Remember that, according to SG canon, the Ancients inhabited Earth for a long period of time (and perhaps even originated here?), it's entirely possible that Destiny was launched from Earth before Atlantis migrated to the Pegasus galaxy. Icarus base / the Ancient database containing the reference to Earth as the point of origin could have been created during this time.
Actually I do, but if you went to the site you'd notice that the advert images don't use Flash or JS and are hosted locally on the website's domain. For example:
1. Nvidia GT300 yields are under 2%
2. Nvidia fakes Fermi boards at GPU Technology Conference
3. Apple keyboard firmware hack demonstrated
4. Miracles happen, GT300 tapes out!
5. Apple to Nvidia: Don't let the door hit your *ss on the way out
Oh, and there's AMD/ATI adverts all over it. Who gives a fuck about nVidia using a mock up, companies do this all the time at tech shows. It's a non-issue! What is the issue is why an article from a site that is so obviously geared around slagging off nVidia was posted here.
the point often missed in dark series is that against a background of apparent despair hope shines all the more brightly
That is the best rebuttal I've ever heard to those who say BSG 2004 was way too dark. The few moments in the series where Galactica's crew were allowed to display positive emotions despite the insanely bleak circumstances were some of the most overwhelmingly powerful pieces of TV I've seen in recent times.... The kind of stuff that makes the hairs stand up on the back of your neck, and occasionally makes you check if anyone is watching you as you fight to hold back a manly tear.
*SPOILER*
When they finally found Earth, for example, it was an immensely powerful scene of joy and celebration... you felt like all the unimaginably horrible shit these people had endured over the last few seasons had all been worth it somehow; the universe had eventually done right by them.... Only for the next scene to show the planet and the same crew surveying it left utterly broken and devestated. It was a total rollercoaster and had me completely glued to the screen. That's what I loved about BSG 2004 - not many shows dare to push those extremes so hard and so fast.
I can't find the exact quote, but on a program on Sky One in the UK I watched about BSG, Joss Whedon commented on it saying something along the lines of "You get more entertainment, more humanity, more action, more drama, more suspense and more storytelling than any other show, and then the opening credits roll".
You've veered a bit off-topic there, but if I had any mod points left I would still mod you up Insightful. Excellent post man, this is precisely why I still browse interesting stories with all the comments unhidden.:)
Yes exactly, I should have clarified that it's just a local client setting in my post. Quite why ms_force_dedicated_server is classed as an sv_cheat cvar is beyond me... but hey, it works fine, so roll with it.
I also mentioned this in a post earlier in the thread, but I have had over 300 hours out of L4D so far.
More content is needed, I don't disagree there (and indeed, it is on the way as promised)... but what is there currently is extremely fun and replayable, especially if you have a few friends / people on your Steam list to play with.
It's been 3 months since I bought the game and I'm still playing it almost every night. The last game I bought before this was Fallout 3, which was a very solid title with a relatively staggering amount of game content, yet I only got around 60 hours out of that. Go figure.
Forget the Survival Pack, the SDK is the release that will really extend this game's lifespan. There are already several fully fledged campaigns in the pipeline from the community, all they need is the tools to put in the finishing touches.
I love L4D, I agree that it's light on content and there are quite a few problems, but I've gotten about 300 hours out of a game that cost me $40ish. That's a bargain in my book, regardless of the issues.
A bunch of my friends and I set up a Steam group and got the dedicated server package installed on one of our Linux servers over Christmas.
If you play L4D a lot, this really is worth doing IMO (you can rent an 8 slot L4D game server for $10-15 a month, between a few people this is nothing) - we have a server geographically close to the majority of us on a decent tube, and we generally get around 30-40ms pings with 60ms spikes. It's very smooth, and is not difficult to setup (took me about 10-15 minutes one Sunday).
The best way we have found to connect to this server via the lobby system consistently is to set steam_group_exclusive in the cfg to our group only. This stops people not in your group from starting a lobby on it. Then when we want to play, we bring up the developer console after starting a lobby and use "sv_cheats 1; ms_force_dedicated_server IP:port". This then connects the lobby to our server every time when we click the Search menu item.
I agree Valve need to do something with this mess and it's a bit annoying to have to work around it like this, but this works nicely. You can of course alias the sv_cheats / ms_force_dedicated_server command to make this even easier.
You can apparently achieve similar results with setting an sv_search_key in the cfg and your group's clients, but this has given us problems so we use the above workaround instead. There is also the openserverbrowser command that gives you a browser window of available / recent / favourite L4D servers to connect to, similar to TF2, CS etc.
Given that a) you post on slashdot so I assume you're technically competent enough to install hlds and edit a config file, b) you obviously enjoy the game and c) your enjoyment is only being ruined by bad servers, I highly recommend you look into picking up your own server, sharing the cost with a few people if necessary. I can gaurentee you it will make the game a lot more enjoyable.
We have an ever increasing need for a reputable organisation such as the EFF fighting our corner. Governments and corporations have woken up to the digital revolution, and they all want their piece of the pie - often at our expense.
They are one of the few organisations I donate monthly to, and I'm not even a US citizen / resident. They really do try and make a difference online and as evidenced by this story, there are no opponents too rich or powerful for them to take a stand against.
I hear you man, you have some valid concerns, but there are a few choices you might want to consider.
DOSBox - emulates DOS flawlessly. I often play a bit of Theme Hospital or GTA with it on my Linux desktops.
Wine - I've not personally used this in a while, but I hear it runs Photoshop CS2 well now in v1.0. It will also let you run a huge amount of Windows apps and games, just not the bleeding edge stuff.
VMWare - If you've got some RAM to spare, slap an XP install in a VMWare image and you have a solid Windows platform right on your Linux desktop.
Dual boot - I dual boot on most of my boxes. Hard drive space is ridiculously cheap these days, I don't see a good reason not to.
As for the great deal of tweaking you've had to do in the past, have you tried Ubuntu recently? I honestly find this easier and quicker to install and configure than Win XP most of the time. It has come a long way.
I couldn't agree more with your sentiment - the two party system is massively flawed in practice, but just for your future reference - it is the UK, not England in this context.
England is just one of the countries (albeit the main one by many standards) within the government of the United Kingdom - England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland. The UK also has some crown dependencies and foreign territories around the world, but these four countries are the only constituent members of the UK. Just to confuse things further, the now defunct term Great Britain is also still used fairly frequently, which refers geographically to the bulk of the British isles (basically England, Scotland, Wales and some of the small islands around it).
While I don't agree with what you have just posted about Linux users being jobless technophobes (I work for a Fortune 10 company, have a flava of Linux installed on 6/7 of my boxes at home, and wax most of my pay cheque every month on various gadgets and hardware... perhaps I'm just an exception to the rule?), I thought your original post here was one of the most refreshing things I've seen on Slashdot for a while.
I find it utterly insane that a site like/. has so many "OMG 640kb should be enough for anyone" style posts. Every single time there is an article like this there seems to be/.'ers coming out of the woodwork claiming how it's stupid to buy anything from the 21st century because their 386SX can still run lynx and nethack. I can understand Joe Sixpack saying he doesn't want to upgrade his computer because "it already runs the interweb just fine", but to hear that same sentiment repeated so many times from a site apparently full of hardcore geeks, who should have higher appreciation for new technology than Mr Sixpack, is rather strange to me.
We are geeks (or nerds, or hackers, or programmers, or gadget whores, or whatever social label you want to give yourselves collectively). Aren't we here because we embrace technology? Why is there so much animosity to anything even remotely fringe tech here at times? It's a straight up question to anyone who fits into the category of/.'er I've described above; I'm honestly curious.
This is exactly the same where I work, and has been ever since Vista went gold. I work for a fortune 10, so there's potentially thousands of Vista licenses sold just to us that are being used for XP.
If as I suspect this is a Microsoft thing rather than our anything to do with our respective software distributors, then yes, there is probably a significant portion of Vista corporate licenses sold being used solely for Windows XP. I know our IT department have absolutely no plans to move anyone to Vista, they are avoiding it like the plague for the forseeable future.
There are a couple of protocols out there that beat TCP for almost every use-case, and in 10 years they might be more popularly used. The internet at large does not have to change a bit to handle these protocols.
A sincere question for you larkhost (how many of those have you seen on/. this year?:) - could you expand on this a little please, which protocols and why? My knowledge of underlying network protocols is not as good as it should be.
Ah ok, my bad. The autocomplete function looks a lot smoother than what I suggested. I just tried out the "-" tags, you're right, it suggests positive tags when you enter in anything prefixed with a minus. That should be pretty straightforward to fix though, right?
To be honest, I hadn't even looked at the hose for a couple of months... I tried to check it out this morning after seeing this post, but my intertubes decided to clog up and I had to run to work. It's looking really good now though, much better than when I first tried it out. Nice work man.
How about having a select element which pulls the top N most used tags out of the database, perhaps having some standardised ones for the main filters too - "-journal", "-stories" etc, then an input element next to it for user entered tags? That way, we could choose a tag if one already exists (and prevent some needless duplication / variations), but if there isn't a relevant tag we can add it in and you still get to collect new tags.
Slashdot Mirror
Remember that, according to SG canon, the Ancients inhabited Earth for a long period of time (and perhaps even originated here?), it's entirely possible that Destiny was launched from Earth before Atlantis migrated to the Pegasus galaxy. Icarus base / the Ancient database containing the reference to Earth as the point of origin could have been created during this time.
Actually I do, but if you went to the site you'd notice that the advert images don't use Flash or JS and are hosted locally on the website's domain. For example:
http://www.semiaccurate.com/openx/www/images/4876678be06cd81266d0bd84b9794faa.jpg
How exactly have you configured ABP and NoScript so that they can automatically distinguish that image as an advertisement?
Oh, and there's AMD/ATI adverts all over it. Who gives a fuck about nVidia using a mock up, companies do this all the time at tech shows. It's a non-issue! What is the issue is why an article from a site that is so obviously geared around slagging off nVidia was posted here.
(and no, I'm not new here.)
the point often missed in dark series is that against a background of apparent despair hope shines all the more brightly
That is the best rebuttal I've ever heard to those who say BSG 2004 was way too dark. The few moments in the series where Galactica's crew were allowed to display positive emotions despite the insanely bleak circumstances were some of the most overwhelmingly powerful pieces of TV I've seen in recent times.... The kind of stuff that makes the hairs stand up on the back of your neck, and occasionally makes you check if anyone is watching you as you fight to hold back a manly tear.
*SPOILER*
When they finally found Earth, for example, it was an immensely powerful scene of joy and celebration... you felt like all the unimaginably horrible shit these people had endured over the last few seasons had all been worth it somehow; the universe had eventually done right by them.... Only for the next scene to show the planet and the same crew surveying it left utterly broken and devestated. It was a total rollercoaster and had me completely glued to the screen. That's what I loved about BSG 2004 - not many shows dare to push those extremes so hard and so fast.
I can't find the exact quote, but on a program on Sky One in the UK I watched about BSG, Joss Whedon commented on it saying something along the lines of "You get more entertainment, more humanity, more action, more drama, more suspense and more storytelling than any other show, and then the opening credits roll".
So say we all!
You've veered a bit off-topic there, but if I had any mod points left I would still mod you up Insightful. Excellent post man, this is precisely why I still browse interesting stories with all the comments unhidden. :)
Yes exactly, I should have clarified that it's just a local client setting in my post. Quite why ms_force_dedicated_server is classed as an sv_cheat cvar is beyond me... but hey, it works fine, so roll with it.
I also mentioned this in a post earlier in the thread, but I have had over 300 hours out of L4D so far.
More content is needed, I don't disagree there (and indeed, it is on the way as promised)... but what is there currently is extremely fun and replayable, especially if you have a few friends / people on your Steam list to play with.
It's been 3 months since I bought the game and I'm still playing it almost every night. The last game I bought before this was Fallout 3, which was a very solid title with a relatively staggering amount of game content, yet I only got around 60 hours out of that. Go figure.
Forget the Survival Pack, the SDK is the release that will really extend this game's lifespan. There are already several fully fledged campaigns in the pipeline from the community, all they need is the tools to put in the finishing touches.
I love L4D, I agree that it's light on content and there are quite a few problems, but I've gotten about 300 hours out of a game that cost me $40ish. That's a bargain in my book, regardless of the issues.
A bunch of my friends and I set up a Steam group and got the dedicated server package installed on one of our Linux servers over Christmas.
If you play L4D a lot, this really is worth doing IMO (you can rent an 8 slot L4D game server for $10-15 a month, between a few people this is nothing) - we have a server geographically close to the majority of us on a decent tube, and we generally get around 30-40ms pings with 60ms spikes. It's very smooth, and is not difficult to setup (took me about 10-15 minutes one Sunday).
The best way we have found to connect to this server via the lobby system consistently is to set steam_group_exclusive in the cfg to our group only. This stops people not in your group from starting a lobby on it. Then when we want to play, we bring up the developer console after starting a lobby and use "sv_cheats 1; ms_force_dedicated_server IP:port". This then connects the lobby to our server every time when we click the Search menu item.
I agree Valve need to do something with this mess and it's a bit annoying to have to work around it like this, but this works nicely. You can of course alias the sv_cheats / ms_force_dedicated_server command to make this even easier.
You can apparently achieve similar results with setting an sv_search_key in the cfg and your group's clients, but this has given us problems so we use the above workaround instead. There is also the openserverbrowser command that gives you a browser window of available / recent / favourite L4D servers to connect to, similar to TF2, CS etc.
Given that a) you post on slashdot so I assume you're technically competent enough to install hlds and edit a config file, b) you obviously enjoy the game and c) your enjoyment is only being ruined by bad servers, I highly recommend you look into picking up your own server, sharing the cost with a few people if necessary. I can gaurentee you it will make the game a lot more enjoyable.
Yes? What do you want?
Man, the mods collective sense of humor is even lower than usual today...
US military Cyber Warfare project starts up again, and suddenly Osama's MySpace gets ruined. Coincidence?
We have an ever increasing need for a reputable organisation such as the EFF fighting our corner. Governments and corporations have woken up to the digital revolution, and they all want their piece of the pie - often at our expense. They are one of the few organisations I donate monthly to, and I'm not even a US citizen / resident. They really do try and make a difference online and as evidenced by this story, there are no opponents too rich or powerful for them to take a stand against.
... Also, they gave me a "free" t-shirt. \o/
"Why sit down on a silly hot seat in AZ? Gay anal lanes".
/.
Ahhh, the joys of being at work on a typically slow Monday with no bosses in the office to catch you reading
Wait... both of you RTFA?
/. record!
We have a new
I hear you man, you have some valid concerns, but there are a few choices you might want to consider.
DOSBox - emulates DOS flawlessly. I often play a bit of Theme Hospital or GTA with it on my Linux desktops.
Wine - I've not personally used this in a while, but I hear it runs Photoshop CS2 well now in v1.0. It will also let you run a huge amount of Windows apps and games, just not the bleeding edge stuff.
VMWare - If you've got some RAM to spare, slap an XP install in a VMWare image and you have a solid Windows platform right on your Linux desktop.
Dual boot - I dual boot on most of my boxes. Hard drive space is ridiculously cheap these days, I don't see a good reason not to.
As for the great deal of tweaking you've had to do in the past, have you tried Ubuntu recently? I honestly find this easier and quicker to install and configure than Win XP most of the time. It has come a long way.
Is this Google URL showing common mistakes in spelling Britney Spears' name:
http://www.google.com/jobs/britney.html
Hoyl ilitrite googaling batmon!
I couldn't agree more with your sentiment - the two party system is massively flawed in practice, but just for your future reference - it is the UK, not England in this context.
England is just one of the countries (albeit the main one by many standards) within the government of the United Kingdom - England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland. The UK also has some crown dependencies and foreign territories around the world, but these four countries are the only constituent members of the UK. Just to confuse things further, the now defunct term Great Britain is also still used fairly frequently, which refers geographically to the bulk of the British isles (basically England, Scotland, Wales and some of the small islands around it).
Have all their lakes frozen over or something? Damn you global warming!
Cheap, fast, good - pick two.
.... will only consume 50% of the power of current SSDs"
.... Ah, shit!
"write data at 100 MB/s and read at 120 MB/s."
Hey cool, that's pretty fast.
"64GB
Good, good.
"There is no information yet about price."
While I don't agree with what you have just posted about Linux users being jobless technophobes (I work for a Fortune 10 company, have a flava of Linux installed on 6/7 of my boxes at home, and wax most of my pay cheque every month on various gadgets and hardware... perhaps I'm just an exception to the rule?), I thought your original post here was one of the most refreshing things I've seen on Slashdot for a while.
/. has so many "OMG 640kb should be enough for anyone" style posts. Every single time there is an article like this there seems to be /.'ers coming out of the woodwork claiming how it's stupid to buy anything from the 21st century because their 386SX can still run lynx and nethack. I can understand Joe Sixpack saying he doesn't want to upgrade his computer because "it already runs the interweb just fine", but to hear that same sentiment repeated so many times from a site apparently full of hardcore geeks, who should have higher appreciation for new technology than Mr Sixpack, is rather strange to me.
/.'er I've described above; I'm honestly curious.
I find it utterly insane that a site like
We are geeks (or nerds, or hackers, or programmers, or gadget whores, or whatever social label you want to give yourselves collectively). Aren't we here because we embrace technology? Why is there so much animosity to anything even remotely fringe tech here at times? It's a straight up question to anyone who fits into the category of
This is exactly the same where I work, and has been ever since Vista went gold. I work for a fortune 10, so there's potentially thousands of Vista licenses sold just to us that are being used for XP.
If as I suspect this is a Microsoft thing rather than our anything to do with our respective software distributors, then yes, there is probably a significant portion of Vista corporate licenses sold being used solely for Windows XP. I know our IT department have absolutely no plans to move anyone to Vista, they are avoiding it like the plague for the forseeable future.
There are a couple of protocols out there that beat TCP for almost every use-case, and in 10 years they might be more popularly used. The internet at large does not have to change a bit to handle these protocols.
/. this year? :) - could you expand on this a little please, which protocols and why? My knowledge of underlying network protocols is not as good as it should be.
A sincere question for you larkhost (how many of those have you seen on
Thanks.
Ah ok, my bad. The autocomplete function looks a lot smoother than what I suggested. I just tried out the "-" tags, you're right, it suggests positive tags when you enter in anything prefixed with a minus. That should be pretty straightforward to fix though, right?
To be honest, I hadn't even looked at the hose for a couple of months... I tried to check it out this morning after seeing this post, but my intertubes decided to clog up and I had to run to work. It's looking really good now though, much better than when I first tried it out. Nice work man.
How about having a select element which pulls the top N most used tags out of the database, perhaps having some standardised ones for the main filters too - "-journal", "-stories" etc, then an input element next to it for user entered tags? That way, we could choose a tag if one already exists (and prevent some needless duplication / variations), but if there isn't a relevant tag we can add it in and you still get to collect new tags.
http://pidgin.im/pidgin/home/