It's not that I don't think this is cool, because I can see all kinds of uses for this sort of thing.
But my question is this...
Are there any uses for high speed video capture that existing technologies weren't already well suited for, or is this just a cheaper and more readily available option?
Trillian. 3.0 Basic is free.
3.0 Pro adds plugin support which gives you a spell checker and Jabber Support (if you want it for the price).
Trillian Basic does a good enough job replacing AIM, ICQ, MSN, and Y!M. Who using Windows would use anything else?
(Yes, I know, Linux and BSD users have other options... but...)
Remember, you are in physical proximity; your license plate number could be recorded.
That's very true, but technically there's still a very gray area when it comes to wireless internet access. On the one hand, it could be argued that simply connecting to a wireless network isn't doing anything wrong. It's what you do once there that matters. On the other hand, most people would probably be up to no good. Though many are just curious.
You also shouldn't forget that SOME software automatically connects to the strongest nearby wap without any intervention from the user. If you drive by and your system tries to connect momentarily, but then you drive out of range before anything happens it could hardly be said that you've broken any laws. At least not YET anyway.
Besides, there isn't much point in "trying to catch someone snooping". If they fear war drivers snooping they need to close up their networks.
Thats why they'd be pissed, at the very least they would cut off your service.
I think you missed the point. They can't cut his service, because they aren't providing it. What he means is that the CABLE companies might come after him because he is reselling the bandwidth he is getting from his DSL provider.
One reason they might do this is because they would be afraid that he might set some kind of example that their cable customers might expect they could get away with. After the cable company THEN has their own customers doing this, they are forced with the decision of either allowing it themselves, or cutting off their customers. That would be sending business to the competition.
What you do with your bandwidth, as long as it doesn't violate terms of service, is your business, not that of your local cable company.
However, would your neighbors be willing to pay?
In my neighborhood, I can count no less than 9 unprotected networks. Most of them are all on the default linksys channel of 6 with the default SSID of "linksys". That can sometimes make them difficult to use since they tend to interfere. Some of them are configured well enough to be usable but are still not protected.
I've found that in the rare events that my internet connection goes down, I've been able to easily just use a neighbor's. I'd feel worse about doing it if it weren't for the fact that it's so common, but it's very common.
A friend and I drove around town one night with a laptop and a wireless 802.11g card and we kept finding Netgear and Linksys routers all night.
Most of them had the default passwords. It's very scary, really.
The scary ones are the ones who know enough to make serious changes to their configuration, but still don't have the sense to change their passwords.
Sorry, listened to the radio series in the '70s
All of them? My, you are talented.
Tertiary Phaze was only aired for the first time this past fall.
Perhaps you mean you heard the first twelve episodes back then, but there have been six more since.
Already I'm fairly certainly they're better than this movie is going to be.
Everytime I read something about it, it only annoys me even more.