Have you tried emailing Rob or otherwise conversing with him directly? Rob's stated several times that he doesn't read most of the comments on Slashdot, so writing here is not a good way to reach him.
--Phil (Not to mention that this thread is rather off-topic for this article.)
But you wouldn't lose just one atom to the water. This motor is a single molecule. Assuming that all of the bonds are covalent, the motor is not going to dissolve in water. It is possible that the motor itself might go floating off into solution, but that is just something the designers would have to account for.
--Phil (Now I just need a Feed and a matter compiler...)
I've seen quite a bit of discussion about this on the MIDRANGE-L mailing list, and so I thought I'd mention a few things. A lot of people seem to think that 9/9/99 as a special date is mostly myth, largely because the computer would store it as 090999, which doesn't look as special. Surely 99/99/99 would be better. Other people pointed out that this sort of thing tended to crop up when the users wanted to add extra information in a field the programmer thought would only be a date. In such a program, 99/99/99 would fail because it was an invalid date, so creative users might be tempted to use a vaild date, but give it special meaning. Two common dates for things like "no expiration" or "not applicable" were 12/31/99 and 9/9/99. The former would be the highest date that could be entered in a two-digit year field, while the latter was easy to remember, yet still a good ways into the future.
9/9/99 problems are likely to be fairly rare, since the necessary circumstances would be somewhat rare, and, hopefully, many such problems have been caught by now. Where today's date does cause problems will likely not be noticed by the population at large. (i.e. no power outages, no broken ATMs.) At a guess, the most likely candidates for problems will be billing software running on older mainframs and midrange computers, and I'm sure the companies will do their utmost to bill you for anything you might owe them.
--Phil (I know the banks with my loans have been quite diligent.)
Re:I'm confused: GnuStep Gnome and WindowMaker
on
GNUstep 0.6.0
·
· Score: 3
Quoth an Anonymous One:
Please clear up my confusion:
I'll certainly try.
AFAIK GnuStep is not related to Gnome at all, right? (I currently don't get through to gnustep.org or gnome.org at all)
Correct. They are entirely different projects, with different goals. They just both happen to be GNU projects.
So do we have at least three free desktop environments on *nix? (except plain windowmanager + plain X11 apps) GnuStep, Gnome and KDE?
Correct again. GnuStep is really the oldest of the three, but work is proceeding more slowly on GnuStep than the other two (because the GnuStep people have set themselves a larger task) and GnuStep doesn't get as much press.
And what's the relation WindowMakerGnome? Is it just that some Gnome user use it because they like it more than E(nlightenment)? (Does Gnome has a "default" windowmanager at all?)
WindowMakerGnome is WindowMaker with Gnome compatibility. That is, the Gnome people have published specifications for making a window manager work well with Gnome, and WindowMaker supports those. I believe that WindowMaker also supports KDE, too. (Gnome does not have an "official" window manager.)
For a general discussion of what GNUStep is, see this post. In a nutshell, GnuStep is a GPLed implementation of the OpenStep specification, which grew out of the NextStep system. I'll also add the NextStep was the most beautifully designed system I've ever seen.
--Phil (If only I had the time to learn Objective-C and help out.)
As luck would have it, I just recently picked up Developing Linux Applications with GTK+ and GDK (not to be confused with Linux Application Development, which, I believe, does not talk about GTK). I haven't had much time to look at it, so I've only gotten as far as the GDK stuff. My intention was to learn about GTK programming so I could get into some GUI stuff under Linux. (I've been doing command-line things under various Unices for a while.) Is the book i grabbed a good introduction to the topic, or should I get this one, which seems to be (by the title, at least) more focused on what I want to learn, and wave good-bye to some more of my money?
--Phil (Not that the money stays long in any case...)
Well, in an ideal world, yes. Unfortunately, we don't live in an ideal world. (Just ask any physics student...) The point of creating the patent system was to encourage the exchange of ideas and to stimulate innovation. If an inventor created something useful, the government would grant him exclusive rights over the idea for a reasonable amount of time in exchange for the inventor publishing full documentation on his invention, thereby allowing anyone to fully use the idea after the time ran out. Expressly excluded from the patent system were mathematics and ideas that did not result in a physical result.
Back to modern times. The patent office allows the patenting of software algorithms, which, in many cases are almost purely mathematical. The patents still run for 17 years, which, while it was a reasonable period of time in the era when patents were created, is several eternities in today's world of software development. And finally, the patent office allows long, convoluted patents that end up boiling down to things like, "A Patent On The Creation Of A Dialog Box For The Purpose Of Asking The Software User A Question."
No, the patent system as it was conceved was not a bad thing, and it was created with the best of intentions. Today's patent system, however, has strayed far from the original ideal, and has become just a method whereby companies with lots of money create unbreakable monopolies for themselves in areas so broad that practally any piece of software could infringe on someone else's patent.
--Phil (there's a really great article on software patents floating around, but I can't remember the URL.)
Use < and >. Then, you have to submit in "HTML Formatted" mode.
Using preview mode to check things helps, but that actually rewrites what's in the buffer, replacing those codes with the characters they represent. Thus, if you use preview, you have to go back and redo all of your special characters.
The article had some interesting sections. It mentions that Larami holds 90% of the $215 million per year industry and later says
Getting consumers to keep trading up for more powerful guns is a key component to Larami's strategy. The New Jersey-based company covers nearly every price point, from a few dollars for the cheapest model to the $39.95 price tag on the CPS 3000.
But Larami, which was acquired by toy giant Hasbro Inc. for about $100 million five years ago, has also maintained its stranglehold through constant innovation, gaining nearly 20 patents over the last decade and suing every other toy maker that comes near its designs.
Sound familiar?
--Phil (They are fun to play with, though. I still have my Super Soaker 50.)
"Film shouldn't be about technology"... thats only because nobody in the film industry understands technology well enough to portray it accurately, you MORON!!
Actually, the better SF films and books are not about technology. They're about people. Sure, you need the technology or whatever you're putting in to make it SF, but people are what make the stories interesting. Maybe it's just me, but I'll take a well-developed character (especially a well-developed, believable villan) over a neat technological idea anyday.
--Phil (I ought to re-read Neuromancer. It's been so long since I've done so that I don't remember whether I liked it or not.)
The way I read his comment, it seemd that he was looking at the issue from the other side. It seems to me that his problem is that licenses such as those basically make him an unpaid employee for the original author. In such a situation, the original author gets paid for a product comtaining at least some code from others, but the others get no compensation. I, at least, prefer working on projects that are more fair, like GPLed stuff. With a GPLed program, others are still able to make money off my work, but anyone (including me) is free to do so.
I guess it's all about how you define freedom.
--Phil (And yes, I have contributed to free software, albiet usually in one- or two-line bug fixes.)
Say a company is selling a software program. They calculate that a reasonable price for the program, based on the expenses incurrend and potential market, is about $40. Then, they look at this study. If only two out of every five people will use theur software, they'll need to charge more to recoup their losses. To make the same amount of money, they'll need to charge $100 per copy. (Assuming that the higher price doesn't chase off more people.) Then, they can point back to that 2/5 study and claim that they're losing 3/5 of their possible income, or $300 for every five people using their software!
Maybe no one's that drastic, but the claim that "piracy makes software prices higher" should immediately indicate that multiplying "pirated" copies by product cost is nowhere near an accurate calculation for "losses". Throw, ans many other comments have, in the fact that many "piraters" wouldn't buy to full version anyway, and you have virtually meaningless numbers.
--Phil (I once illicitly copied software. The world of Free Software has shown me another way.)
I think you're right, but missing the point. From a general employer/employee point of view, you are absolutely correct. The employee was hired to do a job, and to do it under the direction of the company. I don't know what Raster's contract said, but I'm guessing that he was paid to develop E. As his employer, Red Hat has (well, had) the right to tell him how to do that.
But I think that j-edge's comparison to a music artist selling out is very apt. Raster has his own concept of how he wants E to work. If he was instructed to develop it in ways contrary to his plans, he could follow orders and perhaps feel like he sold out, or he could keep his vision and leave his job. It comes down to artistic integrity (and coding can very definitely be an art form).
I haven't looked at E's code, but from the interface, I'd say the Raster's pretty talented. I don't think that he'll have a problem finding work. He might want to consider doing the sort of thing Linus did--explicitly searching for a job that that doesn't involve E. In such a job, he might not have as much time to develop E, but there would be no conflicts of the nature we're seeing here.
--Phil (May we all be lucky enough to find a job where "work" and "play" intersect.)
I disagree, at least for myself. I tend to find paper documentation to be easier to use than online versions. For one thing, books give me more space. If I'm trying to follow something from the online documentation, like the order of parameters to a given function, It's easier to have a book open on my desk than find a spot for an xterm where it doesn't obscure too much of the code. Books are also easier to skim. If I'm looking for information on a concept, and the index gives a range pages, I can scan through a book's pages faster than I can a manpage's screens.
Maybe it's just that I'm more used to books, but I find written documentation to be easier to follow.
--Phil (I should probably grab this book. I could get rid of my reams of printed manpages.)
I like his weekly graph. Older data is on the right, and you can see normal traffic (green is in, blue is out) and compare to the slashdot effect beginning mid-Thursday.
YAPBPR... (Yea another point by point response...)
You make some good points, and the games does have some problems, but I think the pros outweigh the cons. Still, let's see what you said.
I should not have to click build, choose something, then _click build again_ to make it happen.
Agreed. I've been bitten by this a few times, especially since you don't need to hit "build" after assembling a queue!
Sometimes, moving my last unmoved unit automagically causes a new turn to happen. Sometimes it doesn't. I've not found a rhyme or reason to this.
This may be in your settings. The game defaults to "Auto Turn" or something like that, which means that, if none of your units have movement points remaining, the turn automatically ends. I play with it turned off.
On the standard size map, sometimes the tile your mouse pointer is over is not the same tile the move-to line ends at. I didn't have this problem on the huge map.
I've never seen this behavior. It could be a windows-only bug.
It's hard to make an argument for an "intuitive" interface when everyone I know who's played the game winds up accidentally moving pieces they didn't mean to halfway across the board because they were selected, but not on screen, so they didn't have a green box or flashing cursor, and I clicked on a city I could see...
In the Linux version, at least, the game always shows a red or green box with a line if a unit's selected, even if the unit's off the screen.
I may have missed building some impressive improvement that shows me the whole world a la building the Apollo project in original Civ. But space units have unlimited movement. I _can_ just wander one across the whole planet (Hey, why do they only have a sight radius of _one tile_?!) if I want to see the world. But I shouldn't have to! I'm playing a computer game so that the computer can take care of the drudgery. I shouldn't have to sweep a three-tile window across the whole planet to see it-- I shouldn't even have to drag a screen-size window across the whole planet to find the wormhole! But I do, for some reason.
I haven't decided if I like the unlimited space movement or not. I've been using it to my advantage, but it seems a little unbalanced, not to mention a little unrealistic. You could probably write a script to cause your units to search the globe, although I don't think much of the scripting language. I just use spy planes for exploration.
If I can't swap technologies with someone because I have no embassy, how come he can swap technologies with me?
Since you don't have an embassy, you don't have any good way of talking with him and carrying out the negotiations for exchanges of technology. He, on the other hand, has a representative in your civilization that can go talk to you whenever he wants.
If it's called "diplomacy", how come everything is "take it or leave it"? If he wants to swap his Communism for my Fusion, why can't I come back and say, "No, but I can give you Theology for it...."
The diplomacy doesn't seem very good, but I don't recall that CivII's was much better. I tend to play without regard for diplomacy, perhaps telling another ruler to stop trespassing every now and then.
Why are the Egyptians asking me to stop pirating their trade routes when I hadn't pirated their routes for over a hundred turns?
Another bug I've never seen. Perhaps it's fixed in the Linux version.
The units need some tweaking: So here I am, rolling along in my tank, about to assault the puny Americans with five legions in their city.
Legions. You know, footmen with swords?
The tank loses.
I did it twice more, thinking it was just bad luck. Now, admittedly, maybe I should've been picking on someone my own size... Sure, they were in the mountains. Sure, they had city walls and were fortified... But it's a friggin' TANK! How do footmen with swords kill tanks?
This sounds like a serious bug, and it's certainly the worst that you've mentioned. I've never seen such a bug, but I tend to overattack. I'll have to try you situation and see if it's present in the Linux version. As I recall, CivII had similar problems, but they were (eventually) ironed out.
Along the way I picked up whatever technology it is you need to build Mechs, er, War Walkers. So I built an army of three Mechs and three Tanks. Took their puny town with ease.
Except now my tanks are gone. Vanished.
Seems that tanks aren't allowed onto mountain squares. So instead of staying behind like smart little tankers, they rolled right on into the mountains, keeled over, and died. No warning, no nothing. What really pissed me off was losing a leviathan this way. "Land, space, and air" my butt...
I've encountered similar situations. Once where I conquered a mountain town, destroying the town in the process, and another where I built a mountain under a leviathan. In both cases, the units were stuck, but remained in the game. I was able to build a road to them and let them free. Your encounter was probably a bug in the windows version.
The AI for figuring out a trade route should not route through enemy cities. Gee, I wonder why my trade routes keep getting pirated? Oh, well, build another caravan...
I've never had this. I have had my trade routes pass right next to enemy cities, but never through. Likely another fixed bug.
I can't build roads farther than 3 tiles from a city? How do you explain I-10 through the West Texas desert?
This is a fairness rule, and also relatively realistic. The game would be a lot less balanced if anyone could build anywhere. You can always build next to other of your tile improvements, though. I'll bet that I-10 was built by starting at an end and working toward the other end. That's how roads far from your civilization must be built, too.
I can't name my own civilization. Okay, so this is minor. I don't seem to be able to name anything, actually, but perhaps I haven't found that box.
You can change your civilization name, but there's no box for it. You need to go edit one of the configuration files. (I don't remember which one.)
Most of your complaints seem to be the result of bugs in the game. From my experience, those bugs were either not present or fixed in the Linux version, and I think that CTP is a very good game. I'd encourage you to see what people's reactions are to the released Linux version, and, if the feelings are positive, try it out. If you likes CivII, I think you'll like CTP, as long as you don't run into a lot of annoying bugs.
I don't know whether it works with libc5, but glibc2 is fine. It'll work with glibc2.1, too, but network games won't work. (Yes, that's the voice of experience speaking...)
If we're lucky, the game will be able to run from the CD. If the CD doesn't ship with everything tar.gzed, the CD could probably just be mounted in the appropriate place. If you wanted to mess with some of the config files, hopefully a strategic symlink or two should be able to keep the videos on the CD.
It's quite multiuser compatible. Configuration changes made from within the game are stored in ~/.civctp, as are save games. I don't recommend running multiple instances, though, unless you have a lot of CPU and RAM to throw at it.
I don't know about GNOME/KDE, but I doubt it.
--Phil (I epsecially like the fact that Lokisoft made the effort to make the game multiuser friendly.)
Several people have been asking where to find the game. It's available in several places online, but I plan to buy it from a real store. (A "brick and mortar store", as Loki puts it.) My decision was made because I think it better shows a market for Linux games that way. Not only does the company see that people buy the games, so do retailers. Anyway, according to Lokisoft's web page, CTP will be carried by Fry's, Micro Center, Best Buy, and CompUSA. CTP should be shipping to the stores this week, so they should have it on the shelves by next week at the latest. The Linux version has its own box, which looks mostly like the windows version, but has Tux in the lower left-hand corner.
--Phil (I, too, think it's a great game, and recomment it highly.)
Well, I've been an avid CivII fan, and I beta tested the Linux Civ:CTP, so I've formed my own opinion about the differences. I've found that I like CTP. Since I like it, I'll gloss over your supporting statements and jump right to the negative ones...:)
Why can't I custom name a civ anymore?
Actually, you can. It involves editing some text files, but you can add your own civilizations. From poking aroung in the game directories, it seems that a lot of the configuration is done in text files, so people should be able to do some extensive tweaking of the game.
Where are the old wonders and most of the old technologies?
Where are the catapults?
They've been replaced by different wonders and technologies. This isn't a bad thing, just a different one, and, from what I've seen, the new stuff seems pretty balanced.
The game went from being keyboard (and mouse to move around the map) to mouse (and keyboard to do things that are too annoying to do with a mouse).
The game is a product of the times, where most people are more familiar with mice than keyboards. You can do almost everything with a keyboard, though. Look at the "keyboard" section of the configuration menu to see what you can do.
A good deal of the advances make no sense. No concieveable socitey, for example, could have knights and samauri. (I won't get into this, or how many other discrepencies there are, in comparison to Civ 2)
Why not? This is game that has some basis in real life, but it isn't bound to real life. (Consider that I had the same warrior unit around for thousands of years.) I don't see anything in CTP that mightn't have happened with CivII.
The opening Civs are suspect: Why is Canada in there (for example), and countries like Poland not? The pics seem to be more for the countries the expect the game to sell. (Babylon and such not withstanding)
It is an American game. Likely they picked civilization name that they thought would be more familiar to Americans. If you don't like them, you can change them.
The whole conversion thing is a serious detriment to gameplay. In one game I had 15 cities, and in but 4 turns 10 of them had been converted to the religion of another civ that I HADN'T YET SEEN! Further, I had units fortifed around the cities, so I should have seen their cleric coming.
I think it adds a new element to gameplay. CTP has a lot more stealth units, leading to different strategies. Clerics are stealth units, so regular units can't see them. Check the great library for which units can see stealth units. In a number of games, I ended up surrounding my cities with cheap units like warriors or such, just to keep clerics and lawyers away.
The cost to convert BACK a city is rapacious, and they can just try to re-convert it again the NEXT TURN. UGH!
Converting in the first place a city is expensive, too, although I don't remember the cost at the moment.
The advisors are gone. Athough fairly useless in the past, at least in Civ 2 there were amusing and (while learning the game) would let you know how you're doing.
That's a loss I don't miss much. I never listened to my advisors, mostly because I knew what I was doing better than they. For learning CTP, I think that the tutorial does a good job of introducing all of the concepts.
Anyway, I can go on and on. It's really an okay game if you've never played Civ before, but I had expected much, much better.
I liked it, and I think it is a worth successor to CivII
--Phil (And boy, do I love those building queues.) blockquote
Don't forget that Slashdot itself runs Linux and Apache and handles about half a million hits a day, much of that dynamically generated. By my calculations, at peak times, Slashdot tops 10 hits/sec.
You get two identical VoodooII cards and connect the secondary outputs on the cards (the ones inside the case) with a little cable with a few wires flipped over. That leaves the two cards basically alternating rendering lines on the screen. I'm considering picking up a second Diamond Monster 3D II so I can do this.
--Phil (Can't wait to try Q3 on my K6-2 400... >:)
I must confess that I am of mixed feelings about Jon's response to the killings. On one hand, I've had the experience of bieng an schoolyard outcast. I never really "fit in" with the mainstream crowd, and probably had about two regular friends through middle school. One of those friends actually had thoughts of committing suicide. He worked through it, and none of us walked through our school killing other students.
I think we managed because we were friends. We were all rather introverted people, and so we formed close friendships with each other. I think our parents had something to do with our survival, too. I know that my parents brought me up with a fairly good sense of morals, and they made sure that I knew that they were proud of me as I was. Knowing that there are people that accept you as you are helps a lot, I think.
On another hand, there are a lot of violent influences on people these days. We play first-person-shooters for fun. The military uses very similar programs to desensitize people to killing. Many of today's blockbuster movies feature violence and mayhem. The heroes generally must kill dozens of enemies (but it's ok because they're "bad guys", right?) and emerge victorious and lauded.
On the whole, I think it comes down to psychological well-being. Someone who has difficulty distinguishing between reality and fiction has severe problems to begin with. Whether they're a gamer, quake player, or apparently "normal" person, the cause of the problem is far more deep-rooted than just "He played Quake and it taught him to kill."
I don't think that there's an easy answer to either teen violence or schoolground ostracism. But we can let people know that it's OK to be different, and that there are non-violent avenues that may be taken.
Slashdot Mirror
Have you tried emailing Rob or otherwise conversing with him directly? Rob's stated several times that he doesn't read most of the comments on Slashdot, so writing here is not a good way to reach him.
--Phil (Not to mention that this thread is rather off-topic for this article.)
But you wouldn't lose just one atom to the water. This motor is a single molecule. Assuming that all of the bonds are covalent, the motor is not going to dissolve in water. It is possible that the motor itself might go floating off into solution, but that is just something the designers would have to account for.
--Phil (Now I just need a Feed and a matter compiler...)
I've seen quite a bit of discussion about this on the MIDRANGE-L mailing list, and so I thought I'd mention a few things. A lot of people seem to think that 9/9/99 as a special date is mostly myth, largely because the computer would store it as 090999, which doesn't look as special. Surely 99/99/99 would be better. Other people pointed out that this sort of thing tended to crop up when the users wanted to add extra information in a field the programmer thought would only be a date. In such a program, 99/99/99 would fail because it was an invalid date, so creative users might be tempted to use a vaild date, but give it special meaning. Two common dates for things like "no expiration" or "not applicable" were 12/31/99 and 9/9/99. The former would be the highest date that could be entered in a two-digit year field, while the latter was easy to remember, yet still a good ways into the future.
9/9/99 problems are likely to be fairly rare, since the necessary circumstances would be somewhat rare, and, hopefully, many such problems have been caught by now. Where today's date does cause problems will likely not be noticed by the population at large. (i.e. no power outages, no broken ATMs.) At a guess, the most likely candidates for problems will be billing software running on older mainframs and midrange computers, and I'm sure the companies will do their utmost to bill you for anything you might owe them.
--Phil (I know the banks with my loans have been quite diligent.)
For a general discussion of what GNUStep is, see this post. In a nutshell, GnuStep is a GPLed implementation of the OpenStep specification, which grew out of the NextStep system. I'll also add the NextStep was the most beautifully designed system I've ever seen.
--Phil (If only I had the time to learn Objective-C and help out.)
As luck would have it, I just recently picked up Developing Linux Applications with GTK+ and GDK (not to be confused with Linux Application Development, which, I believe, does not talk about GTK). I haven't had much time to look at it, so I've only gotten as far as the GDK stuff. My intention was to learn about GTK programming so I could get into some GUI stuff under Linux. (I've been doing command-line things under various Unices for a while.) Is the book i grabbed a good introduction to the topic, or should I get this one, which seems to be (by the title, at least) more focused on what I want to learn, and wave good-bye to some more of my money?
--Phil (Not that the money stays long in any case...)
Well, in an ideal world, yes. Unfortunately, we don't live in an ideal world. (Just ask any physics student...) The point of creating the patent system was to encourage the exchange of ideas and to stimulate innovation. If an inventor created something useful, the government would grant him exclusive rights over the idea for a reasonable amount of time in exchange for the inventor publishing full documentation on his invention, thereby allowing anyone to fully use the idea after the time ran out. Expressly excluded from the patent system were mathematics and ideas that did not result in a physical result.
Back to modern times. The patent office allows the patenting of software algorithms, which, in many cases are almost purely mathematical. The patents still run for 17 years, which, while it was a reasonable period of time in the era when patents were created, is several eternities in today's world of software development. And finally, the patent office allows long, convoluted patents that end up boiling down to things like, "A Patent On The Creation Of A Dialog Box For The Purpose Of Asking The Software User A Question."
No, the patent system as it was conceved was not a bad thing, and it was created with the best of intentions. Today's patent system, however, has strayed far from the original ideal, and has become just a method whereby companies with lots of money create unbreakable monopolies for themselves in areas so broad that practally any piece of software could infringe on someone else's patent.
--Phil (there's a really great article on software patents floating around, but I can't remember the URL.)
Use < and >. Then, you have to submit in "HTML Formatted" mode.
Using preview mode to check things helps, but that actually rewrites what's in the buffer, replacing those codes with the characters they represent. Thus, if you use preview, you have to go back and redo all of your special characters.
--Phil (<viola!>)
It's been folded into the Ethernet HOWTO. Check out "Using More than one Ethernet Card per Machine"
--Phil (Not that I even have a cable modem; I'm still stuck in 56K-land.)
Sewage flows into river; Computer Failure Blamed
Sewage Spill Linked to Computer
(The above mentioned Y2K sewage problem may be found at Y2K test sends sewage flowing in Los Angeles.)
--Phil (RISKS readers know that there are all sorts of programming bugs lurking around--not just Y2K.)
--Phil (They are fun to play with, though. I still have my Super Soaker 50.)
--Phil (I ought to re-read Neuromancer. It's been so long since I've done so that I don't remember whether I liked it or not.)
The way I read his comment, it seemd that he was looking at the issue from the other side. It seems to me that his problem is that licenses such as those basically make him an unpaid employee for the original author. In such a situation, the original author gets paid for a product comtaining at least some code from others, but the others get no compensation. I, at least, prefer working on projects that are more fair, like GPLed stuff. With a GPLed program, others are still able to make money off my work, but anyone (including me) is free to do so.
I guess it's all about how you define freedom.
--Phil (And yes, I have contributed to free software, albiet usually in one- or two-line bug fixes.)
Say a company is selling a software program. They calculate that a reasonable price for the program, based on the expenses incurrend and potential market, is about $40. Then, they look at this study. If only two out of every five people will use theur software, they'll need to charge more to recoup their losses. To make the same amount of money, they'll need to charge $100 per copy. (Assuming that the higher price doesn't chase off more people.) Then, they can point back to that 2/5 study and claim that they're losing 3/5 of their possible income, or $300 for every five people using their software!
Maybe no one's that drastic, but the claim that "piracy makes software prices higher" should immediately indicate that multiplying "pirated" copies by product cost is nowhere near an accurate calculation for "losses". Throw, ans many other comments have, in the fact that many "piraters" wouldn't buy to full version anyway, and you have virtually meaningless numbers.
--Phil (I once illicitly copied software. The world of Free Software has shown me another way.)
I think you're right, but missing the point. From a general employer/employee point of view, you are absolutely correct. The employee was hired to do a job, and to do it under the direction of the company. I don't know what Raster's contract said, but I'm guessing that he was paid to develop E. As his employer, Red Hat has (well, had) the right to tell him how to do that.
But I think that j-edge's comparison to a music artist selling out is very apt. Raster has his own concept of how he wants E to work. If he was instructed to develop it in ways contrary to his plans, he could follow orders and perhaps feel like he sold out, or he could keep his vision and leave his job. It comes down to artistic integrity (and coding can very definitely be an art form).
I haven't looked at E's code, but from the interface, I'd say the Raster's pretty talented. I don't think that he'll have a problem finding work. He might want to consider doing the sort of thing Linus did--explicitly searching for a job that that doesn't involve E. In such a job, he might not have as much time to develop E, but there would be no conflicts of the nature we're seeing here.
--Phil (May we all be lucky enough to find a job where "work" and "play" intersect.)
I disagree, at least for myself. I tend to find paper documentation to be easier to use than online versions. For one thing, books give me more space. If I'm trying to follow something from the online documentation, like the order of parameters to a given function, It's easier to have a book open on my desk than find a spot for an xterm where it doesn't obscure too much of the code. Books are also easier to skim. If I'm looking for information on a concept, and the index gives a range pages, I can scan through a book's pages faster than I can a manpage's screens.
Maybe it's just that I'm more used to books, but I find written documentation to be easier to follow.
--Phil (I should probably grab this book. I could get rid of my reams of printed manpages.)
It looks rather like he uses MRTG ( Multi Router Traffic Grapher). It's a tool for tracking router usage.
I like his weekly graph. Older data is on the right, and you can see normal traffic (green is in, blue is out) and compare to the slashdot effect beginning mid-Thursday.
--Phil (I like MRTG. Pretty graphs are fun...)
9 10.100.0.2 (10.100.0.2) 19 ms 21 ms 28 ms
Do I even want to know why a 10.x.x.x address is making its way out onto the Internet?
--Phil (If only I could rember which RFC sets aside the non-Internet IPs.)
YAPBPR... (Yea another point by point response...)
You make some good points, and the games does have some problems, but I think the pros outweigh the cons. Still, let's see what you said.
Agreed. I've been bitten by this a few times, especially since you don't need to hit "build" after assembling a queue! This may be in your settings. The game defaults to "Auto Turn" or something like that, which means that, if none of your units have movement points remaining, the turn automatically ends. I play with it turned off. I've never seen this behavior. It could be a windows-only bug. In the Linux version, at least, the game always shows a red or green box with a line if a unit's selected, even if the unit's off the screen. I haven't decided if I like the unlimited space movement or not. I've been using it to my advantage, but it seems a little unbalanced, not to mention a little unrealistic. You could probably write a script to cause your units to search the globe, although I don't think much of the scripting language. I just use spy planes for exploration. Since you don't have an embassy, you don't have any good way of talking with him and carrying out the negotiations for exchanges of technology. He, on the other hand, has a representative in your civilization that can go talk to you whenever he wants. The diplomacy doesn't seem very good, but I don't recall that CivII's was much better. I tend to play without regard for diplomacy, perhaps telling another ruler to stop trespassing every now and then. Another bug I've never seen. Perhaps it's fixed in the Linux version. This sounds like a serious bug, and it's certainly the worst that you've mentioned. I've never seen such a bug, but I tend to overattack. I'll have to try you situation and see if it's present in the Linux version. As I recall, CivII had similar problems, but they were (eventually) ironed out. I've encountered similar situations. Once where I conquered a mountain town, destroying the town in the process, and another where I built a mountain under a leviathan. In both cases, the units were stuck, but remained in the game. I was able to build a road to them and let them free. Your encounter was probably a bug in the windows version. I've never had this. I have had my trade routes pass right next to enemy cities, but never through. Likely another fixed bug. This is a fairness rule, and also relatively realistic. The game would be a lot less balanced if anyone could build anywhere. You can always build next to other of your tile improvements, though. I'll bet that I-10 was built by starting at an end and working toward the other end. That's how roads far from your civilization must be built, too. You can change your civilization name, but there's no box for it. You need to go edit one of the configuration files. (I don't remember which one.)Most of your complaints seem to be the result of bugs in the game. From my experience, those bugs were either not present or fixed in the Linux version, and I think that CTP is a very good game. I'd encourage you to see what people's reactions are to the released Linux version, and, if the feelings are positive, try it out. If you likes CivII, I think you'll like CTP, as long as you don't run into a lot of annoying bugs.
--Phil (Apologies for the long post.)
I don't know whether it works with libc5, but glibc2 is fine. It'll work with glibc2.1, too, but network games won't work. (Yes, that's the voice of experience speaking...)
If we're lucky, the game will be able to run from the CD. If the CD doesn't ship with everything tar.gzed, the CD could probably just be mounted in the appropriate place. If you wanted to mess with some of the config files, hopefully a strategic symlink or two should be able to keep the videos on the CD.
It's quite multiuser compatible. Configuration changes made from within the game are stored in ~/.civctp, as are save games. I don't recommend running multiple instances, though, unless you have a lot of CPU and RAM to throw at it.
I don't know about GNOME/KDE, but I doubt it.
--Phil (I epsecially like the fact that Lokisoft made the effort to make the game multiuser friendly.)
Several people have been asking where to find the game. It's available in several places online, but I plan to buy it from a real store. (A "brick and mortar store", as Loki puts it.) My decision was made because I think it better shows a market for Linux games that way. Not only does the company see that people buy the games, so do retailers. Anyway, according to Lokisoft's web page, CTP will be carried by Fry's, Micro Center, Best Buy, and CompUSA. CTP should be shipping to the stores this week, so they should have it on the shelves by next week at the latest. The Linux version has its own box, which looks mostly like the windows version, but has Tux in the lower left-hand corner.
--Phil (I, too, think it's a great game, and recomment it highly.)
Well, I've been an avid CivII fan, and I beta tested the Linux Civ:CTP, so I've formed my own opinion about the differences. I've found that I like CTP. Since I like it, I'll gloss over your supporting statements and jump right to the negative ones... :)
Actually, you can. It involves editing some text files, but you can add your own civilizations. From poking aroung in the game directories, it seems that a lot of the configuration is done in text files, so people should be able to do some extensive tweaking of the game. They've been replaced by different wonders and technologies. This isn't a bad thing, just a different one, and, from what I've seen, the new stuff seems pretty balanced. The game is a product of the times, where most people are more familiar with mice than keyboards. You can do almost everything with a keyboard, though. Look at the "keyboard" section of the configuration menu to see what you can do. Why not? This is game that has some basis in real life, but it isn't bound to real life. (Consider that I had the same warrior unit around for thousands of years.) I don't see anything in CTP that mightn't have happened with CivII. It is an American game. Likely they picked civilization name that they thought would be more familiar to Americans. If you don't like them, you can change them. I think it adds a new element to gameplay. CTP has a lot more stealth units, leading to different strategies. Clerics are stealth units, so regular units can't see them. Check the great library for which units can see stealth units. In a number of games, I ended up surrounding my cities with cheap units like warriors or such, just to keep clerics and lawyers away. Converting in the first place a city is expensive, too, although I don't remember the cost at the moment. That's a loss I don't miss much. I never listened to my advisors, mostly because I knew what I was doing better than they. For learning CTP, I think that the tutorial does a good job of introducing all of the concepts. I liked it, and I think it is a worth successor to CivII--Phil (And boy, do I love those building queues.) blockquote
Don't forget that Slashdot itself runs Linux and Apache and handles about half a million hits a day, much of that dynamically generated. By my calculations, at peak times, Slashdot tops 10 hits/sec.
--Phil (Way to go, Rob!)
You get two identical VoodooII cards and connect the secondary outputs on the cards (the ones inside the case) with a little cable with a few wires flipped over. That leaves the two cards basically alternating rendering lines on the screen. I'm considering picking up a second Diamond Monster 3D II so I can do this.
--Phil (Can't wait to try Q3 on my K6-2 400... >:)
I was reading Calvin and Hobbes, and came across this cartoon. I think it's appropriate to the topic.
--Phil (That's all. i already poured my heart out in the previous articles.)
I must confess that I am of mixed feelings about Jon's response to the killings. On one hand, I've had the experience of bieng an schoolyard outcast. I never really "fit in" with the mainstream crowd, and probably had about two regular friends through middle school. One of those friends actually had thoughts of committing suicide. He worked through it, and none of us walked through our school killing other students.
I think we managed because we were friends. We were all rather introverted people, and so we formed close friendships with each other. I think our parents had something to do with our survival, too. I know that my parents brought me up with a fairly good sense of morals, and they made sure that I knew that they were proud of me as I was. Knowing that there are people that accept you as you are helps a lot, I think.
On another hand, there are a lot of violent influences on people these days. We play first-person-shooters for fun. The military uses very similar programs to desensitize people to killing. Many of today's blockbuster movies feature violence and mayhem. The heroes generally must kill dozens of enemies (but it's ok because they're "bad guys", right?) and emerge victorious and lauded.
On the whole, I think it comes down to psychological well-being. Someone who has difficulty distinguishing between reality and fiction has severe problems to begin with. Whether they're a gamer, quake player, or apparently "normal" person, the cause of the problem is far more deep-rooted than just "He played Quake and it taught him to kill."
I don't think that there's an easy answer to either teen violence or schoolground ostracism. But we can let people know that it's OK to be different, and that there are non-violent avenues that may be taken.
--Phil