Lisa Nowak was an astronaut, not a rocket scientist. The latter, of course, have no chance whatsoever of any skeletons lurking in their cupboards, honest!
Kids these days - expecting stun guns to be preassembled? Why, in my day you'd build your own with a 9V battery, a fuck-off big capacitor and some other odds and sods scrounged from the technology block!
(Someone in a few years below me actually did this. If you saw him wandering along with a bunch of components and two pokey-out wires in his hands, you'd run away. Very fast. Oh, and someone else built a xenon flash-tube driver for his GCSE technology project. Decided to test it with his fingers, sans flash-tube. Ouch! I did the sensible thing and build a robot...)
Bah. For my thirteenth birthday, I got money towards a microscope. Not any old microscope, mind - but one sold by a local scientific supplies outlet. (The vast, thousand-page catalogue was also great - full of proper laboratory supplies of every possible description!)
It was made in the Soviet Union. Unpacking it from its elastic bands, crinkly yellow-brown paper and unprocessed cotton wool was a fantastic experience.
I've still got it, too - and only realised a month or two back that its LOMO manufacturer is that LOMO - all I can say is that its optics are way better than the cameras...
Five or six years ago, I strapped a tiny composite video camera to it with an intriguing assembly created out of Lego. I got some half-decent results, too. Having said that, I'd still love one of these modern toy efforts. Lugging around a huge box filled with cast-iron optics isn't so much fun nowadays...;-)
You must have been modded redundent for posting about this in another thread. As far as I can tell, you're right target with this one. Skype doesn't work with the new firewall.
No idea about the moderation (only found the problem last night!) but the good news is that the problem appears just about fixed with 10.5.1. When the firewall is enabled, Leopard will now ask about allowing incoming connections every time Skype is started - which is an improvement on it working once, then refusing to start again.
A rather entertaining issue - if you have the firewall enabled and run Skype then quit it, then Skype gets horribly broken, and doesn't start again. Nobody can decide if it's Leopard cryptographically signing (and modifying) the Skype executable and tripping up Skype's own excessive intrusion detection, or Skype modifying its own executable and tripping up Leopard's checks that it's the same application being allowed access to the interweb. I suspect it's the former - as older installations of Skype got killed on my two recently upgraded machines in that way.
I had to re-download and install Skype, and now I have to run it with the firewall switched off. Pending a fixed Skype in 'a few weeks'. Aaaargh...
Time Machine doesn't work on my old-fashioned partitioned external hard disk (half is an NTFS partition for Windows backups...), the Leopard installer initially wouldn't detect my MacBook Pro's own hard disk, and my iMac got nearly deaded by the upgrade (fortunately I had SSH enabled, and was able to get in and run Software Update from the command line, and thus could install the important iMac updates). Oh, and it's all a little bit crashy. It's nearly fantastic - apart from those issues...;-)
Somehow I failed to notice that these newer cards often include the appropriate adapters.
DVI's a superset of analogue VGA - it carries VGA-style analogue signals in addition to the more modern digital stuff, so adaptors are cheap and simple to make.
A few years ago, I didn't realise they're generally included with graphics cards - so I've ended up with a surplus of DVI-to-VGA adaptors. Oops!
I imagine there's some advantage of wire-wrap stuff for one-off, complex circuitry - but what's wrong with printed circuit boards?
Before anyone says they're far too difficult to make, I designed and built my own at secondary school, for a GCSE project where I built a robot. First stage - creating a computer interface! Okay, placing all the tracks and things on a computer, then laser-printing to a bit of acetate and using that as a mask for the UV lightbox prior to developing and etching might rely a bit much on pre-existing computer hardware, but it worked, and was remarkably easy.
Is wire-wrap better for multi-layered circuits, or something?
Sure, I could sample at 1 bazillion hertz, but if I'm only sampling at 1 bit I'm not going to be reproducing the original signal very well, since my sample size isn't high enough to differentiate the data I care about.
Interestingly, the not-particularly-successful Super Audio CD samples at 2.8224 MHz, one bit per sample.
Many artists will make things for money ONLY. The altruistic spirit of OSS does not translate well to game art (with a few exceptions). Usually, the artists doing things for free are usually the bad ones, and the ones demanding lots of cash are the real deal. But without the latter, any game looks and sounds 1995ish, no matter how good the code is.
What about the eleventy billion people working on free modifications for commercial games? Yes, plenty of that is Bad Art, but there are somefantasticbitsofwork out there.
The motivations aren't purely financial, either - I've seen a lot of people get jobs as the result of mod work, but I've also seen people already employed in the games industry contribute stuff back to free mods. I think half of Natural Selection was built that way - it acquired fantastic voice acting, music, audio, animations, models and textures as a result. Altruism? Kinda. The whole place seems built on old boys' networks.
So if you want good game art? Stop mucking about in the world of open source and programming, and try looking at the game mods world!
They've released details saying theres about 50 maps or so. The expected gameplay is 5-6 hours.
I've played through the storyline section - while it is pretty short (I really got the hang of it after some false starts) and really didn't take that long for me to complete, it's definitely my gaming highlight of the year. I just don't want to spoil anything by describing why...
The challenge maps, or whatever they're called, should add loads of replay potential - apparently it can count the number of portals opened, the time taken and so on. So it goes beyond simply solving the puzzles, to solving them in as elegant a manner as possible. Should be fun!
Also, Episode Two is much bigger than Episode One. The environments, the maps, the length, the updated content - everything feels much more like a new game rather than just an expansion.
Described by random inhabitants of the internet as having: "extremely bad writing", with "some of the most dreadfully boring environments you'll ever see" - the "puzzles and triggers in the game are horrific", and "combat is done exactly the wrong way" - what are you waiting for?
I say it'll be Gearbox. Simply because those guys seem to be jumping in a lot for developers that don't want to continue work on one of their game series.
Gearbox did the PC port of the original Halo and, well... They weren't asked to do the port for Halo 2.
From rumours, there was a bit of ill-will between Microsoft and Gearbox - with for example the latter wanting to follow through on promises they'd made about the ability to mod the game, and with Microsoft insisting on intensive testing on every single bit of buggy Gearbox code.
Valve says in the Episode One commentary that they're not planning to implement HDR in the original Half Life 2 because it took so very, very long to assign luminosity levels to objects and shadows and light sources.
I played a bit of an HDR-ified Half-Life 2 at Valve back in June. I think it's what will be used for the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 versions of the game included with the Orange Box - they had no idea what would be done with it regarding the PC.
But quietly from me, you're not really missing anything - personally I much preferred the original lighting in Half-Life 2.;-)
I sort of recall hearing sometime down the line that some of the 3D specs were released, but critical stuff needed for acceptable performance or modern effects was missing.
That would be the WARP triangle setup thingy - something like two custom RISC processors which would munch through data. Matrox did supply microcode to make 'em do all the necessary stuff, but I don't think specs were ever released, nor did anyone figure out how they worked.
Performance and features were about the same as with Windows, but I think some programmers for the open-source drivers wondered if they could get the WARP whatsit to do even more...
Those specifications, promised nearly ten years ago, never arrived to my knowledge. If they ever did, it happened long after the G200 was obsolete.
They did arrive, and for the G400 as well. The first driver to make use of this information was the Utah-GLX module thingy for XFree86 3 - that John Carmack helped with their development. I think the specifications for some particular, programmable section of the cards (WARP setup engine?) weren't released, but microcode blobs for the necessary functionality were.
I think the G200/G400 were among the first to be supported in whatever the 'proper', non-hacky drivers for XFree86 4 were called, but from my experience with a G400, the open-source 3D drivers weren't always that stable.
I moved on to Nvidia after that too - stable closed-source drivers for Linux were much nicer than unstable, open-source ones...
Everything started off well (I mean, that John Carmack helped write the initial G200 driver), but things kind of fizzled out once things were about 95% working for the G400. Previously, I'd always bought Matrox, but after that I was happy to move on to Nvidia - despite the new drivers for Linux being binary-only.
Better idea: instead of popping up a dialog asking to install 3D acceleration, the installer just does it. After all, it'll be free software.
No, it'll have to ask the user - because the 3D driver will have various instabilities and have a tendency to hard-lock the machine at random intervals for some ill-defined reasons. Years will go by, and the situation won't improve - because by then, the hardware in question will be obsolete, and nobody will be bothering to improve the drivers.
Okay, I'm being pessimistic - but something pretty similar happened after Matrox released the specifications for its 3D graphics cards. There were fully open-source drivers, but they weren't exactly high-quality. I moved on to Nvidia after that...
I think the more likely scenario is the NSA rolling up to Larry and Sergi and saying "we need public sector lovable geek mascots to hide behind while we monitor the population's activities. You two seem suitable and have the right profiles. Here's some search tech, and we'll set you up with the right venture capital connections. No go profile everybody."
This conspiracy theory seems incomplete. Did Jimmy Hoffa steal the search technology from Area 51's crashed Roswell UFO, and masqueraded as JFK when FSF supporters attempted to assassinate him for creating the possibility of a faked Apollo moon landing, then went into hiding for many years as Lord Lucan, fathered Princess Diana's unborn child, found Elvis and Marilyn Monroe alive and well in Atlantis, flew an Aurora spy-plane powered by water-fuelled engines through the hole in the North Pole into an unknown hollow Earth down to the South Pole, took this fabled Google search technology to the secret Illuminati base in Antarctica before heading north again, annoyed the Pope and Opus Dei and the long-lost descendants of Jesus Christ and finally became integrated into the Project for a New American Century's headquarters, the NSA - which was almost obliterated when the international Zionist conspiracy felled the Twin Towers with explosives and thermite in the fraudulent September the 11th attacks?
To be honest, you're not trying very hard. Or giving the real-world NSA lots of credit and assuming no end of competence on their behalf. They've cracked every form of encryption as well, right?
Slashdot Mirror
Lisa Nowak was an astronaut, not a rocket scientist. The latter, of course, have no chance whatsoever of any skeletons lurking in their cupboards, honest!
Kids these days - expecting stun guns to be preassembled? Why, in my day you'd build your own with a 9V battery, a fuck-off big capacitor and some other odds and sods scrounged from the technology block!
(Someone in a few years below me actually did this. If you saw him wandering along with a bunch of components and two pokey-out wires in his hands, you'd run away. Very fast. Oh, and someone else built a xenon flash-tube driver for his GCSE technology project. Decided to test it with his fingers, sans flash-tube. Ouch! I did the sensible thing and build a robot...)
Bah. For my thirteenth birthday, I got money towards a microscope. Not any old microscope, mind - but one sold by a local scientific supplies outlet. (The vast, thousand-page catalogue was also great - full of proper laboratory supplies of every possible description!)
;-)
It was made in the Soviet Union. Unpacking it from its elastic bands, crinkly yellow-brown paper and unprocessed cotton wool was a fantastic experience.
I've still got it, too - and only realised a month or two back that its LOMO manufacturer is that LOMO - all I can say is that its optics are way better than the cameras...
Five or six years ago, I strapped a tiny composite video camera to it with an intriguing assembly created out of Lego. I got some half-decent results, too. Having said that, I'd still love one of these modern toy efforts. Lugging around a huge box filled with cast-iron optics isn't so much fun nowadays...
No idea about the moderation (only found the problem last night!) but the good news is that the problem appears just about fixed with 10.5.1. When the firewall is enabled, Leopard will now ask about allowing incoming connections every time Skype is started - which is an improvement on it working once, then refusing to start again.
... And now my iMac is stuck at 'Writing files: 83% complete'.
... bollocks? I'm not sure if I dare switching it off!
Oh
Argh... Is 10.5.1 out? It wasn't when I did my overly optimistic daily manual run of Software Update a few hours ago. I must install! ;-)
Unless Tiger had that problem, then no - this update is 10.4.11, not the much-awaited 10.5.1, which is apparently in testing...
A rather entertaining issue - if you have the firewall enabled and run Skype then quit it, then Skype gets horribly broken, and doesn't start again. Nobody can decide if it's Leopard cryptographically signing (and modifying) the Skype executable and tripping up Skype's own excessive intrusion detection, or Skype modifying its own executable and tripping up Leopard's checks that it's the same application being allowed access to the interweb. I suspect it's the former - as older installations of Skype got killed on my two recently upgraded machines in that way.
;-)
I had to re-download and install Skype, and now I have to run it with the firewall switched off. Pending a fixed Skype in 'a few weeks'. Aaaargh...
Time Machine doesn't work on my old-fashioned partitioned external hard disk (half is an NTFS partition for Windows backups...), the Leopard installer initially wouldn't detect my MacBook Pro's own hard disk, and my iMac got nearly deaded by the upgrade (fortunately I had SSH enabled, and was able to get in and run Software Update from the command line, and thus could install the important iMac updates). Oh, and it's all a little bit crashy. It's nearly fantastic - apart from those issues...
That's what he said - "supporting customers
"If you are a serious phone maker
But he does sound a touch envious of the lifestyles of those at Google - describing his own work as "a deeply unsexy job". Aww...
DVI's a superset of analogue VGA - it carries VGA-style analogue signals in addition to the more modern digital stuff, so adaptors are cheap and simple to make.
A few years ago, I didn't realise they're generally included with graphics cards - so I've ended up with a surplus of DVI-to-VGA adaptors. Oops!
I imagine there's some advantage of wire-wrap stuff for one-off, complex circuitry - but what's wrong with printed circuit boards?
Before anyone says they're far too difficult to make, I designed and built my own at secondary school, for a GCSE project where I built a robot. First stage - creating a computer interface! Okay, placing all the tracks and things on a computer, then laser-printing to a bit of acetate and using that as a mask for the UV lightbox prior to developing and etching might rely a bit much on pre-existing computer hardware, but it worked, and was remarkably easy.
Is wire-wrap better for multi-layered circuits, or something?
Interestingly, the not-particularly-successful Super Audio CD samples at 2.8224 MHz, one bit per sample.
Delta-sigma modulation apparently, instead of the usual, good old pulse-code modulation used on CDs, uncompressed MP3s, and just about everything else...
Do adults actually want to play something so gratuitously violent, gory and nasty?
What about the eleventy billion people working on free modifications for commercial games? Yes, plenty of that is Bad Art, but there are some fantastic bits of work out there.
The motivations aren't purely financial, either - I've seen a lot of people get jobs as the result of mod work, but I've also seen people already employed in the games industry contribute stuff back to free mods. I think half of Natural Selection was built that way - it acquired fantastic voice acting, music, audio, animations, models and textures as a result. Altruism? Kinda. The whole place seems built on old boys' networks.
So if you want good game art? Stop mucking about in the world of open source and programming, and try looking at the game mods world!
I've played through the storyline section - while it is pretty short (I really got the hang of it after some false starts) and really didn't take that long for me to complete, it's definitely my gaming highlight of the year. I just don't want to spoil anything by describing why...
The challenge maps, or whatever they're called, should add loads of replay potential - apparently it can count the number of portals opened, the time taken and so on. So it goes beyond simply solving the puzzles, to solving them in as elegant a manner as possible. Should be fun!
Also, Episode Two is much bigger than Episode One. The environments, the maps, the length, the updated content - everything feels much more like a new game rather than just an expansion.
Got a copy of Episode One, and want some more single-player Half-Life 2 before going all orangey with the Orange Box on Wednesday?
... Um ... Valve Developer Community! Even Steam!
I prescribe my own MINERVA, complete with needlessly cryptic website.
Random games journalist types are quite keen on it. No bribery was involved whatsoever, honest. Other links? Wikipedia! My blog-thing!
Described by random inhabitants of the internet as having: "extremely bad writing", with "some of the most dreadfully boring environments you'll ever see" - the "puzzles and triggers in the game are horrific", and "combat is done exactly the wrong way" - what are you waiting for?
Gearbox did the PC port of the original Halo and, well... They weren't asked to do the port for Halo 2.
From rumours, there was a bit of ill-will between Microsoft and Gearbox - with for example the latter wanting to follow through on promises they'd made about the ability to mod the game, and with Microsoft insisting on intensive testing on every single bit of buggy Gearbox code.
Lit Fuse Films - suspiciously professional-looking films like Combine Nation created using Garry's Mod.
And some very impressive video editing afterwards!
I played a bit of an HDR-ified Half-Life 2 at Valve back in June. I think it's what will be used for the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 versions of the game included with the Orange Box - they had no idea what would be done with it regarding the PC.
But quietly from me, you're not really missing anything - personally I much preferred the original lighting in Half-Life 2.
That would be the WARP triangle setup thingy - something like two custom RISC processors which would munch through data. Matrox did supply microcode to make 'em do all the necessary stuff, but I don't think specs were ever released, nor did anyone figure out how they worked.
Performance and features were about the same as with Windows, but I think some programmers for the open-source drivers wondered if they could get the WARP whatsit to do even more...
What, lxvDXXXV?
(And yes, what have the Romans ever done for us, apart from apparently producing correctly functioning spreadsheet software?)
They did arrive, and for the G400 as well. The first driver to make use of this information was the Utah-GLX module thingy for XFree86 3 - that John Carmack helped with their development. I think the specifications for some particular, programmable section of the cards (WARP setup engine?) weren't released, but microcode blobs for the necessary functionality were.
I think the G200/G400 were among the first to be supported in whatever the 'proper', non-hacky drivers for XFree86 4 were called, but from my experience with a G400, the open-source 3D drivers weren't always that stable.
I moved on to Nvidia after that too - stable closed-source drivers for Linux were much nicer than unstable, open-source ones...
This was in the days when the G400 was still competitive hardware - and Slashdot made a big noise about it all back then too.
Everything started off well (I mean, that John Carmack helped write the initial G200 driver), but things kind of fizzled out once things were about 95% working for the G400. Previously, I'd always bought Matrox, but after that I was happy to move on to Nvidia - despite the new drivers for Linux being binary-only.
No, it'll have to ask the user - because the 3D driver will have various instabilities and have a tendency to hard-lock the machine at random intervals for some ill-defined reasons. Years will go by, and the situation won't improve - because by then, the hardware in question will be obsolete, and nobody will be bothering to improve the drivers.
Okay, I'm being pessimistic - but something pretty similar happened after Matrox released the specifications for its 3D graphics cards. There were fully open-source drivers, but they weren't exactly high-quality. I moved on to Nvidia after that...
This conspiracy theory seems incomplete. Did Jimmy Hoffa steal the search technology from Area 51's crashed Roswell UFO, and masqueraded as JFK when FSF supporters attempted to assassinate him for creating the possibility of a faked Apollo moon landing, then went into hiding for many years as Lord Lucan, fathered Princess Diana's unborn child, found Elvis and Marilyn Monroe alive and well in Atlantis, flew an Aurora spy-plane powered by water-fuelled engines through the hole in the North Pole into an unknown hollow Earth down to the South Pole, took this fabled Google search technology to the secret Illuminati base in Antarctica before heading north again, annoyed the Pope and Opus Dei and the long-lost descendants of Jesus Christ and finally became integrated into the Project for a New American Century's headquarters, the NSA - which was almost obliterated when the international Zionist conspiracy felled the Twin Towers with explosives and thermite in the fraudulent September the 11th attacks?
To be honest, you're not trying very hard. Or giving the real-world NSA lots of credit and assuming no end of competence on their behalf. They've cracked every form of encryption as well, right?