This is the kind of thing your brain adapts to surprisingly quickly. Try flipping your mouse backwards and see how quickly you adapt to it. Some people will find they adapt in a matter of minutes.
Well, sure, this is easy with, say, Distributed Multiheaded X. I think DMX has been integrated into the core Xorg build for some time now. It's one of the many things *nix has done for ages that Windows still takes addon software to do, and I'm not sure if Mac OS X has anything available to do it.
Sadly, there are still many people stuck with Windows for work (I'm one of them) so if we need a solution for something like this, we have to look to the ugly solutions.
Synergy and Maxivista are aimed at two different solutions, though. Synergy shares the mouse and keyboard - it's a software KVM. The two computers run separately, with separate apps, etc etc.
Maxivista actually sets up a virtual display adapter on the "host" and the "client" is connected as an extended desktop. It integrated into the multihead capabilities of the host. This lets you treat them as if it was two monitors on the same computer, dragging windows back and forth, etc. I think Maxivista can do the same as Synergy as well, but I mostly used it for the extended desktop functionality.
I did at one time find a free competitor to Mv that worked (ZoneOS ZoneScreen, or something?) but I found it to be so slow as to be nearly useless.
Uhg, you bring back bad memories for me. I was working DSL support at Earthlink when 9/11 happened, and there was a lot of telco equipment in/around the WTC. I had people who lived in NYC on the phone while the buildings were still burning wanting to know why their DSL was down and when it'd be back up. A couple even complained that they had trouble getting through. Completely shocked me.
Another option for smallish to mediumish gears would be cam gears, the cams themselves, some pulleys, and the like from overhead cam engines at a junkyard. Many makers, such as Toyota, have made nearly exclusively overhead cam engines for 20ish years, and most of those sort of things can be gotten at with little or no disassembly of anything complex. These would mostly be spur and helical.
One game that always stuck with me for excellent music was a kid's game on Atari 8-bit called Tonk in the Land of the Buddy Bots. The general gameplay was similar to Zelda - top down view moving around, though minus swords. The general layout was an approx 15x10 grid with a mountain in the far north, the Big Bad's castle in the far south, and a river through the middle. When your guy was at the peak of the mountain, all that played was a simple two-part motif. A couple screens down, a bass line is added in with slightly ominous overtones. A screen away from either side of the river is a complex four-part harmony with a fleshed out version of the main theme and the bass line. A couple screens from the castle, the ominous bass line dominates with only a hint of the original motif, and at the castle is nothing but the bass line. Likewise with the river, at the west side of it is a simple one-part lilting melody, which gets more complex as you near the waterfall to the east. Any vintage game music fan owes it to themselves to check it out. Level 4 is still quite a challenge even for an adult.
It was such a simple and well-done evolution, I never understood why so few games did anything like that and used the same music for the entire overworld.
Personally, I love the HL2 "cutscenes". Oftimes you don't even really realize you're in a "cutscene" since you rarely lose direct control of your character and you never leave the viewpoint. Some of the director's commentary talked about the various tricks and techniques they used to get the players to look where they were supposed to look during the plot exposition, and by and large it works. It's a lot better than having control of a game unexpectedly taken away and suddenly having an out of body experience.
This isn't always true. My fiancee got a laptop a year or so ago that came with no discs whatsoever. It gave you the option of burning restore discs, which included all the bloatware. There was no way, short of buying a retail copy of Vista or going pirate, to reformat/install without the bloatware. Fortunately most of it uninstalled fairly cleanly, but "just format and reinstall!!" isn't always an option.
I love taking my friends who think GT4 is so amazingly realistic and sticking them in front of GPL at something like Nuerburgring or Monaco and see if they can make a lap without spinning out. Some of them aren't even able to get to the first corners without traction control.
(Yes, GT4 is pretty decent as far as console games go, and is probably the most realistic of the console sims, but still doesn't hold a candle to some Papyrus games. I've done some SCCA autocross in a MR car so I have some idea about how cars are supposed to handle)
I accept that some people have had opposite experiences as mine with VIA chipsets, but I'm not sure I count as having only limited anecdotal experience. My first home-built computer was a 486DX/33 on an ASUS board. From there I worked up the ranks on a K5-133, K6-2 233, Pentium 3 450, etc etc. In the earlier days when processors were more expensive than they are now I tended to keep them across a mobo or two.
Until the Intel chipset with the P3, I had more problems with the VIA chipsets than any other chipset type I used. After that was an Athlon T-bird on the aforementioned KT266 (I'm pretty sure mine wasn't the A. I've heard the A was better). To be fair, it sounds like it was right about the time I gave up on them that they hit their stride, so I honestly can't comment on a lot of their newer chipsets. The KT-7A RAID that I tried supposedly improved after a couple bios revisions as well. So it sounds like you may have come into them just after I was getting out:) It also seems like some people had better luck than others with hitting the good parts while others like me happened to hit the bad ones.
I had several friends growing up who also built computers that tended to stay away from them, as well as several people who went on to run local screwdriver shops that felt the same way at the time. Like I said, it sounds like from reading other posts that they improved by the later Athlon XP+ stage.
Chipsets seem to be like cars though. Some people never buy anything other than some specific brand and never have a problem, while others have nothing but failure with them. I'll grant you their place in history as competition, and competition being good, but it's just a shame that it often wasn't better competition in the earlier days.
Uhg. Personally, I've never had anything but trouble from Via chipsets. I'm pretty sure I even had KT133A and KT266 chipset boards at one point. Endless Safe Mode reinstalls of the IRQ routing drivers, occasional Windows flakiness from said drivers, the USB filter drivers, weird voltage/clock frequency stuff... once I spent the little extra for an Intel chipset for my P3, I never went back to Via. A friend had given me a KT-7A RAID and after a little fighting, I gave it back and bought a nForce chipset board. I realize they need drivers too, but at least they don't break the system utterly when not installed and don't require weekly reinstalls. I can't say I'm sorry to see VIA out of the game.
I'm playing through these now, on the second case of the third game. I showed a couple bits to a lawyer friend of mine who got a kick out of how ridiculous the courtroom process is. I'm still finding them entertaining, though.
I was pretty disappointed with the Wiimote controls for Twilight Princess since it was so highly hyped as "Control the sword with the remote!". Especially since I took glovepie and was able to write a script do direct swing inputs on Ocarina of Time. Swing the remote left, he swings the sword left. Swing it right, he swings right. Overhead swing, does an overhead swing of the sword. It makes the archery a little funny, but it was a lot more entertaining than just wiggling. I should get a youtube vid of that up...
Hmm, now that you mention it, I did have a friend who asked about a computer upgrade specifically because "Norton ran slow". I think you're onto something!
Business apps might be the drivers of the most sales, but I tend to think games are the drivers of "progress". There are very few business apps that need more than NT4 on a decent sized screen with a fast enough processor to run Office. I think even Office 2007's minimum requirements say something about a 500mhz processor. Heck, a large number of companies could probably get away with Windows 3.1, Word 1.1A, Eudora Light for e-mail, and maybe some sort of spreadsheet/accounting software. You really don't need a dual core with 2GB of RAM and Vista Ultimate to send e-mail, write letters, track expenses, and surf the web a bit.
As for nVidia, I'm still split on whether the graphics card is going to end up being dominant, or we're going to end up with something like 16 or 32 general purpose cores with a dynamically allocated number dedicated to graphics. I tend to think that as things are now, highly specialized dedicated graphics cards aren't going anywhere, but I've been surprised before.
My only guess is that being a rock star is a lot more interesting and "main stream acceptable" than, say, strange and jerky dancing or complex finger gymnastics. Pretty much everyone knows what a guitar is and the basics of how they work (push strings/buttons, strum) while dancing and such is little more esoteric. I'm personally enjoying Daigasso! Band Bros, which is an extremely difficult (on Pro level) rhythm/music game for DS.
So he is. Shows how much I've been paying attention:) I have some Kara gear, but haven't even touched ZA beyond getting the 20 slot bag. Maybe someday...
I'm in a somewhat interesting position of being able to see both sides. My wife-to-be is a fairly hardcore raider with a couple or three 70s (her group has taken down Vashj a few times, and making progress on Kael'thas in BT) while I'm a much more casual player. I've mostly enjoyed the changes because I can experience more content on different character types without nearly as much grinding away on each one. On the other hand, she's gotten a little frustrated because people are getting to 70 and wanting spots in raids well before being sufficiently geared or skilled with their characters. She's now having to deal with people who stormed to 70 in quest reward greens who want into SSC or BT with blue and green gear.
Hey hey hey now. Calm down there. Next thing you'll be claiming is that Duke Nukem Forever will be out soon. I don't know if the universe could handle DNF running under Linux on a SSD at the same time without tearing down the middle.
My cell phone has an OLED outer screen (LG VX8300) and I can see ghosting where commonly lit up elements are (signal strength, battery meter, cock, etc). Supposedly the blue OLEDs have particularly short lives. I like the phone decently (aside from the junky locked down Verizon interface) so it doesn't bother me that much.
Still, I look forward to when I can stick some "paper" in my OLED printer, print out a 5x5 sheet, and stick it in my closet for some extra light.
I think it was the expectation of analog controls that made full-size joysticks less attractive. I've recently been playing a bunch of old Atari games I grew up with with a gamepad D-pad, and I'm having a very hard time getting the precise inputs necessary for some of the trickier games. I loaded up a few on the real thing with a real Atari joystick, and had no problems. But, these were games where the stick was an 8-way digital. I remember playing some early games with an analog stick and always found it somewhat awkward with a handheld analog stick. It was tricky to get just the right amount of movement to get where you wanted, and very few sticks had the kind of base or support to make it really comfortable. Once you moved up to games needing multiple analog sticks, building a big heavy base for games that would usually be played on a couch or on the floor in front of a TV wasn't really practical.
Just to be a nit-picker, the Atari 5200 had the first analog stick on a controller
However, the N64 definitely had the first remotely *usable* analog stick. The 5200s was terrible. Terrible terrible. I still have nightmares of trying to make the Star Raiders ship fly straight.
While I don't necessarily disagree with you... feel free to release your patch to tcpip.c and give us a link to the updated source file as soon as you get a chance;)
Sometimes, if a closed-source vendor isn't going to release an update/fix/tweak, the community has to do what they can to do it. Given what many people use Bittorrent for, I suspect getting a rootkit from this patch is the least of their worries. The rest of us will either just have to trust it, use BT on a non-Windows platform, or deal with the slower speeds.
This does bring up an interesting possibility - rather than completely reimplement Windows through something like ReactOS, or translate the API like WINE, how about replacing components of a real Windows install with F/OSS replacements? Drop in a workalike, but open source tcpip.sys and know where it's coming from.
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This is the kind of thing your brain adapts to surprisingly quickly. Try flipping your mouse backwards and see how quickly you adapt to it. Some people will find they adapt in a matter of minutes.
Well, sure, this is easy with, say, Distributed Multiheaded X. I think DMX has been integrated into the core Xorg build for some time now. It's one of the many things *nix has done for ages that Windows still takes addon software to do, and I'm not sure if Mac OS X has anything available to do it.
Sadly, there are still many people stuck with Windows for work (I'm one of them) so if we need a solution for something like this, we have to look to the ugly solutions.
Synergy and Maxivista are aimed at two different solutions, though. Synergy shares the mouse and keyboard - it's a software KVM. The two computers run separately, with separate apps, etc etc.
Maxivista actually sets up a virtual display adapter on the "host" and the "client" is connected as an extended desktop. It integrated into the multihead capabilities of the host. This lets you treat them as if it was two monitors on the same computer, dragging windows back and forth, etc. I think Maxivista can do the same as Synergy as well, but I mostly used it for the extended desktop functionality.
I did at one time find a free competitor to Mv that worked (ZoneOS ZoneScreen, or something?) but I found it to be so slow as to be nearly useless.
Uhg, you bring back bad memories for me. I was working DSL support at Earthlink when 9/11 happened, and there was a lot of telco equipment in/around the WTC. I had people who lived in NYC on the phone while the buildings were still burning wanting to know why their DSL was down and when it'd be back up. A couple even complained that they had trouble getting through. Completely shocked me.
Another option for smallish to mediumish gears would be cam gears, the cams themselves, some pulleys, and the like from overhead cam engines at a junkyard. Many makers, such as Toyota, have made nearly exclusively overhead cam engines for 20ish years, and most of those sort of things can be gotten at with little or no disassembly of anything complex. These would mostly be spur and helical.
One game that always stuck with me for excellent music was a kid's game on Atari 8-bit called Tonk in the Land of the Buddy Bots. The general gameplay was similar to Zelda - top down view moving around, though minus swords. The general layout was an approx 15x10 grid with a mountain in the far north, the Big Bad's castle in the far south, and a river through the middle. When your guy was at the peak of the mountain, all that played was a simple two-part motif. A couple screens down, a bass line is added in with slightly ominous overtones. A screen away from either side of the river is a complex four-part harmony with a fleshed out version of the main theme and the bass line. A couple screens from the castle, the ominous bass line dominates with only a hint of the original motif, and at the castle is nothing but the bass line. Likewise with the river, at the west side of it is a simple one-part lilting melody, which gets more complex as you near the waterfall to the east. Any vintage game music fan owes it to themselves to check it out. Level 4 is still quite a challenge even for an adult.
It was such a simple and well-done evolution, I never understood why so few games did anything like that and used the same music for the entire overworld.
Personally, I love the HL2 "cutscenes". Oftimes you don't even really realize you're in a "cutscene" since you rarely lose direct control of your character and you never leave the viewpoint. Some of the director's commentary talked about the various tricks and techniques they used to get the players to look where they were supposed to look during the plot exposition, and by and large it works. It's a lot better than having control of a game unexpectedly taken away and suddenly having an out of body experience.
This isn't always true. My fiancee got a laptop a year or so ago that came with no discs whatsoever. It gave you the option of burning restore discs, which included all the bloatware. There was no way, short of buying a retail copy of Vista or going pirate, to reformat/install without the bloatware. Fortunately most of it uninstalled fairly cleanly, but "just format and reinstall!!" isn't always an option.
LFG Heroic Nuerburgring. Must have T6 Tires and Engine, 550hp unbuffed pst
I love taking my friends who think GT4 is so amazingly realistic and sticking them in front of GPL at something like Nuerburgring or Monaco and see if they can make a lap without spinning out. Some of them aren't even able to get to the first corners without traction control.
(Yes, GT4 is pretty decent as far as console games go, and is probably the most realistic of the console sims, but still doesn't hold a candle to some Papyrus games. I've done some SCCA autocross in a MR car so I have some idea about how cars are supposed to handle)
I accept that some people have had opposite experiences as mine with VIA chipsets, but I'm not sure I count as having only limited anecdotal experience. My first home-built computer was a 486DX/33 on an ASUS board. From there I worked up the ranks on a K5-133, K6-2 233, Pentium 3 450, etc etc. In the earlier days when processors were more expensive than they are now I tended to keep them across a mobo or two.
Until the Intel chipset with the P3, I had more problems with the VIA chipsets than any other chipset type I used. After that was an Athlon T-bird on the aforementioned KT266 (I'm pretty sure mine wasn't the A. I've heard the A was better). To be fair, it sounds like it was right about the time I gave up on them that they hit their stride, so I honestly can't comment on a lot of their newer chipsets. The KT-7A RAID that I tried supposedly improved after a couple bios revisions as well. So it sounds like you may have come into them just after I was getting out :) It also seems like some people had better luck than others with hitting the good parts while others like me happened to hit the bad ones.
I had several friends growing up who also built computers that tended to stay away from them, as well as several people who went on to run local screwdriver shops that felt the same way at the time. Like I said, it sounds like from reading other posts that they improved by the later Athlon XP+ stage.
Chipsets seem to be like cars though. Some people never buy anything other than some specific brand and never have a problem, while others have nothing but failure with them. I'll grant you their place in history as competition, and competition being good, but it's just a shame that it often wasn't better competition in the earlier days.
Uhg. Personally, I've never had anything but trouble from Via chipsets. I'm pretty sure I even had KT133A and KT266 chipset boards at one point. Endless Safe Mode reinstalls of the IRQ routing drivers, occasional Windows flakiness from said drivers, the USB filter drivers, weird voltage/clock frequency stuff... once I spent the little extra for an Intel chipset for my P3, I never went back to Via. A friend had given me a KT-7A RAID and after a little fighting, I gave it back and bought a nForce chipset board. I realize they need drivers too, but at least they don't break the system utterly when not installed and don't require weekly reinstalls. I can't say I'm sorry to see VIA out of the game.
I'm playing through these now, on the second case of the third game. I showed a couple bits to a lawyer friend of mine who got a kick out of how ridiculous the courtroom process is. I'm still finding them entertaining, though.
I was pretty disappointed with the Wiimote controls for Twilight Princess since it was so highly hyped as "Control the sword with the remote!". Especially since I took glovepie and was able to write a script do direct swing inputs on Ocarina of Time. Swing the remote left, he swings the sword left. Swing it right, he swings right. Overhead swing, does an overhead swing of the sword. It makes the archery a little funny, but it was a lot more entertaining than just wiggling. I should get a youtube vid of that up...
Hmm, now that you mention it, I did have a friend who asked about a computer upgrade specifically because "Norton ran slow". I think you're onto something!
Business apps might be the drivers of the most sales, but I tend to think games are the drivers of "progress". There are very few business apps that need more than NT4 on a decent sized screen with a fast enough processor to run Office. I think even Office 2007's minimum requirements say something about a 500mhz processor. Heck, a large number of companies could probably get away with Windows 3.1, Word 1.1A, Eudora Light for e-mail, and maybe some sort of spreadsheet/accounting software. You really don't need a dual core with 2GB of RAM and Vista Ultimate to send e-mail, write letters, track expenses, and surf the web a bit. As for nVidia, I'm still split on whether the graphics card is going to end up being dominant, or we're going to end up with something like 16 or 32 general purpose cores with a dynamically allocated number dedicated to graphics. I tend to think that as things are now, highly specialized dedicated graphics cards aren't going anywhere, but I've been surprised before.
My only guess is that being a rock star is a lot more interesting and "main stream acceptable" than, say, strange and jerky dancing or complex finger gymnastics. Pretty much everyone knows what a guitar is and the basics of how they work (push strings/buttons, strum) while dancing and such is little more esoteric. I'm personally enjoying Daigasso! Band Bros, which is an extremely difficult (on Pro level) rhythm/music game for DS.
So he is. Shows how much I've been paying attention :) I have some Kara gear, but haven't even touched ZA beyond getting the 20 slot bag. Maybe someday...
I'm in a somewhat interesting position of being able to see both sides. My wife-to-be is a fairly hardcore raider with a couple or three 70s (her group has taken down Vashj a few times, and making progress on Kael'thas in BT) while I'm a much more casual player. I've mostly enjoyed the changes because I can experience more content on different character types without nearly as much grinding away on each one. On the other hand, she's gotten a little frustrated because people are getting to 70 and wanting spots in raids well before being sufficiently geared or skilled with their characters. She's now having to deal with people who stormed to 70 in quest reward greens who want into SSC or BT with blue and green gear.
Hey hey hey now. Calm down there. Next thing you'll be claiming is that Duke Nukem Forever will be out soon. I don't know if the universe could handle DNF running under Linux on a SSD at the same time without tearing down the middle.
My cell phone has an OLED outer screen (LG VX8300) and I can see ghosting where commonly lit up elements are (signal strength, battery meter, cock, etc). Supposedly the blue OLEDs have particularly short lives. I like the phone decently (aside from the junky locked down Verizon interface) so it doesn't bother me that much.
Still, I look forward to when I can stick some "paper" in my OLED printer, print out a 5x5 sheet, and stick it in my closet for some extra light.
I think it was the expectation of analog controls that made full-size joysticks less attractive. I've recently been playing a bunch of old Atari games I grew up with with a gamepad D-pad, and I'm having a very hard time getting the precise inputs necessary for some of the trickier games. I loaded up a few on the real thing with a real Atari joystick, and had no problems. But, these were games where the stick was an 8-way digital. I remember playing some early games with an analog stick and always found it somewhat awkward with a handheld analog stick. It was tricky to get just the right amount of movement to get where you wanted, and very few sticks had the kind of base or support to make it really comfortable. Once you moved up to games needing multiple analog sticks, building a big heavy base for games that would usually be played on a couch or on the floor in front of a TV wasn't really practical.
Just to be a nit-picker, the Atari 5200 had the first analog stick on a controller
However, the N64 definitely had the first remotely *usable* analog stick. The 5200s was terrible. Terrible terrible. I still have nightmares of trying to make the Star Raiders ship fly straight.
I know you meant this in jest, but...
http://www.colinux.org/
While I don't necessarily disagree with you... feel free to release your patch to tcpip.c and give us a link to the updated source file as soon as you get a chance ;)
Sometimes, if a closed-source vendor isn't going to release an update/fix/tweak, the community has to do what they can to do it. Given what many people use Bittorrent for, I suspect getting a rootkit from this patch is the least of their worries. The rest of us will either just have to trust it, use BT on a non-Windows platform, or deal with the slower speeds.
This does bring up an interesting possibility - rather than completely reimplement Windows through something like ReactOS, or translate the API like WINE, how about replacing components of a real Windows install with F/OSS replacements? Drop in a workalike, but open source tcpip.sys and know where it's coming from.