I've been using Windows 98SE on my MacBook Pro since I got it.
If I took a photo of it, you'd notice it has no problems running full-screen, and video would prove it's most definitely not a static screenshot - and better still, Windows XP is no obstacle, and I could even have MacOS X for PowerPC, Linux, FreeBSD, RISC OS appearing in a similar manner with no problems whatsoever.
Landing something at such an altitude could prove problematic - in that it's above a large proportion of the (already very thin) Martian atmosphere. Which means you can't use aerodynamic braking, parachutes and so on to slow down much, instead you'd need some particularly chunky retro-rockets to dispose of the somewhat considerable velocity the probe received when being boosted from Earth orbit.
A second, slightly deeper alternative could be Valles Marineris - although I read somewhere that it's so huge, if you stood in the middle you wouldn't be able to see the multi-kilometre-high cliffs at the sides, thanks to the curvature of Mars. A lot of the 3D renders and fly-throughs around seem to have pretty extreme vertical exaggeration.
Martian geology tends to work on a stupendously huge scale, and some of the largest features probably won't look all that great from the ground. Maybe we need to look for the smaller features, which are still far larger than anything similar on Earth - like those giant cliffs I mentioned earlier...
I like the smell of a new book. Build that into your reader, OK?
I like the smell of old books too.
I have numerous books on my desk right now. There's a copy of Nineteen Eighty-Four I bought in 1999. The edges of the pages are slightly yellowed (cheap paperback and all) - but by book terms, it's pretty new. In eBook terms, it's prehistoric.
There are two older books on my desk. One was printed in 1885. If anything, it's in better condition than the paperback. Ants, Bees and Wasps by Sir John Lubbock. There's another - printed in circa 1870. The Microscope, by Jabez Hogg. By book terms, these are quite old. By eBook terms, they're impossible.
Okay, so you're unlikely to buy some cheap bit of fiction and expect it (or need it) to last for 135+ years, but then again, you might still be interested to read the books you bought perhaps a decade ago. Or other books which people read fifty years ago. Second-hand bookshops are still around - some years ago, I got quite addicted to anthologies of SF short stories from the 1950s and 1960s. At perhaps 20p each, it was a bargain - and the books are still perfectly readable today.
Books have a huge mountain of history behind them, and they're absolutely brilliant objects. Resistant to damage, almost immortal - eBooks have a hell of a lot to compete with...
Hard disk is never the problem- games are not disc intensive. You might speed up laods slightly with a faster disc, but not by much.
... Which is one reason why loads of people suffer from the infamous 'stuttering' in Half-Life 2.
The game uses a 'soundcache' to keep the first 125 milliseconds of all referenced sounds in memory. If a sound needs to be played which isn't fully in memory yet, it starts playing that 125ms while streaming the rest of the data in from disk.
If many new sounds are needed simultaneously, or the hard disk is particularly slow, then you get a glitch in the audio.
Have a fairly fast disk, and things improve considerably - and maps load much more quickly too, thanks to the many megabytes of textures...;-)
In English, the word you use depends on whether the thing you are describing is countable or uncountable. If English isn't your first language, that is the best way to think about it.
Or if you're a programmer, think of it as floats and integers. Perfect!
(Yes, it would appear English is strongly typed, unless you explicitly cast using a metaphor...)
I was appalled that someone might have hacked into this machine and thus given the impression that MacOS X was somehow... insecure, so I hacked into it myself and patched it up with some new security features.
So to anyone wanting to compete in this challenge: sorry.:-(
Teh Hammre? Oh wow, I uploaded that ancient in-joke to the Valve wiki a while ago, after extracting it from the Hammer (née Worldcraft) documentation. It may (or may not be) the entire reason for Worldcraft's renaming...;-)
(Oh, and single-player Half-Life 2 fans: the new MINERVA map is released! Have fun...)
A possible connection to the Atari ST version - this page has a list of disk images, each file appears to contain several games. I don't know what to do with this file to extract the games within, but the site mentions using the STEEM emulator, so maybe that will do it for you?
Ah, that would be a pirate 'CD' - basically a number of games with copy protection removed ('cracked') and compressed ('packed') on to one floppy disk. An '.ST' file is just a floppy disk image - in this case, boot an emulator with it, and it'll load some menu program (complete with picture, scrolling messages from the pirates and music) from which you can choose the game you want to play.
Sometimes it's possible to strip away all the pirate nonsense and have just the game, but the sad thing is that thanks to the copy-protection on the originals, the pirated version of games are often the only ones to survive...
Checklist: An emulator (STeem is pretty good), a TOS ROM image (1.04 is usually fine - my own, real ST has both TOS 1.02 and 2.06 ROMs on it) and the disk image. That's it!
I've turned the volume up and down, muted it, connected headphones - doesn't seem to change the high-pitched hiss. I think it might be a fan or something like that. Noises do change if I disconnect the power, but not the hiss.
Still need to get round to installing Xcode (I need Fink for my work) so haven't checked if it's the hard disk spinning or not. I haven't heard it spin down, anyway, something which my iBook did all the time. (It would make a really sweet chirruping noise!)
I haven't heard any interference over the audio, but one random feature I noticed (it might be Powerbook-era) is that there are effectively two volume settings - one for internal speakers, one for headphones. I usually have the machine muted, but when I plug the headphones in, it's back to how it was. Nifty.
Either the Mysterious Hiss is something which should be very quiet but isn't, or it's something which should be very loud - but isn't. I shall investigate further.;-)
Re:Head to head against Winders and *nix
on
MacBook Pro Reviewed
·
· Score: 3, Funny
This ranks up there with the claim that you can't format floppies in the background on the Mac.
Don't be silly. I just tried formatting a floppy disk in the background on my brand new MacBook Pro, and it simply didn't work. I then tried formatting one in the foreground. Still no luck!
...
I suppose it might help if I actually had a floppy disk drive connected to it...;-)
The iBook G4 most definitely has a fan in it - consider yourself hopeless if you've never got it to switch on. It's LOUD.;-)
I'm typing this with my spangly new MacBook Pro on my lap, so it's time for a mini-review!
Observations: the aluminium case means that if it's been in a cold van for a bit, it's COLD. Cold like ice!
It does get fairly warm in use, but is pretty quiet. Slightly louder than my iBook, but way quieter than an average machine. It makes a slight high-pitched hissing sound, which seems to cut out for a moment every so often. No idea what that is. It's not distracting, just... there.
Keyboard needs some getting used to from my iBook- it's got loads of travel. It's more like a clacky desktop thing than a laptop one, so I'm busy typing this as loudly as I can. Tappety clack! (Where on Earth do the keys go when pressed? The machine's already ridiculously thin...)
No evidence that it's an Intel-based thing beyond the description in 'About This Mac'. No prehistoric BIOS startup screen, no 'Intel Inside' logos, nuffink. Instead, it just feels like an astoundingly speedy Mac. It's FAST. Applications often open before a single bounce of their icons. Rosetta seems completely transparent (and even while emulated, mission-critical applications seem faster than on my iBook) - most of the software I use is Universal already, and I've no idea which applications haven't been recompiled yet.
Screen is very bright, the sound is rather nice, the built-in camera seems pretty high quality (although I definitely need a hair-cut - it ain't flattering), and generally it's all rather special. Only complaints - the keyboard is a bit shiny silver, and the keyboard illumination keys get in the way of the default Expose shortcut keys. Needs a fiddle.
Oh, and there are no wireless networks for me to connect to here. LUDDITES!
Complaints? Not a lot. It gets fairly warm underneath while in use, and the battery life estimates are generally around 3.5 hours, which is still about 2.5 hours better than my iBooks duff battery. It's best not to fight the automatic screen and keyboard brightnesses - just go with the flow, and it's much less annoying.
Oh. I've got a complaint. I don't like the shade of green used on the LEDs. Too blue-ish!
If you loaded the machines up with a gigabyte or two of memory, then some software could be copied to a ramdisk on startup - this ramdisk could also work as a scratch disk and so on. The word 'speedy' might be an understatement...;-)
Not quite automatic reassembly, but I've already got a mug which would pass the test. Indestructible is an understatement.
It was made by Hornsea Pottery, and it was given to me around twenty years ago. It has a picture of a monkey on either side. It's a fairly straight-sided white cylinder with perhaps a slight bluish tint to it, and a square-ish handle. It has a very slight chip or imperfection in the rim, which I suspect it probably acquired when that Mars-sized planetoid crashed into the Earth some billions of years ago in the collision which created the Moon.
It's been dropped on to hard, tiled floors. As a child, I ran with it through a doorway, and it hit the wall surrounding the door - gouging a big chunk of very solid plaster out in the process. (Our house was built from World War 2 bunker surplus materials, and is the second strongest thing known to mankind. Putting a nail into the wall? Good luck.) The mug is truly invincible. I'd investigate further, but I'm concerned for the safety of whatever it might hit - this planet was not built to contend with rigid, Newtonian solids incapable of deformation or damage.
I hear Hornsea Pottery went bust a few years ago. Not bloody surprised...
"Doesn't require Half-Life 2 to play" just means "doesn't require 1.2GB of Half-Life 2 game data to play".
It'll probably still require a hefty chunk of Half-Life 2, though - fortunately the original game's data files have been split up so you can have just textures, sounds, models, maps and so on. I presume Steam will only download what's needed, so if you have HL2 already it should be a smaller download than if you buy just this single episode.
It's the same engine, but they're using features which have been added only recently - I gather the new episode can be run using HDR lighting, for instance. Source keeps changing, and for example, maps compiled recently simply wouldn't load in an original release - except nobody cares, since all players (except paranoids) are running with the latest version anyway, thanks to Steam's automatic updates. The occasional breaking of backwards compatibility is a different matter...
Oh, and if you want more episodic, single-player content, I should be releasing the next MINERVA map soon. Barring catastrophe, next Friday should do it!
I remember a vaguely similar demonstration involving a jar of marbles and some sand at school - except this one was part of a chemistry lesson. (I was probably only aged eleven or twelve at the time, so I think the teachers were still in the attempting-to-instil-wonder phase...)
Anyway. It was used as an analogy for the mixing of (I think) ethanol and water - take 10cm^3 of ethanol, 10cm^3 of water, mix 'em together and you get a bit less than 20cm^3 of liquid resulting.
It must have been a fairly early experiment, 'cause otherwise any teenage pupils would have drunk the ethanol. Yes, children, industrial alcohol contains methanol, and you will go blind if you do that...;-)
What, you mean a multi-gigahertz monster can perform a similar task to my 8MHz, half-megabyte Atari ST of years gone by?
Wait, I know - let's try some basic page layout tasks like drawing lines and ellipses. My Atari ST could manage that (it could also do full WYSIWYG with TrueType fonts rotated to arbitrary angles, bezier curves and assorted other vector type stuff) - it's a bit harder in DHTML/AJAX without SVG, which is admittedly very promising but still a bit... experimental.
DHTML/AJAX might have brightened up previously dismal, static websites no end, but they results are still not up to the standard of software running natively. Compare Google Maps with Google Earth, Gmail with Mail.app, Flikr with iPhoto, one of the aforementioned web office tools with, ooh, Adobe inDesign or something like that.
it showed up in his urine sample. Man, these guys are getting really insidious.
Are, um, male appendage enhancement pills banned by the Olympic authorities?
(Is it 'performance enhancing' if one has to lug a minor python around in one's trousers? I do hope for his sake he wasn't partaking in what he was most likely advertising...)
Slashdot Mirror
I've been using Windows 98SE on my MacBook Pro since I got it.
If I took a photo of it, you'd notice it has no problems running full-screen, and video would prove it's most definitely not a static screenshot - and better still, Windows XP is no obstacle, and I could even have MacOS X for PowerPC, Linux, FreeBSD, RISC OS appearing in a similar manner with no problems whatsoever.
How?
VNC. Easy!
Landing something at such an altitude could prove problematic - in that it's above a large proportion of the (already very thin) Martian atmosphere. Which means you can't use aerodynamic braking, parachutes and so on to slow down much, instead you'd need some particularly chunky retro-rockets to dispose of the somewhat considerable velocity the probe received when being boosted from Earth orbit.
A second, slightly deeper alternative could be Valles Marineris - although I read somewhere that it's so huge, if you stood in the middle you wouldn't be able to see the multi-kilometre-high cliffs at the sides, thanks to the curvature of Mars. A lot of the 3D renders and fly-throughs around seem to have pretty extreme vertical exaggeration.
Martian geology tends to work on a stupendously huge scale, and some of the largest features probably won't look all that great from the ground. Maybe we need to look for the smaller features, which are still far larger than anything similar on Earth - like those giant cliffs I mentioned earlier...
The Register had a fun black helicopters competition - looking for covert military stuff with Google Earth. They've had plenty of weird Google Earth things featured, including an incredible, um, giant profanity. Wahey.
I like the smell of a new book. Build that into your reader, OK?
I like the smell of old books too.
I have numerous books on my desk right now. There's a copy of Nineteen Eighty-Four I bought in 1999. The edges of the pages are slightly yellowed (cheap paperback and all) - but by book terms, it's pretty new. In eBook terms, it's prehistoric.
There are two older books on my desk. One was printed in 1885. If anything, it's in better condition than the paperback. Ants, Bees and Wasps by Sir John Lubbock. There's another - printed in circa 1870. The Microscope, by Jabez Hogg. By book terms, these are quite old. By eBook terms, they're impossible.
Okay, so you're unlikely to buy some cheap bit of fiction and expect it (or need it) to last for 135+ years, but then again, you might still be interested to read the books you bought perhaps a decade ago. Or other books which people read fifty years ago. Second-hand bookshops are still around - some years ago, I got quite addicted to anthologies of SF short stories from the 1950s and 1960s. At perhaps 20p each, it was a bargain - and the books are still perfectly readable today.
Books have a huge mountain of history behind them, and they're absolutely brilliant objects. Resistant to damage, almost immortal - eBooks have a hell of a lot to compete with...
And yes, books do smell better!
Hard disk is never the problem- games are not disc intensive. You might speed up laods slightly with a faster disc, but not by much.
;-)
... Which is one reason why loads of people suffer from the infamous 'stuttering' in Half-Life 2.
The game uses a 'soundcache' to keep the first 125 milliseconds of all referenced sounds in memory. If a sound needs to be played which isn't fully in memory yet, it starts playing that 125ms while streaming the rest of the data in from disk.
If many new sounds are needed simultaneously, or the hard disk is particularly slow, then you get a glitch in the audio.
Have a fairly fast disk, and things improve considerably - and maps load much more quickly too, thanks to the many megabytes of textures...
In English, the word you use depends on whether the thing you are describing is countable or uncountable. If English isn't your first language, that is the best way to think about it.
Or if you're a programmer, think of it as floats and integers. Perfect!
(Yes, it would appear English is strongly typed, unless you explicitly cast using a metaphor...)
Oh. This sounds really important!
s hire,_England___
Name:_Ford_Prefect__________
Billing Address:_72_Borchester_Road,_Ambridge,_Borchester
Credit Card Type:_VISA__________
Credit Card Number:_4242-0563-1337-0584______
Expiration Date:Mar/2008
P.S.: I'm using Safari!
Oooh! Oooh! I'll give you two hundred dollars cash for a copy of that file!
I was appalled that someone might have hacked into this machine and thus given the impression that MacOS X was somehow ... insecure, so I hacked into it myself and patched it up with some new security features.
:-(
So to anyone wanting to compete in this challenge: sorry.
Teh Hammre? Oh wow, I uploaded that ancient in-joke to the Valve wiki a while ago, after extracting it from the Hammer (née Worldcraft) documentation. It may (or may not be) the entire reason for Worldcraft's renaming... ;-)
(Oh, and single-player Half-Life 2 fans: the new MINERVA map is released! Have fun...)
A possible connection to the Atari ST version - this page has a list of disk images, each file appears to contain several games. I don't know what to do with this file to extract the games within, but the site mentions using the STEEM emulator, so maybe that will do it for you?
Ah, that would be a pirate 'CD' - basically a number of games with copy protection removed ('cracked') and compressed ('packed') on to one floppy disk. An '.ST' file is just a floppy disk image - in this case, boot an emulator with it, and it'll load some menu program (complete with picture, scrolling messages from the pirates and music) from which you can choose the game you want to play.
Sometimes it's possible to strip away all the pirate nonsense and have just the game, but the sad thing is that thanks to the copy-protection on the originals, the pirated version of games are often the only ones to survive...
Checklist: An emulator (STeem is pretty good), a TOS ROM image (1.04 is usually fine - my own, real ST has both TOS 1.02 and 2.06 ROMs on it) and the disk image. That's it!
What? Nobody modded this redundant? Fools! ;-)
I've turned the volume up and down, muted it, connected headphones - doesn't seem to change the high-pitched hiss. I think it might be a fan or something like that. Noises do change if I disconnect the power, but not the hiss.
;-)
Still need to get round to installing Xcode (I need Fink for my work) so haven't checked if it's the hard disk spinning or not. I haven't heard it spin down, anyway, something which my iBook did all the time. (It would make a really sweet chirruping noise!)
I haven't heard any interference over the audio, but one random feature I noticed (it might be Powerbook-era) is that there are effectively two volume settings - one for internal speakers, one for headphones. I usually have the machine muted, but when I plug the headphones in, it's back to how it was. Nifty.
Either the Mysterious Hiss is something which should be very quiet but isn't, or it's something which should be very loud - but isn't. I shall investigate further.
This ranks up there with the claim that you can't format floppies in the background on the Mac.
;-)
Don't be silly. I just tried formatting a floppy disk in the background on my brand new MacBook Pro, and it simply didn't work. I then tried formatting one in the foreground. Still no luck!
...
I suppose it might help if I actually had a floppy disk drive connected to it...
The iBook G4 most definitely has a fan in it - consider yourself hopeless if you've never got it to switch on. It's LOUD. ;-)
... there.
I'm typing this with my spangly new MacBook Pro on my lap, so it's time for a mini-review!
Observations: the aluminium case means that if it's been in a cold van for a bit, it's COLD. Cold like ice!
It does get fairly warm in use, but is pretty quiet. Slightly louder than my iBook, but way quieter than an average machine. It makes a slight high-pitched hissing sound, which seems to cut out for a moment every so often. No idea what that is. It's not distracting, just
Keyboard needs some getting used to from my iBook- it's got loads of travel. It's more like a clacky desktop thing than a laptop one, so I'm busy typing this as loudly as I can. Tappety clack! (Where on Earth do the keys go when pressed? The machine's already ridiculously thin...)
No evidence that it's an Intel-based thing beyond the description in 'About This Mac'. No prehistoric BIOS startup screen, no 'Intel Inside' logos, nuffink. Instead, it just feels like an astoundingly speedy Mac. It's FAST. Applications often open before a single bounce of their icons. Rosetta seems completely transparent (and even while emulated, mission-critical applications seem faster than on my iBook) - most of the software I use is Universal already, and I've no idea which applications haven't been recompiled yet.
Screen is very bright, the sound is rather nice, the built-in camera seems pretty high quality (although I definitely need a hair-cut - it ain't flattering), and generally it's all rather special. Only complaints - the keyboard is a bit shiny silver, and the keyboard illumination keys get in the way of the default Expose shortcut keys. Needs a fiddle.
Oh, and there are no wireless networks for me to connect to here. LUDDITES!
Complaints? Not a lot. It gets fairly warm underneath while in use, and the battery life estimates are generally around 3.5 hours, which is still about 2.5 hours better than my iBooks duff battery. It's best not to fight the automatic screen and keyboard brightnesses - just go with the flow, and it's much less annoying.
Oh. I've got a complaint. I don't like the shade of green used on the LEDs. Too blue-ish!
If you loaded the machines up with a gigabyte or two of memory, then some software could be copied to a ramdisk on startup - this ramdisk could also work as a scratch disk and so on. The word 'speedy' might be an understatement... ;-)
Even if you don't appreciate mods, there's no denying their contribution to future game development. True American icons!
:-P
I'm British, you insensitive clod!
Not quite automatic reassembly, but I've already got a mug which would pass the test. Indestructible is an understatement.
It was made by Hornsea Pottery, and it was given to me around twenty years ago. It has a picture of a monkey on either side. It's a fairly straight-sided white cylinder with perhaps a slight bluish tint to it, and a square-ish handle. It has a very slight chip or imperfection in the rim, which I suspect it probably acquired when that Mars-sized planetoid crashed into the Earth some billions of years ago in the collision which created the Moon.
It's been dropped on to hard, tiled floors. As a child, I ran with it through a doorway, and it hit the wall surrounding the door - gouging a big chunk of very solid plaster out in the process. (Our house was built from World War 2 bunker surplus materials, and is the second strongest thing known to mankind. Putting a nail into the wall? Good luck.) The mug is truly invincible. I'd investigate further, but I'm concerned for the safety of whatever it might hit - this planet was not built to contend with rigid, Newtonian solids incapable of deformation or damage.
I hear Hornsea Pottery went bust a few years ago. Not bloody surprised...
Well, I walk to the petrol station! Beat that!
"Doesn't require Half-Life 2 to play" just means "doesn't require 1.2GB of Half-Life 2 game data to play".
It'll probably still require a hefty chunk of Half-Life 2, though - fortunately the original game's data files have been split up so you can have just textures, sounds, models, maps and so on. I presume Steam will only download what's needed, so if you have HL2 already it should be a smaller download than if you buy just this single episode.
It's the same engine, but they're using features which have been added only recently - I gather the new episode can be run using HDR lighting, for instance. Source keeps changing, and for example, maps compiled recently simply wouldn't load in an original release - except nobody cares, since all players (except paranoids) are running with the latest version anyway, thanks to Steam's automatic updates. The occasional breaking of backwards compatibility is a different matter...
Oh, and if you want more episodic, single-player content, I should be releasing the next MINERVA map soon. Barring catastrophe, next Friday should do it!
I remember a vaguely similar demonstration involving a jar of marbles and some sand at school - except this one was part of a chemistry lesson. (I was probably only aged eleven or twelve at the time, so I think the teachers were still in the attempting-to-instil-wonder phase...)
;-)
Anyway. It was used as an analogy for the mixing of (I think) ethanol and water - take 10cm^3 of ethanol, 10cm^3 of water, mix 'em together and you get a bit less than 20cm^3 of liquid resulting.
It must have been a fairly early experiment, 'cause otherwise any teenage pupils would have drunk the ethanol. Yes, children, industrial alcohol contains methanol, and you will go blind if you do that...
What about server hardware sold without an operating system?
What, you mean a multi-gigahertz monster can perform a similar task to my 8MHz, half-megabyte Atari ST of years gone by?
... experimental.
Wait, I know - let's try some basic page layout tasks like drawing lines and ellipses. My Atari ST could manage that (it could also do full WYSIWYG with TrueType fonts rotated to arbitrary angles, bezier curves and assorted other vector type stuff) - it's a bit harder in DHTML/AJAX without SVG, which is admittedly very promising but still a bit
DHTML/AJAX might have brightened up previously dismal, static websites no end, but they results are still not up to the standard of software running natively. Compare Google Maps with Google Earth, Gmail with Mail.app, Flikr with iPhoto, one of the aforementioned web office tools with, ooh, Adobe inDesign or something like that.
Oh, but everyone (and everything) can code perl - the trick is to hit the keys in a sufficiently random manner.There. That's either a full-featured web-browser, or a worm which will destroy the entire internet. I don't really dare to run it...
it showed up in his urine sample. Man, these guys are getting really insidious.
Are, um, male appendage enhancement pills banned by the Olympic authorities?
(Is it 'performance enhancing' if one has to lug a minor python around in one's trousers? I do hope for his sake he wasn't partaking in what he was most likely advertising...)