My point is that there is not enough in common between the products in order to benefit from copying the marketing. Also, that the reason they are making bank is that they are sneaky underhanded exploitive people, is this what we want RadHat or VA to become?
Like what? Offering a product that panders to the base carnal desires of potential consumers, which some people are willing to pay for without any real expectation as to what they are getting? Sneaky billing tactics, confident that a large enough percentage will pay rather than fess up to actual human beings about their unwholesome webrowsing habits to fight them? Exploiting young ladies with the promise of "quick easy money" that in no way approaches the level of income that the resulting works will generate? Safely protected by the inability of free alternatives to find low-cost domestic hosts whose terms of service do not preclude such content?
Gnosticism was a "secret" religion because if anybody found out you were a Gnostic you'd be killed. Scientology is a secret religion because if everybody found out what the core of their beliefs was, they'd have a hard time converting people.
I mean, which sounds like a better pitch to you:
Hi, would you like to join a religion based on the belief that we, as humans, are physically descended from clams, but are possessed by aliens from outer space who have no bodies?
Here take this personality test. Hmmm... How would you like some help in improving this aspect of your personality here?
...really going to be such a butt-ugly chrome pimple?
But seriously, has anyone else noticed that everyone these days is building "set-top boxes" that are conspiratorially designed to only be able to be placed actually on top of the TV? Nothing is square and stackable like my good old VHS machine anymore.
It may very well be that I just don't "get" antialiasing...but I thought I understood the basic concept. That being the case, this question sounds funny to me.
Isn't "antialiasing" (to oversimplify) a form of "intelligent blurring"? (In this case, blurring the fonts corners a bit so that they blend a little smoother with the background).
If so...don't you LOSE detail (while improving the actual appearance) when you antialias?
Yes and no, depending on the implementation. A simple anti-aliasing of a given bit of text at a given resolution will decrease the detail of the font. A form of supersampling, using a higher resolution bitmap to generate an antialiased smaller version will add detail, at the expense of losing background detail. Luckily the background we're talking about is usually a solid color, so detail, schmetail...
Like, the lady at the counter at the pizza place carrying on a conversation on her cell phone the whole time the poor waitperson is trying to take her order and whatnot. The problem isn't her cellphone, its her defective brain.
If we were to calculate the mean cycles to failure for the average home PC, multiply that by the average time it would be switched off for (8-10 hrs min?) and figure out the cost of power being saved, I think we would arrive at a figure which would pay for a new PC at that failure point. (Same with lightbulbs, leaving them on to prevent their burning out is penny wise and pound foolish.)
Plus, with Linux in particular, if you're running it as your desktop OS and don't need to leave it on as a server, it is helpful to reboot occasionally so that when you reboot unwillingly you won't be swamped by all the stuff you should have put in the boot scripts and etc, but put off until later, "Oh I'll just insmod that for now...".
Also, I just saw a commercial for a "business opportunity" involving a "patent-pending" invention which appears to be a phone card vending machine. Why should any vending machine be patentable in this day and age? If you took any given engineer and told him to design a machine to vend a given article, he would come up with several ways to do it in short order. Vending machine design has become "obious".
Did you ever notice how different makes of cars all have different kinds of vent-directing vane thingies? Did you ever notice that none of them works properly and that they all break catastrophically before any other part of the car fails? All except one elegant and useful kind, which consists of a hemispherical piece held in an orbit. You can twist and rotate the vent into any position within a fairly fat conical zone. There are no flimsy linkages to break or stick. I don't know who makes this kind but it was on a rental car I got once. But no, with the patent office here to "promote innovation", we've all got to suffer with a myriad of imperfect imitators.
By the way, I tried to find the f***er on Delphion, but there are about a zillion patents for ducts, vents, airports and the like. Which kind of proves my point, since a cursory examination of them revealed a lot which seem to be pretty much alike except for trivial modifications.
Isn't anyone else bothered that some accursed Martian stromatolites have obviously evolved a bio-organic railgun and even now we are under threat of attack by the Martian aggressors.
When I was in High School and Junior College, I used to publish a couple of 'zines (Well, Johnny, back then we had this thing called paper...) The way things would start out, it was "Hey I've got something to say." Eventually, publishing/editing/distributing/promoting becomes and end in itself, and the original purpose gets sidelined.
Linux is for my desktop. It is faster, more reliable, and easier to set up than Windows. More to the point, it is Free Software. As much as your ilk may protest to the contrary, people do whatever the hell they want with software, and a whole fscking lot of us are happily running Linux as a desktop OS. Cool, playable Free Software games will not "pollute" or cheapen Linux, they will provide new users, new challenges, and new developers to meet those needs.
From my point of view, suggesting that people who enjoy games deserve to be forced to sell their souls to Microsoft and AOL/TW reveals just how mean-spirited and out of touch with humanity you must personally be.
An experiment like this NEVER would have made it to the exhibit hall in any of the schools I went to. They would literally present students interest in the Science Fair with a list of like 20 "experiments" to do.
You got your Hypothesis and Procedure handed to you in purple and white mimeograph. The point of the science fair was not to perform experiments, but to present them properly on posterboard. "Hypothesis must be printed by hand on an unlined white paper 8 1/2" x 5"" or somesuch bologna.
When you got to the actual fair, there would be rows and rows of "Bean plant bends toward light" "Neither Tide nor All is a better detergent" "Metal conducts, wood does not" experiments. Then, in the part of the room closest to the stage were the private and upper-class neighborhood school's experiments, which gleamed with copper and smelled of lemons or potatoes.
But they were still the same assembly-line science, these kids just got their Hypothesis out of one of those newfangled photocopy machines instead of mimeo, and labeled their steps with pre-gummed lettering instead of Sharpie(tm) marker.
Quotes from the games listed on the news page of happypeguin.org
Classic shoot'em up
roguelike game
clone of a C64 game
a clone of popular dos game
A Rubick's clock
A nibbles clone, just better
breakout-style game
I have to admit though, I was dissapointed when I went to the page not to find any "just like game x, only with Tux as the hero" games to make fun of, not that they don't exist in droves. Ugh, Worldforge... I was able to satisfy myself as to the status of WF as a massive circle-jerk when a recent freshmeat announcement heralded "creatures now gain and lose weight accurately as food is eaten and digested" as the stand-out improvement.
Here is my list of rules for the "Linux Games Dogma 2001":
The first pragraph describing your game should not require the words "linux" or "open source" to hold the readers attention.
The use of OpenGL is forbidden. Not that 3d sucks or leads to worse gameplay neccesarily, but I'm not interested in playing the proof-of-concept for your "3D engine" that you started the day you picked up "C for Dummies". You may also not use POVRay-rendered objects in your 2D action game. It looks really ugly.
You will allow the user to use a joystick to play your game. I didn't upgrade to 2.2.18 and its USB support for nothing, and I'd much rather use my Gravis gamepad than emacs/vi cursor control keys to play your game thank you very much.
Tux, the BSD demon and Bill Gates will not appear in your game. You can use any other character you like, just please no more goddamn penguins... On a related note, if you can't draw, find someone who can, or don't use "artwork" in your game.
You may not create another breakout, samegame or tetris variant. Feel free to redo Nethack, but for chrissakes put some graphics in it.
No sound clips from Sci-Fi shows/movies, The Simpsons or other nerdtainment fare are allowed. I understand you don't have a foley studio, but I'd rather hear beep-bop-boop or silence than some gawdawful 8-bit 11KHz Bart Simpson sample.
If something explodes or bleeds or catches fire, the animated effects of violence should match the rest of your game's artwork, not look like you drew it with MS Paint or used the output of an "explosion generator" directly.
I don't care what anybody's motivation is (except the enemy can't be Bill Gates or a facsimile thereof), but the game should be playable without a network connection, either single-player or PvP on a single machine. Don't make me be the "enemy" for the other player just because you're to lazy to write any AI code.
You can make every object in the game black, as far as I care, I don't know where the hell this guy got his "no black" rule
Oooh, that came out mean. I'm just in a pissy mood today, but I'll stand by all these points. There are playable games for Linux, but there's a s**tload of bilge as well.
...while it holds true to many of the points of "Dogma2001" I believe it violates the spirit of the "no 3d acceleration" clause which is "Thou shalt not use technological gimmicks to sell thy games". The primary selling point of Ballblazer was the gimmicky new graphics technology. Luckily, Lucasgames coupled their technology to a game with phenomenal gameplay value. In fact, the same game would be both dull and difficult to play if executed in top-down 2-d, demonstrating that it is not the representation of the world that creates playability, it is the mechanics. Doom was fun not because it could run on a 286, but because it was frenetic and immersive and easy to learn. King's Quest:Mask of Eternity doesn't suck all ass because it is rendered in 3d, but because they abandoned the fun and kooky playability aspects of the Kings Quest series in favor of a hard-to-control character in a game world devoid of meaningful interaction.
There are terrible things that we could do with cloning... growing clones and treating them as non-humans for instance (used for organ transplants, etc).
It would be so much simpler just to have people who enter the hospital for routine surgeries slip into "comas" and then all these comatose people would "die", only in reality we would just get a big room and fill it with coma-oids dangling from wires in the ceiling. Why fiddle around with clones and all that sloppy genetics when you can just get by on plain old conspiracies.
If anybody with 3 milligrams of functioning brain matter looked at the "Flat Earth Society" web page for at least 23 seconds they would realize that it is a joke.
All copyrights will expire, thus the constitution cannot be violated by any extensions of the copyright term.
When the universe finally submits to heat death and cools to 0 degrees Kelvin, the US government will no longer be able to enforce copyright laws, so there is a definite limited time to any copyright protection afforded by the US gov.
Slashdot Mirror
My point is that there is not enough in common between the products in order to benefit from copying the marketing. Also, that the reason they are making bank is that they are sneaky underhanded exploitive people, is this what we want RadHat or VA to become?
Like what? Offering a product that panders to the base carnal desires of potential consumers, which some people are willing to pay for without any real expectation as to what they are getting? Sneaky billing tactics, confident that a large enough percentage will pay rather than fess up to actual human beings about their unwholesome webrowsing habits to fight them? Exploiting young ladies with the promise of "quick easy money" that in no way approaches the level of income that the resulting works will generate? Safely protected by the inability of free alternatives to find low-cost domestic hosts whose terms of service do not preclude such content?
Gnosticism was a "secret" religion because if anybody found out you were a Gnostic you'd be killed. Scientology is a secret religion because if everybody found out what the core of their beliefs was, they'd have a hard time converting people.
I mean, which sounds like a better pitch to you:
...really going to be such a butt-ugly chrome pimple?
But seriously, has anyone else noticed that everyone these days is building "set-top boxes" that are conspiratorially designed to only be able to be placed actually on top of the TV? Nothing is square and stackable like my good old VHS machine anymore.
You've been watching too much Hollywood science.
We changed their DNA!!!
Oh, that explains how an insect could evolve in less than a decade from eating cockroaches to eating people in the subway... how stupid of me.
Yes and no, depending on the implementation. A simple anti-aliasing of a given bit of text at a given resolution will decrease the detail of the font. A form of supersampling, using a higher resolution bitmap to generate an antialiased smaller version will add detail, at the expense of losing background detail. Luckily the background we're talking about is usually a solid color, so detail, schmetail...
Like, the lady at the counter at the pizza place carrying on a conversation on her cell phone the whole time the poor waitperson is trying to take her order and whatnot. The problem isn't her cellphone, its her defective brain.
So does LINE
...how does one get to be African-American when one is "raised on cargo ships"?
To bodly go where unthinking, self-conscious politically correctness has not gone before...
If we were to calculate the mean cycles to failure for the average home PC, multiply that by the average time it would be switched off for (8-10 hrs min?) and figure out the cost of power being saved, I think we would arrive at a figure which would pay for a new PC at that failure point. (Same with lightbulbs, leaving them on to prevent their burning out is penny wise and pound foolish.)
Plus, with Linux in particular, if you're running it as your desktop OS and don't need to leave it on as a server, it is helpful to reboot occasionally so that when you reboot unwillingly you won't be swamped by all the stuff you should have put in the boot scripts and etc, but put off until later, "Oh I'll just insmod that for now...".
Uptime is a means, not and end.
Netscape was effectively free, since payment was entirely on the honor system.
No man, they're wanting to change it back to only non-profit "corporations".
Also, I just saw a commercial for a "business opportunity" involving a "patent-pending" invention which appears to be a phone card vending machine. Why should any vending machine be patentable in this day and age? If you took any given engineer and told him to design a machine to vend a given article, he would come up with several ways to do it in short order. Vending machine design has become "obious".
Did you ever notice how different makes of cars all have different kinds of vent-directing vane thingies? Did you ever notice that none of them works properly and that they all break catastrophically before any other part of the car fails? All except one elegant and useful kind, which consists of a hemispherical piece held in an orbit. You can twist and rotate the vent into any position within a fairly fat conical zone. There are no flimsy linkages to break or stick. I don't know who makes this kind but it was on a rental car I got once. But no, with the patent office here to "promote innovation", we've all got to suffer with a myriad of imperfect imitators.
By the way, I tried to find the f***er on Delphion, but there are about a zillion patents for ducts, vents, airports and the like. Which kind of proves my point, since a cursory examination of them revealed a lot which seem to be pretty much alike except for trivial modifications.
Isn't anyone else bothered that some accursed Martian stromatolites have obviously evolved a bio-organic railgun and even now we are under threat of attack by the Martian aggressors.
Whoever it is that wrote that article.
Needs to learn that it is possible to write paragraphs longer than one sentence.
Prediction:
A Wired article next week will be in iambic pentameter.
When I was in High School and Junior College, I used to publish a couple of 'zines (Well, Johnny, back then we had this thing called paper...) The way things would start out, it was "Hey I've got something to say." Eventually, publishing/editing/distributing/promoting becomes and end in itself, and the original purpose gets sidelined.
...I'd buy a PS2
If I wanted a server, I'd run BSD.
Linux is for my desktop. It is faster, more reliable, and easier to set up than Windows. More to the point, it is Free Software. As much as your ilk may protest to the contrary, people do whatever the hell they want with software, and a whole fscking lot of us are happily running Linux as a desktop OS. Cool, playable Free Software games will not "pollute" or cheapen Linux, they will provide new users, new challenges, and new developers to meet those needs.
From my point of view, suggesting that people who enjoy games deserve to be forced to sell their souls to Microsoft and AOL/TW reveals just how mean-spirited and out of touch with humanity you must personally be.
An experiment like this NEVER would have made it to the exhibit hall in any of the schools I went to. They would literally present students interest in the Science Fair with a list of like 20 "experiments" to do.
You got your Hypothesis and Procedure handed to you in purple and white mimeograph. The point of the science fair was not to perform experiments, but to present them properly on posterboard. "Hypothesis must be printed by hand on an unlined white paper 8 1/2" x 5"" or somesuch bologna.
When you got to the actual fair, there would be rows and rows of "Bean plant bends toward light" "Neither Tide nor All is a better detergent" "Metal conducts, wood does not" experiments. Then, in the part of the room closest to the stage were the private and upper-class neighborhood school's experiments, which gleamed with copper and smelled of lemons or potatoes.
But they were still the same assembly-line science, these kids just got their Hypothesis out of one of those newfangled photocopy machines instead of mimeo, and labeled their steps with pre-gummed lettering instead of Sharpie(tm) marker.
wha...
Quotes from the games listed on the news page of happypeguin.org
I have to admit though, I was dissapointed when I went to the page not to find any "just like game x, only with Tux as the hero" games to make fun of, not that they don't exist in droves. Ugh, Worldforge... I was able to satisfy myself as to the status of WF as a massive circle-jerk when a recent freshmeat announcement heralded "creatures now gain and lose weight accurately as food is eaten and digested" as the stand-out improvement.
Here is my list of rules for the "Linux Games Dogma 2001":
Oooh, that came out mean. I'm just in a pissy mood today, but I'll stand by all these points. There are playable games for Linux, but there's a s**tload of bilge as well.
...while it holds true to many of the points of "Dogma2001" I believe it violates the spirit of the "no 3d acceleration" clause which is "Thou shalt not use technological gimmicks to sell thy games". The primary selling point of Ballblazer was the gimmicky new graphics technology. Luckily, Lucasgames coupled their technology to a game with phenomenal gameplay value. In fact, the same game would be both dull and difficult to play if executed in top-down 2-d, demonstrating that it is not the representation of the world that creates playability, it is the mechanics. Doom was fun not because it could run on a 286, but because it was frenetic and immersive and easy to learn. King's Quest:Mask of Eternity doesn't suck all ass because it is rendered in 3d, but because they abandoned the fun and kooky playability aspects of the Kings Quest series in favor of a hard-to-control character in a game world devoid of meaningful interaction.
It would be so much simpler just to have people who enter the hospital for routine surgeries slip into "comas" and then all these comatose people would "die", only in reality we would just get a big room and fill it with coma-oids dangling from wires in the ceiling. Why fiddle around with clones and all that sloppy genetics when you can just get by on plain old conspiracies.
If anybody with 3 milligrams of functioning brain matter looked at the "Flat Earth Society" web page for at least 23 seconds they would realize that it is a joke.
When the universe finally submits to heat death and cools to 0 degrees Kelvin, the US government will no longer be able to enforce copyright laws, so there is a definite limited time to any copyright protection afforded by the US gov.