I don't know how willing I would be to accept an award from an award institution-no matter how reputable-that I knew got some of its money from the KKK. That's an extreme, I realize, but I'm trying to make a point.
I see your point, but what if you used the opportunity of your acceptance speech to point out loudly and clearly what a bunch of racist pinheads the KKK are? Would that be okay? Or what if you publicly donated all of the award money to the Anti-Defamation League or the Southern Poverty Law Center? Perhaps that would be a more effective statement than quietly refusing the award.
I'm personally not very worried about RMS selling out to the Dark Side for a few thousand bucks. He's had plenty of opportunities to sell out over the years, somehow I don't feel like he's going to start now.
this is in no way condoning the awful violence that has plagued Northern Ireland, but...
Surely you are aware that England colonized Ireland in a most brutal and naked way for hundreds of years? That Ireland only gained its independence in the 20th century? That many Irish feel resentment that a significant chunk of their country remains in the hands of colonizers?
Now, on the other hand, it must be said that a majority of people in Ulster are Protestant / Pro-British, but still the rights of the minority must be respected.
Everytime I see an article about Sun on Slashdot, no matter how positive, there's always a lot of mudraking going on? Bitter SGI folks? OS envy? Hatred of computing corporations?
Honestly, I think a big part of it is the last one. There is a general anti-corporate feeling in the community. Now, as with most things, that feeling can be healthy to a degree, but you don't want to overdo it.
Also, speaking as a Sun shareholder, I think everyone should run out and buy as many SPARCstations as possible. Now if I only had the money to both a) keep my SUNW and b) actually buy a new SPARC for myself.
PS. I think the term you're looking for is muckraking.
Sorry, Bruce. I guess I should have actually looked at the source before flapping my virtual gums.;-) Lesson learned.
And re: what the poster below me says, yeah, I'd probably better go in and look at the NE2k code to be sure that all my packets aren't being forwarded to the line-eater.;-)
First of all, I like Iceland very much. Both the people and the country seem very nice from what little I know. So my post shouldn't be construed as slander on Icelanders.
However, it is my understanding that Iceland is not an official voting member of NATO, but has a defence "understanding" with the alliance.
And as far as Vikings, again it was my understanding that enjoyed a good bit of pillage and rape (but then who doesn't) until they were settled down by Christian missionaries. So the Scandinavians had a reputation for fierceness until about the 12th-13th century, and after that, they have a reputation for being as gentle as lambs.
England in particular was terrorized in the Middle Ages by Norsemen raiding expeditions.
But since the US is, in the current era, the dominant member of the international oligarchy --- the guarantor, if you will, of THE SYSTEM --- and since terrorism is more or less defined as the use of violent and somewhat random means to overthrow the system... well, trying to define the US as terrorist is oxymoronic with those definitions, isn't it?:)
Excellent, thoughtful point. thank you for pointing this out.
the notion of a religious theocracy grates against my nerves pretty strongly.
As opposed to a secular theocracy?;-) Seriously I agree with you here... Neither Iran nor Yugoslavia nor any of the other nations on the US's official shit list is exactly a libertarian utopia. So in most respects, Americans are better off than most in terms of political freedom. However we are still very very far from the ideals of Thomas Jefferson et al who advocated a limited Federal government that was powerful within its domain, yet whose domain was very limited. The Feds seem to think that everyone's business is their own. They also seem to think that duplicating every state law at a Federal level is also a keen idea.
Of course, it should be said that the blame for all of this rests squarely with the American voters, that tiny fraction of the adult population that actually gets out there and determines who runs things. We elected these assholes who wrote these idiotic laws, now we have to deal with the consequences.
That said, a poster in this thread had an excellent idea... Ireland is a fine, fine, non-aligned country. And, I happen to be of Irish ancestry myself, or so I am told. And my girlfriend has red hair, so she's GOT to be Irish, right?! And if I can claim Irish citizenship, then I'm entitled to travel around various EU nations such as the Netherlands. Look out Europe, here I come!
Download from Iceland (These 360,000 brave people does not have an army) and you are probably safe.
Now that's some mushy-headed thinking. Did you ever stop to wonder why Iceland doesn't have an army? Could it be because they have big, powerful neighbors like NATO to protect them? Or that they are a tiny island in the middle of nowhere, thousands of miles from the nearest potential agressor?
Remember, Icelanders are the decendants of Vikings, a very fierce and warlike tribe!
I thought Becker works for NASA, the National Aeronautical and Space Administration, not the NSA, the black-helicopter National Security Administration.
Furthermore, I thought that Becker's drivers are copyright by him personally, and not NASA or whatever agency he works for.
You have a good point that the US Government is not allowed to copyright anything per se; anything they produce is in the public domain.
As a semi-patriotic American, I must agree as well. It's not just invading other countries (though Slobo is no Boy Scout) or supporting repressive regimes (Indonesia, Nicaragua, etc) it's mainly Federal oppresion of its own citizens. The main example of this is the War on (Some) Drugs / Minorities / Damn Longhairs / Amendments I-X [inclusive] / All Non-God-Fearing-Right-Thinking-People-Everywhere.
On the other hand, and this is a big other hand, not too many countries are much better. I would rather live in Fascist USA than Uber-Fascist China. The list of free, democratic, non-warlike nations grows ever shorter... hmmm, I wonder if the Netherlands is looking for a new immigrant who is an excellent Python programmer... Only problem is I don't speak Dutch. Let's see, I hear New Zealand is nice, and they don't invade hardly anybody. Of course they do subscribe, or at least give lip service to, the War on Drug Users (err, except Alcohol, which kills more people every year than heroin, cocaine, and others combined.) And nicotine. And wait, I forgot caffeine. Errr, where was I?
That was another thing on my mind! Thank you for pointing this out! Yet another example of anti-Wookie racisim! If it wasn't for Chewie, they never would have got into that detention center to save Her Worshipfullness' ass!
I know you're joking, but debian/non-free is oh, several hundred megabytes;-)
[ I don't have a 3dfx. Think sour grapes:-P ]
Voodoo 1's are about $30 these days. V2's are less than $100. There's really no excuse.
I only have a measly P-233mmx with a V1 and Q3 test, especially the new build, is perfectly playable. Even on the lowest detail settings it looks nicer than Quake2.
Why no Wookies in Episode I?? Has Lucas and the rest of the Lucasfilm crew suddenly turned against our most beloved of characters, Chewbacca, and his most noble race, the Wookies?
Why are there (apparently) no Wookies in SW:TPM?
I can attribute this to nothing but latent anti-Wookie racism. First, you slowly write them out of the trilogy. Then, they're nothing but a bunch of lazy Wooks who will rip your arms out of your sockets if you so much as breathe wrong. Of course, you wouldn't want them living in your neighborhood and marrying your daughter. Unless you live in Kentucky, in which case your daughter probably has more hair than a wookie.
This wookie racism has to stop! Remember, Chewbacca is hundreds of years old by the time of SW:ANH. Why shouldn't he be in the first trilogy? I am going to write Lucas a letter and explain to him my feelings on this subject. Just as soon as they let me out of the Institute.
... on the topic of this thread is that it's really not a big deal to recieve email at root (as long as you don't actually log in as root to read it.) Any sensible person will.forward all of root's mail to a user account. Even better, mailer daemons like sendmail and exim will take care of this automatically.
Berating this guy for using a root@ email address is silly and showing a snotty attitude.
I have always wondered what the big deal about logging in as root was about. Why is it so forbidden and dangerous? Are you afraid you will accidently delete something or fubar it?
Well, yes, that is the first and foremost danger, probably. I've experienced this myself, once accidentally deleting my main.netscape folder when I thought I was in a different directory (or something, it was late at night.)
Besides this, if you are using root for your day-to-day work, you might run a binary or script that would be a big no-no to run as root. Like some malicious trojan horse code. While there is always a slight danger installing any software that you haven't thoroughly reviewed, this danger is lessened when the software is only run with the priveleges of a normal user.
If you are running a strictly single-user system and are not connected to a network, you could probably "get away with" logging in as root all the time. But there is no real reason to do this, just create a damn user! Unix security will protect you from your own late-night ineptitude!
1. There isn't a current framerate counter. You can use 'timerefresh' to get a guess based on the current position.
Ah, thanks. Very helpful in testing the program. I understand it's not 100% scientific. By the way, in the FPS I quote in the rest of this post, in all cases I am standing on the quad damage of map 1.
2. Because you have vsync on. Turn it off. Quake3 has renderered its pass and is waiting to for the vblank interval to switch buffers. You can turn off vsync by doing this in the shell:
export FX_GLIDE_SWAPINTERVAL=0
Hmm. Well, that did seem to help with the FPS. But still, watching top at another console, there is never less than 10% CPU idle and more often it's about 15%. This isn't a super big deal to me, I'm just wondering why it doesn't use 100% like Quake2 did. Perhaps, methinks, Q3 is significantly more efficient in its processing.
3. Quake3 is a _lot_ more demanding than Q2. It pushes about five to ten times as many triangles as Q2 did. Use "fastest" in the video configuration along with r_lodbias 2 in the console.
It's understood that Q3 is a lot more demanding. Hell, my machine used to be quite a sweet platform for Q2 (and still is of course) but in Q3, it's barely meeting the minimum. That's really fine with me, because Q3 has such obvious graphics improvements. (Now gameplay improvements, that remains to be seen.)
5. Great! The only real problem people are having is that Q3 blows up if you don't have a 16bit depth on the desktop. I'm going to revise this in the next test relesae.
Luckily I always run in 16 bpp so I didn't have this problem.
Here are some random comments:
I found the cleaner interface (than Q2) to be nice and certainly more readable.
One time in the middle of a deathmatch it quit with a signal 8. I can't get it to repeat it so far, but it only just happened.
In general everything looks pretty nice, even on my low end system. I found a huge speedup switching from lightmap to vertex graphics. About 10 fps. The other settings only affected the fps by about 1 or 2, but all of the goodies on tends to add up. High geometry seems to cost me about 5 fps. The visual difference is not that striking on my (P233-Voodoo1) machine.
With all the graphics settings on the lowest possible, including texture quality slider, I sometimes get strange, tripping blending and morphing effects on textures, especially close to walls. It's actually kind of cool to look at but detracts from gameplay. The problem seems to go away when I bump the slider up to the next level. Maybe I can send a screenshot of what I'm talking about or something.
16 bit textures are noticably faster (about 3-4 fps) than compressed on my system. I didn't try 32 bit (ha ha I wish.)
Considering that this is a pre-alpha test, I found the general gameplay to be fairly smooth and involving for an experienced Quaker. I couldn't say how Joe Q. Public is going to react to an net only game like this. I'm sure most longtime quakers like me will buy Q3A and love it, especially the Linux box. It's just more incentive to go out there and get a couple of SLI Voodoo2's and a fast Celeron...
Actually, I've heard that the TNT2 is going to blow away the Voodoo3, and furthermore that Riva is going to release programming specs for Linux. Can anyone confirm this? Zoid, if TNT2 can be made to work on Linux, you think Q3A will support it?
1. Is it possible to find out the current framerate?
2. Why does top show that Q3A uses at most 80% of processor resources? Shouldn't it use nearly 100% for better performance?
3. I've got a measly P-233mmx with a Voodoo 1. So the game is far from fast or smooth. It is roughly playable on the *lowest* of every detail / graphics setting. Quake2 was fairly smooth on my Linux box. And it used 100% CPU.
4. It seems to play faster in 640x480 than the next step down (512xsomething).
5. Other than that, it was easy to set up and use.
Sounds about like me... my grades weren't great in HS, but I did have good test scores and consequently was expected to excell in college. Unforunately, that is not the case. Some of my classes I do well in, and others I'm failing for various reasons. I am like you; when I am interested in a problem, I rip it to shreds. When I'm not, well, I tend to go watch the Simpsons, etc. Only I'm 22 and still 2 years away from graduation (at least.) Of course I did take lots of time off to work as a sysadmin. Still, I regret nothing!!! MUAHAHAHAHA!!!!!
...of many years, and who has many many hours of live Dead on mp3, I hope this has something to do with some naughtiness on Deadabase's part (ad banners?) and not a general crackdown on trading Dead shows. I really, really, really hope that. I find it hard to believe anything else, in fact.
Of course trading tapes and DAT's is no different at all than trading mp3's. I think maybe where Deadabase got in trouble is that they tried to portray themselves as the "official site on the net" for downloading Dead shows, a big no-no.
I will be really worried if they go after Sugarmegs.
They can have my 4-6-69 Set II when they pry it from my cold dead fingers!
This is not a flame, but an honest question from someone with very little BSD background (other than legend.)
Why the splits between Net, Open, and Free, and god knows what else BSD? Why do people say "FreeBSD is great because it's one distribution" ignoring the existence of OpenBSD etc?
I just don't understand.
On a totally unrelated note, is there any interest in a Python script that makes automating URL submissions to a variety of web search engines very easy? I've written one recently and I'm wondering if there's any interest.
Email me in private if you like (remove the SPAM-B-GONE.)
Slashdot Mirror
I was planning on running 1.0 of the client or nothing at all (sticking to rc5 which is not a memory hog.)
I'm still (apparently) in the Stone Age, running Glibc2.0 on a Pentium-233mmx.
I don't see a client for me on their unix download page.
Is this true? Should I just wait? I don't plan on upgrading to glibc2.1 anytime in the near future.
At least not on my *main* workstation.
Thanks
Contrary to popular belief, upgrading to each minor kernel revision is not required by law!
The Kernel Gestapo is not going to bust down your door and demand to see your papers and ask why have you not upgraded to zee newest release?
I see your point, but what if you used the opportunity of your acceptance speech to point out loudly and clearly what a bunch of racist pinheads the KKK are? Would that be okay? Or what if you publicly donated all of the award money to the Anti-Defamation League or the Southern Poverty Law Center? Perhaps that would be a more effective statement than quietly refusing the award.
I'm personally not very worried about RMS selling out to the Dark Side for a few thousand bucks. He's had plenty of opportunities to sell out over the years, somehow I don't feel like he's going to start now.
Surely you are aware that England colonized Ireland in a most brutal and naked way for hundreds of years? That Ireland only gained its independence in the 20th century? That many Irish feel resentment that a significant chunk of their country remains in the hands of colonizers?
Now, on the other hand, it must be said that a majority of people in Ulster are Protestant / Pro-British, but still the rights of the minority must be respected.
Honestly, I think a big part of it is the last one. There is a general anti-corporate feeling in the community. Now, as with most things, that feeling can be healthy to a degree, but you don't want to overdo it.
Also, speaking as a Sun shareholder, I think everyone should run out and buy as many SPARCstations as possible. Now if I only had the money to both a) keep my SUNW and b) actually buy a new SPARC for myself.
PS. I think the term you're looking for is muckraking.
And re: what the poster below me says, yeah, I'd probably better go in and look at the NE2k code to be sure that all my packets aren't being forwarded to the line-eater. ;-)
However, it is my understanding that Iceland is not an official voting member of NATO, but has a defence "understanding" with the alliance.
And as far as Vikings, again it was my understanding that enjoyed a good bit of pillage and rape (but then who doesn't) until they were settled down by Christian missionaries. So the Scandinavians had a reputation for fierceness until about the 12th-13th century, and after that, they have a reputation for being as gentle as lambs.
England in particular was terrorized in the Middle Ages by Norsemen raiding expeditions.
Excellent, thoughtful point. thank you for pointing this out.
the notion of a religious theocracy grates against my nerves pretty strongly.
As opposed to a secular theocracy? ;-) Seriously I agree with you here... Neither Iran nor Yugoslavia nor any of the other nations on the US's official shit list is exactly a libertarian utopia. So in most respects, Americans are better off than most in terms of political freedom. However we are still very very far from the ideals of Thomas Jefferson et al who advocated a limited Federal government that was powerful within its domain, yet whose domain was very limited. The Feds seem to think that everyone's business is their own. They also seem to think that duplicating every state law at a Federal level is also a keen idea.
Of course, it should be said that the blame for all of this rests squarely with the American voters, that tiny fraction of the adult population that actually gets out there and determines who runs things. We elected these assholes who wrote these idiotic laws, now we have to deal with the consequences.
That said, a poster in this thread had an excellent idea... Ireland is a fine, fine, non-aligned country. And, I happen to be of Irish ancestry myself, or so I am told. And my girlfriend has red hair, so she's GOT to be Irish, right?! And if I can claim Irish citizenship, then I'm entitled to travel around various EU nations such as the Netherlands. Look out Europe, here I come!
Now that's some mushy-headed thinking. Did you ever stop to wonder why Iceland doesn't have an army? Could it be because they have big, powerful neighbors like NATO to protect them? Or that they are a tiny island in the middle of nowhere, thousands of miles from the nearest potential agressor?
Remember, Icelanders are the decendants of Vikings, a very fierce and warlike tribe!
Furthermore, I thought that Becker's drivers are copyright by him personally, and not NASA or whatever agency he works for.
You have a good point that the US Government is not allowed to copyright anything per se; anything they produce is in the public domain.
On the other hand, and this is a big other hand, not too many countries are much better. I would rather live in Fascist USA than Uber-Fascist China. The list of free, democratic, non-warlike nations grows ever shorter... hmmm, I wonder if the Netherlands is looking for a new immigrant who is an excellent Python programmer... Only problem is I don't speak Dutch. Let's see, I hear New Zealand is nice, and they don't invade hardly anybody. Of course they do subscribe, or at least give lip service to, the War on Drug Users (err, except Alcohol, which kills more people every year than heroin, cocaine, and others combined.) And nicotine. And wait, I forgot caffeine. Errr, where was I?
Sometimes you get shown the light in the strangest of places if you look at it right!
---Anonymous Deadhead since 1990
That was another thing on my mind! Thank you for pointing this out! Yet another example of anti-Wookie racisim! If it wasn't for Chewie, they never would have got into that detention center to save Her Worshipfullness' ass!
I know you're joking, but debian/non-free is oh, several hundred megabytes ;-)
[ I don't have a 3dfx. Think sour grapes :-P ]
Voodoo 1's are about $30 these days. V2's are less than $100. There's really no excuse.
I only have a measly P-233mmx with a V1 and Q3 test, especially the new build, is perfectly playable. Even on the lowest detail settings it looks nicer than Quake2.
Why are there (apparently) no Wookies in SW:TPM?
I can attribute this to nothing but latent anti-Wookie racism. First, you slowly write them out of the trilogy. Then, they're nothing but a bunch of lazy Wooks who will rip your arms out of your sockets if you so much as breathe wrong. Of course, you wouldn't want them living in your neighborhood and marrying your daughter. Unless you live in Kentucky, in which case your daughter probably has more hair than a wookie.
This wookie racism has to stop! Remember, Chewbacca is hundreds of years old by the time of SW:ANH. Why shouldn't he be in the first trilogy? I am going to write Lucas a letter and explain to him my feelings on this subject. Just as soon as they let me out of the Institute.
Thank you for your time.
Berating this guy for using a root@ email address is silly and showing a snotty attitude.
Well, yes, that is the first and foremost danger, probably. I've experienced this myself, once accidentally deleting my main .netscape folder when I thought I was in a different directory (or something, it was late at night.)
Besides this, if you are using root for your day-to-day work, you might run a binary or script that would be a big no-no to run as root. Like some malicious trojan horse code. While there is always a slight danger installing any software that you haven't thoroughly reviewed, this danger is lessened when the software is only run with the priveleges of a normal user.
If you are running a strictly single-user system and are not connected to a network, you could probably "get away with" logging in as root all the time. But there is no real reason to do this, just create a damn user! Unix security will protect you from your own late-night ineptitude!
got another signal 8 just now...
Ah, thanks. Very helpful in testing the program. I understand it's not 100% scientific. By the way, in the FPS I quote in the rest of this post, in all cases I am standing on the quad damage of map 1.
2. Because you have vsync on. Turn it off. Quake3 has renderered its pass and is waiting to for the vblank interval to switch buffers. You can turn off vsync by doing this in the shell:
export FX_GLIDE_SWAPINTERVAL=0
Hmm. Well, that did seem to help with the FPS. But still, watching top at another console, there is never less than 10% CPU idle and more often it's about 15%. This isn't a super big deal to me, I'm just wondering why it doesn't use 100% like Quake2 did. Perhaps, methinks, Q3 is significantly more efficient in its processing.
3. Quake3 is a _lot_ more demanding than Q2. It pushes about five to ten times as many triangles as Q2 did. Use "fastest" in the video configuration along with r_lodbias 2 in the console.
It's understood that Q3 is a lot more demanding. Hell, my machine used to be quite a sweet platform for Q2 (and still is of course) but in Q3, it's barely meeting the minimum. That's really fine with me, because Q3 has such obvious graphics improvements. (Now gameplay improvements, that remains to be seen.)
5. Great! The only real problem people are having is that Q3 blows up if you don't have a 16bit depth on the desktop. I'm going to revise this in the next test relesae.
Luckily I always run in 16 bpp so I didn't have this problem.
Here are some random comments:
I found the cleaner interface (than Q2) to be nice and certainly more readable.
One time in the middle of a deathmatch it quit with a signal 8. I can't get it to repeat it so far, but it only just happened.
In general everything looks pretty nice, even on my low end system. I found a huge speedup switching from lightmap to vertex graphics. About 10 fps. The other settings only affected the fps by about 1 or 2, but all of the goodies on tends to add up. High geometry seems to cost me about 5 fps. The visual difference is not that striking on my (P233-Voodoo1) machine.
With all the graphics settings on the lowest possible, including texture quality slider, I sometimes get strange, tripping blending and morphing effects on textures, especially close to walls. It's actually kind of cool to look at but detracts from gameplay. The problem seems to go away when I bump the slider up to the next level. Maybe I can send a screenshot of what I'm talking about or something.
16 bit textures are noticably faster (about 3-4 fps) than compressed on my system. I didn't try 32 bit (ha ha I wish.)
Considering that this is a pre-alpha test, I found the general gameplay to be fairly smooth and involving for an experienced Quaker. I couldn't say how Joe Q. Public is going to react to an net only game like this. I'm sure most longtime quakers like me will buy Q3A and love it, especially the Linux box. It's just more incentive to go out there and get a couple of SLI Voodoo2's and a fast Celeron...
Actually, I've heard that the TNT2 is going to blow away the Voodoo3, and furthermore that Riva is going to release programming specs for Linux. Can anyone confirm this? Zoid, if TNT2 can be made to work on Linux, you think Q3A will support it?
2. Why does top show that Q3A uses at most 80% of processor resources? Shouldn't it use nearly 100% for better performance?
3. I've got a measly P-233mmx with a Voodoo 1. So the game is far from fast or smooth. It is roughly playable on the *lowest* of every detail / graphics setting. Quake2 was fairly smooth on my Linux box. And it used 100% CPU.
4. It seems to play faster in 640x480 than the next step down (512xsomething).
5. Other than that, it was easy to set up and use.
Sounds about like me... my grades weren't great in HS, but I did have good test scores and consequently was expected to excell in college. Unforunately, that is not the case. Some of my classes I do well in, and others I'm failing for various reasons. I am like you; when I am interested in a problem, I rip it to shreds. When I'm not, well, I tend to go watch the Simpsons, etc. Only I'm 22 and still 2 years away from graduation (at least.) Of course I did take lots of time off to work as a sysadmin. Still, I regret nothing!!! MUAHAHAHAHA!!!!!
Of course trading tapes and DAT's is no different at all than trading mp3's. I think maybe where Deadabase got in trouble is that they tried to portray themselves as the "official site on the net" for downloading Dead shows, a big no-no.
I will be really worried if they go after Sugarmegs.
They can have my 4-6-69 Set II when they pry it from my cold dead fingers!
How is this discovery "further proof" of your nutty fairy tales?
This is not a flame, but an honest question from someone with very little BSD background (other than legend.)
Why the splits between Net, Open, and Free, and god knows what else BSD? Why do people say "FreeBSD is great because it's one distribution" ignoring the existence of OpenBSD etc?
I just don't understand.
On a totally unrelated note, is there any interest in a Python script that makes automating URL submissions to a variety of web search engines very easy? I've written one recently and I'm wondering if there's any interest.
Email me in private if you like (remove the SPAM-B-GONE.)