FPS on PCs is more like bloodsports. It's *serious* domination play, and the speed rush of going up against the best players is like no other experience. . Some people relax by hunting other people, and FPSes are a socially acceptable way of doing that. So, I can see your point, but the 'we' in your first sentence actually means 'I'.
Given widespread availability of *good* hardware compilation tools, providing a C++, Java, C# level of abstraction to the actual hardware, reverse engineering will only have to take place at the level of the interfaces between chips. This is just a matter of time. DRM-like measures are just pissing in the wind.
So, why do you *eat*? It may strike you as a frivolous question, but what motivates you to eat, to have sex? Do you ever get angry, and if so *why*?
Have you ever tried drugs, prescription or otherwise, that have substantially changed your personality?
Why are you a geek?
What do you imagine to be the rational and/or psychological underpinnings of the choices you've made?
I'm using a usb HSDPA modem supplied by '3', in the UK. The system in question is a laptop running XP. In Swansea (a small city in South Wales), I get most of the promised 3.6 Mbps bandwidth. Ten miles West down the road, towards the more rural end of Wales, I can only get a 57.6kbps GPRS connection. I can't comment on latency as I've not used it for gaming. Download limit on my contract is 7Gb per month, which is a bit lame but acceptable. The modem software is big and ugly but works. The only real worry I have is that I'm accustomed to running my Windows and Linux boxen behind a decent, external, firewall. I've not tried to get this working via Linux yet.
It's kind of dangerous to make sweeping generalisations. The closed-source drivers for the ATI Mobility Xpress 200M are problematic. It wasn't that simple. And, sorry, but Ubuntu didn't support VPN over wireless out of the box (not a totally unreasonable thing to want), and the small plethora of utilities that might have facilitated this wouldn't work. I got it working under Ubuntu and Gentoo by writing a bash/sed script. I notice that you elected to avoid comment on the wireless and vpn issues. Sure I could have written the relevant software myself but at the time I was working on a physics degree. For the record, I've done things in the past like fixing a bug in the ISA NE2000 clone driver under a rather earlier version of Linux. I've also produced a CD-bootable firewall-oriented system (not distributed... based on the non-stateful packet filter in the 1.x kernel and therefore a little insecure - it was a learning experience).
To balance this, the closed source default drivers under XP were also somewhat crap, but they worked with most of my games. In the end, I went with the Radeon Omega drivers, which are faster and much less buggy.
My experience doesn't match yours.
I'd agree that XP doesn't always come up with a pefect install. It often lacks wifi drivera, and it needed the approriate video and wifi drivers on a recent re-install I did for my brother's HP (not a recent machine, nor antediluvian). However, your assertion that Linux is an easier install is, er, untrue. I have XP and Gentoo installed on my laptop (ATI Radeon x200m video, audio AC97 codec). I've *had* Ubuntu. Ubuntu came up with the right screen res but no acceleration. The wifi drivers were a minor pain to install, but a much bigger pain was the VPN script I had to write to get access to my university's wan (Via MPPE encryption vpn, otherwise a straightforward thing). So, maybe you have no idea what you're talking about.
On the other hand, if you possess some talent for some area of thought, say, maths, and you work with people who are less talented, it's abundantly obvious that you have more innate ability and can achieve more for far less work. I'm not a genius, but I am relatively imaginative, I do have some feel for maths, and I've worked with a partner of mine for nearly ten years, who *was* and *is* a genius. She's a hard worker, while I'm something of a slacker. I know when I'm outclassed, though, just as I've known perfectly well that I have, in my turn, outclassed other people, and with my minimal effort to their painfully won achievements.
People are not equal. People are not equal physically, and if you accept that the mind is an epiphenomenon of the hardware on which it runs, then to render people equal, you'd need some kind of homeostatic process that implements the equaliser. Show me this process, or admit that you believe in the soul.
I suspect that this opinion is held by those people who would wish, for personal reasons, to seek to characterise originality and genius as a mixture of obsession and hard work. If they can convince themselves and others, then at some level they can think 'I could do all those things, but I have a life'. It's just comfort-zone area-denial for the self-deluded.
It looks as there there are multiple paths to this kind of phenomenon, the first potential path having been discovered by Stanley Miller and Harold Urey. So, yes, it's beautiful, but it may also be rather more probable than you might imagine.
The idea is to focus on an area of the genome that isn't strongly conserved, so, the genes that code for histamine would be ignored (because if they altered enough, they'd kill the organism, and it would have no children). So, presumed junk DNA. Still, a lot of assumption.
In humans, although IANAMB, ISTR that environmental stress can alter the genetic mutation rate. Just one potantial spanner for the clockwork.
The model for mutation rate in mitochondrial DNA has a confidence factor of plus or minus an order of magnitude anyway, but the central figure for the lifetime of the modern human race, ie, 100k years, is quoted as gospel. *That* annoys me.
Mmm... YMMV. I installed Kubuntu 7.04 for my mum, and she's in her late sixties. Flash works fine under 32-bit Linux, and the big majority of the video-enabled sites work under it. It's *still* not a completely trivial install but it's a million times more sorted than used to be the case. I anticipated a glitch when my dad claimed that my nephew had managed to bone the install somehow, but it turned out that he'd fiddled with the BIOS settings (the machine was an old IBM Thinkpad T31 which previously ran a limping and usually dead Windows 95). My mum (via the Thinkpad) has email, music, chat, web access, DVD, xvid and vivx video capability, wireless (via a PC card), and should she ever require it, a word processor.
Since I installed it, my dad, in his seventies, has been using it more than his own laptop (a modernish Acer with Windows XP), and my nephew regularly steals it off my mum. I passworded everything that wasn't nailed down, and since then, it's been fine.
So, overall, it's actually pretty good.
The only remaining *real* issue is games. I boot into Windows on my laptop to play a small collection of games, and that's pretty much it.
For the record you can occasionally *play* the original SpaceWar at the Computer History Museum. Under supervision, of course. The two programmers used a polymorphic object system written in PDP-1 assembler, and the machine was *just* powerful enough to simulate and draw two ships. I was rather impressed.
He was also not noticeably anti-semitic, and reformed the laws such that Jews were no longer confined to the ghettoes, whereas the Catholic Church was cruelly abusive. You could legitimately argue that this was a political ploy in the Machiavellian tradition, to limit and diversify the powers of major political blocs under his control, but he was still in some ways very much a force for good. I'm not usually a fan of exemplars of the high-testosterone global dominator psyche, but Napoleon was one of the better instances of the breed. It's possible that, had he retained power, the European continent's love of Rationalism as compared with Great Britain's preference for Empiricism may have damaged science in the longer term. Hard to say, really. It's also possible that had he been 6'4 rather than 5'2, he may not have felt the need to assert himself in such a striking manner. It's a bit of a sidewise jump, but the coolest dog I ever owned was a Jack Russell.;-)
The side that valued and understood science to the degree that it mandated the system of SI Units, and the side which sought to limit the oppressively brutal power of the Catholic Church? A side that might have unified Europe far earlier?
On the contrary, I'd suggest that the LENR work is far more exciting because we don't have a theoretical framework which describes it. New physics, anyone?
Slashdot Mirror
Trusted by anyone who has the same secret decoder ring, obviously.
FPS on PCs is more like bloodsports. It's *serious* domination play, and the speed rush of going up against the best players is like no other experience. . Some people relax by hunting other people, and FPSes are a socially acceptable way of doing that. So, I can see your point, but the 'we' in your first sentence actually means 'I'.
Given widespread availability of *good* hardware compilation tools, providing a C++, Java, C# level of abstraction to the actual hardware, reverse engineering will only have to take place at the level of the interfaces between chips. This is just a matter of time. DRM-like measures are just pissing in the wind.
So, why do you *eat*? It may strike you as a frivolous question, but what motivates you to eat, to have sex? Do you ever get angry, and if so *why*? Have you ever tried drugs, prescription or otherwise, that have substantially changed your personality? Why are you a geek? What do you imagine to be the rational and/or psychological underpinnings of the choices you've made?
Insightful? This is *funny*, unless the moderator is poking sarcastic fun at Slashdot readers. And, I just can't imagine *that*.
Well, for one, the patient could die of brain cancer.
I'm using a usb HSDPA modem supplied by '3', in the UK. The system in question is a laptop running XP. In Swansea (a small city in South Wales), I get most of the promised 3.6 Mbps bandwidth. Ten miles West down the road, towards the more rural end of Wales, I can only get a 57.6kbps GPRS connection. I can't comment on latency as I've not used it for gaming. Download limit on my contract is 7Gb per month, which is a bit lame but acceptable. The modem software is big and ugly but works. The only real worry I have is that I'm accustomed to running my Windows and Linux boxen behind a decent, external, firewall. I've not tried to get this working via Linux yet.
It's kind of dangerous to make sweeping generalisations. The closed-source drivers for the ATI Mobility Xpress 200M are problematic. It wasn't that simple. And, sorry, but Ubuntu didn't support VPN over wireless out of the box (not a totally unreasonable thing to want), and the small plethora of utilities that might have facilitated this wouldn't work. I got it working under Ubuntu and Gentoo by writing a bash/sed script. I notice that you elected to avoid comment on the wireless and vpn issues. Sure I could have written the relevant software myself but at the time I was working on a physics degree. For the record, I've done things in the past like fixing a bug in the ISA NE2000 clone driver under a rather earlier version of Linux. I've also produced a CD-bootable firewall-oriented system (not distributed... based on the non-stateful packet filter in the 1.x kernel and therefore a little insecure - it was a learning experience). To balance this, the closed source default drivers under XP were also somewhat crap, but they worked with most of my games. In the end, I went with the Radeon Omega drivers, which are faster and much less buggy. My experience doesn't match yours.
I'd agree that XP doesn't always come up with a pefect install. It often lacks wifi drivera, and it needed the approriate video and wifi drivers on a recent re-install I did for my brother's HP (not a recent machine, nor antediluvian). However, your assertion that Linux is an easier install is, er, untrue. I have XP and Gentoo installed on my laptop (ATI Radeon x200m video, audio AC97 codec). I've *had* Ubuntu. Ubuntu came up with the right screen res but no acceleration. The wifi drivers were a minor pain to install, but a much bigger pain was the VPN script I had to write to get access to my university's wan (Via MPPE encryption vpn, otherwise a straightforward thing). So, maybe you have no idea what you're talking about.
Speak for yourself. Oh, hang on, what am I saying?
On the other hand, if you possess some talent for some area of thought, say, maths, and you work with people who are less talented, it's abundantly obvious that you have more innate ability and can achieve more for far less work. I'm not a genius, but I am relatively imaginative, I do have some feel for maths, and I've worked with a partner of mine for nearly ten years, who *was* and *is* a genius. She's a hard worker, while I'm something of a slacker. I know when I'm outclassed, though, just as I've known perfectly well that I have, in my turn, outclassed other people, and with my minimal effort to their painfully won achievements. People are not equal. People are not equal physically, and if you accept that the mind is an epiphenomenon of the hardware on which it runs, then to render people equal, you'd need some kind of homeostatic process that implements the equaliser. Show me this process, or admit that you believe in the soul.
I suspect that this opinion is held by those people who would wish, for personal reasons, to seek to characterise originality and genius as a mixture of obsession and hard work. If they can convince themselves and others, then at some level they can think 'I could do all those things, but I have a life'. It's just comfort-zone area-denial for the self-deluded.
It looks as there there are multiple paths to this kind of phenomenon, the first potential path having been discovered by Stanley Miller and Harold Urey. So, yes, it's beautiful, but it may also be rather more probable than you might imagine.
Google for abiogenesis and amino acids.
The idea is to focus on an area of the genome that isn't strongly conserved, so, the genes that code for histamine would be ignored (because if they altered enough, they'd kill the organism, and it would have no children). So, presumed junk DNA. Still, a lot of assumption. In humans, although IANAMB, ISTR that environmental stress can alter the genetic mutation rate. Just one potantial spanner for the clockwork.
The model for mutation rate in mitochondrial DNA has a confidence factor of plus or minus an order of magnitude anyway, but the central figure for the lifetime of the modern human race, ie, 100k years, is quoted as gospel. *That* annoys me.
You've said what I'd want to say, and with a passion that I no longer possess. I respect that.
So, what's the laser going to do? Nice sound effect, by the way.
Mmm... YMMV. I installed Kubuntu 7.04 for my mum, and she's in her late sixties. Flash works fine under 32-bit Linux, and the big majority of the video-enabled sites work under it. It's *still* not a completely trivial install but it's a million times more sorted than used to be the case. I anticipated a glitch when my dad claimed that my nephew had managed to bone the install somehow, but it turned out that he'd fiddled with the BIOS settings (the machine was an old IBM Thinkpad T31 which previously ran a limping and usually dead Windows 95). My mum (via the Thinkpad) has email, music, chat, web access, DVD, xvid and vivx video capability, wireless (via a PC card), and should she ever require it, a word processor. Since I installed it, my dad, in his seventies, has been using it more than his own laptop (a modernish Acer with Windows XP), and my nephew regularly steals it off my mum. I passworded everything that wasn't nailed down, and since then, it's been fine. So, overall, it's actually pretty good. The only remaining *real* issue is games. I boot into Windows on my laptop to play a small collection of games, and that's pretty much it.
For the record you can occasionally *play* the original SpaceWar at the Computer History Museum. Under supervision, of course. The two programmers used a polymorphic object system written in PDP-1 assembler, and the machine was *just* powerful enough to simulate and draw two ships. I was rather impressed.
How do we know whether he really is loved by all? If the lese majeste laws are so tough, I'd imagine they'd skew accurate reportage, wouldn't you?
He was also not noticeably anti-semitic, and reformed the laws such that Jews were no longer confined to the ghettoes, whereas the Catholic Church was cruelly abusive. You could legitimately argue that this was a political ploy in the Machiavellian tradition, to limit and diversify the powers of major political blocs under his control, but he was still in some ways very much a force for good. I'm not usually a fan of exemplars of the high-testosterone global dominator psyche, but Napoleon was one of the better instances of the breed. It's possible that, had he retained power, the European continent's love of Rationalism as compared with Great Britain's preference for Empiricism may have damaged science in the longer term. Hard to say, really. It's also possible that had he been 6'4 rather than 5'2, he may not have felt the need to assert himself in such a striking manner. It's a bit of a sidewise jump, but the coolest dog I ever owned was a Jack Russell. ;-)
The side that valued and understood science to the degree that it mandated the system of SI Units, and the side which sought to limit the oppressively brutal power of the Catholic Church? A side that might have unified Europe far earlier?
Is that really such a bad thing for him to want? I often feel that the wrong side won the Napoleonic Wars. :-)
Thank you... can you provide some links?
On the contrary, I'd suggest that the LENR work is far more exciting because we don't have a theoretical framework which describes it. New physics, anyone?