Well, I can't say anything about the Powerbook line, but I have a iBook G4 933mhz, with 640MB of ram. Running OSX 10.3(? - whatever it came with), it feels fine.
I've got an effectively identical machine - something I've wondered about is what extra stuff you get with a Powerbook over an iBook.
I've been incredibly happy with my iBook, and have no real complaints whatsoever, and I regard it as being the best machine I've ever had. But what extra do you get for a significantly more expensive Powerbook, apart from a bigger screen, wireless networking and a sexier silver finish?
Reading this article, I think it might be time to play through it again..
Same here - although I'm wondering If I should be playing System Shock 1, thanks to some useful links posted in various other comments regarding getting it to work on a modern machine...
Why do people continue to insist on stupid "Best viewed with X" labels. Your website should be developed to display properly on any standards-compliant browser, and not be restricted to a particular platform or application.
I put a 'Best viewed using a computer!' notice up on a site I built.
Along with a 'Web server powered by electricity'...
Each time I hear people talk on the radio for more than 30 seconds, I swtich to another station!!!!!!!
Why not boogie on down to the latest phat beats with the UK's biggest street music radio station, Radio 4? Guaranteed to be music-only and speech-free, and it's also available online...;-)
Actually, an iPod with both radio (including LW!) and recording abilities would be great, especially if you could set a timer. My memory's terrible, and I'm always missing stuff I wanted to listen to.
Great thing about deus ex is that you dont need thousands of rounds of ammunition to play it. I have personally played through the game without firing a shot (and with harming only one person).
I played a significant portion of the first game without firing a shot - although I wasn't exactly a pacifist.
It's all thanks to that gloriously deadly glowing blue sword thing I 'borrowed' in Hong Kong. Utterly brilliant for ambushes, and works against even the nastiest of foes. I'm hiding in a shadow, they walk past, I leap out and chase - it doesn't matter if they hear me or not because they're practically chopped in half moments later...;-)
I think this is the 'emergent' gameplay they're talking about. In a Gamasutra article about System Shock 2 (free login required), the developers mentioned 'mini-games' - little, easy-to-code features that dramatically alter the overall gameplay, and add many new things for the player to work against or use in their favour. Examples would be the security cameras, item research and suchlike, where by themselves they're pretty small, but when integrated into the fabric of the game the player has to develop new strategies to make use of them - and there are many ways.
Probably simpler (and more realistic) than the omnipresent ventilation ducts in Deus Ex 2, anyway.:-)
Switch the damn thing off. It\'s a bloody annoying hack which may (or may not be) switched on for a particular web host, meaning that for security reasons your code has to check whether it's switched on or off, and massage data accordingly.:-)
I\'ve got two functions which automatically strip incoming data of any added escaping, because with my form validation stuff the text may either go into an SQL query or back into the form again, with missing fields highlighted. Text might have come out of the database sans escaping, for editing purposes, and I don't want to have to write my forms code to treat data differently depending on its source. If everything\'s plain, unescaped text, it makes things so much simpler...
A couple of simple rules - firstly, when creating a database query, always (integer )$record_id or '".mysql_escape_string( $input_string )."' all variables in your queries, having previously checked them for sanity.
Secondly, keep as much code as possible in defined functions, out of the scope of register_globals idiocy. Yes, it can be switched off, but always assume that it's switched on, and is your enemy. Plus, it's a lot easier to track incoming data in your code when it's all defined at the beginning...
I've got it working now, and it's, well, a bit slow. This is on a 933MHz iBook G4. As a vague guess, I'd estimate QEMU on this machine's about equal to a 75MHz Pentium - the 166MHz machine I otherwise use is a lot faster.
It's usable, but I wouldn't recommend it for extended work - all I need it for is quickly testing the compatibility of sites I've built with various Internet Explorer versions. If it displays properly, it's done. QEMU on this machine is probably more than sufficient for that, and it doesn't take too long to boot either.
Then you would be hacking the OS instead, becaus AFAIK Mac OS is limited to the chips that Apple want to run it on.
There's always the VMware-like, non-emulating Mac-on-Linux - if Linux gets ported to the Xbox2, I wouldn't be surprised if other software gets ported too.:-)
Something odd about the MacOS Xbox screenshots - the last one has the 'About' window reporting 128MB of memory. Doesn't the Xbox have 64MB, then there's the overhead from the x86 operating system, PearPC etc.?
All I can think of is that it's not all allocated, and PearPC will be swapping stuff to the hard disk in a frenzy of IDE activity. The word 'particularly' comes to mind when thinking how slow the system will be.
(Oddly, I'm typing this while installing Windows 98 on my iBook, thanks to QEMU...)
There was another game the Bungie people were working on after Halo - that being the mysterious 'Phoenix'.
Nobody outside Bungie really knows what sort of game it was, but according to Matt Soell, "the game formerly known as Phoenix has indeed been shelved. The consensus was that we could finish the game but we would not be happy with the result. If the team didn't think they'd enjoy the game as designed, they could not seriously expect others to enjoy it."
Who knows how many other game ideas they've been having...
A man who cares about performance on the KDE team? Well if it works out, the result might be something good.
They seem to know something about improving performance. Try a recent KDE release, you'll be surprised.:-)
Heading back to the topic, I've been very impressed with the Nvidia drivers when using SuSE 9.0. Fast, completely stable, and dead easy to install - and that's with the standard Nvidia installer. With 9.1, it's supposed to be even easier...
BTW, did anyone else notice that NASA TV didn't cover this flight? It's too bad, because the Ansari X-Prize feed was completely useless. Once people jumped onto the webcast, the poor server just didn't have the bandwidth to keep up.
I checked NASA TV first, which is where I watched last week's flight - and there was nothing.
In fact, I couldn't find any live feeds, although the 'News Multiscreen' thingy on BBC News 24 on Freeview was showing the launch. Yes, a tiny quarter-screen, silent view from a ground-based tracking camera, but it was better than nothing.
It looked a lot smoother flight than last week's, as while it wobbled a bit from side to side while the rocket was burning, it had none of the terrifying roll. Interestingly, it was a different pilot at the controls - Brian Binnie instead of Mike Melvill. Still, he seemed to do okay.:-)
The original Halo was ported to PC, but it was horrible. While the X-Box is (for all intents and purposes) an outdated x86 PC in a fancy box, the PC port would run horrible on machines that were many times faster than the X-Box.
It runs pretty nicely on my PC at 640x480 but maximum visual quality - and its specifications aren't really that much greater than the Xbox. 1.1GHz Athlon, Geforce4Ti, Win98SE. Completely stable too, unlike most other games on my machine.
I suspect that a lot of people's problems are due to expecting it'll run at some very high resolution with all the graphics card's bells and whistles turned on. Crank it up to 1280x960, switch on anisotropic filtering etc. and my machine promptly grinds to a halt. Then there's the DirectX 9 shaders and stuff, which people might be trying to get to run on some slow, barely-DX9-capable graphics cards like those cheap Nvidia cards...
All the shaders in Halo eat fill-rate for breakfast. Turn the resolution down a notch or two, switch off the particularly advanced features and things will improve...
I, too, was waiting for Halo to have some modding potential. Then, as you mentioned, they took forever to get the game out to PC, then waited forever for an SDK, which they promised... And I flat out gave up on it.
The SDK got released, but it's for a multiplayer-only, Gearbox-sponsored version of Halo PC ('Halo CE', for 'Custom Edition'), and is dependent on software I can't afford (3DSMax, although there have been efforts to get it to work with the free GMax).
I'd really been hoping for the ability to build new single-player maps - in the full game the AI's great, the vehicles are great, the graphics and sound are great, but the mapping's either excellent or plain awful. Of course, it looks like that's never going to happen now, and Halo PC will soon be forgotten, like you said.
Apparently there's been very little uptake of Halo CE, so with so few potential players and a technically limited platform for modification, it probably won't be long until Gearbox has to drop it completely.
A game with lots of potential, but sadly impossible to take any further...
First Doom III beats it to the shelf. Then Halo 2. Will Half-Life 2 really ever come out?
Half-Life 2's in a pretty similar situation to how Halo 2 is now - the developers think they are done with it, and are waiting for final bug-finding and testing from the publishers.
I wouldn't be surprised if there was some announcement of Half-Life 2 going Gold pretty soon, followed shortly afterwards by Halo 2.
I'm really hoping Halo 2 makes its way to the PC eventually. I don't buy many games, and when I do it's mainly for the modding potential, so a games console would be a bit pointless for me (especially as I don't have a telly to connect it to) - although having waited the best part of two years for the PC port of the original Halo I suppose I better sit tight.:-)
Seriously, I hear there's a thing called folders you can use to store stuff. Might be worth a try?
I do use them, especially as working on a big Half-Life mod leaves me with thousands of different files, all of different versions. The desktop is just the overflow for temporary archives, shortcuts and so on. Every so often, when the desktop gets too unwieldy, I shove it into C:\Other Stuff\<metasyntactic variable>\. There's gigabytes of random crap in there...:-)
When I do run out of space, I just dig out another (low-capacity) hard disk from my pile of real-world junk and hook it up. I'm currently up to a whopping 14GB total storage capacity for my Windows stuff. (!)
Actually, I've done that accidentally, and Windows did indeed explode. Playing roughly twenty of the Half-Life 2 Bink videos simultaneously didn't do it much good at all, especially when it was opening a million other bits of junk at the same time...
I only keep Windows around for Half-Life stuff, anyhow.:-)
...could potentially allow a malicious site to erase files from the user's Download directory
My download directory in Windows is my desktop. Have you seenmy desktop? It's a fairly old screenshot, too - it's only got worse since then. My iBook's equally bad, except everything's just randomly strewn around the place...
A bit of remote tidying-up would be greatly appreciated.:-)
While their quality is unquestionable, Apple's products perform functions not only without the user needing to understand how they work but where understanding how they work does not extend the user any extra power.
I've had my oft-mentioned iBook for a bit over six months now; it is quite probably the best computer I've ever had. Yes, it's got very little upgrade potential (memory's already at 640MB, and I don't need wireless networking) but I really don't mind.
In a way, it's like there isn't a computer there at all, just MacOS X in a handy carrying case. It just works. The battery last absolutely ages, so I'm not worrying about when it's about to run out; it's incredibly quiet, so I can work without a constant computer whir and hum; all the hardware features I need are built in, so I'm not messing around with external cards or devices, fighting with incompatible devices...
I can forget there's a computer there, and get on working with the software.
People claim that Apple is a hardware company, I think I'd disagree. with MacOS X, they're a software company - except the software has a solid, physical presence in the real world.:-)
Ben Wilson of the University of British Columbia, Lawrence Dill of Simon Fraser University [Canada], Robert Batty of the Scottish Association for Marine Science, Magnus Whalberg of the University of Aarhus [Denmark], and Hakan Westerberg of Sweden's National Board of Fisheries, for showing that herrings apparently communicate by farting.
Please, not 'farting' - I believe the correct term is 'fast, repetitive ticks' (or, um, 'FRTs').
I didn't see the bee at all, until it was played back. The bee was on the screen for a full 20 seconds in total.
Reminds me of something from a certain radio series I listened to last night..
The Somebody Else's Problem field is much simpler and more effective, and what's more can be run for over a hundred years on a single torch battery. This is because it relies on people's natural disposition not to see anything they don't want to, weren't expecting, or can't explain. If Effrafax had painted the mountain pink and erected a cheap and simple Somebody Else's Problem field on it, then people would have walked past the mountain, round it, even over it, and simply never have noticed that the thing was there.
So, presumably to avoid detection, terrorists and other ne'r-do-wells should wear gorilla suits - invisibility is just too much effort.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I can't say anything about the Powerbook line, but I have a iBook G4 933mhz, with 640MB of ram. Running OSX 10.3(? - whatever it came with), it feels fine.
I've got an effectively identical machine - something I've wondered about is what extra stuff you get with a Powerbook over an iBook.
I've been incredibly happy with my iBook, and have no real complaints whatsoever, and I regard it as being the best machine I've ever had. But what extra do you get for a significantly more expensive Powerbook, apart from a bigger screen, wireless networking and a sexier silver finish?
Reading this article, I think it might be time to play through it again..
Same here - although I'm wondering If I should be playing System Shock 1, thanks to some useful links posted in various other comments regarding getting it to work on a modern machine...
Why do people continue to insist on stupid "Best viewed with X" labels. Your website should be developed to display properly on any standards-compliant browser, and not be restricted to a particular platform or application.
I put a 'Best viewed using a computer!' notice up on a site I built.
Along with a 'Web server powered by electricity'...
Each time I hear people talk on the radio for more than 30 seconds, I swtich to another station!!!!!!!
;-)
Why not boogie on down to the latest phat beats with the UK's biggest street music radio station, Radio 4? Guaranteed to be music-only and speech-free, and it's also available online...
Actually, an iPod with both radio (including LW!) and recording abilities would be great, especially if you could set a timer. My memory's terrible, and I'm always missing stuff I wanted to listen to.
Great thing about deus ex is that you dont need thousands of rounds of ammunition to play it. I have personally played through the game without firing a shot (and with harming only one person).
;-)
:-)
I played a significant portion of the first game without firing a shot - although I wasn't exactly a pacifist.
It's all thanks to that gloriously deadly glowing blue sword thing I 'borrowed' in Hong Kong. Utterly brilliant for ambushes, and works against even the nastiest of foes. I'm hiding in a shadow, they walk past, I leap out and chase - it doesn't matter if they hear me or not because they're practically chopped in half moments later...
I think this is the 'emergent' gameplay they're talking about. In a Gamasutra article about System Shock 2 (free login required), the developers mentioned 'mini-games' - little, easy-to-code features that dramatically alter the overall gameplay, and add many new things for the player to work against or use in their favour. Examples would be the security cameras, item research and suchlike, where by themselves they're pretty small, but when integrated into the fabric of the game the player has to develop new strategies to make use of them - and there are many ways.
Probably simpler (and more realistic) than the omnipresent ventilation ducts in Deus Ex 2, anyway.
magic_quotes_gpc = On
:-)
:-)
Switch the damn thing off. It\'s a bloody annoying hack which may (or may not be) switched on for a particular web host, meaning that for security reasons your code has to check whether it's switched on or off, and massage data accordingly.
I\'ve got two functions which automatically strip incoming data of any added escaping, because with my form validation stuff the text may either go into an SQL query or back into the form again, with missing fields highlighted. Text might have come out of the database sans escaping, for editing purposes, and I don't want to have to write my forms code to treat data differently depending on its source. If everything\'s plain, unescaped text, it makes things so much simpler...
A couple of simple rules - firstly, when creating a database query, always (integer )$record_id or '".mysql_escape_string( $input_string )."' all variables in your queries, having previously checked them for sanity.
Secondly, keep as much code as possible in defined functions, out of the scope of register_globals idiocy. Yes, it can be switched off, but always assume that it's switched on, and is your enemy. Plus, it's a lot easier to track incoming data in your code when it's all defined at the beginning...
page_record_input( ACTION_EDIT, array_unescape( $_POST['input_record'] ), (integer )$_GET['record_id'] );
And lastly, always assume that your users are out to get you. Validate all data, and assume everything and everyone is hostile.
They like seeing their name and logo on Slashdot's front page.
Yup. With all this link-spamming of google.com, they're looking to increase their rankings in the search engines...
(Yes the GP poster...)
:-)
I've got it working now, and it's, well, a bit slow. This is on a 933MHz iBook G4. As a vague guess, I'd estimate QEMU on this machine's about equal to a 75MHz Pentium - the 166MHz machine I otherwise use is a lot faster.
It's usable, but I wouldn't recommend it for extended work - all I need it for is quickly testing the compatibility of sites I've built with various Internet Explorer versions. If it displays properly, it's done. QEMU on this machine is probably more than sufficient for that, and it doesn't take too long to boot either.
Unlike the MacOS Xbox of the article.
Then you would be hacking the OS instead, becaus AFAIK Mac OS is limited to the chips that Apple want to run it on.
:-)
There's always the VMware-like, non-emulating Mac-on-Linux - if Linux gets ported to the Xbox2, I wouldn't be surprised if other software gets ported too.
The first Apple gaming system??
;-)
That would be the Apple Pippin.
Something odd about the MacOS Xbox screenshots - the last one has the 'About' window reporting 128MB of memory. Doesn't the Xbox have 64MB, then there's the overhead from the x86 operating system, PearPC etc.?
All I can think of is that it's not all allocated, and PearPC will be swapping stuff to the hard disk in a frenzy of IDE activity. The word 'particularly' comes to mind when thinking how slow the system will be.
(Oddly, I'm typing this while installing Windows 98 on my iBook, thanks to QEMU...)
There was another game the Bungie people were working on after Halo - that being the mysterious 'Phoenix'.
Nobody outside Bungie really knows what sort of game it was, but according to Matt Soell, "the game formerly known as Phoenix has indeed been shelved. The consensus was that we could finish the game but we would not be happy with the result. If the team didn't think they'd enjoy the game as designed, they could not seriously expect others to enjoy it."
Who knows how many other game ideas they've been having...
A man who cares about performance on the KDE team? Well if it works out, the result might be something good.
:-)
They seem to know something about improving performance. Try a recent KDE release, you'll be surprised.
Heading back to the topic, I've been very impressed with the Nvidia drivers when using SuSE 9.0. Fast, completely stable, and dead easy to install - and that's with the standard Nvidia installer. With 9.1, it's supposed to be even easier...
BTW, did anyone else notice that NASA TV didn't cover this flight? It's too bad, because the Ansari X-Prize feed was completely useless. Once people jumped onto the webcast, the poor server just didn't have the bandwidth to keep up.
:-)
I checked NASA TV first, which is where I watched last week's flight - and there was nothing.
In fact, I couldn't find any live feeds, although the 'News Multiscreen' thingy on BBC News 24 on Freeview was showing the launch. Yes, a tiny quarter-screen, silent view from a ground-based tracking camera, but it was better than nothing.
It looked a lot smoother flight than last week's, as while it wobbled a bit from side to side while the rocket was burning, it had none of the terrifying roll. Interestingly, it was a different pilot at the controls - Brian Binnie instead of Mike Melvill. Still, he seemed to do okay.
Probably been linked to already, but here's Spaceflight Now's coverage.
The original Halo was ported to PC, but it was horrible. While the X-Box is (for all intents and purposes) an outdated x86 PC in a fancy box, the PC port would run horrible on machines that were many times faster than the X-Box.
It runs pretty nicely on my PC at 640x480 but maximum visual quality - and its specifications aren't really that much greater than the Xbox. 1.1GHz Athlon, Geforce4Ti, Win98SE. Completely stable too, unlike most other games on my machine.
I suspect that a lot of people's problems are due to expecting it'll run at some very high resolution with all the graphics card's bells and whistles turned on. Crank it up to 1280x960, switch on anisotropic filtering etc. and my machine promptly grinds to a halt. Then there's the DirectX 9 shaders and stuff, which people might be trying to get to run on some slow, barely-DX9-capable graphics cards like those cheap Nvidia cards...
All the shaders in Halo eat fill-rate for breakfast. Turn the resolution down a notch or two, switch off the particularly advanced features and things will improve...
I, too, was waiting for Halo to have some modding potential. Then, as you mentioned, they took forever to get the game out to PC, then waited forever for an SDK, which they promised... And I flat out gave up on it.
The SDK got released, but it's for a multiplayer-only, Gearbox-sponsored version of Halo PC ('Halo CE', for 'Custom Edition'), and is dependent on software I can't afford (3DSMax, although there have been efforts to get it to work with the free GMax).
I'd really been hoping for the ability to build new single-player maps - in the full game the AI's great, the vehicles are great, the graphics and sound are great, but the mapping's either excellent or plain awful. Of course, it looks like that's never going to happen now, and Halo PC will soon be forgotten, like you said.
Apparently there's been very little uptake of Halo CE, so with so few potential players and a technically limited platform for modification, it probably won't be long until Gearbox has to drop it completely.
A game with lots of potential, but sadly impossible to take any further...
First Doom III beats it to the shelf. Then Halo 2. Will Half-Life 2 really ever come out?
:-)
Half-Life 2's in a pretty similar situation to how Halo 2 is now - the developers think they are done with it, and are waiting for final bug-finding and testing from the publishers.
I wouldn't be surprised if there was some announcement of Half-Life 2 going Gold pretty soon, followed shortly afterwards by Halo 2.
I'm really hoping Halo 2 makes its way to the PC eventually. I don't buy many games, and when I do it's mainly for the modding potential, so a games console would be a bit pointless for me (especially as I don't have a telly to connect it to) - although having waited the best part of two years for the PC port of the original Halo I suppose I better sit tight.
That is, without a doubt, the most organized 194-icon desktop I've ever seen.
Nah. Right-click, 'Arrange Icons', 'by Type'. Easy!
Seriously, I hear there's a thing called folders you can use to store stuff. Might be worth a try?
:-)
I do use them, especially as working on a big Half-Life mod leaves me with thousands of different files, all of different versions. The desktop is just the overflow for temporary archives, shortcuts and so on. Every so often, when the desktop gets too unwieldy, I shove it into C:\Other Stuff\<metasyntactic variable>\. There's gigabytes of random crap in there...
When I do run out of space, I just dig out another (low-capacity) hard disk from my pile of real-world junk and hook it up. I'm currently up to a whopping 14GB total storage capacity for my Windows stuff. (!)
Voila -- Your computer just exploded.
:-)
Actually, I've done that accidentally, and Windows did indeed explode. Playing roughly twenty of the Half-Life 2 Bink videos simultaneously didn't do it much good at all, especially when it was opening a million other bits of junk at the same time...
I only keep Windows around for Half-Life stuff, anyhow.
...could potentially allow a malicious site to erase files from the user's Download directory
:-)
My download directory in Windows is my desktop. Have you seen my desktop? It's a fairly old screenshot, too - it's only got worse since then. My iBook's equally bad, except everything's just randomly strewn around the place...
A bit of remote tidying-up would be greatly appreciated.
While their quality is unquestionable, Apple's products perform functions not only without the user needing to understand how they work but where understanding how they work does not extend the user any extra power.
:-)
I've had my oft-mentioned iBook for a bit over six months now; it is quite probably the best computer I've ever had. Yes, it's got very little upgrade potential (memory's already at 640MB, and I don't need wireless networking) but I really don't mind.
In a way, it's like there isn't a computer there at all, just MacOS X in a handy carrying case. It just works. The battery last absolutely ages, so I'm not worrying about when it's about to run out; it's incredibly quiet, so I can work without a constant computer whir and hum; all the hardware features I need are built in, so I'm not messing around with external cards or devices, fighting with incompatible devices...
I can forget there's a computer there, and get on working with the software.
People claim that Apple is a hardware company, I think I'd disagree. with MacOS X, they're a software company - except the software has a solid, physical presence in the real world.
At least in Germany you have to pay at least 350 Euros if you want Apple to repair your 'book that is older then one year.
:-)
Depends where you get it from - not Germany, but I bought my iBook from John Lewis here in the UK. Two year repair-or-replacement warranty for free.
It really pays to shop around.
Your lucky you got any media coverage. In the UK all it got was a blurb on a high teletext page, and a mention on the BBC website.
They had footage on Channel 4 News that evening - nothing very much, but it was nice to see things without the RealVideo compression.
Otherwise, remarkably quiet, especially when compared with the coverage about Branson's involvement. Maybe he really is the better publicist?
Ben Wilson of the University of British Columbia, Lawrence Dill of Simon Fraser University [Canada], Robert Batty of the Scottish Association for Marine Science, Magnus Whalberg of the University of Aarhus [Denmark], and Hakan Westerberg of Sweden's National Board of Fisheries, for showing that herrings apparently communicate by farting.
Please, not 'farting' - I believe the correct term is 'fast, repetitive ticks' (or, um, 'FRTs').
Reminds me of something from a certain radio series I listened to last night..
So, presumably to avoid detection, terrorists and other ne'r-do-wells should wear gorilla suits - invisibility is just too much effort.