I end up with a seriously ugly desktop unless I'm willing to spend quite some time trying to figure out why all the fonts are so big
Feature, not a bug (sort of) - the X server asks your monitor what DPI it does, and KDE sets the font sizes as appropriate. 10pt on one monitor should look physically the same size as 10pt on another, even if the monitors are different sizes and are running at different resolutions.
Admittedly, it annoys the hell out of me, particularly with one of my monitors which reckons 10pt should be enormous, so I invariably bodge the XF86Config file so that everything runs at a fixed 75dpi...
I noticed that too - I've become worryingly adept at identifying types of gun, and I'm an pacifist from the UK whose only real-world sightings of guns are of those carried by the police officers at airports. I'm hugely pro-gun-control, partially because I've seen vaguely realistic simulations of what these devices can do. Point, pull trigger, kill. Reload.
I sometimes wonder if politicians were to play realistic, multiplayer computer games, they'd perhaps get an inkling of what actually goes on in warfare and the utter, horrible randomness of it all, and perhaps be a bit more hesitant in sending in the troops.
Unlike books and films, there's no viewer-friendly plot - you can very easily get taken out by a sniper, or be shot in the gut by a teenager who was hiding behind a door with an AK47. There's no writer in the background keeping the characters alive for a happy ending or a sufficiently poignant death. It's just - bang! All the heroics and all the training in the world can't always protect you from a wannabe teenage martyr with an assault rifle.
But in real life there's no respawn. You're just another number on the news, just another box on a plane.
Okay, it's not released yet, and it's single-player only, but a lot of people seem convinced we're cheating somehow. But we aren't - we're just a bunch of nutters who can make the prehistoric Half-Life engine sing and dance like the very latest...:-)
you have committed a namespace violation. your application will be ignored until you find a name that does not conflict with a currently maintained, widely used application.
I suggest changing to the name 'Phoenix'. No, wait...
What you're doing is wrong, but I think I love you. A few people on Slashdot made references to Cassini using something called 'convolution coding' in a previous article's comments, and I didn't know anything about what they were talking about - but now I know.
Too bad this is only a false-color image and has no relation to the colors visible to the human eye.
There are pictures corresponding to approximately what the human eye would see - kind of boring, and similar to the pictures taken by Voyager 2. The improvement in Cassini's false-colour pictures is due to the use an infra-red camera and some carefully tuned filters, letting the spacecraft peer straight through Titan's distinctly murky atmosphere. This is the breakthrough - it's finally possible to figure out what's under that atmosphere, and at high resolution too!
I downloaded and tried installing the recent OpenOffice.org the other day, but the installation program broke. It virtually finished, got to 'Converting fonts' and then hung. The little progress bars were wibbling away, but nothing was happening - I left it for an hour, hoping it would finish, but nothing happened.
Anyone else had this problem? What should I do?
I'm now investigating the latest NeoOffice/J - I've got an older version, and it's pretty good, apart from it being very, very slow. If this one breaks too, I think I'll cry...
Apparently, there are both lossless and lossy compression schemes, and it sounds like the compression is done within the cameras themselves - it's not like, say, the Mars Rovers which have a fairly big processor in the middle doing all the work. I don't think it mentions the specific compression algorithms themselves; I wouldn't be surprised if the lossy one is a form of JPEG. I know that was used on Mars Pathfinder, also launched in 1997...
The raw images I have seen are pretty messy, and for trulyspectacular views of Saturn, its rings and its moons it's probably best to wait for them to be processed properly. The FAQ details some of the ways in which they're processed on the ground, too - anyone want a go themselves?:-)
Nah, they need to tailor it to match the discerning tastes of today's online FPS player.
Behold - l33t f4rm3r!
Jump into your nitro-boosted tract0r and race round the generic post-apocalyptic countryside idyll, chasing off campers with your laser shotgun! Powerups, headshots and sh33p await those who can master the 'g1t 0rf m01 l4nd!!1' gameplay! Collect the EU-subsidy Quad-bike Damage and obliterate your evil foes the supermarkets - and maybe, just maybe, capture control of the elusive c0mb1ne h4rvest0r, and win the game!
Yep, same here. I got the little message saying upgrade to 0.9.1, so I did. And then I started up 0.9.1 and got a little message saying upgrade to 0.9.1, so I did...
I might as well copy-and-paste from a comment I posted a few weeks ago. I can't be arsed writing another detailed criticism of all these 'scripting' allegations...
"Then there are claims of 'scripting' in the leaked demos. Believe it or not, some things have to be scripted. Decent AI might get a simulated soldier to behave realistically and evade or attack the player at appropriate moments, but higher-order behaviours (like, say, breaking a door open) need to be scripted. It would be impressive for a human player to instantaneously figure out all the interactive aspects of a map, let alone a computer-controlled enemy. The scripting for such complex behaviours needs a lot of work to take account of many different possiblities, and it's obvious that Valve didn't include all of them in the demonstration map. But it's not as if the whole lot was faked, like the E3 2000 Halo demonstration...
"I've done a bunch of single-player mapping for Half-Life. One of the hardest things is the scripting - not the obvious, scripted sequence stuff, but the behind-the-scenes mechanics which makes the world come alive. AI works for the moment, while scripting is needed to set the scene, and to make the enemies more than simplistic automata. AI drives the scripting, and scripting drives the AI."
There's not a lot of detailed info but there's quite a lot I haven't seen before.
Valve have said quite a lot about the capabilities of the engine (see the VERC link above) - I was a bit suspicious about this article when I first saw it a few days ago, but on closer inspection it looks like someone's read a few things about the capabilities and trundled off in their own imagination.
It's not a bad article, but it doesn't look like it's been written by someone particularly familiar with the internals of 3D game engines in general, let alone Source in particular...
One interesting thing is that it uses a lot of similar technology and concepts to the original Half-Life engine, only with another five and a half years of development. It sounds like I'll be right at home.:-)
Not to mention the clarity of those 32 bit textures; my god, I shudder at the thought of going back to banding 16 bit hell.
Veering off-topic, but I've always wondered why some area of the software, be it OpenGL or the game itself, doesn't perfom some kind of dithering when converting the 24-bit image data down to 16-bit.
Most textures look fine at 16-bit, it's mainly things like skies and fades which get the horrible banding effects. Okay, it's mainly of historical interest now that texture compression and hyper-high-res textures are standard on anything vaguely modern, but I still wonder why the conversions were so bad...
Slashdot Mirror
I end up with a seriously ugly desktop unless I'm willing to spend quite some time trying to figure out why all the fonts are so big
Feature, not a bug (sort of) - the X server asks your monitor what DPI it does, and KDE sets the font sizes as appropriate. 10pt on one monitor should look physically the same size as 10pt on another, even if the monitors are different sizes and are running at different resolutions.
Admittedly, it annoys the hell out of me, particularly with one of my monitors which reckons 10pt should be enormous, so I invariably bodge the XF86Config file so that everything runs at a fixed 75dpi...
I noticed that too - I've become worryingly adept at identifying types of gun, and I'm an pacifist from the UK whose only real-world sightings of guns are of those carried by the police officers at airports. I'm hugely pro-gun-control, partially because I've seen vaguely realistic simulations of what these devices can do. Point, pull trigger, kill. Reload.
I sometimes wonder if politicians were to play realistic, multiplayer computer games, they'd perhaps get an inkling of what actually goes on in warfare and the utter, horrible randomness of it all, and perhaps be a bit more hesitant in sending in the troops.
Unlike books and films, there's no viewer-friendly plot - you can very easily get taken out by a sniper, or be shot in the gut by a teenager who was hiding behind a door with an AK47. There's no writer in the background keeping the characters alive for a happy ending or a sufficiently poignant death. It's just - bang! All the heroics and all the training in the world can't always protect you from a wannabe teenage martyr with an assault rifle.
But in real life there's no respawn. You're just another number on the news, just another box on a plane.
Sweet and fitting? Bullshit.
This only applies to Windows, though. Under Linux, hair regrowth occurs.
Yes.
There are graphically better HL maps out there, you just have to stop playing this f-fing map :)
:-)
And right on cue, Nightwatch!
Okay, it's not released yet, and it's single-player only, but a lot of people seem convinced we're cheating somehow. But we aren't - we're just a bunch of nutters who can make the prehistoric Half-Life engine sing and dance like the very latest...
you have committed a namespace violation. your application will be ignored until you find a name that does not conflict with a currently maintained, widely used application.
I suggest changing to the name 'Phoenix'. No, wait...
Dear Economist Troll,
What you're doing is wrong, but I think I love you. A few people on Slashdot made references to Cassini using something called 'convolution coding' in a previous article's comments, and I didn't know anything about what they were talking about - but now I know.
I think I'm going to have to get a subscription to the Economist now...
Too bad this is only a false-color image and has no relation to the colors visible to the human eye.
There are pictures corresponding to approximately what the human eye would see - kind of boring, and similar to the pictures taken by Voyager 2. The improvement in Cassini's false-colour pictures is due to the use an infra-red camera and some carefully tuned filters, letting the spacecraft peer straight through Titan's distinctly murky atmosphere. This is the breakthrough - it's finally possible to figure out what's under that atmosphere, and at high resolution too!
The preliminary maps of Titan from Cassini's imagery are already beating the best images taken from Earth - including the astounding images taken from ground-based telescopes by the European Southern Observatory. Interestingly, features on the different maps do match up - which definitely shows that they're real feature, and not random camera artefacts.
I'll have a look into that, thanks!
I have got the Bitstream Vera fonts installed (the monospaced ones are great for programming) - a common theme?
Soullessbastard: Thanks for all the links, too!
I downloaded and tried installing the recent OpenOffice.org the other day, but the installation program broke. It virtually finished, got to 'Converting fonts' and then hung. The little progress bars were wibbling away, but nothing was happening - I left it for an hour, hoping it would finish, but nothing happened.
Anyone else had this problem? What should I do?
I'm now investigating the latest NeoOffice/J - I've got an older version, and it's pretty good, apart from it being very, very slow. If this one breaks too, I think I'll cry...
Well, roughly a billion kilometres an hour then.
:-)
At least I was in the right order of magnitude; that's pretty good going for astronomy!
BUT - Beagle was not ESA developed - it was private briutish project ...
So you could say that its life was nasty, briutish and short?
(Badum-TISH!)
I'm sorry.
I find myself curious what compression algorithms they are using... is it lossless?
:-)
I was reading an interesting page on how the cameras process the data and on some of the technical aspects regarding the images - the FAQ on the raw images available for downloading.
Apparently, there are both lossless and lossy compression schemes, and it sounds like the compression is done within the cameras themselves - it's not like, say, the Mars Rovers which have a fairly big processor in the middle doing all the work. I don't think it mentions the specific compression algorithms themselves; I wouldn't be surprised if the lossy one is a form of JPEG. I know that was used on Mars Pathfinder, also launched in 1997...
The raw images I have seen are pretty messy, and for trulyspectacular views of Saturn, its rings and its moons it's probably best to wait for them to be processed properly. The FAQ details some of the ways in which they're processed on the ground, too - anyone want a go themselves?
Er... The speed of light's pretty quick.
Roughly a billion (10^9) miles per hour, in fact.
Given how unstable and unreliable Orkut has been lately, I reckon Google should sue back! :-)
I remember Konqueror getting support for Shockwave through Wine with 'reaktivate' - does anyone know what happened to that project? I can't find anything more recent than late 2001...
Nah, they need to tailor it to match the discerning tastes of today's online FPS player.
Behold - l33t f4rm3r!
Jump into your nitro-boosted tract0r and race round the generic post-apocalyptic countryside idyll, chasing off campers with your laser shotgun! Powerups, headshots and sh33p await those who can master the 'g1t 0rf m01 l4nd!!1' gameplay! Collect the EU-subsidy Quad-bike Damage and obliterate your evil foes the supermarkets - and maybe, just maybe, capture control of the elusive c0mb1ne h4rvest0r, and win the game!
Ahem.
tract0r!!1
Apparently side steps or nonsteps also constitute steps backwards.
What about jumping up and down on the spot?
Yep, same here. I got the little message saying upgrade to 0.9.1, so I did. And then I started up 0.9.1 and got a little message saying upgrade to 0.9.1, so I did...
Have you tried upgrading to 0.9.1?
Powerful AI? Scripted sequences?
I can just imagine...
"But what's my motivation in this battle?"
I might as well copy-and-paste from a comment I posted a few weeks ago. I can't be arsed writing another detailed criticism of all these 'scripting' allegations...
"Then there are claims of 'scripting' in the leaked demos. Believe it or not, some things have to be scripted. Decent AI might get a simulated soldier to behave realistically and evade or attack the player at appropriate moments, but higher-order behaviours (like, say, breaking a door open) need to be scripted. It would be impressive for a human player to instantaneously figure out all the interactive aspects of a map, let alone a computer-controlled enemy. The scripting for such complex behaviours needs a lot of work to take account of many different possiblities, and it's obvious that Valve didn't include all of them in the demonstration map. But it's not as if the whole lot was faked, like the E3 2000 Halo demonstration...
"I've done a bunch of single-player mapping for Half-Life. One of the hardest things is the scripting - not the obvious, scripted sequence stuff, but the behind-the-scenes mechanics which makes the world come alive. AI works for the moment, while scripting is needed to set the scene, and to make the enemies more than simplistic automata. AI drives the scripting, and scripting drives the AI."
There's not a lot of detailed info but there's quite a lot I haven't seen before.
Valve have said quite a lot about the capabilities of the engine (see the VERC link above) - I was a bit suspicious about this article when I first saw it a few days ago, but on closer inspection it looks like someone's read a few things about the capabilities and trundled off in their own imagination.
It's not a bad article, but it doesn't look like it's been written by someone particularly familiar with the internals of 3D game engines in general, let alone Source in particular...
There's also the official Valve FAQ for modders over at the VERC Collective.
:-)
One interesting thing is that it uses a lot of similar technology and concepts to the original Half-Life engine, only with another five and a half years of development. It sounds like I'll be right at home.
Not to mention the clarity of those 32 bit textures; my god, I shudder at the thought of going back to banding 16 bit hell.
Veering off-topic, but I've always wondered why some area of the software, be it OpenGL or the game itself, doesn't perfom some kind of dithering when converting the 24-bit image data down to 16-bit.
Most textures look fine at 16-bit, it's mainly things like skies and fades which get the horrible banding effects. Okay, it's mainly of historical interest now that texture compression and hyper-high-res textures are standard on anything vaguely modern, but I still wonder why the conversions were so bad...
You can change the name of Firefox completely with Firesomething - although I use it primarily for the random comedy names.
Go, Mozilla Firebadger!
A Google search for 'msits.exe' turns up a tonne of links, including several mentioning 'http://www.008k.com//f//22776/msits.exe'.
:-)
There's what looks like a valid 6.5kB EXE there - might this be a copy? For forensic purposes only, mind.