Slashdot Mirror

nuntius asks: "I went over to Aureal's Homepage to check for any news drivers, but all I saw was talk of the resignation of all senior staff/executives and talk of Chapter 11. What's happening? When did I miss this?" Looking at the state of Aureal's site, and the plethora of 404's, the obvious conclusion is, at the very least, that things are not going well. It's a shame. Aureal looked to be doing some pretty neat things for the state of Linux Multimedia. Can anyone shed some light on what is going on and whether the company has a future?

Nothing like some quality quickies to survive humpday. Magus311X sent us linkage to an awesome web site that has the plans for nearly every set of legos. If you still have your big bucket, you'll love it. I always got bored half way through the plans tho. Started putting guns on my castles and plants on my spaceships wings. HP LoveJet (I like that one) sent us a webpage that will compute your Wu-Tang name ('Rob Malda' = 'Grand Moff Puppeteer') Blaxthos sent us a photo of the most amazing toilet mankind has developed thus far. Looking for some new comics? Bob Barker pointed us to Tug House and Cecil noticed EtherLife v1.5.. I dig EL15. And now the pointless violence and stupidity portion of the quickies: DragonHawk sent us some nice pictures of people ignoring the warning labels on spray cans, and also building a potato gun capable of firing spuds at 550 MPH. Then we have a guy who builds "sparkler bombs" by setting off 1000 sparklers at a time. Jura sent us pictures of computers that he apparently shot the hell out of. Elwood sent us linkage to another license, this one is the BPL or The "Bastard Public License" Next, random Slashdot references from around the net: Raps sent us writes Alfdot, a Slashdot parody weblog about everyone's favorite lame 80s sitcom (cancelled no doubt do to government conspiracy). Slashdot Man earned a special place on my list of 'people to get a restraining order for' his fan page. Eeeek rebrane sent us a Slashdot drinking game. And the perfect quickie to get some closure on the day: McAdder sent us Final Thoughts which is a website that spams your friends and family upon your death to send them your, well, final thoughts from beyond the grave. Wierd.

Nothing like some quality quickies to survive humpday. Magus311X sent us linkage to an awesome web site that has the plans for nearly every set of legos. If you still have your big bucket, you'll love it. I always got bored half way through the plans tho. Started putting guns on my castles and plants on my spaceships wings. HP LoveJet (I like that one) sent us a webpage that will compute your Wu-Tang name ('Rob Malda' = 'Grand Moff Puppeteer') Blaxthos sent us a photo of the most amazing toilet mankind has developed thus far. Looking for some new comics? Bob Barker pointed us to Tug House and Cecil noticed EtherLife v1.5.. I dig EL15. And now the pointless violence and stupidity portion of the quickies: DragonHawk sent us some nice pictures of people ignoring the warning labels on spray cans, and also building a potato gun capable of firing spuds at 550 MPH. Then we have a guy who builds "sparkler bombs" by setting off 1000 sparklers at a time. Jura sent us pictures of computers that he apparently shot the hell out of. Elwood sent us linkage to another license, this one is the BPL or The "Bastard Public License" Next, random Slashdot references from around the net: Raps sent us writes Alfdot, a Slashdot parody weblog about everyone's favorite lame 80s sitcom (cancelled no doubt do to government conspiracy). Slashdot Man earned a special place on my list of 'people to get a restraining order for' his fan page. Eeeek rebrane sent us a Slashdot drinking game. And the perfect quickie to get some closure on the day: McAdder sent us Final Thoughts which is a website that spams your friends and family upon your death to send them your, well, final thoughts from beyond the grave. Wierd.

Iceweasel writes "BTW, since Unreal Tournament came out today (and trust me, I already have my copy :), the Linux UT files were released today. Go to www.fileplanet.com or unreal.epicgames.com to get the 3 MB download. " Thanks to all the people who e-mailed me about GT Interactive - click below to get Tim Sweeney's take on the whole deal.

[Hi, I just posted this info in the Slashdot forum elaborating on why we didn't ship the Linux executables in the Unreal Tournament box.]

The UT Linux executables will be available for download rather than being included in the box.

We don't like this either. We REALLY, REALLY wanted the Linux executables to be on the CD, we reserved space for it, and actually had it there in the directory structure during beta.

GT asked us yank it, because they were worried about tech support issues: that thousands of Linux users would have questions about installation that GT reps (who are only familiar with Windows and consoles) wouldn't be able to answer.

We obliged with their request, because GT is responsible for performing (and paying for) UT tech support, and it didn't seem fair to put the burden on them.

Here is part of a message I sent to a GT exec, advocating putting Linux on the UT CD-Rom:

---begin---

Why Linux on the Unreal Tournament box is a very good move:

First, Red Hat Linux is selling very well in retail, and there's a good chance that by word of mouth, Linux users will pick up Unreal Tournament with their Linux purchase or afterwards. I'd be very surprised if we didn't gain over 3% more sales from Linux users. Now if UT sells a million units (Tim's wild guess), that's 30,000 additional units. If we make it *very* clear that the Linux version is unsupported (no tech support calls), then surely this is a profitable move.

Second, while Linux users are far outnumbered by Windows users, the statistics don't tell the whole story. Linux users are the hardest of the hardcore. They're among the movers and shakers who are serious deathmatchers (Quake 2 and Quake 3 are available for Linux); they run major community web sites; they run servers on T1 and T3 connections. These people have far more influence on gaming than their numbers indicate.

Third, Linux is gaining an incredible amount of momentum, and sticking the Linux penguin logo on the UT box would further the Unreal franchise's position as a leading-edge product that's not afraid to push into new territories. This has always been our hallmark -- Epic shipped the first-ever DirectX game (Fire Fight, published by Electronic Arts); now the Unreal Tournament demo is the first DirectX7 release; and now we have the chance to be the first game to ship simultaneous with Windows and Linux versions in the same box.

---end---

GT considered all of this and understood the issues, but still had overriding concerns about the cost.

I can't say I blame them; I sure wouldn't want to be responsible for supporting users with 10 different versions each of 10 different Linux distributions, each with a completely different set of video drivers, x-windows shells, permissions, and possibly even recompiled kernels. Linux's approach kicks ass on the Internet with its open, user-driven community. But it doesn't seem too compatible with the mass-market distribution model, where companies pay rooms full of people to answer phones and help customers, and where one tech support call wipes out all the profit from a box sold.

Emailing companies like GT *politely* to show your support for the Linux platform is a great idea. Just keep in mind that, to publishers, the Linux thing isn't simply a popularity contest; supporting Linux needs to make sense financially, and there are some serious issues with support and compatibility they need to consider.

Tim Sweeney
Epic Games
http://unreal.epicgames.com/

PhillC wrote in to send us an entertaining little site where you can read a list of things Warning Labels Say not to do. Proof positive that stupid people are everywhere.

Justin Bradford writes "Corel announced on comp.emulators.ms-windows.wine that they plan to use WineLib (the library side of WINE, the open source Windows emulator) to port all of their products. Here's what Gavriel State (gavriels@corel.com), Linux porting team leader, had to say: "We are actively committing engineering resources to the Wine project. Once our exploration and evaluation has settled down a bit (read: we've cleaned up our hacks), we'll begin submitting patches to Alexandre to review and commit to the CVS tree. We'll be spending some effort on getting the WordPerfect Suite 8 applications running under Wine, but our primary focus will be on porting ou WordPerfect Suite 9 applications using WineLib. We'll also begin participating publicly on the WINE newsgroup and mailing lists, so that we can contribute our ideas as well as our code. You should be seeing a lot more of us in the future."" S: What is of particular interest to me is that they have already coded a Win32-on-MacOS library when they ported CorelDraw to the Mac. This means Corel has very valuable expertise in the Win32-emulation area.