I played Modem Wars a very long time ago and I remember it more as a multiplayer realtime war game. You could argue other strategy/action games such as Choplifter, Rescue Raiders, or the Ancient Art of War were RTS by that respect. Dune II created the formula we know as the RTS genre, however, which is similar to the old Intellivision turn-based strategy game Utopia. You gather resources, build buildings, and build armies and compete with a nearby enemy.
Another nuance, but nothing to quibble about - he said the WWW was formed ~1992, but the world wide web actually existed for a long time before 1992 (I've heard early '80s), but it first started to emerge in 1991 with the WorldWideWeb browser on NeXT and 1992 with the Lynx browser and Mosiac later in that year. The name World Wide Web I think was coined around 1990 or 1991, for that matter.
I played poker and chess as a kid and don't care for either now, but there are plenty of people that play them until they die, whether they're putting money on it or not. I still occasionally get together with old friends and play pen and paper RPGs because it's a nice escape (and 90% of the time we just bullshit and drink beer anyway). My brother and his wife play board games, but never video or P&P RPGs..
America (especially) is obsessed with categorizing things. Cartoon = Disney = for kids, not Cartoon = South Park = for adults (God forbid I mention Anime or Hentai).
So what makes me too old to play computer games? Fallout 1/2 were some of the best RPG computer games I ever played. The Longest Journey was a fantastic adventure game (I don't care much for the sequel, tho). Both of those were written mainly for adults. I love Unreal Tournament 2004 and the Battlefield games, as well. I know people my age and older that think Half Life is the best game ever written (never played it much myself - makes me queasy, as does the sequel).
IRC itself works a bit differently, as messages are all transmitted through the server and then broadcast to the clients on that channel. The CTCP and DCC features of IRC do use direct client-to-client connections, however, so it would entirely depend on when that feature was added (I'm pretty sure it wasn't in the client I used in 1990 when I was introduced to IRC).
bah, the music/movie industry just realized they're in a rut and have had no original ideas in years, plus it costs too much to try anything new, so they found a way to sell the same old movies and songs again - after all, all DVDs and CDs cache in memory and therefore will require a second license. I expect the bill will be retroactive to 1926 or so.
I expect if they tried that, they'd be thrown out of court.
I don't think this is enforcable at the router level - routers would need to be redesigned to identify copyright packets before the copyrighted media is sent (since copyrighted media arriving at the router is a violation). The nature of the Internet itself makes this problematic - routers do not guarantee a specific route or order, they send using a fastest path approach which may involve hundreds of routers. That means the media may require hundreds of simultaneous licenses or use a fixed TCP route through the Internet. Streaming would be next to impossible, however, because there is no way of knowing if a UDP packet has arrived or if anybody intercepted it, meaning all routers would have to have a license for the file being sent.
Copyrighted software would be a nightmare - you can launch the same program multiple times on most OS's and each copy would require a separate license for each, but launching multiple data items within the same program would only require 3 licenses (one for install CD, one for harddisk file and one for the copy in memory).
I don't understand why people buy $25 million dollar yachts which require about $12 million a year to maintain or $12 million dollar mansions in Ft Lauderdale when they don't even live in them or $20000 stereo systems or heck, even $350 iPods when perfectly good alternatives exist. I mean, why get a yacht when a fishing dinghy will do? Why a mansion if you can live comfortably in a shed?
People buy Alienware because it's expensive and has the latest bells and whistles. For that matter, most people never upgrade their desktop PC, they just buy a new one when the old one gets outdated (like any appliance). If they do upgrade it, they usually pay someone to do it.
Anyhow, those specs should be good for about a year of gaming (the highest minimum CPU spec I've seen lately is NWN2 with its 2.4GHz minimum).
It's memorable and there are already legal examples - Pittsburgh Pirates, Disney's Pirates of the Carribean, etc. I certainly haven't seen any raids on Disney's site.
Back in the 1980s I even knew a sysop that ran a legal BBS called Pirates Harbor. He promised "booty" as you progressed levels up in the system including download privledges, but all the software available was legal. A lot of the software hosted there was actually created by pirates, but made for use by gamers. I remember stuff like a Wizardry Scenario Editor, an Ultima sprite editor (I know the author of that one), a booklet of hack codes for different games (assembly calls for stuff like infinite lives), and also the one that got me in trouble in Jr High - the BBS version of the Anarchist Cookbook. In a nutshell, I printed 3 pages on bombs and a black powder recipe for a friend at school and then he made photocopies and started selling them. Someone got caught and turned in people up the food chain until I was fingered. I had a scared chat with a police officer and the Principal, but nothing illegal was done and there was no school policy banning information (until the next week). It was long before Columbine - I'd have been expelled and straightjacketed if I brought such a thing today. Incidentally, I did build one bomb - a smoke bomb (saltpeter and sugar) - which was pretty much where my interest in the subject ended.
The first LSL game was a graphical update to a text adventure Sierra bought called Soft Porn. The only really novel stuff Al added was graphics, the main character's name, and a couple of minor plot changes. I found the text adventure and the graphical version quite amusing, probably because Al didn't add much to it (also probably my age at the time - 14). I didn't find the sequel very funny, however, and didn't play another.
Maybe I've grown up, but giving a wedgie to a guard is not really funny to me. Slipping drugs in his Coke and convincing him aliens were attacking would be funny... (Syd Barrett's rumored behavior not intended). Turning off the water to the building and then delivering a Habenero and Salami sandwich is funny... especially when he shoves his head in the toilet bowl to try to stop the burning. A collie barking at the well and you having a conversation with it - awesome (Fallout 2 spoof on Lassie).
I still think the biggest problem with UNIX-likes like Linux is shelf space. Your average Joe needs a word processor. Does Joe check the net and download and install OpenOffice or AbiWord? No - when Joe needs something, he thinks "I should go to the store and buy it." Going to the store gives Joe that comforting, printed set of instructions and support phone number but in most cases limits his choices to the top 1-2 vendors (currently Microsoft and Apple). Joe may even have dialup, and OpenOffice would take days to download. Until Joe becomes computer savvy, which may never happen, he'll continue to do the same thing. There are alternative physical methods - AOL became the monster it is by getting copies of its software in everybody's hands through direct mail - but most people still don't trust downloaded software (what if I get a virus from it?).
My opinion on the standards you listed POSIX was meant to keep a standard set of programs and most major UNIX vendors adopted it. It required a substantial licensing fee to be labeled POSIX Compliant, however, so many of the more recent UNIX-like OS's like OSX, FreeBSD and Linux, choose to be POSIX compatible (e.g. uncertified).
CDE (Common Desktop Environment) was burdened by high licensing costs and tightly controlled by its creators. It's still around on most high end UNIX machines, but personally, I never liked it much, even though I still have to use it today. Even when it first appeared, I thought IRIX's GUI was far superior (I still think that, though would prefer KDE or GNOME).
Openboot (which mac users know as Open Firmware) is still being used, but pretty much being crushed by BIOS/EFI because Intel (based) chips corner the market and Intel therefore has near total control of what is used in the market. Intel favors anything they develop over outside sources, so EFI is the the future not Openboot. I still find Forth a curious choice of languages for it, but I suppose a stack based language works well for device drivers. I learned enough Forth to write a custom boot chooser for PPC macs, but it was tailored to my particular system (with 7 boot partitions across 4 drives - Be, PPC Linux, Mach linux, + various versions of Mac 7-9, of which I remember very little except being obsessed at getting it to work and borrowing code liberally).
OSF... ah, what can I say... the history is too long. In a nutshell, IBM, HP, and DEC decided to make a third major flavor of UNIX (Sys/V, BSD, OSF) because AT&T and Sun were working together to standardize Sys/V and they feared they'd be at a disadvantage. As far as I know, only DEC actually put out an OSF system (named OSF/1, Digital Unix, and later Tru64 and currently owned by HP through aquisition), though it's possible others did but those OS's never achieved enough popularity for my company to support (we support HP-UX and AIX for those vendors, respectively). Tru64 is pretty much in maintenance mode at this point and I don't believe there has been an update to it in more than a year. HP was planning to migrate Tru-64 users to HP-UX last I heard.
If you think TIFF is better for lossless compression than PNG, you're misguided. Not that TIFF is a bad format, just that its best lossless compression, deflate (which is essentially LZ77 + Huffman encoding), is EXACTLY the same compression algorithm used in PNG.
Some of the compressions supported by TIFF, like LZW (based on LZ78 - our favorite now mostly* expired patent) and packbits work best on images containing lots of similar data. CCITT fax 3 and 4 are really only useful on black and white images, so I've never actually used them.
Most photo editing software programs support JPEG compression on TIFFs, even - GIMP: Launch GIMP. Create an image. File->Save. Name the file image.tif. Click Save. Notice your compression options are: O None O LZW O Pack Bits O Deflate O JPEG
JPEG actually works quite differently than the non-lossy algorithms. It divides the image up in a quadtree like manner (maybe it is a quadtree - I forget) and achives better compression by reducing the aspects of the image the eye doesn't notice as much, like saturation. The advantage of a quadtree structure is that similar colors are usually next to other similar colors in all directions, not just linearly, which is valuable when trying to decide what data to lose during compression.
* - IBM still has a patent on LZW that expires August 11, 2006, but the earlier Unisys patent would likely invalidate it if they tried to enforce it - see the footnote http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/gif.html
no, it's not patent free, but it was meant to be an open data format (like PDF). TIFF contains patented compression schemes LZW and JPEG. I know Unisys wanted royalties for TIFF during the GIF days before the LZW patent expired, so people were encouraged not to use it, but hopefully now that the LZW patent has expired and Forgent is losing its case for JPEG it's free (finally).
Incidentally, Aldus was bought by Adobe a few years ago and now TIFF is, if I recall correctly, both trademarked and copyrighted by Adobe corporation.
or read good 'ol Jack Chick. I have an original of this one - found it in a stack in a bathroom in the mid-80s: http://www.chick.com/reading/tracts/0046/0046_01.a sp - at the time I thought it was the funniest, most misguided thing I've ever read. An old friend had a complete collection of Chick's printed works (also found in bathrooms, incidentally), but I'm pretty sure you can find them all reproduced on the net. I could go on and on about what a misguided idiot I think Chick is but it's not worth the effort.
I expect Vista is worse... much worse, at least at this point, which is why it was delayed. Moving to new kernel code (64 bit native on 64 bit processors, new memory management, new HAL), a (badly needed) complete rewrite of DirectX from the ground up, ditching standard C libs for a more secure set of libs (notice that VC2005 lists the standard C libs as deprecated), completely reworking the GUI to be hardware accelerated, and probably dozens more I'm not even thinking of.
Still, without knowing what the defects are or how many packages it's against, it's hard to say if the numbers are too big or not. I also would question the Linux numbers because something like KDE, postgres, etc. may have their own list of bugs and because Debian is known to be a "slow and stable" distribution that sticks to an older codebase with proven software. Also, how many people are spending time just trying to break the latest developer version of Debian? I expect few outside of the core, though there may be some in the unstable branch. Microsoft has thousands of dedicated testers.
I actually was pretty happy with Windows 2000, to tell the truth - compare it to, say Windows ME and it's like comparing Budweiser to Red White and Blue, Blatz, or Black Label - they're all shit beer but at least you know what you're getting with a Bud and you can count on them all tasting about the same. You rarely (if ever) get a Bud that tastes like you just licked a dog's ass. For most people a Bud is good enough, others are happy with Black Label because they bought 24 cans for $6, even if 1 in 4 cans is skanked, and still others, well, we consider beer made with rice the lost deadly sin.
Even at 4.5 cents per album, recording costs would likely kill you since, unless the industry has changed drastically, all overhead costs come out first. That means the producer gets his 15%, the manager gets his 10%, etc., and at the end, you get your 4.5 cents - but if it cost you $10000 to make the album and promote it, that is considered your expense, not the label's expense, and therefore you need to sell 220000+ copies to even see a penny, and then you might need to split that penny 3 or 4 ways among several members. The industry has defended this for years saying they are promoting you at their cost (since most of the time you still owe them money) and without them nobody would want to see you live and they don't take any cut from live appearances. IMO, that hinges entirely on radio play - if you don't get radio play, only live appearances and word of mouth sells albums.
What I learned from the recording industry is that everyone gets paid except the artists. The exception is the songwriter, since that person typically gets an up-front percentage of the gross. I also learned that if you co-write song lyrics, make damn well sure you get some credit or you will never see any money.
At least today a good home studio that rivals cheap label studios costs about $3000 (plus the cost of a computer) to set up, which, even with the computer cost is cheaper than my old band's recording cost (which was around $5500). Note that that is a studio with a hardware card for multiple simultaneous record channels and no live mixing, which is essential for good drum recordings (ok, not essential, but it makes it MUCH easier to tweak in the mixdown).
OS 8.5 was the first to require a PPC (not 8) and OS X.5 (in development) that is rumored to require a G4 or better. Apple may backpedal on that (or it may just be rumor) as I heard the same thing initially about X.4.
Yeah, don't get me started on Alberto but for him to provide a warrant on every citizen in the United States without reasonable cause seems a bit far fetched as well as being completely unconstitutional.
The argument used to address congress recently was that we're at war and any and all means of engaging the enemy are legal. While I understand and accept that the NSA has been given power to monitor conversations from US citizens to foreign countries, it still isn't legal for them to monitor internal domestic communications without a warrant, which, as far as I can tell, includes wartime.
If you have a lot of time, read through this document, which details how the domestic spying was found to be legal earlier this year. It does not show any evidence that the NSA has authority to collect a phone database of domestic calls and analyze them.
for that matter, Macintosh has hardware requirements for the operating systems for years.
OS 8 I believe required a PPC processor (601 or greater) OS X.0 was G3 or better OS X.4 requires a G4 or better there were others before these, but I forget which went to what model.
to use Quartz Extreme (hardware accelerated GUI) you needed a specific type of GPU(shader capable?), as well.
I don't see how this gets around the fact that, like the CIA, the NSA is NOT supposed to be gathering intelligence within the borders of the United States (see the executive order that created the NSA)- that is the FBI's responsibility. President Bush used an executive order to allow for the NSA to investigate within the USA after 9/11.
I believe that any monitoring that originates and terminates in the United States prior to Bush's executive order is illegal (it's also illegal after Bush's order, IMO) unless Clinton also gave an executive order to permit it.
From wikipedia:...the NSA's United States Signals Intelligence Directive 18 (USSID 18) strictly prohibits the interception or collection of information about "...US persons, entities, corporations or organizations..." without explicit written legal permission from the Attorney General of the United States"
I suspect the idea would be difficult to patent due to a number of very similar techniques, but I've seen sillier things patented. About the only thing unique is the way the arbitrary texture is handled.
First of all, I'll point out a 32000x32000 texture is 3 (no alpha) or 4 (with alpha) GB of memory - too much for RAM in most cases, much less for VRAM. The only way to load such a beast is to grab a chunk of it (but, as he specifies, not pre-chunking the data). This is nothing new as far as a technique - people have been doing it with terrain height maps (vertexes) for years - he's just applying it to the surface texture. The new aspect, if I read into this correctly, is that the fragment shader determines the detail level it needs and loads the correct pixels of the texture appropriately. The shader would need to determine max detail level (texture size to load) and coordinates and load that into VRAM. A gray area is that I'm not sure if it would generate MIP maps in the new texture or simulate them in the shader (depends on the speed of hardware MIP mapping). Another gray area is whether the loading would be sped up by bit shifting and only loading the parts needed or completely replaced. Still, all the techniques are old, only the way they are put together is new.
I don't know - personally, I've seen evidence that the government has been spying illegally for years (much of it summed up here), and while I don't directly fear it, I do fear history repeating itself.
If you ride a bus during business hours, you usually get business people. The only time I saw freaks on a bus was riding the Greyhound to and from college when I didn't have a car, never during any I rode during core business rider hours of 7-9 and 4-6. I'd still say 95% or more of the people on the Grayhound were normal, it's just that the oddballs (and drug addicts, another thing I saw a lot of on the Grayhound) stick out.
I was raised about 30 miles away from a city, and not even a big one, although the area is now considered an outer ring suburb and people are sticking in multi-million dollar mansions everywhere. My parents both grew up on farms, so they wanted land for gardening as well as privacy and picked jobs nearby. My mom had bad allergies (hayfever), my dad mild asthma (reacting only to shellfish). Mix and match and you get me, allergic to most living things (though the only food I have problems with are cheeses with long mold times such as sharp cheddar) with asthma, sinus allergies and rashes when I come in contact with allergens. In the same environment, you also get my brother, allergic to nothing and his worst ailment is an occasional spring rash caused by dry skin. The only difference in my brother and my being raised? My mom had a cat and noticed I got a rash when it came in contact with me, so she got rid of it when I was about 6 months old. Incidentally, cats are what I'm most allergic to now - 18+ on a scratch test, but only because that was the max - they had to redo some of the scratches because the splotch overran them. The nurse that administered it said it was the worst reaction she had ever seen.
hadn't you heard? NASA dropped about 500 contractors last year, and plans a 15.3% workforce cut by summer (though they're trying to buy out jobs and keep layoffs to a minimum). Now they're outsourcing work to India...
Welcome to my world, boys and girls - enjoy those 5 and 6 AM meetings - I certainly do. My eyes are naturally red now.
Not to mention something like 12 states do in fact regulate gas prices to avoid the kind of price gouging that created the Standard Oil monopoly. Should the price be too low, the service stations are fined. If it's too high, the oil companies are investigated for consumer gouging and fined. Not that the consumer ever sees that money back - usually it gets dumped in some state fund.
What they really want is to offer commercial content that they provide for a fee like TV on demand to be the majority of the bandwidth and non-commercial content (in their eyes) such as google searches to be throttled to a tiny portion of the bandwidth. If I were a cable company, I'd want that too, since I can charge more for various services - want fast TV on Demand and fast all around Internet? That is bundled for only $120/month. Each is individually priced at only $80 apiece (using a tiered pricing model where you need "basic" high speed first). I strongly suspect the cable companies will get their way on this one, just because of the FCC and supreme court's track record of backing of big businesses like the baby Bells.
Google isn't getting any "special favors" anyhow - they get the _same_ treatment as everyone else - it's net NEUTRALITY. They pay for their telecom connection just like everyone else. Just because their content is better than yours and more people want to see it when it gets to your piece of the pipeline doesn't mean they're getting special favor - they're just offering better content. Buck up and offer something worth looking at and you can hog your share too.
SGI is NOT dead... at least not yet, but the spirit of the old company I'm sure died long ago.
Chapter 11 US bankruptcy law allows for a company to reorganize to be profitable primarily by removing the debt owed. The caveat is that they need to prove to the court that removing the debt and any reorganization (e.g. layoffs, budgeting changes, etc) will return the company to profitability. SGI apparently thinks that they can return to profitability
If SGI had filed Chapter 7, that would be a different story - that means they have no chance of returning to profitability and are liquidating all assets to pay creditors.
Personally, I saw them on the decline well before the purchase of Cray, but that was probably because of my involvement in a CAD company where I saw the license dropoff about 1-2 years before that purchase (same thing happened with DEC when our Alpha and Digital UNIX licenses dropped off). Then the lack of pre-built software for their existing workstations (e.g. Mozilla) convinced me that they were dead in the workstation market, and their supercomputers weren't making much market noise where IBMs were making a lot of market noise and HPs were at least getting some market noise.
I rarely trust benchmarking because often there are tradeoffs that make one area perform poorly and another well. That said, take a look at this benchmark - it shows some serious problems (stdlib allocate is 3000+% slower!), but also some stuff that macosx does well (blowfish, stdlib write).
I expect macosx would trounce XP in 2d graphics tests because quartz extreme makes heavy use of graphics hardware and we won't have that until Vista for Windows. I don't know of any hardware accelerated GUI features for Linux but I'm running the fairly old KDE and badly need to update my box (my distribution is no more and I need to tarball and archive about 200MB of data [mostly text files], then switch distributions).
Personally, I don't think microkernel is bad, but it has the same advantages and shortcomings as a true object oriented languages like Smalltalk. For illustration, in Smalltalk, you could have a case where object2 may need to alter data from object1. Object2 requests the data from object1, object1 sends the data to object2, object2 checks if changes are needed and if so, updates the data and then sends a message with the updated data back to object1. In C++, that could be accomplished simply by making the data public or protected and allowing the other object to directly access its data (though you can also write helper functions that do messaging exactly the same as above). The good thing about messaging is you don't have to worry about another object breaking your data as much and it makes the code much more modular (easier to test and debug, IMO) and reusable.
Most cities in the US have public transportation, whether it be bus and/or light rail, subways, or the el (elevated trains like in Chicago). Inter-city trains exist, but nothing like the bullet trains in Europe and Asia. Even notorious spots like Los Angeles have pretty good bus service, even though most people drive. I can't imagine driving in New York, but driving in Chicago isn't too bad and it has a great public transportation system.
Um, how is fresh air healthy? I'm allergic to most living things like pollen, mold, mildew, cats, dogs, etc., so having the air chilled and then (more importantly) pushed through a cleaning filter seems like a good idea for me. AC is like refrigerating your home, so honestly, I think if anything, pesticides, herbicides, and cleaning chemicals are a major source of illnesses. Suburbanites in the US seem obsessed with having perfectly manicured, thick carpets of lawn and perfectly clean houses.
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I played Modem Wars a very long time ago and I remember it more as a multiplayer realtime war game. You could argue other strategy/action games such as Choplifter, Rescue Raiders, or the Ancient Art of War were RTS by that respect. Dune II created the formula we know as the RTS genre, however, which is similar to the old Intellivision turn-based strategy game Utopia. You gather resources, build buildings, and build armies and compete with a nearby enemy.
Another nuance, but nothing to quibble about - he said the WWW was formed ~1992, but the world wide web actually existed for a long time before 1992 (I've heard early '80s), but it first started to emerge in 1991 with the WorldWideWeb browser on NeXT and 1992 with the Lynx browser and Mosiac later in that year. The name World Wide Web I think was coined around 1990 or 1991, for that matter.
no
I played poker and chess as a kid and don't care for either now, but there are plenty of people that play them until they die, whether they're putting money on it or not. I still occasionally get together with old friends and play pen and paper RPGs because it's a nice escape (and 90% of the time we just bullshit and drink beer anyway). My brother and his wife play board games, but never video or P&P RPGs..
America (especially) is obsessed with categorizing things. Cartoon = Disney = for kids, not Cartoon = South Park = for adults (God forbid I mention Anime or Hentai).
So what makes me too old to play computer games? Fallout 1/2 were some of the best RPG computer games I ever played. The Longest Journey was a fantastic adventure game (I don't care much for the sequel, tho). Both of those were written mainly for adults. I love Unreal Tournament 2004 and the Battlefield games, as well. I know people my age and older that think Half Life is the best game ever written (never played it much myself - makes me queasy, as does the sequel).
IRC itself works a bit differently, as messages are all transmitted through the server and then broadcast to the clients on that channel. The CTCP and DCC features of IRC do use direct client-to-client connections, however, so it would entirely depend on when that feature was added (I'm pretty sure it wasn't in the client I used in 1990 when I was introduced to IRC).
bah, the music/movie industry just realized they're in a rut and have had no original ideas in years, plus it costs too much to try anything new, so they found a way to sell the same old movies and songs again - after all, all DVDs and CDs cache in memory and therefore will require a second license. I expect the bill will be retroactive to 1926 or so.
I expect if they tried that, they'd be thrown out of court.
I don't think this is enforcable at the router level - routers would need to be redesigned to identify copyright packets before the copyrighted media is sent (since copyrighted media arriving at the router is a violation). The nature of the Internet itself makes this problematic - routers do not guarantee a specific route or order, they send using a fastest path approach which may involve hundreds of routers. That means the media may require hundreds of simultaneous licenses or use a fixed TCP route through the Internet. Streaming would be next to impossible, however, because there is no way of knowing if a UDP packet has arrived or if anybody intercepted it, meaning all routers would have to have a license for the file being sent.
Copyrighted software would be a nightmare - you can launch the same program multiple times on most OS's and each copy would require a separate license for each, but launching multiple data items within the same program would only require 3 licenses (one for install CD, one for harddisk file and one for the copy in memory).
I don't understand why people buy $25 million dollar yachts which require about $12 million a year to maintain or $12 million dollar mansions in Ft Lauderdale when they don't even live in them or $20000 stereo systems or heck, even $350 iPods when perfectly good alternatives exist. I mean, why get a yacht when a fishing dinghy will do? Why a mansion if you can live comfortably in a shed?
People buy Alienware because it's expensive and has the latest bells and whistles. For that matter, most people never upgrade their desktop PC, they just buy a new one when the old one gets outdated (like any appliance). If they do upgrade it, they usually pay someone to do it.
Anyhow, those specs should be good for about a year of gaming (the highest minimum CPU spec I've seen lately is NWN2 with its 2.4GHz minimum).
It's memorable and there are already legal examples - Pittsburgh Pirates, Disney's Pirates of the Carribean, etc. I certainly haven't seen any raids on Disney's site.
Back in the 1980s I even knew a sysop that ran a legal BBS called Pirates Harbor. He promised "booty" as you progressed levels up in the system including download privledges, but all the software available was legal. A lot of the software hosted there was actually created by pirates, but made for use by gamers. I remember stuff like a Wizardry Scenario Editor, an Ultima sprite editor (I know the author of that one), a booklet of hack codes for different games (assembly calls for stuff like infinite lives), and also the one that got me in trouble in Jr High - the BBS version of the Anarchist Cookbook. In a nutshell, I printed 3 pages on bombs and a black powder recipe for a friend at school and then he made photocopies and started selling them. Someone got caught and turned in people up the food chain until I was fingered. I had a scared chat with a police officer and the Principal, but nothing illegal was done and there was no school policy banning information (until the next week). It was long before Columbine - I'd have been expelled and straightjacketed if I brought such a thing today. Incidentally, I did build one bomb - a smoke bomb (saltpeter and sugar) - which was pretty much where my interest in the subject ended.
The first LSL game was a graphical update to a text adventure Sierra bought called Soft Porn. The only really novel stuff Al added was graphics, the main character's name, and a couple of minor plot changes. I found the text adventure and the graphical version quite amusing, probably because Al didn't add much to it (also probably my age at the time - 14). I didn't find the sequel very funny, however, and didn't play another.
Maybe I've grown up, but giving a wedgie to a guard is not really funny to me. Slipping drugs in his Coke and convincing him aliens were attacking would be funny... (Syd Barrett's rumored behavior not intended). Turning off the water to the building and then delivering a Habenero and Salami sandwich is funny... especially when he shoves his head in the toilet bowl to try to stop the burning. A collie barking at the well and you having a conversation with it - awesome (Fallout 2 spoof on Lassie).
I agree completely.
I still think the biggest problem with UNIX-likes like Linux is shelf space. Your average Joe needs a word processor. Does Joe check the net and download and install OpenOffice or AbiWord? No - when Joe needs something, he thinks "I should go to the store and buy it." Going to the store gives Joe that comforting, printed set of instructions and support phone number but in most cases limits his choices to the top 1-2 vendors (currently Microsoft and Apple). Joe may even have dialup, and OpenOffice would take days to download. Until Joe becomes computer savvy, which may never happen, he'll continue to do the same thing. There are alternative physical methods - AOL became the monster it is by getting copies of its software in everybody's hands through direct mail - but most people still don't trust downloaded software (what if I get a virus from it?).
My opinion on the standards you listed
POSIX was meant to keep a standard set of programs and most major UNIX vendors adopted it. It required a substantial licensing fee to be labeled POSIX Compliant, however, so many of the more recent UNIX-like OS's like OSX, FreeBSD and Linux, choose to be POSIX compatible (e.g. uncertified).
CDE (Common Desktop Environment) was burdened by high licensing costs and tightly controlled by its creators. It's still around on most high end UNIX machines, but personally, I never liked it much, even though I still have to use it today. Even when it first appeared, I thought IRIX's GUI was far superior (I still think that, though would prefer KDE or GNOME).
Openboot (which mac users know as Open Firmware) is still being used, but pretty much being crushed by BIOS/EFI because Intel (based) chips corner the market and Intel therefore has near total control of what is used in the market. Intel favors anything they develop over outside sources, so EFI is the the future not Openboot. I still find Forth a curious choice of languages for it, but I suppose a stack based language works well for device drivers. I learned enough Forth to write a custom boot chooser for PPC macs, but it was tailored to my particular system (with 7 boot partitions across 4 drives - Be, PPC Linux, Mach linux, + various versions of Mac 7-9, of which I remember very little except being obsessed at getting it to work and borrowing code liberally).
OSF... ah, what can I say... the history is too long. In a nutshell, IBM, HP, and DEC decided to make a third major flavor of UNIX (Sys/V, BSD, OSF) because AT&T and Sun were working together to standardize Sys/V and they feared they'd be at a disadvantage. As far as I know, only DEC actually put out an OSF system (named OSF/1, Digital Unix, and later Tru64 and currently owned by HP through aquisition), though it's possible others did but those OS's never achieved enough popularity for my company to support (we support HP-UX and AIX for those vendors, respectively). Tru64 is pretty much in maintenance mode at this point and I don't believe there has been an update to it in more than a year. HP was planning to migrate Tru-64 users to HP-UX last I heard.
If you think TIFF is better for lossless compression than PNG, you're misguided. Not that TIFF is a bad format, just that its best lossless compression, deflate (which is essentially LZ77 + Huffman encoding), is EXACTLY the same compression algorithm used in PNG.
Some of the compressions supported by TIFF, like LZW (based on LZ78 - our favorite now mostly* expired patent) and packbits work best on images containing lots of similar data. CCITT fax 3 and 4 are really only useful on black and white images, so I've never actually used them.
Most photo editing software programs support JPEG compression on TIFFs, even - GIMP:
Launch GIMP. Create an image. File->Save. Name the file image.tif. Click Save. Notice
your compression options are:
O None
O LZW
O Pack Bits
O Deflate
O JPEG
JPEG actually works quite differently than the non-lossy algorithms. It divides the image up in a quadtree like manner (maybe it is a quadtree - I forget) and achives better compression by reducing the aspects of the image the eye doesn't notice as much, like saturation. The advantage of a quadtree structure is that similar colors are usually next to other similar colors in all directions, not just linearly, which is valuable when trying to decide what data to lose during compression.
* - IBM still has a patent on LZW that expires August 11, 2006, but the earlier Unisys patent would likely invalidate it if they tried to enforce it - see the footnote http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/gif.html
no, it's not patent free, but it was meant to be an open data format (like PDF). TIFF contains patented compression schemes LZW and JPEG. I know Unisys wanted royalties for TIFF during the GIF days before the LZW patent expired, so people were encouraged not to use it, but hopefully now that the LZW patent has expired and Forgent is losing its case for JPEG it's free (finally).
Incidentally, Aldus was bought by Adobe a few years ago and now TIFF is, if I recall correctly, both trademarked and copyrighted by Adobe corporation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_role-playi ng_games#Controversy
a sp - at the time I thought it was the funniest, most misguided thing I've ever read. An old friend had a complete collection of Chick's printed works (also found in bathrooms, incidentally), but I'm pretty sure you can find them all reproduced on the net. I could go on and on about what a misguided idiot I think Chick is but it's not worth the effort.
or read good 'ol Jack Chick. I have an original of this one - found it in a stack in a bathroom in the mid-80s:
http://www.chick.com/reading/tracts/0046/0046_01.
I expect Vista is worse... much worse, at least at this point, which is why it was delayed. Moving to new kernel code (64 bit native on 64 bit processors, new memory management, new HAL), a (badly needed) complete rewrite of DirectX from the ground up, ditching standard C libs for a more secure set of libs (notice that VC2005 lists the standard C libs as deprecated), completely reworking the GUI to be hardware accelerated, and probably dozens more I'm not even thinking of.
Still, without knowing what the defects are or how many packages it's against, it's hard to say if the numbers are too big or not. I also would question the Linux numbers because something like KDE, postgres, etc. may have their own list of bugs and because Debian is known to be a "slow and stable" distribution that sticks to an older codebase with proven software. Also, how many people are spending time just trying to break the latest developer version of Debian? I expect few outside of the core, though there may be some in the unstable branch. Microsoft has thousands of dedicated testers.
I actually was pretty happy with Windows 2000, to tell the truth - compare it to, say Windows ME and it's like comparing Budweiser to Red White and Blue, Blatz, or Black Label - they're all shit beer but at least you know what you're getting with a Bud and you can count on them all tasting about the same. You rarely (if ever) get a Bud that tastes like you just licked a dog's ass. For most people a Bud is good enough, others are happy with Black Label because they bought 24 cans for $6, even if 1 in 4 cans is skanked, and still others, well, we consider beer made with rice the lost deadly sin.
Even at 4.5 cents per album, recording costs would likely kill you since, unless the industry has changed drastically, all overhead costs come out first. That means the producer gets his 15%, the manager gets his 10%, etc., and at the end, you get your 4.5 cents - but if it cost you $10000 to make the album and promote it, that is considered your expense, not the label's expense, and therefore you need to sell 220000+ copies to even see a penny, and then you might need to split that penny 3 or 4 ways among several members. The industry has defended this for years saying they are promoting you at their cost (since most of the time you still owe them money) and without them nobody would want to see you live and they don't take any cut from live appearances. IMO, that hinges entirely on radio play - if you don't get radio play, only live appearances and word of mouth sells albums.
What I learned from the recording industry is that everyone gets paid except the artists. The exception is the songwriter, since that person typically gets an up-front percentage of the gross. I also learned that if you co-write song lyrics, make damn well sure you get some credit or you will never see any money.
At least today a good home studio that rivals cheap label studios costs about $3000 (plus the cost of a computer) to set up, which, even with the computer cost is cheaper than my old band's recording cost (which was around $5500). Note that that is a studio with a hardware card for multiple simultaneous record channels and no live mixing, which is essential for good drum recordings (ok, not essential, but it makes it MUCH easier to tweak in the mixdown).
I made a mistake and I was sorta right on one
OS 8.5 was the first to require a PPC (not 8) and OS X.5 (in development) that is rumored to require a G4 or better. Apple may backpedal on that (or it may just be rumor) as I heard the same thing initially about X.4.
Yeah, don't get me started on Alberto but for him to provide a warrant on every citizen in the United States without reasonable cause seems a bit far fetched as well as being completely unconstitutional.
The argument used to address congress recently was that we're at war and any and all means of engaging the enemy are legal. While I understand and accept that the NSA has been given power to monitor conversations from US citizens to foreign countries, it still isn't legal for them to monitor internal domestic communications without a warrant, which, as far as I can tell, includes wartime.
If you have a lot of time, read through this document, which details how the domestic spying was found to be legal earlier this year. It does not show any evidence that the NSA has authority to collect a phone database of domestic calls and analyze them.
for that matter, Macintosh has hardware requirements for the operating systems for years.
OS 8 I believe required a PPC processor (601 or greater)
OS X.0 was G3 or better
OS X.4 requires a G4 or better
there were others before these, but I forget which went to what model.
to use Quartz Extreme (hardware accelerated GUI) you needed a specific type of GPU(shader capable?), as well.
I don't see how this gets around the fact that, like the CIA, the NSA is NOT supposed to be gathering intelligence within the borders of the United States (see the executive order that created the NSA)- that is the FBI's responsibility. President Bush used an executive order to allow for the NSA to investigate within the USA after 9/11.
...the NSA's United States Signals Intelligence Directive 18 (USSID 18) strictly prohibits the interception or collection of information about "...US persons, entities, corporations or organizations..." without explicit written legal permission from the Attorney General of the United States"
I believe that any monitoring that originates and terminates in the United States prior to Bush's executive order is illegal (it's also illegal after Bush's order, IMO) unless Clinton also gave an executive order to permit it.
From wikipedia:
I suspect the idea would be difficult to patent due to a number of very similar techniques, but I've seen sillier things patented. About the only thing unique is the way the arbitrary texture is handled.
First of all, I'll point out a 32000x32000 texture is 3 (no alpha) or 4 (with alpha) GB of memory - too much for RAM in most cases, much less for VRAM. The only way to load such a beast is to grab a chunk of it (but, as he specifies, not pre-chunking the data). This is nothing new as far as a technique - people have been doing it with terrain height maps (vertexes) for years - he's just applying it to the surface texture. The new aspect, if I read into this correctly, is that the fragment shader determines the detail level it needs and loads the correct pixels of the texture appropriately. The shader would need to determine max detail level (texture size to load) and coordinates and load that into VRAM. A gray area is that I'm not sure if it would generate MIP maps in the new texture or simulate them in the shader (depends on the speed of hardware MIP mapping). Another gray area is whether the loading would be sped up by bit shifting and only loading the parts needed or completely replaced. Still, all the techniques are old, only the way they are put together is new.
I don't know - personally, I've seen evidence that the government has been spying illegally for years (much of it summed up here), and while I don't directly fear it, I do fear history repeating itself.
If you ride a bus during business hours, you usually get business people. The only time I saw freaks on a bus was riding the Greyhound to and from college when I didn't have a car, never during any I rode during core business rider hours of 7-9 and 4-6. I'd still say 95% or more of the people on the Grayhound were normal, it's just that the oddballs (and drug addicts, another thing I saw a lot of on the Grayhound) stick out.
I was raised about 30 miles away from a city, and not even a big one, although the area is now considered an outer ring suburb and people are sticking in multi-million dollar mansions everywhere. My parents both grew up on farms, so they wanted land for gardening as well as privacy and picked jobs nearby. My mom had bad allergies (hayfever), my dad mild asthma (reacting only to shellfish). Mix and match and you get me, allergic to most living things (though the only food I have problems with are cheeses with long mold times such as sharp cheddar) with asthma, sinus allergies and rashes when I come in contact with allergens. In the same environment, you also get my brother, allergic to nothing and his worst ailment is an occasional spring rash caused by dry skin. The only difference in my brother and my being raised? My mom had a cat and noticed I got a rash when it came in contact with me, so she got rid of it when I was about 6 months old. Incidentally, cats are what I'm most allergic to now - 18+ on a scratch test, but only because that was the max - they had to redo some of the scratches because the splotch overran them. The nurse that administered it said it was the worst reaction she had ever seen.
hadn't you heard? NASA dropped about 500 contractors last year, and plans a 15.3% workforce cut by summer (though they're trying to buy out jobs and keep layoffs to a minimum). Now they're outsourcing work to India...
Welcome to my world, boys and girls - enjoy those 5 and 6 AM meetings - I certainly do. My eyes are naturally red now.
Not to mention something like 12 states do in fact regulate gas prices to avoid the kind of price gouging that created the Standard Oil monopoly. Should the price be too low, the service stations are fined. If it's too high, the oil companies are investigated for consumer gouging and fined. Not that the consumer ever sees that money back - usually it gets dumped in some state fund.
What they really want is to offer commercial content that they provide for a fee like TV on demand to be the majority of the bandwidth and non-commercial content (in their eyes) such as google searches to be throttled to a tiny portion of the bandwidth. If I were a cable company, I'd want that too, since I can charge more for various services - want fast TV on Demand and fast all around Internet? That is bundled for only $120/month. Each is individually priced at only $80 apiece (using a tiered pricing model where you need "basic" high speed first). I strongly suspect the cable companies will get their way on this one, just because of the FCC and supreme court's track record of backing of big businesses like the baby Bells.
Google isn't getting any "special favors" anyhow - they get the _same_ treatment as everyone else - it's net NEUTRALITY. They pay for their telecom connection just like everyone else. Just because their content is better than yours and more people want to see it when it gets to your piece of the pipeline doesn't mean they're getting special favor - they're just offering better content. Buck up and offer something worth looking at and you can hog your share too.
SGI is NOT dead... at least not yet, but the spirit of the old company I'm sure died long ago.
Chapter 11 US bankruptcy law allows for a company to reorganize to be profitable primarily by removing the debt owed. The caveat is that they need to prove to the court that removing the debt and any reorganization (e.g. layoffs, budgeting changes, etc) will return the company to profitability. SGI apparently thinks that they can return to profitability
If SGI had filed Chapter 7, that would be a different story - that means they have no chance of returning to profitability and are liquidating all assets to pay creditors.
Personally, I saw them on the decline well before the purchase of Cray, but that was probably because of my involvement in a CAD company where I saw the license dropoff about 1-2 years before that purchase (same thing happened with DEC when our Alpha and Digital UNIX licenses dropped off). Then the lack of pre-built software for their existing workstations (e.g. Mozilla) convinced me that they were dead in the workstation market, and their supercomputers weren't making much market noise where IBMs were making a lot of market noise and HPs were at least getting some market noise.
I rarely trust benchmarking because often there are tradeoffs that make one area perform poorly and another well. That said, take a look at this benchmark - it shows some serious problems (stdlib allocate is 3000+% slower!), but also some stuff that macosx does well (blowfish, stdlib write).
http://www.geekpatrol.ca/blog/106/
I expect macosx would trounce XP in 2d graphics tests because quartz extreme makes heavy use of graphics hardware and we won't have that until Vista for Windows. I don't know of any hardware accelerated GUI features for Linux but I'm running the fairly old KDE and badly need to update my box (my distribution is no more and I need to tarball and archive about 200MB of data [mostly text files], then switch distributions).
Personally, I don't think microkernel is bad, but it has the same advantages and shortcomings as a true object oriented languages like Smalltalk. For illustration, in Smalltalk, you could have a case where object2 may need to alter data from object1. Object2 requests the data from object1, object1 sends the data to object2, object2 checks if changes are needed and if so, updates the data and then sends a message with the updated data back to object1. In C++, that could be accomplished simply by making the data public or protected and allowing the other object to directly access its data (though you can also write helper functions that do messaging exactly the same as above). The good thing about messaging is you don't have to worry about another object breaking your data as much and it makes the code much more modular (easier to test and debug, IMO) and reusable.
Most cities in the US have public transportation, whether it be bus and/or light rail, subways, or the el (elevated trains like in Chicago). Inter-city trains exist, but nothing like the bullet trains in Europe and Asia. Even notorious spots like Los Angeles have pretty good bus service, even though most people drive. I can't imagine driving in New York, but driving in Chicago isn't too bad and it has a great public transportation system.
Um, how is fresh air healthy? I'm allergic to most living things like pollen, mold, mildew, cats, dogs, etc., so having the air chilled and then (more importantly) pushed through a cleaning filter seems like a good idea for me. AC is like refrigerating your home, so honestly, I think if anything, pesticides, herbicides, and cleaning chemicals are a major source of illnesses. Suburbanites in the US seem obsessed with having perfectly manicured, thick carpets of lawn and perfectly clean houses.