I wasn't clear, above. I won't argue that registration is inevitably followed by confiscation. Assertions that "confiscation is sure to follow" are arguably fallacious.
However, historically, registration has been followed by confiscation many times, and it is reasonable for people to worry about the possibility.
Saying "If you drink too much, you are sure to kill someone when you drive home" is arguably fallacious. You might drink too much, weave all over the road, and still not kill anyone on your way home. But there have been many cases where someone drank too much and did kill someone while driving home, so it is reasonable to worry about the possibility.
The gun registration example also has the added spice that it is a publicly-acknowledged tactic of advocates of banning all firearms. For example, Pete Shields (author of Guns Don't Die--People Do) famously said in 1976 that while the ultimate goal is to ban all firearms, getting them registered would happen first.
P.S. I made an error in the parent comment. The Sullivan Law didn't directly lead to confiscation as I implied. (New York City mostly refuses to register any new firearms under the Sullivan Law; unless you are rich, you cannot register a firearm in New York City. But that's not really confiscation.) What I was actually thinking of was the 1967 registration of rifles and shotguns, which was followed by the 1991 confiscation of rifles and shotguns, using the registration lists of course. That wasn't the Sullivan Law, and I apologize for the error.
I actually chose that example to get the NRA-types all upset.
Interesting. You chose to irritate "NRA-types" rather than clearly illustrate your point?
When you say "the government", what I suppose you meant was "non-US governments not subject to U.S. laws."
Um, no. I meant any government, US or otherwise.
"Some other governments not subject to U.S. laws, confiscated guns some time after requiring registration, therefore, if we have gun registration in the U.S., confiscation of guns is sure to follow."
You clearly haven't researched the history of gun control. Look up the Sullivan Act in New York City, for example.
This is exactly why I want to see government pushed as low on the stack as possible. Don't do something at the federal level if you can do it at the state level. Don't do it at the state level if you can do it at the county or city level.
Right now we are looking at Florida doing this. If Florida is stupid enough to pull this, people and businesses in Florida at least have the option to go to a different state. Imagine if it were a Federal tax law.
This is also a great example of why laws should be clearly written. A few years back, there was an initiative in Washington state with some vague provisions. The anti- guys pointed out that with some broad interpretation, the initiative would give some really broad powers to the government; the backers of the initiative said "Don't be silly, no one would ever interpret the law that way." Oh, really?
There are actually two kinds of slippery slope arguments. The fallacious one is where you say that "event X has happened, therefore event Y will inevitably happen." An example of this is "if the government makes us register our guns, they will come to take the guns away."
Not the best example, because there are plenty of examples from real life where first the government required registration, and then the government came and took the guns away. It's hardly unreasonable to worry about something that has actually happened many times.
A better example would be "Since it is possible to put an RFID chip in cats and dogs now, it's possible to put one in people now, and therefore the government is going to require RFID chips implanted in all people. Therefore RFID chips in cats and dogs will lead to tyranny."
Nope. It was over 20 years ago so I can't swear I remember it perfectly, but I'm not making it up.
I never played with psionics
They were a big pain in the games I played in. The DM had this idea that "psionics takes place at the speed of thought" so when two psionics got into a psi battle, everything else stopped until the psi battle was resolved. Which was no fun, except for the DM and the psionic character(s) involved in the battle.
If I ever allowed psionics in my own games, I would have them take combat round turns just like everyone else.
As for illusionists, our group figured that if you believed an illusion, you would take damage from it, and thus even a first-level Illusionist (with level 1 Phantasmal Forces) could, if clever, kill some pretty heavy enemies. If I were running a game now, I'd rule that Phantasmal Forces at level 1 never causes damage, or if it does, it's very limited damage.
One of the things that makes Firefox more secure is that it is just an application, it cannot install software for you. One of the things that makes Windows Update work is that IE can install software for you.
Windows Update is the main reason IE is still on my Win2K desktop computer.
Oh, so did we. And "fumbles". We used the tables from Arduin Grimoire initially, and later just wrote our own. Everyone in my gaming group liked the Arduin Grimoire a great deal.
that's a rule you should ignore
Um, we did. This is a discussion of glaring holes in the rules. We ignored glaring holes.
any sensible GM would either give the guards some poison, or deny the fighter his Dex bonus to AC, or make the guards always hit.
No, that's my point. If you have 100 hit points, four guys with crossbows can't kill you because they can't hurt you fast enough. Let's say they can actually fire twice each, and each guy always hits (reasonable under the circumstances). If we assume 1d6+1 for a crossbow bolt, that's 8d6+8. Assuming a perfectly average roll that's (8 * 3.5) + 8, or 36 points of damage. Even if they have double damage, they can't kill you.
First-level commoners now have 1-8 HP (1d4, plus Con bonus, so maybe up to 8). Can still be killed by a kitty if it gets a crit, but then, a lucky kitty can really hurt you in real life, too.
That's better, but it's still a bit silly. No game system is perfect, of course, and I'm not saying this rule is a reason not to play D&D.
if you think D&D sucks, look at 3.5e
I wouldn't go so far as to say that D&D sucks. I had many happy hours playing AD&D 1E, despite its many problems. (We had a ton of custom rules that helped.) I was impressed by the 2E rules, and I'm sure that the latest rules are cool.
All that said, I really like GURPS. If you like this sort of game, you should give GURPS a try.
Sadly, I haven't actually played any of these games in years. I ought to get a gaming group together.
There are a few howlers in the D&D game mechanics. Note: I haven't seen Third Edition yet.
0) You are a 12th level Fighter being marched down a corridor, no armor, your arms bound behind your back, and four men with crossbows are guarding you. So you run for it. Why not? After all, you have almost 100 hit points, and a crossbow does something like 1d6+1 and is slow to reload besides. Sure, we don't want our game to be like the real world, but should there be no chance that they can kill you?
D&D should have critical hits, or "impale" rules like Runequest, or something.
1) A typical town person has 1 hit point. 1 hit point is the smallest amount of damage you can do. Any blow with a sword will kill a town person. Okay. But also, say, a house cat: three attacks, claw/claw/bite, any one can kill a town person.
2) A 1st level mage is incredibly easy to kill, and only has one spell per day, and that one spell might even be something lame like Burning Hands. A 20th level mage, on the other hand, has so much firepower as to render the rest of the party irrelevant. This is overall considered to be balanced?
It would be better if 1st level mage characters were a bit stronger, and 20th level mage characters were a lot weaker.
No, the original D&D was simply called "Dungeons and Dragons". The one with rules for characters up to level 3 was the Basic Set.
I liked AD&D 2E; I thought they did a great job of retaining the good parts of D&D while getting rid of the deadwood, and I liked the new stuff. Instead of several character classes that are slightly different, you would now have one character class with some sub-classes. So a Thief is really just a Rogue who specialized in Thief skills, and an Assassin is a Rogue who specialized differently. An Illusionist is a specialization of a mage, instead of a whole different class, and there are other specializations such as Invoker or Necromancer. I thought it was neat.
I used to read Dragon magazine, and there would be all these cool rules about how to calculate how far you could jump, or whatever. Calculate how much weight you have, index with your strength score, adjust for difficulty, yada yada yada.
My friends and I came to the conclusion that the game just slows down too much when you do all that. It's better just to say, "that's a hard jump, it's -3, so try to roll your Dexterity minus three." We played actual combat according to the rules, but pretty much everything else was rolling against statistics, possibly at a plus or minus.
I can tell you a true story, a sad story, about using all the rules.
When I was in high school, there was a game shop near my home, and one day they had a tournament. A bunch of guys volunteered to be Dungeon Masters. One of the DMs, a guy I knew, was familiar with all the rules of AD&D. This was around 1981 or 1982, so we're talking first edition AD&D.
The store said the tournament was to use the standard AD&D rules. This guy assumed that meant all of them.
The characters in the tournament were all around 4th to 6th level or so. So this guy's group got into some kind of fierce battle, won the victory, but were injured. Their cleric started casting lots of heal spells.
This guy knew that, according to the rules, if you used lots of psionic powers within a short period of time, you have to roll on the Psionic Encounters Table. And he also knew that, according to the rules, certain spells count as using psionic powers -- among them, heal spells.
So he rolled his dice. Oh, a psionic encounter. He rolled his dice again. Oh, it's Mind Flayers. He rolled for how many. Three.
So three Mind Flayers attacked a party of 4th to 6th level characters that was only partially healed after a major battle. Everyone died.
The players were not exactly happy at this turn of events. They were all immediately finished with the tournament, and all because this one DM knew all the rules and applied all the rules. The store wasn't exactly happy, either. And the DM didn't really feel happy about it either, I'm sure.
Up until version 4.0, the XFree86 guys were getting multi-platform development for free: Debian took care of it. Debian cares a great deal about supporting multiple platforms, and Debian builds everything on a bunch of platforms and contributes back bug fixes. They were doing that for XFree86.
Now Debian is simply going to walk away from XFree86. The XFree86 project will either have to suddenly do a whole bunch of work to keep the multi-platform nature of XFree86, or else the "86" part is going to mean something again.
I find it amazing that the XFree86 guys ever thought that this license change was a good idea, and that they aren't falling all over themselves to reverse it now that the consequences are becoming clear.
We have been using TCP/IP for something like 20-30 years now. OMG, TCP/IP-developement is stagnant! We must work faster!
Heh. And cars still run on wheels! Car design is stagnant!
If you are talking about Xfree, the answer would be: two. Xouvert and Xorg.
Oh, more than that. There is also the freedesktop.org project, the one where Keith Packard is doing really cool things with a composition manager. And there may be others.
The amendment to remove support for non-free in Debian didn't even get a majority, let alone the 3:1 majority it would have required to win.
True. It's understandable: I think most of the people who voted against it figure "Debian is great now, why mess with the formula".
RMS and other hard-core free software believers are annoyed that non-free is under the same umbrella organization as the free software, but I think most people who want only free software are content just to leave non-free out of sources.lst.
I think it was a masterful bit of spin on David Dawes's part. I don't think it succeeds, but it's impressive anyway.
I think the big Linux vendors were already planning to jump to X.org, and the license change was just the steel girder that broke the camel's back. XFree86, as an organization, has had increasing bad publicity: patches languishing, weird political in-fighting, organizational chaos. The license change got a whole bunch of people, all at once, to stop muttering in annoyance and actually fork the project. (Maybe we should thank XFree86 for making it happen so quickly.)
Another priceless bit of spin: now XFree86 can now get back to its roots, distributing software directly to end users. That sounds much better than "all the Linux distros are dumping us like last month's garbage".
XFree86, both the organization and the software, will quickly become irrelevant. I don't know whether they will actually disappear, but it's safe to stop paying attention to them.
They are a public station, and they aren't even considering Ogg Vorbis, and/or Icecast?
If we can't get even the public stations on board with free and open standards, how will we ever get those standards to spread?
Anyone who lives in the area served by that public station, please write them a letter, and ask them to look into using Ogg/Icecast. Then, instead of providing a link to the Real player, they can provide a link to Winamp. Or even Zinf.
Or maybe even Real's player. I found a bunch of old news items (from 2002) saying that Real was on board with Ogg Vorbis, and the RealOne player would play Ogg Vorbis. And it looks like the new Helix player supports Vorbis. Does Real do a good job now of playing Ogg streams? (The icecast.org web site does not list the Real players as an option, but I suppose it's possible that the web site is out of date.)
And if Real is smart, they will make their player work to play Icecast streams. I'd say the same about Microsoft and Windows Media Player, but I'll bet they can't resist the urge to try to throw roadblocks in the way of the competition.
This made me wonder if they even considered going to Ogg Vorbis streaming with Icecast. Whether they considered it or not, it made me wonder how many Icecast streams are available.
I had skipping on my Ogg file playback, and a few other similar problems, when I first tried 2.6.0. It turned out that my X server was set to nice -10; when I changed the X server nice value to 0, my system became snappy and responsive.
Nothing like what you describe has ever happened to me. I have several computers running GNOME.
But it's nice to have choice
on
GNOME 2.6 Reviewed
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I have no interest in spatial browsing. I'll be turning it off immediately.
However, I'm not annoyed it went in. The GNOME desktop is kind of like a Mac desktop, only with you in complete control, and running on whatever hardware you choose. If Steve Jobs and the Apple desktop guys decide they don't like spatial, bam, it's gone, and tough luck to you if you liked it. With GNOME, you have more freedom than that.
Maybe some Mac folks who used and liked spatial from pre-OS X days will adopt GNOME now.
Here's a story I heard about Robotron. I don't know if it's true.
I heard that Disney decided to sue Williams over the name "Robotron", since Disney owns the name "Tron" (from the movie). Williams lawyers, in court, argued that the name isn't actually "Robo-tron", but actually "Robot Ron".
Slashdot Mirror
I wasn't clear, above. I won't argue that registration is inevitably followed by confiscation. Assertions that "confiscation is sure to follow" are arguably fallacious.
However, historically, registration has been followed by confiscation many times, and it is reasonable for people to worry about the possibility.
Saying "If you drink too much, you are sure to kill someone when you drive home" is arguably fallacious. You might drink too much, weave all over the road, and still not kill anyone on your way home. But there have been many cases where someone drank too much and did kill someone while driving home, so it is reasonable to worry about the possibility.
The gun registration example also has the added spice that it is a publicly-acknowledged tactic of advocates of banning all firearms. For example, Pete Shields (author of Guns Don't Die--People Do) famously said in 1976 that while the ultimate goal is to ban all firearms, getting them registered would happen first.
P.S. I made an error in the parent comment. The Sullivan Law didn't directly lead to confiscation as I implied. (New York City mostly refuses to register any new firearms under the Sullivan Law; unless you are rich, you cannot register a firearm in New York City. But that's not really confiscation.) What I was actually thinking of was the 1967 registration of rifles and shotguns, which was followed by the 1991 confiscation of rifles and shotguns, using the registration lists of course. That wasn't the Sullivan Law, and I apologize for the error.
steveha
I actually chose that example to get the NRA-types all upset.
Interesting. You chose to irritate "NRA-types" rather than clearly illustrate your point?
When you say "the government", what I suppose you meant was "non-US governments not subject to U.S. laws."
Um, no. I meant any government, US or otherwise.
"Some other governments not subject to U.S. laws, confiscated guns some time after requiring registration, therefore, if we have gun registration in the U.S., confiscation of guns is sure to follow."
You clearly haven't researched the history of gun control. Look up the Sullivan Act in New York City, for example.
steveha
This is exactly why I want to see government pushed as low on the stack as possible. Don't do something at the federal level if you can do it at the state level. Don't do it at the state level if you can do it at the county or city level.
Right now we are looking at Florida doing this. If Florida is stupid enough to pull this, people and businesses in Florida at least have the option to go to a different state. Imagine if it were a Federal tax law.
This is also a great example of why laws should be clearly written. A few years back, there was an initiative in Washington state with some vague provisions. The anti- guys pointed out that with some broad interpretation, the initiative would give some really broad powers to the government; the backers of the initiative said "Don't be silly, no one would ever interpret the law that way." Oh, really?
Vague laws are ticking time bombs.
steveha
Severed Head of Mr. Jones: Murder! Murrrrrrderrrr!
Severed Head of Mr. Smith: Guilty! He's guillllllty!!
Severed Head of Mr. Cooper: Dang, it's cold in here. And how are we talking without any lungs?
There are actually two kinds of slippery slope arguments. The fallacious one is where you say that "event X has happened, therefore event Y will inevitably happen." An example of this is "if the government makes us register our guns, they will come to take the guns away."
Not the best example, because there are plenty of examples from real life where first the government required registration, and then the government came and took the guns away. It's hardly unreasonable to worry about something that has actually happened many times.
A better example would be "Since it is possible to put an RFID chip in cats and dogs now, it's possible to put one in people now, and therefore the government is going to require RFID chips implanted in all people. Therefore RFID chips in cats and dogs will lead to tyranny."
steveha
I think your making this up.
Nope. It was over 20 years ago so I can't swear I remember it perfectly, but I'm not making it up.
I never played with psionics
They were a big pain in the games I played in. The DM had this idea that "psionics takes place at the speed of thought" so when two psionics got into a psi battle, everything else stopped until the psi battle was resolved. Which was no fun, except for the DM and the psionic character(s) involved in the battle.
If I ever allowed psionics in my own games, I would have them take combat round turns just like everyone else.
As for illusionists, our group figured that if you believed an illusion, you would take damage from it, and thus even a first-level Illusionist (with level 1 Phantasmal Forces) could, if clever, kill some pretty heavy enemies. If I were running a game now, I'd rule that Phantasmal Forces at level 1 never causes damage, or if it does, it's very limited damage.
steveha
Part of the reason this is called a FANTASY RPG
As I said, we don't want it to be really realistic.
But I think such an escape should be a daring risk, not a "ho hum, no way these peasants can kill me" sort of thing.
steveha
You need to use IE for Windows Update. Full stop.
One of the things that makes Firefox more secure is that it is just an application, it cannot install software for you. One of the things that makes Windows Update work is that IE can install software for you.
Windows Update is the main reason IE is still on my Win2K desktop computer.
steveha
we used critical hits
Oh, so did we. And "fumbles". We used the tables from Arduin Grimoire initially, and later just wrote our own. Everyone in my gaming group liked the Arduin Grimoire a great deal.
that's a rule you should ignore
Um, we did. This is a discussion of glaring holes in the rules. We ignored glaring holes.
steveha
any sensible GM would either give the guards some poison, or deny the fighter his Dex bonus to AC, or make the guards always hit.
No, that's my point. If you have 100 hit points, four guys with crossbows can't kill you because they can't hurt you fast enough. Let's say they can actually fire twice each, and each guy always hits (reasonable under the circumstances). If we assume 1d6+1 for a crossbow bolt, that's 8d6+8. Assuming a perfectly average roll that's (8 * 3.5) + 8, or 36 points of damage. Even if they have double damage, they can't kill you.
First-level commoners now have 1-8 HP (1d4, plus Con bonus, so maybe up to 8). Can still be killed by a kitty if it gets a crit, but then, a lucky kitty can really hurt you in real life, too.
That's better, but it's still a bit silly. No game system is perfect, of course, and I'm not saying this rule is a reason not to play D&D.
if you think D&D sucks, look at 3.5e
I wouldn't go so far as to say that D&D sucks. I had many happy hours playing AD&D 1E, despite its many problems. (We had a ton of custom rules that helped.) I was impressed by the 2E rules, and I'm sure that the latest rules are cool.
All that said, I really like GURPS. If you like this sort of game, you should give GURPS a try.
Sadly, I haven't actually played any of these games in years. I ought to get a gaming group together.
steveha
There are a few howlers in the D&D game mechanics. Note: I haven't seen Third Edition yet.
0) You are a 12th level Fighter being marched down a corridor, no armor, your arms bound behind your back, and four men with crossbows are guarding you. So you run for it. Why not? After all, you have almost 100 hit points, and a crossbow does something like 1d6+1 and is slow to reload besides. Sure, we don't want our game to be like the real world, but should there be no chance that they can kill you?
D&D should have critical hits, or "impale" rules like Runequest, or something.
1) A typical town person has 1 hit point. 1 hit point is the smallest amount of damage you can do. Any blow with a sword will kill a town person. Okay. But also, say, a house cat: three attacks, claw/claw/bite, any one can kill a town person.
2) A 1st level mage is incredibly easy to kill, and only has one spell per day, and that one spell might even be something lame like Burning Hands. A 20th level mage, on the other hand, has so much firepower as to render the rest of the party irrelevant. This is overall considered to be balanced?
It would be better if 1st level mage characters were a bit stronger, and 20th level mage characters were a lot weaker.
I could name other things, but that's plenty.
steveha
No, the original D&D was simply called "Dungeons and Dragons". The one with rules for characters up to level 3 was the Basic Set.
I liked AD&D 2E; I thought they did a great job of retaining the good parts of D&D while getting rid of the deadwood, and I liked the new stuff. Instead of several character classes that are slightly different, you would now have one character class with some sub-classes. So a Thief is really just a Rogue who specialized in Thief skills, and an Assassin is a Rogue who specialized differently. An Illusionist is a specialization of a mage, instead of a whole different class, and there are other specializations such as Invoker or Necromancer. I thought it was neat.
steveha
No, you are a little bit mixed up as to the history.
l
The Basic Set was around the same time as AD&D. I'm pretty sure it actually came out after AD&D, at least after the AD&D Player's Handbook.
The original was a set of very poorly edited, poorly organized books. You can see pictures and read about them here, if you like:
http://www.lyberty.com/encyc/articles/d_and_d.htm
steveha
I used to read Dragon magazine, and there would be all these cool rules about how to calculate how far you could jump, or whatever. Calculate how much weight you have, index with your strength score, adjust for difficulty, yada yada yada.
My friends and I came to the conclusion that the game just slows down too much when you do all that. It's better just to say, "that's a hard jump, it's -3, so try to roll your Dexterity minus three." We played actual combat according to the rules, but pretty much everything else was rolling against statistics, possibly at a plus or minus.
steveha
I can tell you a true story, a sad story, about using all the rules.
When I was in high school, there was a game shop near my home, and one day they had a tournament. A bunch of guys volunteered to be Dungeon Masters. One of the DMs, a guy I knew, was familiar with all the rules of AD&D. This was around 1981 or 1982, so we're talking first edition AD&D.
The store said the tournament was to use the standard AD&D rules. This guy assumed that meant all of them.
The characters in the tournament were all around 4th to 6th level or so. So this guy's group got into some kind of fierce battle, won the victory, but were injured. Their cleric started casting lots of heal spells.
This guy knew that, according to the rules, if you used lots of psionic powers within a short period of time, you have to roll on the Psionic Encounters Table. And he also knew that, according to the rules, certain spells count as using psionic powers -- among them, heal spells.
So he rolled his dice. Oh, a psionic encounter. He rolled his dice again. Oh, it's Mind Flayers. He rolled for how many. Three.
So three Mind Flayers attacked a party of 4th to 6th level characters that was only partially healed after a major battle. Everyone died.
The players were not exactly happy at this turn of events. They were all immediately finished with the tournament, and all because this one DM knew all the rules and applied all the rules. The store wasn't exactly happy, either. And the DM didn't really feel happy about it either, I'm sure.
steveha
Up until version 4.0, the XFree86 guys were getting multi-platform development for free: Debian took care of it. Debian cares a great deal about supporting multiple platforms, and Debian builds everything on a bunch of platforms and contributes back bug fixes. They were doing that for XFree86.
Now Debian is simply going to walk away from XFree86. The XFree86 project will either have to suddenly do a whole bunch of work to keep the multi-platform nature of XFree86, or else the "86" part is going to mean something again.
I find it amazing that the XFree86 guys ever thought that this license change was a good idea, and that they aren't falling all over themselves to reverse it now that the consequences are becoming clear.
steveha
We have been using TCP/IP for something like 20-30 years now. OMG, TCP/IP-developement is stagnant! We must work faster!
Heh. And cars still run on wheels! Car design is stagnant!
If you are talking about Xfree, the answer would be: two. Xouvert and Xorg.
Oh, more than that. There is also the freedesktop.org project, the one where Keith Packard is doing really cool things with a composition manager. And there may be others.
steveha
The amendment to remove support for non-free in Debian didn't even get a majority, let alone the 3:1 majority it would have required to win.
True. It's understandable: I think most of the people who voted against it figure "Debian is great now, why mess with the formula".
RMS and other hard-core free software believers are annoyed that non-free is under the same umbrella organization as the free software, but I think most people who want only free software are content just to leave non-free out of sources.lst.
steveha
I think it was a masterful bit of spin on David Dawes's part. I don't think it succeeds, but it's impressive anyway.
I think the big Linux vendors were already planning to jump to X.org, and the license change was just the steel girder that broke the camel's back. XFree86, as an organization, has had increasing bad publicity: patches languishing, weird political in-fighting, organizational chaos. The license change got a whole bunch of people, all at once, to stop muttering in annoyance and actually fork the project. (Maybe we should thank XFree86 for making it happen so quickly.)
Another priceless bit of spin: now XFree86 can now get back to its roots, distributing software directly to end users. That sounds much better than "all the Linux distros are dumping us like last month's garbage".
XFree86, both the organization and the software, will quickly become irrelevant. I don't know whether they will actually disappear, but it's safe to stop paying attention to them.
steveha
They are a public station, and they aren't even considering Ogg Vorbis, and/or Icecast?
If we can't get even the public stations on board with free and open standards, how will we ever get those standards to spread?
Anyone who lives in the area served by that public station, please write them a letter, and ask them to look into using Ogg/Icecast. Then, instead of providing a link to the Real player, they can provide a link to Winamp. Or even Zinf.
Or maybe even Real's player. I found a bunch of old news items (from 2002) saying that Real was on board with Ogg Vorbis, and the RealOne player would play Ogg Vorbis. And it looks like the new Helix player supports Vorbis. Does Real do a good job now of playing Ogg streams? (The icecast.org web site does not list the Real players as an option, but I suppose it's possible that the web site is out of date.)
And if Real is smart, they will make their player work to play Icecast streams. I'd say the same about Microsoft and Windows Media Player, but I'll bet they can't resist the urge to try to throw roadblocks in the way of the competition.
steveha
This made me wonder if they even considered going to Ogg Vorbis streaming with Icecast. Whether they considered it or not, it made me wonder how many Icecast streams are available.
I found a list here:
http://www.icecast.org/streamlist.php
Not as many as I had hoped to find.
steveha
I had skipping on my Ogg file playback, and a few other similar problems, when I first tried 2.6.0. It turned out that my X server was set to nice -10; when I changed the X server nice value to 0, my system became snappy and responsive.
steveha
Nothing like what you describe has ever happened to me. I have several computers running GNOME.
I have no interest in spatial browsing. I'll be turning it off immediately.
However, I'm not annoyed it went in. The GNOME desktop is kind of like a Mac desktop, only with you in complete control, and running on whatever hardware you choose. If Steve Jobs and the Apple desktop guys decide they don't like spatial, bam, it's gone, and tough luck to you if you liked it. With GNOME, you have more freedom than that.
Maybe some Mac folks who used and liked spatial from pre-OS X days will adopt GNOME now.
steveha
Of course Robotron: 2084 predated Smash TV.
;-)
Here's a story I heard about Robotron. I don't know if it's true.
I heard that Disney decided to sue Williams over the name "Robotron", since Disney owns the name "Tron" (from the movie). Williams lawyers, in court, argued that the name isn't actually "Robo-tron", but actually "Robot Ron".
If it isn't true, it ought to be.
steveha