adding there was a way to look up and down in the default keyboard controls but it was in the block of keys above the arrow keys, e.g. about the most inconviniant place possible. I think there was a strafe button as well but again I don't think it was in a particulally conviniant position.
Duke nukem 3D could be configured to modern settings but the default control setup was clearly designed for keyboard only play (jump duck and fire were on keys a long distance from the arrow keys and the sideways arrows were set up to turn not strafe).
There is a difference between supporting something and putting that thing on easilly accessible keys in the default control setup and expecting people to use it.
In a true perspective view different parts of a wall vertex will be different distances from your viewpoint, therefore they will not be a straight vertical line. In the psuedo perspective that doom and duke used a wall vertex is always a straight vertical line.
This is more noticable in duke than in doom because duke lets you move your view up and down and therefore see angles further from the vertical than doom does.
Did you actually play doom in the era when it came out or have you only played modern ports with default controls set to match modern expectations?
Games from that era (up to and including duke and quake) were designed to be playable with just a keyboard.
IIRC doom really only had five main controls, forward, backward, turn left, turn right and fire. Plus weapon select controls of course but you didn't need to have your hands on those all the time. In those days players weren't expected to aim vertically or to strafe.
It wasn't until much later that the standard control scheme of today (keyboard for forward backward and strafe, mouse for turning, aiming and firing) became the expected way to play (the oldest game I can remember playing with that scheme as default was UT).
Around here, the programmers never met a thread they didn't like. Add a requirement like - "display dialog box to confirm shutdown" and suddenly the thread count in the application jumps by 4... Lemme guess these programs are also buggy crash prone peices of shit?
having more than one thread doing UI stuff has always struck me as more trouble than it's worth (you need loads of extra locks and a lot of thinking about what does and doesn't constitute a consistent state). Indeed some common gui libraries (swing for example) aren't built to support multiple threads accessing thier components for just this reason.
I'm guessing that 36GB and 72GB refer to three dimms per channel times 6 channels (three per processor) and 2GB or 4GB modules. IIRC with DDR3 if you put three dimms on a channel you are limited to DDR3-800 speeds.
My guess is they aren't processing them on paper but have some computer system that takes the incoming faxes and for beuracratic reasons they can't get said computer system fixed.
Putting your swap file on a RAM-Disk has long been the stereotypical geek example of human stupidity...someone who knows just enough to be very dangerous. Putting a swapfile on a regular ramdisk (that uses up system memory) is indeed stupid.
Putting swap on storage that is faster than a HDD but not directly usable as ram seems pretty sensible to me in certain situations (admittedly I don't belive those certain situations are the average users desktop).
One thing i've learnt is that the cost of a system has a highly nonlinear relationship to the ammount of ram required with small increments in cost until you get to the limit of your chosen family of computers then a large jump as you move to a higher end family.
Additionally, if you have excess amounts of RAM available, every modern operating system will cache all disk reads, thereby offering instant access to your apps/files, the SECOND time you open them. And then some virus scan runs overnight and kicks everything out of ram so you have to wait for it to grind back in when the morning comes.
The problem is our desktops are running on operating systems and software designed with a batch processing mindset. Sure there has been the odd tweak for interactivity but we still rely on the OS to guess what it should cache in memory and what it shouldn't rather than designing knowlage of deadlines and reuse probabilities into our software.
MYSQL made thier money by putting the client libs under the GPL and trying to claim that the GPL applied to the wire protocol (a dubious claim but still not something I'd want to risk ending up in court over if I could help it) and then selling commercial licenses to let people get out of those restrictions.
Sure someone can fork mysql but I don't see much money in a database that can only be used with FOSS software and it won't help those who are already using commercial mysql with non-gpl software.
Not that I think oracle would kill mysql, that would just encourage the rise of postgresql which is a much better database and therefore a lot more of a threat than mysql is.
Luckily, patents are not(yet) subject to the absurd lengths given to copyrights, so it is possible to move to free formats simply by standing still. Indeed and that is what I predict will happen with audio, mp3 is "good enough" and only has a few years left to run on the patents it's a bit of a minefield working out exactly when because of the sheer number of patents surrounding it, the problem of identifying which of them are likely to hold up in court,the issue that the legal status will vary by jurisdiction and the issue that more modern encoders may use techniques not listed in thr original patent*.
With video things are less clear, the patents on the currently most popular video format still have a long time to run. With networks increasing in capacity going back to an older codec may be a way to get support from both sides.
*mp3 like many mpeg family standards is built on the principle of defining the behaviour of the decoder but leaving the details of how the encoder decides what aspects of the sound to encode and with what level of accuracy to the individual encoder, this allows encoder performance to be improved without breaking the standard.
png wasn't even supported in IE until after the patent on gif ran out I'm pretty sure it was supported in the sense that non-transparent images and palleted images with binary transparency were supported even as far back as IE4 long before the patent ran out.
Full support took a lot longer (it was finally added in IE7) and unfortunately while that wasn't really a problem for those replacing gifs with pngs misunderstandings and exaggerated claims about it almost certainly did impact png adoption.
MY understanding is it wasn't a driver bug per-se but an interaction of a short spindown timeout with a slightly longer regular disk access (not sure what the source of that access was) and it hit a lot of linux configurations.
Utterly trashed is probabblly a slight exaggeration, it certainly made a lot of drives report excessive load cycle counts but I doubt there is any good data on how many actual failures it caused.
Unfortunately I don't have much confidence of that happening, gif still remains pretty common despite how long the superior png format has been arround.
With video and audio things are even worse with major vendors outright refusing toe support the unencumbered option (unlike png which has wide support).
Personally I think there is more chance of internet bandwidth increasing to a level where we can revert back to a format where the patents expire sooner than there is of a new unencumbered format taking hold.
I know they bought SUN but do they "own" (as in possessive form) the OpenOffice? IMO the most sensible definition of own with regards FOSS is owning the right to offer copies of the codebase under new licenses. Some FOSS projects don't have any such owner but i'm pretty sure Sun did own openoffice in that sense and that ownership will have passed to oracle in the takeover
complete control of the jury's information feed will give the best and most consistent results for any party to the dispute What I don't get is if you are going to reduce juries actions to an essentially mechanical processes what is the point of having a jury in the first place?
CD-rs are much more prone to dying. Indeed and while they are relatively new formats I'd expect the same to apply to DVD-R and BD-R.
And unless you are very rich you aren't going to be getting all your backup discs/home videos proffesionally mastered so they are going to be on the recordable variant of the media.
Yes and no, if you have a fixed term copyright then you don't need to know exactly when it was published, only that it was published before a certain date. Worst case if you have no information at all (and most likely do have some information on when the library you are borrowing the copy from obtained it) you can just hold it for the length of time the copyright would take to expire had it been released the day you scanned it.
Unfortunately with the current life plus system you'd have to hold a work for a couple of centuries to be reasonably sure it was in the public domain unless you can find reliable information on when the author died.
The full version will also eventually "expire" when MS takes down the auth servers for the full version... Windows activation only needs a remote server for initial activation and reactivation on hardware changes*, not to continue running once installed.
Though I doubt MS will shut down the servers for a LONG time and by the time they do I strongly suspect there will be a crack (and updates will have stopped so no risk of an update breaking the crack).
* when using a kms machines must periodically check in with the kms but the kms itself only needs initial activation and reactivation on hardware changes.
I'm running it fine on two computers in my office at the moment. One is a dell vostro 420 with 8GB of ram, the other is a custom built box* with 48GB of ram. Both have been running for considerably longer than a week.
I've also run it briefly on an optiplex 755 but ran into the issue of lack of support for the altera paralell port dongles I was using at the time.
Driver wise the custom build box was the easiest since both nvidia and intel officially support it. The dells were trickier to find drivers for (especially the vostro since despite supporting 8GB of ram dell doesn't officially support ANY 64-bit OS on it!) but once the drivers were found they seem to run fine (though I do run the SATA interfaces in compatability mode to avoid the need to mess arround with slipstreaming or F6 floppies).
* Intel SC5520SC motherboard, 2x 2.4GHz xeon 5500 series processors, intel SC5650WS case, some low end nvidia graphics card, two 1TB HDDs, some cheap sony DVD writer.
And if your mules are killed or if you need more, its easier to airlift in some robots than to train or find more mules. Any particular reason they couldn't just train up mules at home and airlift them in?
In any case, the person firing the gun (assuming they're hand-holding the gun rather than having it fastened to something rigid) will need to absorb more energy/momentum when firing the gun than the target will when hit by the bullet. IIRC there is a type of gun known as a "recoilless rifle" that avoids that, the downside is much lower efficiancy (e.g. you need a lot more propellant) and they eject hot gasses out the back.
Slashdot Mirror
adding there was a way to look up and down in the default keyboard controls but it was in the block of keys above the arrow keys, e.g. about the most inconviniant place possible. I think there was a strafe button as well but again I don't think it was in a particulally conviniant position.
Duke nukem 3D could be configured to modern settings but the default control setup was clearly designed for keyboard only play (jump duck and fire were on keys a long distance from the arrow keys and the sideways arrows were set up to turn not strafe).
There is a difference between supporting something and putting that thing on easilly accessible keys in the default control setup and expecting people to use it.
In a true perspective view different parts of a wall vertex will be different distances from your viewpoint, therefore they will not be a straight vertical line. In the psuedo perspective that doom and duke used a wall vertex is always a straight vertical line.
This is more noticable in duke than in doom because duke lets you move your view up and down and therefore see angles further from the vertical than doom does.
Did you actually play doom in the era when it came out or have you only played modern ports with default controls set to match modern expectations?
Games from that era (up to and including duke and quake) were designed to be playable with just a keyboard.
IIRC doom really only had five main controls, forward, backward, turn left, turn right and fire. Plus weapon select controls of course but you didn't need to have your hands on those all the time. In those days players weren't expected to aim vertically or to strafe.
It wasn't until much later that the standard control scheme of today (keyboard for forward backward and strafe, mouse for turning, aiming and firing) became the expected way to play (the oldest game I can remember playing with that scheme as default was UT).
Around here, the programmers never met a thread they didn't like. Add a requirement like - "display dialog box to confirm shutdown" and suddenly the thread count in the application jumps by 4...
Lemme guess these programs are also buggy crash prone peices of shit?
having more than one thread doing UI stuff has always struck me as more trouble than it's worth (you need loads of extra locks and a lot of thinking about what does and doesn't constitute a consistent state). Indeed some common gui libraries (swing for example) aren't built to support multiple threads accessing thier components for just this reason.
I'm guessing that 36GB and 72GB refer to three dimms per channel times 6 channels (three per processor) and 2GB or 4GB modules. IIRC with DDR3 if you put three dimms on a channel you are limited to DDR3-800 speeds.
My guess is they aren't processing them on paper but have some computer system that takes the incoming faxes and for beuracratic reasons they can't get said computer system fixed.
Putting your swap file on a RAM-Disk has long been the stereotypical geek example of human stupidity...someone who knows just enough to be very dangerous.
Putting a swapfile on a regular ramdisk (that uses up system memory) is indeed stupid.
Putting swap on storage that is faster than a HDD but not directly usable as ram seems pretty sensible to me in certain situations (admittedly I don't belive those certain situations are the average users desktop).
One thing i've learnt is that the cost of a system has a highly nonlinear relationship to the ammount of ram required with small increments in cost until you get to the limit of your chosen family of computers then a large jump as you move to a higher end family.
Additionally, if you have excess amounts of RAM available, every modern operating system will cache all disk reads, thereby offering instant access to your apps/files, the SECOND time you open them.
And then some virus scan runs overnight and kicks everything out of ram so you have to wait for it to grind back in when the morning comes.
The problem is our desktops are running on operating systems and software designed with a batch processing mindset. Sure there has been the odd tweak for interactivity but we still rely on the OS to guess what it should cache in memory and what it shouldn't rather than designing knowlage of deadlines and reuse probabilities into our software.
MYSQL made thier money by putting the client libs under the GPL and trying to claim that the GPL applied to the wire protocol (a dubious claim but still not something I'd want to risk ending up in court over if I could help it) and then selling commercial licenses to let people get out of those restrictions.
Sure someone can fork mysql but I don't see much money in a database that can only be used with FOSS software and it won't help those who are already using commercial mysql with non-gpl software.
Not that I think oracle would kill mysql, that would just encourage the rise of postgresql which is a much better database and therefore a lot more of a threat than mysql is.
Luckily, patents are not(yet) subject to the absurd lengths given to copyrights, so it is possible to move to free formats simply by standing still.
Indeed and that is what I predict will happen with audio, mp3 is "good enough" and only has a few years left to run on the patents it's a bit of a minefield working out exactly when because of the sheer number of patents surrounding it, the problem of identifying which of them are likely to hold up in court,the issue that the legal status will vary by jurisdiction and the issue that more modern encoders may use techniques not listed in thr original patent*.
With video things are less clear, the patents on the currently most popular video format still have a long time to run. With networks increasing in capacity going back to an older codec may be a way to get support from both sides.
*mp3 like many mpeg family standards is built on the principle of defining the behaviour of the decoder but leaving the details of how the encoder decides what aspects of the sound to encode and with what level of accuracy to the individual encoder, this allows encoder performance to be improved without breaking the standard.
png wasn't even supported in IE until after the patent on gif ran out
I'm pretty sure it was supported in the sense that non-transparent images and palleted images with binary transparency were supported even as far back as IE4 long before the patent ran out.
Full support took a lot longer (it was finally added in IE7) and unfortunately while that wasn't really a problem for those replacing gifs with pngs misunderstandings and exaggerated claims about it almost certainly did impact png adoption.
MY understanding is it wasn't a driver bug per-se but an interaction of a short spindown timeout with a slightly longer regular disk access (not sure what the source of that access was) and it hit a lot of linux configurations.
Utterly trashed is probabblly a slight exaggeration, it certainly made a lot of drives report excessive load cycle counts but I doubt there is any good data on how many actual failures it caused.
I believe it was actually Mandrake (before it became Mandriva), and it bricked LG optical drives
That was a different (earlier) issue.
Unfortunately I don't have much confidence of that happening, gif still remains pretty common despite how long the superior png format has been arround.
With video and audio things are even worse with major vendors outright refusing toe support the unencumbered option (unlike png which has wide support).
Personally I think there is more chance of internet bandwidth increasing to a level where we can revert back to a format where the patents expire sooner than there is of a new unencumbered format taking hold.
I know they bought SUN but do they "own" (as in possessive form) the OpenOffice?
IMO the most sensible definition of own with regards FOSS is owning the right to offer copies of the codebase under new licenses. Some FOSS projects don't have any such owner but i'm pretty sure Sun did own openoffice in that sense and that ownership will have passed to oracle in the takeover
complete control of the jury's information feed will give the best and most consistent results for any party to the dispute
What I don't get is if you are going to reduce juries actions to an essentially mechanical processes what is the point of having a jury in the first place?
CD-rs are much more prone to dying.
Indeed and while they are relatively new formats I'd expect the same to apply to DVD-R and BD-R.
And unless you are very rich you aren't going to be getting all your backup discs/home videos proffesionally mastered so they are going to be on the recordable variant of the media.
Yes and no, if you have a fixed term copyright then you don't need to know exactly when it was published, only that it was published before a certain date. Worst case if you have no information at all (and most likely do have some information on when the library you are borrowing the copy from obtained it) you can just hold it for the length of time the copyright would take to expire had it been released the day you scanned it.
Unfortunately with the current life plus system you'd have to hold a work for a couple of centuries to be reasonably sure it was in the public domain unless you can find reliable information on when the author died.
The full version will also eventually "expire" when MS takes down the auth servers for the full version...
Windows activation only needs a remote server for initial activation and reactivation on hardware changes*, not to continue running once installed.
Though I doubt MS will shut down the servers for a LONG time and by the time they do I strongly suspect there will be a crack (and updates will have stopped so no risk of an update breaking the crack).
* when using a kms machines must periodically check in with the kms but the kms itself only needs initial activation and reactivation on hardware changes.
I'm running it fine on two computers in my office at the moment. One is a dell vostro 420 with 8GB of ram, the other is a custom built box* with 48GB of ram. Both have been running for considerably longer than a week.
I've also run it briefly on an optiplex 755 but ran into the issue of lack of support for the altera paralell port dongles I was using at the time.
Driver wise the custom build box was the easiest since both nvidia and intel officially support it. The dells were trickier to find drivers for (especially the vostro since despite supporting 8GB of ram dell doesn't officially support ANY 64-bit OS on it!) but once the drivers were found they seem to run fine (though I do run the SATA interfaces in compatability mode to avoid the need to mess arround with slipstreaming or F6 floppies).
* Intel SC5520SC motherboard, 2x 2.4GHz xeon 5500 series processors, intel SC5650WS case, some low end nvidia graphics card, two 1TB HDDs, some cheap sony DVD writer.
XP is not an option since he wants to use the full memory instead of being limited to 3.5Gig. ;)
There is always XP professional x64 edition
And if your mules are killed or if you need more, its easier to airlift in some robots than to train or find more mules.
Any particular reason they couldn't just train up mules at home and airlift them in?
In any case, the person firing the gun (assuming they're hand-holding the gun rather than having it fastened to something rigid) will need to absorb more energy/momentum when firing the gun than the target will when hit by the bullet.
IIRC there is a type of gun known as a "recoilless rifle" that avoids that, the downside is much lower efficiancy (e.g. you need a lot more propellant) and they eject hot gasses out the back.
That link seems broken, i'm guessing http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/2608713.stm is the article you meant?