Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Unhappy With Bungie's Use Of Linux
Noctavis writes: "According to this article at Inside Mac Games, 'Mat Soell [of Bungie] indicated in a forum post several days ago that some Microsoft employees they have spoken with were unhappy that the Myth servers ran on Linux, as of course Windows NT is the platform of choice at the Redmond campus.' For those who may not know: Bungie Software, now Bungie Studios, was acquired by Microsoft earlier this year and its upcoming title Halo will apparently be the flagship game on the X-Box in a year from now; some say its "killer-app." It has since been reconfirmed for the Mac & PC, but the timetable for such a release has not yet been revealed. (Anyone think we can realistically expect it sooner than 3-6 months after the X-Box release?)"
Well, let's read Slashdot in Lynx. Then banner hits become irrelevant.
Maybe the stories will become more balanced, who knows.
"The game literally put my jaw on the floor"?
Wow. Either you've got a really, really, really big mouth, or they included explosives in the game box. Lemme know if its explosives so I can stay far away. That's dangerous!
That assumes that a command line is ever "right".
(humor impaired, see above...)
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
You do know that you can filter out postings about Microsoft...
This kind of news matters to some of us. This post is more humerous than informative, to me. It's entertaining and good reading none the less.
"Evil beware: I'm armed to the teeth and packing a hampster!"
Lex orandi, lex credendi.
Can you imagine trying to run a game server on some NT box. Bwahahahaha.
That's one sure way to send Bungy into a black hole and cut out one source of games form a competing platform...
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
A little sensitive to criticism, are we?
I'm sorry to have to inform you that the technical points raised by this article are salient. Remember Hotmail? It *still* runs UNIX, if I'm not mistaken, despite Microsoft's best efforts to make it run on NT. Fact was, NT just couldn't handle the load. I see no reason to believe that this might not be the case here as well.
Oh, one other point. You wrote: /. page had a threshold filter like the comments page did... =)
If only the main
It does. You can filter out any type of story you don't want to read. Don't blame me if you haven't figured out how to use it yet. And don't complain about /.'s editorial bias. D'you think msn.com would give you anything better? Or perhaps Mindcraft?
Chris Tembreull
Web Developer, NEC Systems, Inc.
Chris Tembreull
"My karma just ran over your dogma."
It is not only Microsoft. 99% game companies release only for Windows ( on PC market) and it has nothing to do with world domination.
Linux is not gamers OS and there is no money to made there (remember Quake for Linux ?.) Simple as that.
Somebody actually did a 'DOOM for system administration' game a while back. I don't have the link handy, but the idea was that you could run around and kill processes using whatever weapon you had at hand. Each enemy had a different process ID number--when you killed that enemy, you killed the corresponding process.
I think the biggest problem was that if you weren't careful, you'd kill the PID associated with your DOOM game, dropping you out immediately.
How to Become a Millionaire
Examine the operations of a Silicon Valley giant with huge revenues (Oracle, Cisco, corner Beacon gas station)
Spot product/service/technology gap in their market direction
Develop product/service/technology, or a pretty good fake of it
Wait patiently (thumb twiddling optional)
Accept their ludicrous buy out offer
Repeat
Conspiring Against Bill
Think of a wildly successful software product/game/doohickey (hint: do not look at what others are already developing, it's probably dead already)
Develop it entirely without M$ products
Wait
Accept ludicrous buyout offer from M$ (assuming they don't Imitat^H^H^H^H^Hnnovate same idea)
Listen for disgruntled mutterings from Redmond when they realize it's stable on a non-M$ platform
Listen for screems from Redmond after they unsuccessfully try to convert it over to their platform
Throw back head and cackle with insane glee
Repeat
It's all true! ±5%
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Someone just joining wouldn't know that we've discussed this over and over again, and people that have been around for a while generally have learned how to ignore stories that they don't like.
<personal comment>Based on your comment (and the high user number), I guess you haven't learned to ignore yet. Don't worry, enlightenment will come some day...
If it helps, look through the BLO pages. They're funny... :)
"and makes them money..." :-)
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
I don't see what the problem here is. Microsoft has brought a company, needing (as they do) some real games-programming talent. They want the company that they have brought to run Microsoft software on thier internet gaming servers.
What's the problem here?
Sure, we hate NT, and all things Microsoft. I think it's fair to say most of us won't be buying X-Boxes. Worst-case scenario, the servers all topple under the load and a bunch of people will not be able to play online games for a short time, until the problem is fixed. Some adminastrators will have to do some quite hard work getting the servers back up.
Boo hoo. Boo bloody hoo.
Michael
...another comment from Michael Tandy.
"Goodness me, how unlike the FBI to abuse the trust of the American public." -- The Onion
Yeah, I've seen the 150 MB trailer. And I'm impressed. But those tricks are being built into the next generation of engines already - someone has to be working on inverse kinematics by now (and why not, most developers use 3D Studio MAX, which is very heavily IK-based), the physics engines will improve due to free CPU cycles from new TnL accelerators, and many new engines are coming with excellent terrain handling.
Those would appear to be Halo's strong points, and they're all coming in the next 12 months.
Hello-
:-)
Matt (two t's, IMG) Soell here to hopefully clear the waters that people have thoughtfully muddied in my name.
There is NO ugly corporate pressure from MS demanding that we change our servers. None, zilch, zero, null.
There have been a few scattered individuals who've made comments to the effect that we might want to consider an MS server solution. This has never come from anyone in a position of authority and has never been more than a passing suggestion of that individual's own opinion. They are as entitled to their opinions as we are to ours. The decision is still ours to make. In other words, it was no big deal, and that's all I've ever said about it.
It's like me sending a letter to Inside Mac Games suggesting they fact-check their articles so they can avoid presenting biased inference as fact or at the very least spell people's names properly. They might feel a wee bit of annoyance at my suggestion but they'd still be free to ignore it completely. Know what I'm saying?
No doubt some of the conspiracy theorists already think I'm typing this with a gun to my head, so there's probably no point in dragging this out because people are going to believe whatever they want to believe. But I'll say it again in a way that hopefully no one can misinterpret:
There is no interference from Microsoft in our choice of servers or anything else.
-Matt
"..sleep with Satan"
"Now they're just an MS pawn"
Oh ho, it is only business. Ensemble Studios (Age of Kings fame) released every game with MS being their publisher and somehow, in my humble opinion, their games are the best out there.
Fact is, they were forced to change hats in jannisaries to some unrealistic crap simply because MS was afraid that historically correct ones looked too much like KKK but, well, this kind of PC stupidity is not confined to MS.
You ain't kidding, but you've never seen a more horrid piece of crap than webshots. It downloads really crappy artwork for backghrounds ALL FUCKING DAY!
I would wager that OpenGL works better in HalfLife due to the fact that Halflife is based on the QuakeII engine, which was OpenGL-only. Direct3D support is more of a hack.
There's another instance this applies to also.. Unreal Tournament. Direct3D performance in this game is quite superior to OpenGL. In fact, the Unreal engine was originally worked only in software and Glide, but for reasons obvious, the developers decided to port to Direct3D as the main rendering engine.
Of course, OGL vs. D3D performance is somewhat dependent on your video card drivers, but with good drivers for each, you can see the differences between different game engines.
Take for example, Motorola! Do you think their employees are running on computers running Motorola CPUs? Nope, they're using Intel boxes! Now, isn't that something. No wonder they're having a hard time fabbing PowerPC chips faster than 500MHz.. the Intel math on their desktop machines are screwing up the calculations! :)
-----
Linux user: if (nt == unstable) { switchTo.linux() }
Those who laugh at you for you having a Mac.. are the people who constantly call you to fix their PC.
Realistically, this would never work for any of bungie's stuff; it may work wonderfully for the people, if they take a year long vacation or something first.
-Daniel
It's fine to advocate linux as much as we can, but it's also important to avoid hypocrisy
________
Half-life is based on the Quake 1 engine....
Martee
~~~~~~~~~~
Martee
Hey, you're right about that too. I love my gameplay as much as the next guy.
But gameplay doesn't make for a lot of box copy, which sells games. I'll still buy it no matter how dated it is (hey, we still play Duke3D over our LAN sometimes), but who else will?
Microsoft doesn't sell to the educated market - it goes for the home user, Mom and Dad who are amazed that computers don't take up a whole room anymore. If MS sold for the power user market, they'd be pushing Win2000 Pro left and right - it's good enough to for once. Instead, they push Windows ME, which is dumbed down for the masses.
Therefore, the boxes with the complex words and pretty pictures will sell. Not the ones with gameplay. And that's unfortunate.
But that still doesn't change the fact that Halo's engine will be out of date by October 2001.
> If it's Microsoft operating systems, the plural is SOS.
I thought it was pieces of shite
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
This story more than any other I 've seen to date, brings home the point of the "borg/Bill Gates" logo used on Microsoft stories. Good sense of humor.
--- RFC 1149 Compliant.
Microsoft's panties are in a bunch from the discovery that their newly acquired jewel, Bungie "Studios" is running Linux game servers?
The developers have spent considerable time building expertise in coding and supporting their game engine (server) for Linux, only to be told to use NT? I've always had the "right tool for the job" mentality - This is not unlike trying to use a small flat-blade screwdriver in a philips head screw because your boss, a technophobic idiot, insists the company's three-ring bound policy manual requires the use of Screwdriver #14, Small Flatblade in ALL SCREWS.
This is little more than an annotation in the infamous "Microsoft Hall of Innovation" joke file floating around the net. Let's see..
Will Loki Games be allowed to port Halo to Linux? No.
Will the Mac/PC versions of Halo ship within six months of the X-Box version? No.
Will Microsoft allow Bungie to release tools such as: limited source code for mod authors, or information on the engine technology used? No.
Will mod authors who manage to rip open the game's internals and release custom client/gameplay modifications receive C&D (cease and desist) letters to pull their websites? Yes.
"Bungie Studios." Fancy the wording - "Studio." Is this an artist colony? Perhaps employees sense their disposable nature in a revolving-door Microsoft world when they are part of an "ENSEMBLE" group, and not a "Software" company.
Why would the owners of a software company give up self-determination to such a soulless, malevolent entity? To borrow loosely from the words of Dennis Hopper, from the film "Speed".. : "Money, mainly money.. I wish I had a nobler purpose, Jack, but in the end I'm afraid it's just the money."
Sorry for the venom, but consider: Had Bungie not been acquired, the game would most likely have seen a Mac/PC simultaneous release, with a remarkably well done Loki linux client following two months later. The mod community most likely would have been encouraged. Odd how many game developers today, with the exception of Microsoft, seem to understand that a vibrant mod community can extend the life of your game, and contribute to it's ultimate success tenfold.
It's it funny how simply putting "Microsoft" in front of anything immediately polarizes the suject in to "them" and "us."
THIS SPACE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK.
well this conforms the reports and sightings. microsoft is trying to take over the world. but as if it wasnt already known... microsoft has been eating up the apps ever since it split. i dont know if this is for the good of mankind or not. i think they would have been less opressive if they stayed one large company instead of two large companies
Until OS X ships, officially and fur real, its a great beta... Lots of things have died in beta.
I'm waiting until the General Availability release before declaring victory. Then its party time...
Unixes/Linuxen win, CLIs win where they should, GUIs win where they should. Aqua spreads like warm massage oil over computing platforms everywhere its needed but only there, and Apple sells really neat hardware people can work and play with.
Oh, wasn't there a strong-arming bunch of FUD types from Redmond a while back? Made buggy whips didn't they?
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Well, realistically, why wouldn't they be upset? It's equivalent to, say, Ford Motor company reacquiring Hertz, and finding out that all their executives drive Cadies...
It doesn't really mean anything tho... People aren't buying and playing Myth because of what server it runs on...
NecroPuppy
I like you, Stuart. You're not like everyone else, here, at Slashdot.
Microsoft meddling in the affairs of one of its vassal companies? This came as no surprise to me either.
But I bet it came as a surprise to Bungie, judging by their letter to their fans. To quote:
What drove us then drives us now: to make the games we want to make, on our own terms, and in our own way.
Holding true to this vision allowed us to create the Marathon and Myth series, and has now led us to Redmond to work closely with the Xbox development team.
Here's how I figure the deal went down:
1. Bungie develops game for several platforms and makes a name for themselves. (I think the history here speaks for itself.)
2. Bungie would like to develop for the Xbox as well, and tries to get the SDKs for it. (It fits their pattern; if they have the patience to develop for Mac, PC, AND PS2, why not a fourth one?)
3. Microsoft offers to not just send over SDKs, but buy out Bungie. Part of this was probably the assurance that Bungie staff would have an opportunity to influence the design of the Xbox. (Bungie's Acquisition FAQ bears this out -- see "Why is this happening")
4. Bungie sells out to Microsoft in a fit of naivete and/or stupidity. If you haven't called up that FAQ already, do so -- read the Q&As starting with "Why do you believe Microsoft will leave you alone when there are so many documented examples of Microsoft doing shady things?" and try to hold down the bile.
What it looks like to me is that Microsoft drew Bungie into its blob-like folds on the promise of listening to them and benefitting from their talent, and proceeded to ream them.
Like this laughable line:
The existing bungie.net servers will continue to exist for the indefinite future. We are bringing the current head of the bungie.net admins along to ensure that bungie.net is maintained to our standards, and he will act as a full member of an online community team to ensure that future iterations of bungie.net are designed with the players in mind.
They probably seriously believed that when they signed over their good name. Pity them. And pity the forseeable future, which ended even before the ink was dry. And as for other promises, well, another thing they said in their FAQ was:
Will Microsoft control the content or direction of Bungie games?
No. The plan is that they'll leave us more or less alone to do what we do, and trust that the results will be worth it. They will be involved on some level at every step of the process, including conceptualization, but they will not shape the development of the games or censor content. Their interactions with us will mostly be on a business level.
In the current light, make of that what you will. To me, it looked like a cloudy day way back when they signed the contract, and now it looks like it's going to hail.
You cannot truly appreciate Dilbert until you read it in the original Klingon.
Well, by end-user, I meant someone who buys Quake3 and runs a server, not someone id might pay to do the same, etc.
Pretty well anyone with the bandwidth to run a good server will have a clue about a good machine/OS to run it on.
btw, one of the replies, the one that says "I wish my users were using Linux" has the right idea. A system which is secure enough that it stops them from screwing with it. (yet, ideally, open enough that they can still install software, etc.)
Heck, how many of you would've read this Slashdot article if it wasn't buttered up with scandal and comments that scare people?
This is a manual virus. Copy it to your sig and help me spread!
Dunno, didn't they supposedly try to migrate hotmail to nt? If it was working and making money, why mess with it? But, if the story is true, they did. Motivation? All that expensive BSD license fees? The prestige of putting a service like hotmail on your *cough* flagship product? The humiliation of having to use a 'free' alternative OS? In general, I would think they care. In this case, sounds like someone *cough* is trying to make a mountain out of a molehill.
There is much cruelty in the universe, John.
Yeah, we seem to have the tour map.
That "failed" conversion to Windows 2000 seems to be working pretty well for them.
You misheard him. What he actually said was -
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
You must play a lot of Jagged Alliance 2.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
But remember, Unreal 1 had no linux server port. Unreal Tournament did; that's why I only said Unreal in my original post :)
Praying for the end of your wide-awake nightmare.
See around here the truth doesn't matter. Rarely does a topic mean what the article is really about. They skim for a sentence or two and take it out of context to incite zealots and generate banner hits. See my previous comment on this matter.
1 5229&cid=109
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=00/09/20/14
The truth really hurts, doesn't it?
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
> > How do you know he wasn't taking a leak and happened to strike up a conversation with one of the janitors cleaning the crapper?
> That's the problem with "anonymous sources", they oughta have names...
I've heard that Billy the Borg goes around disguised as a janitor so he can overhear candid opinions from his employees. Maybe this news was just too OTT, and he blew his cover when he heard it.
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
hey there ya AC Date rapist...That article was about them *begining* the switchover. The switchover completed about a month ago. Go to K-Mart and get a clue.
Remember it, write it down, take a picture, I dont give a fsck!
Heh, okay well you replied anonymous -1 point for you.
Next, if you sell out to a comapny and YOU lose control of your company and things go wrong and bungie's reputation is tarnished because their executives decided to do some silly agreement with Microsoft which is basically ruining a lot of the thrill of the company and its games WHAT do you call it?
Looking out for the companies best intrest by signing a deal with Microsoft that is going to probably piss a lot of people off no matter how good the games are you write?
I am not saying I dont like it I am saying quite simply they sold out to MS, maybe it is in the companies best intrest but they still sold out, and I can label someone for what they are and I dont HAVE to like what they do if I find it wrong.
Jeremy
It is getting harder all the time to port a game from Windows due to what is occuring in the Direct3D vs. OpenGL wars.
Short version of API war: Direct3D sucks as an API, but over time its feature set has grown to signifigantly surpass OpenGL. The OpenGL ARB has its head stuck in (the sand), doesn't want to make "short term" API compromises and add all these new-fangled game features, and would prefer to have 4 years of debate per feature. Companies like nVidia have been opening a plethora of OpenGL extensions to allow game developers access to features otherwise only available under DirectX, but their use now requires card-specific programming, which both sucks in general and sucks even more under OpenGL which hides certain critical info (like texture memory issues.)
Game companies pressured to produce the latest and greatest looking game would now rather code to DirectX/3D than OpenGL. OpenGL support comes later, if at all, and uses only a subset of the graphics functionality the windows game has, unless a trememdous ammount of additional work occurs.
Its great if Bungee is still stating they will release for the Mac, but it remains to be seen how they handle the API issue. Most companies writing cross-platform games tend to wrote to the lowest common denominator of Direct3D and their best card donator, this is between nVidia, 3dfx, and ATI.
If other ports are made, they would likely be using the Mac graphic code base with new platform code, which is non-trivial in and of itself.
While Microsoft may not prevent them from porting, they may not have the time and/or resources to do it...
Why is it that bitching about microsoft and even to an extent, online privacy rights takes precedence over something cool like scientists finding a "massive" black hole in the center of our galaxy and several others? Personally, I think it is pretty cool that we are orbiting a black hole and would like to learn more about other people's opinions and theories about this.
SInce the process were also armed, there was also a small (but real) chance that they'd kill one another . . .
IIRC the original PlayStation was a CD ROM addon for the SNES. Sony spent a lot of time and effort developing it with Nintendo, only to get brushed off.
Pissed, they fininshed turning the PS into a standalone console - which was named the PlayStation, but abbreviated as PSX to distinguish it from the earlier PS that never hit the market. Evidently, the X makes it sound cool.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Actually, this brings up another point. Why would Bungie want to code for a console, they've always made games that are in non-console genres.
:)
When I say that I refer to Bungie's prevailing genres: FPS and Strategy games. Genres that don't translate to consoles.
I love consoles for a lot of things.. Chrono Cross is my current obsession and will continue to be so for a while to come, and my preordered PSX2... Well, need I go on?
There's a big difference between focusing efforts on platforms that they control, and buying a company in order to prevent that company's product from being released for other platforms, which is what the previous poster was claiming. Now I've seen no evidence to support that claim, and I'm not trying to back it up, I'm just pointing out that you seem to have missed what he was saying.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
GAWD, if my users aren't smart enough to understand me when I say DO NOT download and/or run Comet Cursor (specifically, in bullitens, several of them), then how the hell do I expect them to understand how to use even GNOME?
funny munging
Kind of strange that EA isn't on the list?
Funny that Electronic Arts isn't officially doing anything on the X box yet, since consoles have been their forte. Heck, they pretty much jumped-started the old Sega Genesis way back when. And PSX ports have allways been a priority.
Makes one wonder...
and remember that even a Mac port is highly unlikely Whatever. At the MacWorld Expo in NY this July, Alex (Bungie's CEO) announced that Halo will definetly be coming to the Mac. And Ed Freies (sp?), VP of MS's games division said that Apple, MS and someone from Bungie will team up and be bringing all MS games to the Mac.
Thank you for purporting to represent the entire Slashdot audience with your personal opinions. Both you and the poster you were replying to are doing a fine job of deciding what all Slashdot readers should see. Perhaps we should just let you guys decide which stories get posted. Hell, if you aren't interested in it, I'm sure nobody else will be either.
Now that I'm through with the sarcasm, I'd just like to say that if the story doesn't interest you, nobody is making you click on the little link to read the article or the posts. Just skip it and move on. That's not too tough for you is it?
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
That I cant argue with.. but whatever was left of them and what they did is just poop.
Jeremy
The main discussion shouldn't be if they're unhappy about servers running Linux (but I have to admit it's very funny). It should be about the impact of such M$ acquisitions in Linux gaming. Here in home I have to boot Windows when I want to play some games, though many companies are slowly porting their games. BTW, I hear many people say W2k rules (and they're reinstalling it every month because "weird errors happen"). 15 years of Microsoft O/S's experience made me sick of it.
No, SOS was the OS for the Apple ///.
Which was appropriate as it was an infamous flop.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Yes, an employee walkout twelve months from now; An announcement that they've created "Boing! Software", the new office is already leased - The foosball table arrives Monday, and the frozen juice machine is already stocked - Please send your resume's.
THIS SPACE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK.
It was the 150 meg movie that made me start drooling over Halo, not a few screenshots. The movie is incredible. If the game looks or runs half that good, it will still kick the crap out of most other games.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Im glad they are unhappy, and they can
stay unhappy.
Comparing Halo and T2 is like comparing Q3A and Q2; it's not fair to either game. Dynamix has nothing to fear, since they're so close to release. Bungie probably has nothing to fear, since their release isn't going to happen any time soon (doubt it? check the slippage on Oni)
IMHO, anyway.
I have no
--
Excel 95 actually has a "mini-Doom" game built in. No enemies to shoot though. And no bullets. Ok, maybe "Doom-Style-Walkthrough" would be a better term ;-)
1. Open Excel 95 with a blank work sheet
2. Go down to the 95th row
3. Select the whole row
4. Tab over to coloum B
5. Goto Help/About
6. Hold down ctrl-alt-shift and click on the tech support button
7. A window appears call "Hall of Tortured souls"
8. At the end of the hall and all the programmers names
9. Do a 180 turn and type excelkfa. Walk thuorgh the wall and see the pictures.
where in that whole article did it mention linux?
I saw it mention pay-for-play.
/me does a search on the page.
ALT+F linux
NOT FOUND
looks to me like this is just a holy war.
Bloody dumbo. Profit-making indeed. Vapour-hardware is more like it.
no sig
yeah, that was reminding me of elliot there for a ahwile.... but, had it been really similar, gates would have shot balmer in the face, and he would have gotten back up...
JA2 is a damn fine game. one of the greatest ever made in my opinion :)
-------
-------
"don't smoke, don't drink, don't fuck
at least i can fucking think"
Minor Threat
I heard some horrible news.
Microsoft has licensed this technology. Frankly, I don't understand how this could have happened. Slashdot and the Open Source community has been one of the longest users of this. It is just plain sad.
Take this personaility test.
Here I was thinking it was buggy and slow because I was accessing it with Netscape, but you're saying it was the servers?
Maybe, maybe not. I dropped hotmail and signed up for some other OS' mail... much better.
-jpowers
-jpowers
it didn't used to be. and the backend stuff is still largely BSD as you just said.
-------
-------
"don't smoke, don't drink, don't fuck
at least i can fucking think"
Minor Threat
They *have* lost, they are just rolling for double or nothing... appeals courts are the craps tables for the compulsive gamblers of the lower courts... you *could* win this time, and get your wife's ring out of the pawn shop, or you could end up without the car, too...
They lost, but right now they are playing with a line of credit from the house... I'd like to be on the collection end when they lose again.
--
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
Got any mmore details on this?
--
NO TOUCH MONKEY!
Granted, Bungie has some cool products coming down the pipeline. And, agreed, Gates' acquisition is 'troubling.' However, there seems to be an assumption that Bungie is truly a significant and unique company.
Could the world simply do without Bungie? Yes.
Would Microsoft attempt to be as competitive without the Bungie acquisition? Yes, although this may have sped things up.
I guess what I am trying to point out is that there is much more out there than Bungie and there seems to truly be thousands of programmers as/more talented and innovative than the Bungie people. I'm sure everyone knows this. Just a little reminder.
Why worry? Someone will do it better.
Part of the reason Bungie was innovative was that it could be creative because of its very nature, size and entrepreneurialship. Now its nature has changed and it has lost its ability to innovate; it is now part of a mega corporation.
Others out there will quickly fill this spot and excel.
If not already observed:M$ has also purchased FASA Interactive (Read: Mechwarrior III), They're laying the groundwork for a big X-Box rollout by capturing some of the best of what runs/will run on PCs.
Actually acquiring these properties and then trying to monkey them up to make the M$-collective happy is detrimental to the eventual rollout of their toy. Not that they haven't done boneheaded things before, but with one year to go, consider, "Does a project like this benefit from scope creep?"
It's all true! ±5%
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Let someone (anyone, anywhere) post an article that is even slightly wrong about Linux, and Slashdot makes indignant noises. But the same principles of accuracy don't apply to Slashdot, of course... after all, Microsoft is "evil," so Slashdot thinks it is justified in publishing baseless speculation and rumor.
Come on, Slashdot! While you let talking at MIT go to your head, you forget that with power comes responsibility. Microsoft never learned that lesson; too bad you're interested in emulating their poor example.
All about me
Obviously Comet Cursor and Webshots is a joke as they are both bandwidth wasting pieces of crap. And as far as comparing Gimp to Photoshop, well.....
BWAAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAAH.
*wipes tear*
And please, continue replacing the word "the" with "da" as your street smarts have impressed me again and again.
demoically posess them
> I urge you all to follow suit. Who is with > me???? > Iam! I think it's a great idea! I'll certainly never, um, respond to...um...er... Oh, damn. Virg
Oh, great. Another "I'm not interested, so we shouldn't have this on Slashdot" post by someone who thinks that their opinions and tastes reflect that of the entire Slashdot community. Haven't we done this before, ad naseum?
Get over yourself. Some of us like to keep up to date on Microsoft's anti-competitive nature. To those of us who love to play Bungie games on non-Windows OSes, this is not a good sign. If you don't like it, don't read it. There's always the option to filter MS news items.
You think you're tired? I'm sick unto death of people like you going around discussion threads I like to read bitching about their very existance. I think I just about overdosed on it when Slashdot started carrying anime info.
Bunch of whiners. Get the point of Slashdot. It's not just about reading what you like and censoring what you don't. The whole point of the moderation system and the ability to customize your Slashboxes and home page is that you don't have to see this stuff if you don't want to, but your opinion shouldn't be able to demand that no one else can.
Heck, I can't stand Jon Katz, but guess what -- I got over it. I just don't read his articles, even when the front page excerpt is so vacuous and full of misinformation as to send my blood boiling, such as whenever he starts babbling nonsensically about role-playing games he seems to have never actually read, much less played.
Why don't you grow up and realize that many people here are interested in what MS does. Your opinion is just one amongst many, not The One.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
The Linux zealot part of his brain believes it, but the rest of him knows the truth.
How much does Microsoft pay you to troll Linux-centric forums refuting every single piece of NT "FUD" ?
If it is high, and full-time, give me a call, I can easily whore my zealous ways to the side of NT for money.
Lars -
My main reason for having a console is that I dig being able to kick back on the couch (after a long day of sitting in front of a computer) and play some mindless games. Sure, there are various living-room-computer setups, but I haven't seen one that made me want to shelf my psx, which can be kicked out of the way, plugged / unplugged without a hassle, and hasn't once barfed on me.
I think we are all forgetting that MS uses Unix on some of their web servers. LE -=- UNIX, BABY... YEA!!!
"Bill Gates is just a monocle and a Persian Cat away from being one of the bad guys in a James Bond movie." - Dennis Miller
"No, Meester Bond, I expect you to upgrade!" - Dennis Miller
Those are good packages, but give the Devil his due: The Gimp != Photoshop. The Gimp is great, but there are still plenty of places where Photoshop simply outshines.
:-)). We still don't have a good SQL editor/environment. We have a lot, but we have a long way to go. In the words of Roger Waters, "The Tide is Turning."
We still don't have a Quicken (yes, gnuCash is quite swell and all). We still don't have a DreamWeaver (yes, I use and enjoy Emacs
Hotmail is being migrated to Win2000 entirely for marketing reasons. The sales people need to be able to say, "Win2000 works for huge operations like Hotmail, it will surely work for your e-commerce company." I think it's a great test. If Hotmail crashes and burns, it will be a major public humiliation for MS and they would deserve it. If Hotmail does fine running Win2000, then good for them, they managed to design an actual working OS.
-B
photoshop: www.gimp.org
There is a reason why photoshop is #1 in it's area, because it is the best. Gimp has a long way to go before it can math photoshop overcall.
Your FUD no longer holds up here. In a year, the linux desktop will rule over windows with an iron fist. You can take that one to da bank.
This is actually quite funny...windows is around for a long time because it does the desktop well enough for 90% of the users out there. Why do so many Linux zealots insit that Linux must run on everything without anything else? That is the MS trap trying to make your OS do everything under the sun. The saying Jack of All Trades, Master of None comes to mind here.
this space for rent
Yeah.. Apparently that post was overrated.. That seems like balanced moderation to me.
I'll say it again -I find the Bungie Liberation Page funny and a great way for people within to let their gripes be known.. I work with a guy who left softimage just after MS bought them up.. Sounds like not good folks to work for. Good to hear people from within speaking out.
air and light and time and space
Ok this is what.. a Mac news outlet...
:)
Microsoft news outlets have clamed for a long time now they are fair with non-Microsoft products. Not missquoting RMS or mislabling him as a comunist and not giving Microsoft specal treatment.
But we know better... misquotes, improper tests and statistics inflasion is some of the things proMicrosoft publications have done. Add to this Microosofts own jernalist handlers and you can see Microsoft is never far from any such artical.
Now here comes a Mac mag.. Apple is one of long time rivals to Microsoft (I argue however that this relationship predates Microsoft as the evil empire and dates back to IBM as the evil empire.. then Apple.. then Microsoft.. in that order.. Apples time of evil was short mostly becouse Apple isn't evil.. and the patents were Xeroxes idea Apple simply paid for them)
Anyway... this is about Microsoft basing not Apple bashing so let's get this rant on track
Microsoft publications clame they are not anti-anything and just trying to publish the facts.
However thies "facts" are clearly not from the real world but from some Sim world Microsoft has running back at MsHQ.. probably on a Sun Sparc sence it seems so presistent in it's "facts".
Yeah Microsofts people didn't say they use NT everywhere.. they said they ignore the people who laugh at Microsoft for having to use Unix systems in it's own company.
Microsoft would have us believe Unix is obsolete.. that it can not do anything anymore...
But Linux is 10 years old not 30 or 40... Windows is a few years older...
(Build on 20 year old Dos based on 30 year old CP/M.. Giving Windows the same legacy as Linux... a 10 year old system based on 30 year old design... only Unix was compleatly revised 10 years ago. CP/M was not)
Every time Linux shows up with a bug fix Microsoft "jernalists" scream "See Linux has bugs"
But the reality is... they can't seem to report Linux bugs that have not been fixed. Ohh they exist but Microsoft jernalists are not ready to really understand Linux well enough to find them.
In the mean time defective features (Unix world calls thies "bugs" BTW not featues) stay in place on Windows. No effort is made to safe guard them, sheald them or remove them leaving Windows open to more attacks.
While Linux includes such minnor bug reports as "Icons are ugly" Microsofts "Features" include e-mail viruses.
Yeah Mac jernalists are gona be slanted... Linux jernalists say "We are LINUX jernalists.. you KNOW our slant" Microsoft jernalists say "Slant us? *fnord*Windows is god*fnord* nooo *fnord*worship bill gates*fnord* we wouldn't do that"
Yeah even our own CmdrTaco has an obveous Debian bies.. yet he still reports on RedHat and SuSA, Mandrake and all the other Linux disros of note...
So in closing *Fnord*Linux from Scratch*Fnord* I'd like to say that basicly right now unbiesed reporting is a rare gem... *Fnord*Meow Pawjects*Fnord* and that we need to keep an eye out for the yellow in jernalism today *Fnord*Vote for Ralf Nader*Fnord* thank you... *Fnord* ZenToe.cgi *Fnord*
I don't actually exist.
Yeah, I noticed that, too. Again.
Sometimes I suspect that /. articles are written that way so the moderators can know who actually read the external articles and who didn't.
I can see the fnords!
Here is Doom for SysAdmins: http://www.cs.unm.edu/~dlchao/flake/doom/ .
Just try not to kill 'init'...;-)
It's their company now - why shouldn't they enforce NT laws? Would a Linux company say to an acquired startup "Gee, it's nice you're using NT. We wouldn't dare consider shifting you to Linux". Of course not. They'd move them as soon as possible.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
I'm tired of little digs at Microsoft masquarading as news around here. I use Unix and I don't like Microsoft very much. But I don't want to whine like a spoiled puppy about it either. Can we stick to the real stuff the matters, like new products, on-line rights and privacy, and science?
flame you for working on renegades ;-)
Sorry, couldn't resist. Honestly, I haven't been following the development of Halo or Tribes 2 very much, as I've been spending all my time drooling over Baldur's Gate 2. It just strikes me as messed up that a few screenshots for Halo are shown and suddenly the entire community proclaims it as a Godsend, and everyone immediately forgets about Tribes 2.
And I'm not sure that I would say Tribes was only half-heartedly team-oriented. Seems to me that when it first came out there was a much more concerted effort for teamwork (in pubs at least). The game is very, very different now than when it was released, and the teamwork is very different as well.
We may have a different perspective, as I only play base, but I don't know that you don't play base frequently as well. I simply never play mods.
Moller
...so, you're saying it'll be perfect for the Xbox?
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
Just imagine if every snide workplace comment you heard daily was reported by the mainstream press to represent your company's opinion. I'm sorry, but for this to make /. is beyond lame. I think this site has too much influence for Taco and co. to not at least dig *a little bit* before reporting anything that is submitted.
Come on, get serious here...
To put this in terms you'll better understand, comparing Photoshop and the GIMP is like comparing a 64 CPU E10000 to a Pentium 60 running Linux...
If the gimp suits your needs, then by all means use it. But Photoshop costs $500+ dollars. That means that most of the people using it (or at least the ones that paid for it) really, trully need it's features... Otherwise they'ed already be using on of the plethora of cheaper alternatives...
ARGH, now I'm going to have to buy TWO next-gen consoles. *grumble*
-- Dr. Eldarion --
Of course there is no gun to your head. The implant at the base of your spine eliminates the need for that.
Getting more sereous...
Intentional or not repeatedly suggesting (from any level) that Windows should be used has an impact.
No conspericys or anything...
But it effects the way you think.... after about 100 occurences you re-evaluate Windows...
Give it say 100 re-evaluations and you'll probably reconsider....
Is this branwashing? Yeah.. so why isn't everyone in Microsoft using Windows?
Blue Screen Of Death.... and installing Windows is MAJORLY painful...
Deal with 10 Windows installs or 10 BSODs and you re-evaluate Windows BIG TIME.. it has a more profound psycological impact than hinting around you should use Windows...
Yeah.. Microsofts been branwashing people into using Linux for years... and they didn't even know it...
anyway... get on your conspericy theries etc...
The reality is however Microsoft has clamed for years Unix wasn't useful... We ignored them for a while now we have to deal with this from people who should know better...
Now we get to say Microsoft uses Unix... Ignore us please..
And of os venders.. only Microsoft uses a compeating product.... (Apple uses Sun Sparcs but thats not a compeating product.. thies are opposate extreams of the market and they are hardware venders)
Yes it's annoying... No Microsoft isn't putting presure on you... They have yet to get HotMail to remove those dam BSD boxes
Finnally expect the "Quality covrage" NT Mags give Unix when obveously Unix centric news sources talk about Windows... that means mispelling names and getting facts totally totally messed up...
Hay and tomarow we may even make up some statistics.... naa not even Slashdot would stoop THAT low
I don't actually exist.
I just had to do this. I needed to vent about this whole Bungie situation. Here, we have one of the oldest and, bar-none, coolest software companies known to man.
I don't know how many hours I lost to Marathon, its sequels, WW, Myth, Myth II.. I planned to lose massive amounts of time to Oni and Halo. But since the announcement..
Well, I haven't seen Oni (still). That game just looked so damn cool. Anime brought to life. What's worse, Halo. That game literally put my jaw on the floor. And that was before seeing the game in motion on the trailers.
What was even better was that it was Bungie, a company that was committed to being cross platform and even committed to Linux. And here we see that being tread on. Bungie is being tread on. The thought honestly fills me with anger. Here is one of the brightest groups of people making games. Here is a group of people who gets as much respect from the Macheads as id software does from PC enthusiasts.
And they're being tread on.
*sigh* I was looking forward to Halo too.. And on Linux no less. Not some console game. No, I'm not slamming consoles. I just like having a keyboard and a mouse for shooter games. Excuse me, I'm gonna go cry now.
Yawn, ideed...
--
Information wants to be beer, or something like that.
Unfortunately in the future I predict that enough people interested in gaming and MS will apply at and transfer into Bungie, such that the pressure from within the organization of Bungie itself will force a large degree of MS conformity.
-Daniel
but basically I'm too lazy to set up my favorites for the mods. That and I'm very set in my base ways, I know all the maps, I know all the weapons, and I love going on the servers frequented by the top 10 teams from OGL and holding my own.
::sigh:: even 30 year old men can be incredibly immature in computer games. oh well.
:-) I play base because I was involved in the base community on the OGL ladder. I don't feel the animosity towards mods that the rest of the base community seems to feel. "Llama Caging" and such.
Moller
Obviously Comet Cursor and Webshots is a joke as they are both bandwidth wasting pieces of crap.
If they're what people want, then there's no harm done. Would you rather bandwidth go unused?
And please, continue replacing the word "the" with "da" as your street smarts have impressed me again and again.
If I had any street smarts at all, I'd know better than to reply to a known troll..
See ya!
Blue
i browse at -1 because they're funnier than you are.
The Gimp is great, but there are still plenty of places where Photoshop simply outshines.
Name five - and remember that the gimp can read and use external photoshop plugins.
I can think of one, and only one - pantone/CMYK support. Until someone coughs up $10k for it, though, there's nothing to be done about it.
See ya!
Blue
i browse at -1 because they're funnier than you are.
- Sit on the couch for hours, instead of a chair
- Use the single surround sound system I have (I can't afford two decent ones)
- Take a memory card (nice n' small) to a friend's dwelling and play there as well.
There are "solutions" to these, but most of them are quite pricey, so I'd rather just have the console. Besides, I hate waiting for PC ports of console games to arrive!Aside from those advantages for RPG's, I must point out that multiplayer with people I know is easier -- I know several people who don't own toasty-enough boxen to play most modern games, and who wouldn't want to lug it around if they did! For this, an N64 is schweet!
--
We may not imagine how our lives could be more frustrating and complex—but Congress can. – Cullen Hightower
Why would MS release X-Box but not Halo? Wouldn't it make sense to just wait?
But Photoshop costs $500+ dollars. That means that most of the people using it (or at least the ones that paid for it) really, trully need it's features.
You've out-caveated your own argument. The people with whom I have worked who have paid for photoshop use it for pre-press work. The original poster's assertion related to those users who also wanted eye-candy, ie, not professional users. In that context, photoshop is Yet Another Application, and, within that context, my argument is more than valid.
See ya!
Blue
i browse at -1 because they're funnier than you are.
He said they 'get by' with word and solitaire, and 'need' photoshop'. I think my arguments still stands in that context.
The article mentions, right at the bottom, that some microsoft employees groan that it uses linux.
The editor then ads that 'NT is the preferred platform at Microsoft' . DUH.
Hardly a groundbreaking article there guys.. of COURSE some microsoft drones aren't going to like it.
They did NOT say that 'Microsoft is very unhappy with the current state of the game servers' or anything. They just mentioned that some 'employees' didn't like it.
Wah. Some of my employees don't like using windows either. Doesn't make them conspirators.
Hmm, a MAC gaming magazine is reporting something about LINUX servers instead of WINNT servers. In related news, AtariMag is reporting that a SEGA genesis is being used at NINTENDO btw, What is the plural of OS?
I mean, that's what you guys do, right? I mean, go in, muck around with the definition of an "OS" and an "Application" and then get sued by the government, right?
--
If halo is delayed until 3-6 mo. after the xbox release (currently slated for October 12, 2001), its tech will be extremely dated. As PC Games go, it'll be left in the dust if MS doesn't release by April. Unless they've got one hell of a surprise up their sleeves, they've got to make a Q1 ship date.
"Bill Gates is just a monocle and a Persian Cat away from being one of the bad guys in a James Bond movie." - Dennis Miller
Have you seen Tomorrow Never Dies? The villain in this bond is Elliot Carver, and I simply can not watch the movie without counting the number of times he reminds me of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs (you know, of Pixar) rolled into one.
Ed Booher
Network Engineer
One Call Internet
http://www.onecall.net/
"If Linux is an 18-wheeler semi, capable of pulling multi-ton loads cross-country, BeOS is a slick Porsche 911 Turbo."
- Franco Vitaliano / OPEN Magazine -
[Disclaimer - Any and all views, opinions, outlooks, philosophies, words of wisdom, words of brash stupidity, and principles outlined in this post are the belief of the Reverend Eddie W. Booher, Jr. and are not necessarily synonymous with the views of his employer or religion.]
"Genius may shine aloof and alone, like a star, but goodness is social, and it takes two men and God to make a Brother."
There is a reason why photoshop is #1 in it's area, because it is the best.
No, it's #1 in its area because it has support for proprietary pre-press color matching, which costs a ton of money. Not that photoshop is not a kick-ass application, but, all else equal, that is the reason it is the leading commercial pre-press application.
Photoshop was a true innovator amongst windows apps. Remember how freaked out you were by modeless windows? Many apps now follow that model, but, back in the day, it was freakish.
The gimp is not a perfect application - I use it every day, and I have some issues with its interface. At the lower levels, though, it does its job very, very well. The API is very accessable, and for batch image processing, it is unparralelled.
But then, you've probably never used the gimp, have you?
This is actually quite funny...windows is around for a long time because it does the desktop well enough for 90% of the users out there.
You're an idiot. Windows does well because M$ did a very good job of controlling the market for consumer operating systems while the other players made serious mistakes.
The rest of your post has nothing at all to do with mine, so I'll leave your rhetorical questions to the realm of rhetoric.
See ya!
Blue
i browse at -1 because they're funnier than you are.
pedantics and semantics. :P you're right, but people who NEED photoshop.. should use a mac :)
blue
i browse at -1 because they're funnier than you are.
Are you saying that Hotmail was running on Windows 95?
Why do I keep typing pythong?
Ummmm, here's my favorite features in no particular order:
1 - HUGE 3rd party plug in support (no... i don't want to write my own plug ins)
2 - Capable of handling pressure sentisitive devices (drawing tablets)
3 - CMYK is really important. Pantone is less so (for me), though Duotones are right up there.
4 - Clipping paths
5 - Layers
6 - LAB color space
7 - Rulers and guides
8 - Import/Rasterize postscript files and PDF's
9 - Kerning controls for type
10 - History palette
11 - Edittable type
That's it for starters... do you want more, or shall we call it quits?
Loki seems to think its worth the cost of porting games. ID didn't do too badly porting games (of course, they developed their games on the NeXT, originally, so a Unix port was straight-forward).
You are right-- there are other possible reasons for their change of plans. However, in this respect, I think the most obvious explaination is the correct one. Historically, MS has purchased other companies for no other reason than to shut down competition. I don't see why they wouldn't do it in this case, either.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
*sniff* I had never heard of Halo before and suddenly a friend of mine sent me the prelease movie.. *jaw fell to the ground* What can be worse than hearing of this wonderful new game and then learning only 24hrs later that it may never be released to the real game world (sorry Microsoft x-box isnt in the real gameworld yet). Arrrrgghh! If anything made me hate monopoly its this. (and by the way Myth was wonderful..except the neverending maze in the tunnels)
I don't think anyone was bitching that they weren't using their own server OS, we thought it was humorous that they tried to move it to NT and failed, leaving it running whatever open source OS it started with (FreeBSD? IIRC)
You would think that they would learn from their own mistakes, and admit that NT is not the answer for EVERYTHING and let well enough alone, but they will probably attempt another conversion and cause plenty of outages in the process.
Finkployd
An NDA? About Hotmail starting to use W2K? Riiiiight. MS would be broadcasting that from the tree tops.
-David T. C.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
I wonder if Slashdot would react the same way "MS is the all-consuming Borg" if Redhat objected to its children companies using NT on their machines.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
I've been a Myth player for a long time now, ever since TFL on my Mac.
IIRC, Bungie was on NT servers at first, but then they were having a lot of trouble with them, so they changed to Linux. I don't see why they'd want to go back.
- Amon CMB
Men believe what they want. - Caesar
Hey, I've been in jobs where I thought my boss was a moron, but I knew better than to walk up to the boss and say, "Hey, I think you're a fucking moron."
Sure, Microsoft's official position doesn't speak for every employee (although I hear they own all their employees' ideas...not a joke this time.) The article never lists what employees they are...it could be Bill & Steve, or it could be Cletus the Idiot Janitor. That part we don't know. Slashdot, for me, is not a job. It's what I read/respond to when I'm loafing (a lot lately.) In a job, if your employer says "no Linux; we're an NT house" you say "yes sir/maam" or you say "bye". That's how it is, unless you can talk the boss into switching.
BTW, someone else posted something about the Hotmail/BSD thing...they've switched back and forth for quite a while now. Just more proof that not every OS is cut out for every job. Keep Microsoft's OS on the isolated PC; leave the big boys to do the networking.
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
Precicely what's so irritating when someone goes off on some rant stating "How is this news?" 9 times out of 10 it's news to me, and I'm interested. Yowza.
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
A friend of a friend of mine works at Microsoft and she said that although MS will EVENTUALLY release a Mac Halo, they will absolutely not release any of the expansion packages for it.
Originally Bungie was making Halo FOR the Mac. Figures...
But on a lighter note, I just received Mac OS X... It's amazing!
The next comment I write will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
Just off the top of my head, the Gimp does already have layers.
It's not photoshop, but it's getting better day by day.
Yeah, it's sad to see that web journalism has gone the way of yellow journalism. Anything to sell eyeballs.
:^) Here's a few suggestions you could make to the folks at Microsoft then next time they idly suggest you move over to one of their POS OS's.
;^) and get back in the ring.
Now, to go offtopic.
1.) Re-open the XENIX vault.
2.) Help get XF86 going on it.
3.) Help with the WINE port.
a.) If not WINE, then at least their API.
I think that WINE has effectively proven itself to be a proof-of-concept--it can be done. The whole of NT could be made obsolete by sometime next year if only Microsoft would get off their duffs, admit that BillG was a probably little tipsy when he made the demand that they write a better UNIX than UNIX
Thing is, I think it'd sell millions of copies.
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
1 - as my post said, the gimp reads photoshop plugins.
2 - ever see the linux penguin? created in the gimp with a drawing tablet.
3 - no fair using ones i've already used.
4, 5, 7 - you've never actually used the gimp, have you? those have all been available for years.
6 - i don't know what LAB is.
The type stuff is all feature creep, as far as I'm concerned - the gimp does read postscript, and pdf is pretty simple. I'm sure if anyone wanted it, a plugin would be written. But, come on, kerning controls/a font editor, in a gfx program? Now, if you had said there's no linux equivalent to pagemaker, you'd have been righ the first time..
Anyways, why not try using the gimp, and a modern version at that, before lambasting it so roundly? The fact that you don't even know it does layers is pretty friggin sad.
Blue
i browse at -1 because they're funnier than you are.
Erm.. do you mean, as opposed to page 6 of /. ?
Obviously this story isn't as important as, say, MPAA v. 2600 or the AOL/Time Warner merger, but stories on Slashdot are not (and should not be) ordered by importance.
To everyone who's bitching about how this story shouldn't be on Slashdot, standard CTFC (change the fucking channel) argument applies. Edit your preferences, and the story will magically disappear. But some of us want to read this.
--
The dog ate my
Another conversion? Hotmail's already running on Windows — NT5/Win2K.
Cheers,
Bill: ...and of course they use NT so they're a perfect acquisition ...er... some free operating system
Ballmer: No, my leige, they use
Bill: What?
Ballmer (perspiring): Uh... It's not one of ours...
Bill: OF COURSE IT'S NOT ONE OF OURS! NONE OF OURS ARE FREE!
Ballmer (wetting pants): It's Linux, my lord...
Bill: Well fix that, you imbecile! What's the point of being a Mighty Evil Master if I can't have my whims!
Ballmer: Yes, my liege! Your lordship!
2 years later
Ballmer: News, my liege!
Bill: It better not be another one of those damnable snipes about the International Space Station plummeting in flames into Lake Erie after Win2002 hung the piloting systems. I'm sooo tired of that.
Ballmer: No, my liege, we have converted the Myth servers to our own O/S.
Bill: Ah, good, how's that going?
Ballmer: Err.. Well it's funny you mention 'plummeting in flames'...
It's all true! ±5%
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
It's a little like shelf space in a supermarket. Most people don't know what a battlezone that is. Bungie had to know how ugly distribution really was because they depended utterly on being able to do it- well before internet file sharing was as big as it is now. Every step of the way, they faced total failure if one of the 800lb gorillas decided they didn't like Bungie being there.
I don't know how much 'stick' was combined with the 'carrot' MS offered- it hardly matters. Bungie would be able to smell the _shadow_ of a stick. The merest hint of '...or we'll lean on your distributors' and Bungie would cave, knowing better than most companies how weak their lifeline was.
Sure this isn't capitalism- your point? Slashdot readers of all people ought to understand how real barriers to entry can be. The way things work, Bungie had and has no guaranteed access to a free market, the way they were playing it. They wanted the distribution channels that are owned by the larger players, they wanted to be sold in stores and they were.
They got tired of the brinksmanship. I for one won't hold that against them- the stress would have killed me if I was the one daring to do it :) at the same time, I don't expect their products will ever see any platform I use (i.e. Mac or Linux)- yes, I know it's promised for Mac, and I believe this is a lie or deception and that MS will FIND a way to see that Halo doesn't get finished for Mac, even something as simple as setting the priorities so fixing X-Box bugs etc is always more important. And finally, it's somewhat academic for me as I simply won't knowingly buy Microsoft stuff under any circumstances, any more than I'll buy RIAA label CDs at this point. It's a pity, but there it is- the only way you can pretend to defy a trust is by depriving yourself of whatever they are controlling. I will have to choose to not give MS money in the event that Halo manages to ship for Mac. I still don't believe this is likely to happen, though. *shrug* Bungie died, deal with it. They don't even use its name in MS X-Box press releases, did you notice? So much for using Bungie brand recognition.
LOL, NT server doesn't cut it as a server?
Hmmm..
Why do I keep typing pythong?
----------
Stupid sexy Flanders.
Just suppose that RedHat had acquired a game company that ran all their servers on NT. Then suppose a few RedHat employees gently suggested that they might like to run on Linux instead. Would we be in the least surprised? Would we think this was in some way evil? Of course not.
Why this whole story is in any way surprising to anyone is quite beyond me.
Quote from the linked article. :
"We are an organized resistance to the subjugation of the Myth The Fallen Lords and Myth SoulBlighter game servers by Microsoft. We don't mind Microsoft running them as long as they don't attempt to make any stupid changes to their mode of operation, performance, free status, or existence
Ummm.... Microsoft purchased the whole company, servers and all. That kinda gives them the right to do whatever they want. If Bungi was smart, they would have put a clause in the sale contract providing for the maintinance and status of these games in their curent configuration. If they didn't, I can't blame Microsoft for wanting to make a profit off this some day. Why else would they buy the company???
Dirty Pirate Hooker
Mr. Coward, obviously you're befuddled by too much Solitaire - how can you say that W2K DC performs better than Sun, when performance is a hardware issue, and when you compare SPARC to x86, it's an apples and oranges game?
What performs better? ten intel boxes to one sparc box? $50000 worth of intel equipment for $50000 worth of Sun equipment (which presumably includes OS and service, which the intel box would not, because the OS is licensed free from MS - to MS).
How does it compare price/performance when you include what a REAL customer pays for Win2K Data Center - which is exhorbitant considering it's almost identical to Win2k professional, code-wise, with a few registry bits flipped?
Reliability is also a relative term, because in the Windows world, you have less uptime, but you CALL that reliability because the downtime is planned for, not unexpected downtime. But can you hot-swap CPU's and motherboards in your Intel boxes? How many more Win2k boxes are required simply to maintain the CaptiveDirectory services?
How many MAN-HOURS were invested in this project, start to finish? (including the prior attempts at migration that FAILED). Do you REALLY expect a customer to undertake such a foolish venture, and eat those costs? How do you explain the increase in customer complaints? Is this Microsoft's grand vision of the future? The promise of "New Technology"? Will HotMail be better off at the end of this migration, or will your marketing people finally get to brag, and forget about the big black-eye they got when they picked a fight with big-bad Unix. That makes it worth it, eh? But it's all about serving your customers, isn't it?
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Don Quixote took on windmills, imagining they were giants; the Linux crowd (of which I am a joyful member) takes on a giant, imagining it a windmill. It is important, sometimes, to play that we are on the side of the just (we are, IMNSHO); these little news items remind us that the giant is just as nearsighted and self-absorbed as we are.
MS suffers from Not-Invented-Here. So do we. Microsoft would like everyone to use their OS. So do we (wish that people would use our OS). The giant is obsessed with world domination, with controlling how our Euros are spent, and how our information is traded-- and they are obsessed with making sure *they* control the information. So are w... okay, maybe not.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
Even more, does any Slashdotter agree with any other Slashdotter?
... and today's pet project has
Need it be explained that Microsoft set the tone for this situation? There are _plenty_ of industries out there where you can start a business, do good work, and have a future- though the numbers may be decreasing across the board (corporatism, in a word). The game industry is not one of them, apparently. Bungie chose not to die like Looking Glass. The question people should be asking is, do they wish to have companies like Bungie and Looking Glass forced out of the business for the convenience of the larger players? Do they like having their choices wiped out? Just because this effect is prevalent does not make it desirable.
There's a site which uses the embeddable version of IE to do this for you... You point it at a URL and it returns a JPG of what the site looks at in the browser you specify. I didn't bother saving a link because the odd bits of web stuff I do work just fine in lynx, but it could be handy to your web person.
That's quite a major allegation that people who fuck with Microsoft end up dead. Got any proof or examples or references or anything like that?
Or is this FUD?
MS did in fact attempt to convert hotmail to NT:
http://www.unix-vs-nt.org/kirch/hotmail.html
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
Just like Linux isn't the answer for everything.. or any other OS.
Each OS has its uses, and each problem asks for a little research which system will work best for the given problem. As someone once explained to me: (and I've seen the statement on /. as well)
"What's the best OS?"
"Depends on what you want to do with it".
Of course it makes sense to move everything to one system to decrease TCO, especially when other systems make up only a very small percentage of the total network. But, I suppose Bungie runs independently from the rest of MS so I doubt that's an issue here.
This is of no surprise. But kinda silly. Microsoft should layoff on this issue. After all they are having difficulty with their Hotmail service as they try to ease WinNT/2K servers into spots which were used by BSD servers.
The WinNT servers are not even fully introduced and already it is apparent that they are not capable of handling the load. This same problem is going to occur again if Bungie is forced to give up their Linux servers. Then you'll have even more people peeved off about the Bungie/Microsoft union. I've been on Bungie.net and I have to say that their reliability of service is what keeps me coming back. Even with Diablo II around, I find that Bungie.net is loads better than Battle.net. If MS changes the way Bungie does things than the situation will be as bad as Battle.net.
Microsoft needs to gain the trust of the gaming consumer if they want their foray into the game market to be profitable. This can be a first step in either the right path, profitability and happy consumers, or the wrong path. Which leads to lose and Bill Gates castle being stormed and he ultimatly being guillotined. Now we wouldn't want that. 8^p
-- What's this '-r *' file doing here? -- Oh well, a simple 'rm' should do the trick.
I tried using it a while ago, maybe a year or so, during the first round of "the gimp is the opensource photoshop" and have ceased to find reason to go download it every week to see what it does and doesn't do. I'll go get the latest build this weekend, but honest, without CMYK & LAB color space support (lightness + A&B channels, by the way - all the contrast is stored in one channel of the image and all the color information is stored in the other two channels) I really doubt that I'll even want to put to to use...
And before you blast type in a graphics program...
How else can you get semi-transparent type over a background? (Answer by creating the type in another program and importing it as an EPS and then adjusting the opacity of the imported artwork). Why add needless steps when you can just click and type?
I'm guessing that you don't spend much time in photoshop, otherwise you'd know the problem there... And as another poster pointed out, this isn't about penguins... this is about things like the images in Adobe ads and Epson stylus ads...
It scares me how uninformed some slashdotters are on topics which they obviously have strong opinions about...
hotmail ran/runs on mostly FreeBSD servers. microsoft bought it that way, and have tried a few times to switch it to NT. each time they have, it's failed under the load to some degree. they're working on migrating the whole thing really slowly to NT5 right now.
this is as far as i know though, i did expirence the failures both times, when people whined to me to help them out, that hotmail wasn't working. but anyhow, i could be wrong. this is just as much as i know.
-------
-------
"don't smoke, don't drink, don't fuck
at least i can fucking think"
Minor Threat
Actually, there is a back page for /. If you submit a story to a specific subtopic (such as Apache) they'll sometimes post it only to the subtopic and not to the front page. You'll be lucky if the story gets 10 comments total. Quite possibly a fate worse than being rejected.
But...if this article had been back-paged, the signal to noise ratio would probably be a bit higher. People don't bother slinging flames when they know that no one is reading.From Apple eNews: August 10, 2000:
"During his keynote address, Steve Jobs welcomed Ed Fries onto the Macworld stage. Vice President of Games for Microsoft, Fries reassured the audience. Yes, Microsoft certainly will release Halo for the Mac. In fact, it will be released for the Mac at the same time it is released for X-Box, Microsoft's new videogame console."
X-Box. Just means it won't compete with Tribes 2 anytime soon.
I'm biased, I love tribes, and I think Tribes 2 will be awesome. It kinda burns me that some sites show 1 or 2 screenshots from Halo and suddenly every gaming site and their mother is crowing that Halo is THE game we should be anticipating, THE game that will revolutionize squad warfare, and so on. It's just hype, hype, and more hype, when Tribes 2 will be out in a month or two, and Tribes IS the game that revolutionalized squad warfare (with due respect to TFC and CS).
sorry, just a little rant, don't mind me.
Moller
Scientists have discovered the moon isn't really made of cheese!
Yes, but apparently Win2k is less crap, because Microsoft has finally successfully migrated Hotmail from FreeBSD to Win2k. So while NT4 can't handle it, 2k probably could. Of course, you'd probably need more powerful machines, and more of them, to do the same job, but that's fine; this is Microsoft.
--
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
half-life for mac os was ported (to 99% completion) by andrew meggs, an excellent coder, i might add. sierra killed the project because of support cost issues. see westlake for example of the burden of patches to the windows version to the person(s) responsible for a mac port.
and unlike half-life, which used a chomping stack of mfc for its menus (arguably the most annoying aspect of the port), halo is, and has been, running under mac os for a long time.
besides, to steal an oft-used carmackism, game coders should do "The Right Thing" and have the discipline to code portably from day one. i believe jason jones et al share that sentiment...
Indeed and it will no doubt run perfectly well, proving that having access to the source code is a good thing. Of course nobody outside the Empire has that kind of access.
But then, you've probably never used the gimp, have you?
YEs I have, i find it's interface clunky and overall not as mature as Photoshop.
The rest of your post has nothing at all to do with mine I was responding directly to what you said. Every OS has it's place. And face it windows does get the job done, not necessairly the best but at a level that many find at leastacceptable(i personally don't think windows is a very good piece of software). I was responding directly to you, if you cannot back it up please don't act like you never said it.
this space for rent
Yes, I hear that they will now be focusing their efforts only on platforms which will make a profit for them. What a concept, eh? :)
Cheers,
I love the word "literally," because it reminds you just how much hyperbole and metaphor we use in daily conversation. Examples like that happen when it's abused as a synonym for "really" or "truly" in an already-hyperbolic phrase. My favorite has to be (actually heard this on a sports show): "He literally exploded onto the national scene." True if you're a terrorist, I guess, but thankfully not in college basketball.
Let's see. Bungie *was* going to develop Halo for BeOS and Linux. Since it has been acquired by MS, it is not. Coincidence? I don't think so.
Sounds like a load of MS-BS, to me.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
Sorry, couldn't resist.
Bite my yammer.
Let's see . . . Michael Eilers writes that Mat Soell claimed that some Microsoft employees weren't happy they were using Linux.
Whoa. Where'd that come from? Never would have expected such a thing.
Where's the newsflash about scientists claiming the moon isn't really made of cheese?
(Score: -1, Redundant)
-- dR.fuZZo
Having a Linux dedicated server port for your online multiplayer game is almost a necessity for success these days. It's what set Quake 1 and 2 apart from games like Unreal, Shogo, Sin, etc. (well at least that was part of it).
Also, having users freely provide their bandwidth in support of your game FOR FREE is a big bonus. Granted, most X-Box games will probably have tons of MSN proprietary servers to play on; but if I'm a developer, porting a linux server is really a win-win situation.
Praying for the end of your wide-awake nightmare.
They switched over about a month ago. This was discussed (Never as a submission although I am sure it was submitted) in a -1 Offtopic kinda way ;)
Remember it, write it down, take a picture, I dont give a fsck!
"Mat Soell indicated in a forum post several days ago that some Microsoft employees they have spoken with were unhappy that the Myth servers ran on Linux..."
Hmm... I'll bet some Microsoft employees don't like kung pao chicken. Does that warrant a headline like "Microsoft Unhappy With Chinese Government"?
The assumption that Microsoft speaks for every employee and that every employee speaks for the company is utterly ridiculous. Does every Slashdotter agree with every other Slashdotter? Would you be willing to adopt the views of "some Slashdot viewers" when talking about the views of "the open-source community"?
It's too late to save Bungie, I fear. My guess: inside of two years, they'll be Windows-only. Halo will never come out for anything but Windows (or, if it comes out for MacOS, it'll be a crippled port not unlike what Sierra tried to do to Half-Life). Or if it comes out for anything but Windows and Mac (and remember that even a Mac port is highly unlikely), the inevitable sequel will not.
But this is more proof of why MS must be stopped. It buys companies with big cross-platform plans, and then turns them into platform-tied shadows of their former selves, more or less solely to try and keep control of the industry. Think about it: these guys even fought TCP/IP for years, because they couldn't control it (even MacOS, the supposed "lord of all things closed and proprietary," can file-share over TCP/IP out of the box; only Windows can't, at least not with the standard mechanisms they provide).
----------
I wouldn't say the migration was really 'successful', maybe mediocre. I am tech support at an ISP, and I have been getting a lot of calls lately complaining that hotmail is slow and gives errors. That didn't used to happen.
Of course I have nothing to do with that, but it doesn't stop people from calling...
Sigs are awesome huh?
If I recall correctly, Bungie no longer owns the rights to the Myth Series. When Microsoft bought out Bungie, Take Two owned like 20% of Bungie, and as part of the deal, Take Two gets to own all rights to the Myth series, so it should be a null point which OS the Myth servers run on. Check Section II
Doh!
How do you know he wasn't taking a leak and happened to strike up a conversation with one of the janitors cleaning the crapper?
Wow! Even M$ janitors are partisan! The ways of the borg are most impressive.
Then again, to assume the devil's advocate's opposition: How do we know not?
That's the problem with "anonymous sources", they oughta have names...
It's all true! ±5%
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
The comments about the usage of Linux for the server has very little to do with the entire article. As a matter of fact, what you see quoted in summary is the whole discussion of the OS issue from the article. I was hoping for information on the topic.
I went there expecting to read about the OS server war, and was greated by text about the Mac gamers not wanting the software messed with. I have nothing against Mac gamers, I was one once myself. Frankly, I don't give a rats ass about 99% of what this article was really about, and would have appreciated a more balanced summary.
Slashdot should have done a better job with the commentary on this one, or at least added more about the "meat" of the article.
I think this qualifies as news for a gaming site...this is not really late breaking Linux, or techie news. The geeks at the compund may have forgotten the second part of their slogan on this one. (Stuff that matters.)
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
Coincindentally, SquareSoft, who is arguably the best console developer out there, is missing from that list. One of the many, many reasons I'll be getting a PSX2 (I refuse to call it a PS2) instead of an x-box.
;)
Among the other reasons is the fact that it has cool blue and green LEDs on it
Oh yeah, Enix isn't there either.
-- Dr. Eldarion --
What ever happened to Bungee being able to keep its culture in the burocracy known as Microsoft? If you start dictating the tools used for the job, that is as good a way as any to kill off the culture. People are making decisions based on doing a job they like, not just the $$ or benes. Leave them alone and you will recieve rewards. Start dictating practice and you may as well have fired the lot.
I believe a delination should be made between slashdot's readers and the entity known as slashdot. A case could be made that the readers make slashdot what it is, but it doesn't seem to be the case. And you should be moderated up. You make a very good point.
They did? When did this happen - I would've thought there would have been a lot of talk about this?
The word I heard was that MS had used a lot of Windows machines as "front ends" to the Hotmail service (to make it look like the Hotmail service was completely running as a Windows-enterprise service), but that the backends (database/file services/etc) were still running some form of BSD because the Windows platforms couldn't handle the load.
Has this changed in the last year?
If Squaresoft isn't making titles for the X-Box, I ain't buying one. ^_^
I just wish that Sony would stop being such dicks so I could end my boycott and buy a Playstation 2 when it comes out...
"RFC 882: We put the . in
The OS the game. It's actually a multitiered, multiplayer REAL-TIME game. It's part adventure, part FPS, part sim, part everything.
I just wish I could figure out how to quit.
Microsoft doesn't immediately switch its Hotmail unit over to Windows servers, Slashdot bitches that they won't use their own stuff.
Naw, I think "snickers" is a much better word than "bitches", though it doesn't serve your purpose to cast posters here as hypocrites, now does it?
Now that they (apparently) have moved over to Win2K, the snickering's a bit quieter, though I have to wonder if MS had to add extra boxen to ensure smooth service.
But hey, if it works, it works.
Microsoft wants their Bungie unit to use Windows serrvers, Slashdot bitches that they want everything to run Windows.
You have it right that time - most posters are bitching that a unit can't use what it believes are the best tools for the job due to corporate policy.
1 out of 2 right...not bad, but you can do better.
-------------
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
But, Linux *is* the answer if you're looking for a cheap and stable platform for something you're counting on end-users to run.
Sure, a huge Sun box might be faster and more stable, or WinNT might be more common, but what's the most likely for some geek working in an ISP to use to throw up a server?
Of the OSes and hardware available to the target group for Halo server-ops, Linux on PC hardware is the best available.
(No doubt a *BSD could do it as well, but here I'd aim for the largest of the free OSes first and get users to port to the others, like id did with Quake servers.)
I think a lot of people, including IMG are over-reacting to Mr. Soell's comments. His original forum post at Rampancy.net only indicated that a few people made some "snarfy comments." It is not like Microsoft in general is in a state of discontent because Bungie Studios is using Linux to power their Bungie.net servers.
Honestly, I doubt Microsoft in general really cares, as long as the product works and makes them money. Granted they don't make much if anything off of Bungie.net, but the people who use it are the same people who are going to buy Halo when it is released.
So, I guess the point is: there is no need to over-react because a couple of OS fanatics made a few remarks...people here do it all of the time...
In fact, OS X RULES AND ALL OTHER OSs STINK!!
btw, that was sarcasm.
out.
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
Bah! Tribes was good (I even worked on the #1 most popular mod for it - Renegades) but it was the "missing link" of action games. It was a team-oriented game from the start, but only halfheartedly so. Tribes 2 doesn't yet appear to enter the realm of full team-oriented reinforcement within the gameplay.
And frankly, the engine for Halo is much, MUCH more powerful. I've been tracking the two games, and noted that Dynamix appeared (up until the buyout) to be very intimidated by Halo. In fact, shortly after any feature was described for Halo, they tended to announce the very same feature for Tribes 2. How original. ("Look! We have independent wheel movement now!")
One big thing to note... almost as soon as Bungie becomes a part of the Microsoft Games Group, Dynamix decides that it's no longer that interested in releasing T2 for PC and Mac. I tend to think the competition just loosened up.
Don't get me wrong. I'll buy Tribes 2 and I'll most likely play it quite a bit, but I'd seen and heard what Bungie was doing for Halo (beyond just a simple screenshot or movie) and was duly impressed. I'm just hoping that these recent changes don't derail their train of creativity and impose unreasonable restrictions.
-Noctavis
-Noctavis
"We've spoken to a couple people here who've made snarfy comments about us not using an MS server for b.net and we've ignored them."
Sounds a fair bit different than what Inside Mac Games reported, doesn't it? Sure, you can translate that to mean "M$ is unhappy", but he never actually SAID that. It's just people falling prey to a media organization (insidemacgames in this case) who are buttering up their stories with scandal and comments that scare people.
It increases page views (heck, how many of you visited the url given in the story?), and that's all they're trying to do.
As far as I can tell, Bungie was a privately held company, with 20% held by TakeTwo. MS bought TakeTwo's ownership, TakeTwo got ownership of programs, including Myth & Oni, as well access to current and future technologies.
So blame Oni's absence on TakeTwo.
If I'm correct, and Bungie is a private company, then they weren't bought unless they (the owners) wanted to be bought. By all accounts, this was not a corporate raid, or hostile takeover. MS made an offer that Bungie liked, and they went with it.
So blame Bungie if Bungie is screwed by MS. If they made a pact with the devil, it's their own doing.
Another perspective comes from their CEO. They saw the writing on the wall (and to infer), didn't want to go the way of Looking Glass Studios. So they got a big company with deep pockets to give them access to what they would need to stay in business for a good while longer.
Here's the full quote:
Why is this happening?
For two reasons:
A. Microsoft is offering us the opportunity to lead the way on a next-generation console system. We will not only be one of the premier developers for the platform, but we'll be working directly with the Xbox team, helping to optimize the hardware and software for each other. We'll influence the design of the system; we'll help to ensure that the Xbox is the best platform to code for, and the most impressive console on the block. Such an opportunity does not come often. Bungie has always tried to keep abreast of the industry, if not ahead of it, and next-gen consoles seem like the place to be if you develop games. This deal allows us to get into that market in a big way.
B. The business of publishing entertainment software independently has changed enormously since Bungie started. Bungie was not in immediate danger of going under, but we realized that within a few years we'd need a strong partner if we wanted to keep making games the way we always have. We opted to make what we saw as an inevitable move while we were still in a position of strength, rather than wait for circumstances to force our hand. The ultimate goal is to ensure Bungie continues to exist and continues to produce the high-caliber games for which it is known.
Here are locations of info:
MacCentral report on acquisition
Bungie Corporate Info
NDB.com
Bungie Acquisition FAQ
-----
D. Fischer
ShoutingMan.com
In fact, OS X RULES AND ALL OTHER OSs STINK!!
:P
Huh? It took them ten versions of the operating system to get the command line right.
For the humor impaired, sod off
--
Communication is only possible between equals
Nobody held a gun to their heads and declared: "You MUST arrange a deal wherein MS acquires you!"
They made a conscious business decision (oriented around profits, a motive all companies maintain) to sleep with Satan, and now they're starting to feel the heat from the flames.
I guess sometimes the price you pay for profits is too much.
Still.... I wouldn't wish that sort of Hell on anyone, particularly Bungie. They were an epic game company, with tons of talent and creativity. Now they're just an MS pawn.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
I wouldn't want any of my end users running Linux. I think it's great for my servers, but my users do just fine with solitaire and word. Not to mention they need photoshop, webshots and comet cursor.
Hey that's just me though. Call me a crazy sonm of a bitch.
IIRC, it was some sort of thing kinda like a version number. I don't really remember the details, but I think they went through a bunch of models and the X one was the one they stuck with. Somebody correct me if I'm wrong.
Anyways, calling it a PS2 causes too much confusion and too many bad jokes.
-- Dr. Eldarion --
Wow! This story actually made /. front page news, eh?
/. news. Mmmmm, makes you wonder. Maybe there should be a back page for /. What about all that news that is submitted but never posted?
As if there is back page
At least we can hope. =)
You have it right that time - most posters are bitching that a unit can't use what it believes are the best tools for the job due to corporate policy.
I'm sure macromedia dictates that no one use an Adobe program as long as Macromedia has an equivalent program to it... Imagine finding that their site was designed in GoLive, or that their logo's were developed using Illustrator... There'd be some backlash there... Likewise, Microsoft can't the best job it can trying to sell copies of Advanced Server if people are able to point to their own products which don't use it...
For the time being, it appears (according to more information from Matt Soell in the various Halo forums) that Take Two is mainly interested in creating a Myth III. Bungie continues to supply the matchmaker server for Myth players from its current location in Redmond, and they expect to do so for the indefinite future... We'll see if that changes at some point.
-Noctavis
(Webmaster in the Bungie fan community)
-Noctavis
Since when has microsoft cared about products that work?
----
ADVENTURERS! - ANTIHERO FOR HIRE - CARDMASTER CONFLICT
It should be obvious since if I was, you wouldn't be seeing this post.
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
- W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO
The points being made in the IMG article are that (a) Microsoft might just make alterations to a system that works quite well for online play. Among these potential changes are a move from a free-play to a pay-for-play model, or that they may turn it off altogether, and b that they may do to Bungie.net what they did to Hotmail, e.g. attempt to set the service (which had run well, if not perfectly) on Linux and make it use NT/2000 as some sort of PR maneuver, completely disregarding the technical issues, such as downgraded performance and lower stability.
As near as I can tell, these concerns are legitimate - I wouldn't be happy either, were there a possibility that one of my favorite pastimes could be mucked up or even destroyed by a company with a chip on its shoulder, looking to score points for its flagship product at any cost.
You're not seeing the forest for the trees.
Chris Tembreull
Web Developer, NEC Systems, Inc.
Chris Tembreull
"My karma just ran over your dogma."
As long as we are taking shots at Microsoft, then maybe the public will start to realize that there is/needs to be a stable, reliable alternative to windows *whatever year* . This is a news for nerds site, so these particular nerds just dont like microsoft. If ya don't like it, don't read it.
"sigs are for losers"
I hate consoles. The PC keyboard and mouse combo (along with tons of other available peripherals) offer infinitely better control. PC monitors have much better resolution than TVs. Hard drives are fairly cheap and offer tons of storage space. PC game graphics nearly always kick the crap out of console game graphics.
I've tried playing shooters on playstation, N64, and Dreamcast... to put it mildly, they suck. RTS games suck on consoles too. About the only games consoles are good for are platform scroller type games and sports games, but since equivalent controllers are available for the PC, the PC does those games just as well or better anyway. The only real advantages that consoles have are consistant hardware and a low pricetag. But, as they say, you get what you pay for. I think the additional utility, flexibility, and power of the PC warrants the extra cost. But then, I'm a rather hardcore gamer and have been for nearly 20 years. I've seen several console games that have slow-down problems even though they were written specifically for the console's hardware. So even with consistant hardware, games don't always run smoothly, which is a complaint I've heard console gamers make about PC games.
I'd be glad to elaborate on my complaints about consoles, or to hear other people's views on them.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
if your users *need* comet cursor I'm very happy I don't have to be anywhere near them.