I don't think they should be PDFs. It's not always the most convenient thing to have a PDF viewer open at the same time as whatever you're tring to figure out. Help systems I've encountered are very rarely helpful. Websites can be nice, especially for info that needs to be current (ie bug reports). I think printed manuals are still needed if you want to sell to the most clueless customers (puhdiff? what's a puhdiff?). Printed manuals are definitely better for anything requiring rebooting and any hardware installation/configuration. If you install something that messes up your booting capability, how else do you get help?
The PDFs might be good if someone makes a device for viewing PDFs from CDs that is completely independant of the computer, and cheap enough so everyone has one. This doesn't look too likely with the current cost of displays.
The flat panels kinda remind me of star trek >=TNG type panels... now all they need are touchscreens and a star trek theme, and they could change the name from Atlantis to Enterprise. No warp drive though... gotta wait till 2060s for Zephram Cochran (sp?) (OK, I've been watching first contact too much).
I haven't done much searching recently, but I have jazz++ from Jazzware, and it works fairly well for hand sequencing. I couldn't get it to record, but I probably have an old version. Looking at the page now, it looks like they're going opensource.
If what you're saying is true, the "requirements" on the sides of boxes and on websites are false. I keep seeing very high requirements for games IMHO with only slightly better graphics than I got with a 486. What used to only need DOS, 8MB RAM, a CDROM drive, and a sound card now needs winblows, a 3D accelerator, and 64MB. I don't get it. Maybe it's all the overhead of having an actual OS instead of DOS. Maybe what we need is a boot-floppy based game system that has all the 3d and input routines on the floppy and boots the game on the CD. And maybe I'm completely wrong.
And my complaint is not with price, but with the bother of getting a game, finding out it doesn't work, waiting for the upgrade to come, installing it and hoping it works.
I don't get why all the new games have such high system requirements. I know they want to have spiffy graphics, but at the expense of availability? There should be settings to allow for crummy graphics, but fast play. X-wing and TIE Fighter only needed a 486, and I still consider them to have pretty good graphics. Heck, Wing Commander III had excellent graphics, and it just barely ran on a 486-50 (but for some reason it refuses to work with my newer computer). Now I see all games having anything to do with 3d needing an accelerator, and if not, an absurd amount of memory (no single program should consume 128MB!).
Now that I'm done ranting about requirements, I just wanted to say that this looks to be a great game.
The real questions with this display combination thing are "What's the best balance between number of displays and their size?" and "Do they sell a product like that?"
They have a display made from four displays 1/4 the size, but would it be more or less expensive to combine 9 1/9 size or 16 1/16 size displays? I'm thinking that if the joining process is cheap enough, you could have displays made up of 1" squares, thus reducing the cost of each display (fewer pixels to go wrong), and the entire display, to a point, that point being where the cost of joining (and calibrating) the little displays meets the savings of having smaller units.
This looks really neat, to say the least. They don't mention a price, though. It's probably well above $1000, seeing as it's basically a flat-panel display with calibrated backlighting and fancy circuitry.
Soo many applications... I could probably rig POV-ray to do spiffy 3d with it, it would rock for 3d games (well, maybe not.. it seems like you have to keep your head straight, not something that happens often when gaming), it might also be good for VRML... Ooh the possibilities...
I remember in that in the book Xenocide by Card, Ender used a method of speech called "subvocalizing" to communicate with his computer-friend without anyone else hearing it. Is this actually possible? If so, why aren't we doing that instead of speaking aloud? It seems to me that would solve the problem of talking loudly to a little black box where it was inappropriate. Someone tell me if this is just something Card made up.
I once made a lego machine gun that shot an assembly of a 2x1 flat brick with the ridges in it and a 2x2 flat brick underneath with a 2x2 gear connected to my motor. The Technic gears fit nicely into the ridges, as long as there's only one bump-worth of them. The fire rate was poor because I couldn't get the "bullets" out of the holder fast enough. Also, aiming was limited, because I had to point it down to get the bullets out, then point it to where I wanted to shoot, while the thing came out. Those things do get accelerated pretty fast, though. Not much of a range, I guess my batteries were weak at that point.
when I turn on my system with the printer on, linux somehow turns it off without realizing it. it then won't let me set it up because it looks like it's not there when it's off.
how's that for "lack of drivers"?
BTW, if someone can help me with this, I'd be very appreciative.
Couldn't you have a directable laser beam or something reflecting off of the inside of the windshield? Since the laser would be brighter than the outside when you're using it, you would be able to create a visible image on the windshield without replacing it. You don't want it too bright, though, or it'll burn your eyes out:-P
Another thing with that is that the image shifts when you do; you wouldn't have that with something embedded in the glass. I'm not sure if it would match up properly, though.
Using the Internet is like walking around town. You can just go around looking at stuff, you can buy things from stores, you can have conversations, you can meet new people, etc. Why do we need a license to do these things? Is it because we can also do harmful things? We can do that when we're not online without a license.
Another thing... did you notice that they plan to discriminate against racists(can you say 'hypocracy'?)? I'm not saying I like racists, I just support everyone's right to free speech. That's basically all you can do on the Internet, speak(you can buy stuff too, but how is that harmful?).
While I admit that doom, etc. are rather gory, and some sims are a bit violent, that's no reason to ban them. Violence is a fact of life. In any group of people, some will be more violent than others, and the idealists in the group want to restrict their violence. This might be OK if the violent people were massacring (sp?) lots of others, but what we're talking about are video games. Have you ever seen a report that a video game directly, seriously harmed someone? Further, have you ever seen a study that says that a significant percentage of the violent game playing community turn into violent killers themselves? I thought not.
Why don't the people trying to restrict violent games put their energy into trying to stop RL violence? And if they say that the violent games are causing the RL violence, do they actually have any proof that violent games cause people who wouldn't be violent otherwise to be violent? Games kill no one. It's people who kill people.
I love xpilot, but I can only really play against the robots, because whenever I try the servers in the metaserver, they're too slow and/or have nobody else there. Are all these things really in Europe, like the names seem to say? Or is it just that I'm an idiot for trying to play it on a 56K dialup?
M$ product (first release, so it has an ant farm worth of bugs in it), costing more than a decent home computer just so you can have unlimited remote users...
--or--
A Linux distro costing less than the hard drive you put it on which has been refined over years of hacking AND costs nothing to host an unlimited number of users on an unlimited number of machines...
I think pre-loading is a Bad Thing; look at Windoze. The only reason windoze is on so many systems now is that it was pre-loaded and people were too lazy or ignorant to take it off. Then M$ got lazy too. Since nobody switched to anything else, they figured they could skimp on the product and charge more and make a fortune (which they did).
Also, from a technical standpoint, it might be hard to make an installation that would work on every system you put it into. I suppose you could have some sort of setup utility that figures everything out for you, but still, you would have to have the information needed to run on many different types of machines on the drive already, each system info section would waste disk space for all systems but the one it was designed for. It just seems like a waste of perfectly good disk space to me.
It's not like you could install it on only the motherboard. If you're going to bundle it with any single piece of hardware, the logical choice would be the hard drive. If you buy a motherboard, you could just be replacing a broken one. If you buy a hard drive, you're going to have lots of extra room to put a new OS on. Of course, neither of these choices really make sense, because you can't install an OS without a keyboard, monitor, power supply, and either a CD-ROM or floppy disk drive (not on a normal system anyway. I could concieve of a system where you install an OS via a network card or something...).
First of all, this guy didn't do anything yet, and even if he did what his plan says, it wouldn't be creation of any sort. The article says his method calls for the use of dead cell parts. If you took a computer that didn't work because the monitor was broken and the power supply blew, and replaced the monitor and power supply, you didn't create it. Real creation is something from nothing or from things naturally occurring in an environment without life (as someone said, from dust).
Second, this is not creation like God did. In order for God to have created life, He had to be outside the universe, because if He was in the universe He would be living and someone would have had to create Him, and if THAT someone was in the universe, he would have had to be created by someone... ad infinitum.
Anyway, creation doesn't work when God is inside the universe. The guy in this article is definitely inside the universe, so what he's doing is not creation, it's merely perpetuation.
- Does having the case off like that interfere with your monitor/radio/TV reception? - How do you keep the cards from wobbling in their slots and/or snapping at the connectors? - The drives seem far from your chair. Do you have to get up to change disks? - Is the thing under the floppy drive a CD-ROM drive or what?
I love the idea of computer users learning to program. I don't know how interested I would be in computers if I couldn't program them. Programming is my favorite part of computing, but Winblows takes that away from people by completely shutting them out from the way the computer really works. This is why I loath it. I like mucking around in C++ and assembly (even though Linux doesn't really let me do anything in assembly:-(, and DOS crashes half the time:-/)
I haven't really seen anything done in Python yet, so I guess I'll have to search for it. I started out in QBasic (poor me), then moved on up to C++ once I figured out how to do graphics with it (which was mainly what I was using QB for anyway). I took one look at VB and recoiled in disgust.
...Where at the end there's a hologram from the one species that was the only one in the universe, until they split into humans, vulcans, klingons, etc.?
I know it's just an excuse for their costume dept. to slack off, but I thought it was kind of a nice theory.
...that it would be that fuzzy. The drawings you see in textbooks always show a completely dark circle inside a slightly dark circle, though this view does make more sense, if you think about it.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think they should be PDFs. It's not always the most convenient thing to have a PDF viewer open at the same time as whatever you're tring to figure out. Help systems I've encountered are very rarely helpful. Websites can be nice, especially for info that needs to be current (ie bug reports). I think printed manuals are still needed if you want to sell to the most clueless customers (puhdiff? what's a puhdiff?). Printed manuals are definitely better for anything requiring rebooting and any hardware installation/configuration. If you install something that messes up your booting capability, how else do you get help?
The PDFs might be good if someone makes a device for viewing PDFs from CDs that is completely independant of the computer, and cheap enough so everyone has one. This doesn't look too likely with the current cost of displays.
The flat panels kinda remind me of star trek >=TNG type panels... now all they need are touchscreens and a star trek theme, and they could change the name from Atlantis to Enterprise. No warp drive though... gotta wait till 2060s for Zephram Cochran (sp?) (OK, I've been watching first contact too much).
I haven't done much searching recently, but I have jazz++ from Jazzware, and it works fairly well for hand sequencing. I couldn't get it to record, but I probably have an old version. Looking at the page now, it looks like they're going opensource.
If what you're saying is true, the "requirements" on the sides of boxes and on websites are false. I keep seeing very high requirements for games IMHO with only slightly better graphics than I got with a 486. What used to only need DOS, 8MB RAM, a CDROM drive, and a sound card now needs winblows, a 3D accelerator, and 64MB. I don't get it. Maybe it's all the overhead of having an actual OS instead of DOS. Maybe what we need is a boot-floppy based game system that has all the 3d and input routines on the floppy and boots the game on the CD. And maybe I'm completely wrong.
And my complaint is not with price, but with the bother of getting a game, finding out it doesn't work, waiting for the upgrade to come, installing it and hoping it works.
I don't get why all the new games have such high system requirements. I know they want to have spiffy graphics, but at the expense of availability? There should be settings to allow for crummy graphics, but fast play. X-wing and TIE Fighter only needed a 486, and I still consider them to have pretty good graphics. Heck, Wing Commander III had excellent graphics, and it just barely ran on a 486-50 (but for some reason it refuses to work with my newer computer). Now I see all games having anything to do with 3d needing an accelerator, and if not, an absurd amount of memory (no single program should consume 128MB!).
Now that I'm done ranting about requirements, I just wanted to say that this looks to be a great game.
The real questions with this display combination thing are "What's the best balance between number of displays and their size?" and "Do they sell a product like that?"
They have a display made from four displays 1/4 the size, but would it be more or less expensive to combine 9 1/9 size or 16 1/16 size displays? I'm thinking that if the joining process is cheap enough, you could have displays made up of 1" squares, thus reducing the cost of each display (fewer pixels to go wrong), and the entire display, to a point, that point being where the cost of joining (and calibrating) the little displays meets the savings of having smaller units.
This looks really neat, to say the least. They don't mention a price, though. It's probably well above $1000, seeing as it's basically a flat-panel display with calibrated backlighting and fancy circuitry.
Soo many applications... I could probably rig POV-ray to do spiffy 3d with it, it would rock for 3d games (well, maybe not.. it seems like you have to keep your head straight, not something that happens often when gaming), it might also be good for VRML... Ooh the possibilities...
I remember in that in the book Xenocide by Card, Ender used a method of speech called "subvocalizing" to communicate with his computer-friend without anyone else hearing it. Is this actually possible? If so, why aren't we doing that instead of speaking aloud? It seems to me that would solve the problem of talking loudly to a little black box where it was inappropriate. Someone tell me if this is just something Card made up.
I once made a lego machine gun that shot an assembly of a 2x1 flat brick with the ridges in it and a 2x2 flat brick underneath with a 2x2 gear connected to my motor. The Technic gears fit nicely into the ridges, as long as there's only one bump-worth of them. The fire rate was poor because I couldn't get the "bullets" out of the holder fast enough. Also, aiming was limited, because I had to point it down to get the bullets out, then point it to where I wanted to shoot, while the thing came out. Those things do get accelerated pretty fast, though. Not much of a range, I guess my batteries were weak at that point.
when I turn on my system with the printer on, linux somehow turns it off without realizing it.
it then won't let me set it up because it looks like it's not there when it's off.
how's that for "lack of drivers"?
BTW, if someone can help me with this, I'd be very appreciative.
Couldn't you have a directable laser beam or something reflecting off of the inside of the windshield? Since the laser would be brighter than the outside when you're using it, you would be able to create a visible image on the windshield without replacing it. You don't want it too bright, though, or it'll burn your eyes out :-P
Another thing with that is that the image shifts when you do; you wouldn't have that with something embedded in the glass. I'm not sure if it would match up properly, though.
Using the Internet is like walking around town. You can just go around looking at stuff, you can buy things from stores, you can have conversations, you can meet new people, etc. Why do we need a license to do these things? Is it because we can also do harmful things? We can do that when we're not online without a license.
Another thing... did you notice that they plan to discriminate against racists(can you say 'hypocracy'?)? I'm not saying I like racists, I just support everyone's right to free speech. That's basically all you can do on the Internet, speak(you can buy stuff too, but how is that harmful?).
Anyway, that's just how I feel about it.
While I admit that doom, etc. are rather gory, and some sims are a bit violent, that's no reason to ban them. Violence is a fact of life. In any group of people, some will be more violent than others, and the idealists in the group want to restrict their violence. This might be OK if the violent people were massacring (sp?) lots of others, but what we're talking about are video games. Have you ever seen a report that a video game directly, seriously harmed someone? Further, have you ever seen a study that says that a significant percentage of the violent game playing community turn into violent killers themselves? I thought not.
Why don't the people trying to restrict violent games put their energy into trying to stop RL violence? And if they say that the violent games are causing the RL violence, do they actually have any proof that violent games cause people who wouldn't be violent otherwise to be violent? Games kill no one. It's people who kill people.
Netscape 4.07 Kernel 2.0.36 RH5.2
I love xpilot, but I can only really play against the robots, because whenever I try the servers in the metaserver, they're too slow and/or have nobody else there. Are all these things really in Europe, like the names seem to say? Or is it just that I'm an idiot for trying to play it on a 56K dialup?
W2K: Why $2K? Why not!
M$ product (first release, so it has an ant farm worth of bugs in it), costing more than a decent home computer just so you can have unlimited remote users...
--or--
A Linux distro costing less than the hard drive you put it on which has been refined over years of hacking AND costs nothing to host an unlimited number of users on an unlimited number of machines...
Which would you choose?
I think pre-loading is a Bad Thing; look at Windoze. The only reason windoze is on so many systems now is that it was pre-loaded and people were too lazy or ignorant to take it off. Then M$ got lazy too. Since nobody switched to anything else, they figured they could skimp on the product and charge more and make a fortune (which they did).
Also, from a technical standpoint, it might be hard to make an installation that would work on every system you put it into. I suppose you could have some sort of setup utility that figures everything out for you, but still, you would have to have the information needed to run on many different types of machines on the drive already, each system info section would waste disk space for all systems but the one it was designed for. It just seems like a waste of perfectly good disk space to me.
It's not like you could install it on only the motherboard. If you're going to bundle it with any single piece of hardware, the logical choice would be the hard drive. If you buy a motherboard, you could just be replacing a broken one. If you buy a hard drive, you're going to have lots of extra room to put a new OS on. Of course, neither of these choices really make sense, because you can't install an OS without a keyboard, monitor, power supply, and either a CD-ROM or floppy disk drive (not on a normal system anyway. I could concieve of a system where you install an OS via a network card or something...).
First of all, this guy didn't do anything yet, and even if he did what his plan says, it wouldn't be creation of any sort. The article says his method calls for the use of dead cell parts. If you took a computer that didn't work because the monitor was broken and the power supply blew, and replaced the monitor and power supply, you didn't create it. Real creation is something from nothing or from things naturally occurring in an environment without life (as someone said, from dust).
Second, this is not creation like God did. In order for God to have created life, He had to be outside the universe, because if He was in the universe He would be living and someone would have had to create Him, and if THAT someone was in the universe, he would have had to be created by someone... ad infinitum.
Anyway, creation doesn't work when God is inside the universe. The guy in this article is definitely inside the universe, so what he's doing is not creation, it's merely perpetuation.
Just my $/50.
- Does having the case off like that interfere with your monitor/radio/TV reception?
- How do you keep the cards from wobbling in their slots and/or snapping at the connectors?
- The drives seem far from your chair. Do you have to get up to change disks?
- Is the thing under the floppy drive a CD-ROM drive or what?
I love the idea of computer users learning to program. I don't know how interested I would be in computers if I couldn't program them. Programming is my favorite part of computing, but Winblows takes that away from people by completely shutting them out from the way the computer really works. This is why I loath it. I like mucking around in C++ and assembly (even though Linux doesn't really let me do anything in assembly :-(, and DOS crashes half the time :-/)
I haven't really seen anything done in Python yet, so I guess I'll have to search for it. I started out in QBasic (poor me), then moved on up to C++ once I figured out how to do graphics with it (which was mainly what I was using QB for anyway). I took one look at VB and recoiled in disgust.
Time to go Python hunting...
...Where at the end there's a hologram from the one species that was the only one in the universe, until they split into humans, vulcans, klingons, etc.?
I know it's just an excuse for their costume dept. to slack off, but I thought it was kind of a nice theory.
...that it would be that fuzzy. The drawings you see in textbooks always show a completely dark circle inside a slightly dark circle, though this view does make more sense, if you think about it.
200MB of disk space?!! I remember when excellent games came on 1 disk, maybe 2. Remember Serf City or Hexxagon?
That aside, the graphics on this thing look extreemly good.