- You can run a Windows installer, that's the normal way of installing software under Wine, in fact. Standard installers work fine most of the time. - You need to override some DLLs for some application - fortunately it's easily done through wineconfig, and the Wine App DB is helpful in specifying settings that improve the compatibility for a certain app. Generally, installers that want to put stuff into c:\windows aren't a problem as Wine maintains a virtual C: drive. - Some.NET apps may actually run natively if you use Mono. I've found Wine.NET support to be so-so. DirectX is well-supported. DX8 is fully supported, DX9 is for the most part. I've played Half-Life 2 successfully with Wine, although for the Episodes, you need to turn HDR off - that's an example of a missing DX9 feature in Wine. Sometimes you may take a performance hit if software fallbacks are required. - Photoshop runs well. In fact, Photoshop is one of the applications that Wine 1.0 is supposed to run perfectly. - Performance is very application-specific. Sometimes they'll run at Windows performance levels or even better. HL2 performed as well as on Windows for me, while Civilization 4 performs somewhat worse, and Oblivion (though it's been a long time since I ran it) performed considerably worse. The small utility applications I often use Wine for run as well as on Windows.
As a user, one of the bigger problems I notice with Wine are regression bugs. It's not uncommon for an app to work well in one version, be very much broken in the next, and so on. It's something frequently experienced with Deus Ex - sometimes Wine runs it perfectly, sometimes it crashes after startup. Wine generally avoids implementing application-specific code to make certain applications work properly, which sometimes makes compatibility difficult.
The article explicitly says: "The new spot's size has not been announced. The Great Red Spot is roughly as wide as the entire Earth." And from the photo, the new one definitely isn't half the size of the Great Red Spot.
In fact, back then, it wouldn't even fully run on high-end hardware, you truly needed some bleeding edge stuff. There was compression on something (I can't remember what it was) that would be used for performance reasons unless 500+ MB of VRAM were available, which wasn't the case then. Today, Crysis is at least as resource-hungry, relatively speaking, as Doom3 was then, but it gets a lot of praise, and actually runs relatively worse in my experience.
And indeed, hard to see how Doom3 was a misstep. It received very good reviews and I think it's a success because it did what it tried to. There's the complaint of old-skool, repetitive gameplay... but that is largely what was promised. iD had intended the game to be a throwback to the old Doom style of play all along, and they did that. I know many disliked that in 2004 but you can hardly complain that they delivered something other than what was promised.
I would speculate now that Doom4 will also have rather old-skool gameplay. It'll probably be more modern than Doom3's but old-skool compared to whatever other shooters are out at the time. I would be extremely surprised - if intrigued - if iD decided to also try for some big gameplay innovation. At least we can be reasonably sure that the game will look absolutely amazing.
Absolutely, not preaching is the key. Don't start talking about modifying the source, freely studying it, etc. - that gives the impression that this software is for enthusiasts only. Always emphasize the practical advantages. That means, saying that the software is free as in beer and showcasing the funcionality. For someone who's using IE (in particular, IE6), install Firefox, show tabs, show DownthemAll, show Adblock, show CustomizeGoogle - they'll be sold.
Likewise, when trying to get "normal" users to install Ubuntu, tell them that they'll never need to install an antivirus or fight spyware. Yes, being free is important, but emphasize the functional advantages over the lack of cost or, say, the lack of activation - because the fact is that many people are happy with their versions where activation is, uh, "deactivated".
Wouldn't fly with hardware companies. They cooperate with MS and other software corporations, and the hardware manufacturers would be pretty pissed off if new software didn't require more processing power. That's the upgrade cycle for you. Look at WinXP, its hardware requirements amount to what is, by now, an ancient computer. The hardware companies can be satisfied knowing that Vista will force people to buy new hardware.
Personally though, I would love a lite version of Windows. I don't use Windows much these days but I find it already has too much stuff I don't need (WinXP) and it's too fat for an OS I just need to run games and occasionally other apps. My Windows folder is now approaching the 4.5 GB mark - well smaller than Vista is but still not quite a "lite" OS.
Is there any information yet on whether Spirit and Opportunity might see anything if there actually is impact - such as maybe seeing the dust rise or even capturing a glimpse of the asteroid in the Martian atmosphere?
Too late in every sense. We've been transmitting our location for 50 years, and it's also too late to do anything even if someone is coming after us. If you assume a civilization that has the capability of interstellar travel, it can be taken for granted that their technology would be so far ahead that they'd be able to eliminate Earth's defenses and occupy it within hours. If there is a hostile civilization with sufficient technology out there, we're fucked anyway. Our hope would be that:
1. By the time it'd be possible to track us down with those signals, we'll reach a sufficient level of technology to defend our planet (or will have died off by then);
or
2. The hostile civilization would, for whatever reason, not consider an invasion of Earth to be worth the time and resources.
Yeah, I often think something like that when reading about manned spaceflight. Or when reading sci-fi. It's sad, we really haven't moved forward much in terms of space exploration. We've had space flight for 50 years. Compare the advances in information technology over the last 50 years to space advances. Heck, much of the sci-fi written 50 years ago seems to have very primitive information technology by modern standards.
I know that space is extremely expensive, but it's a new frontier for mankind. If NASA had the budget of the Pentagon, we'd probably be much further down the road by now. But governments aren't going to do that. There's not much value for them in space exploration, ultimately. Sending man to Mars won't increase your military power. Even if the planet had mountains of gold, colonization to gather it would eat up all the profits. It's not that profitable, economically or militarily, and that's what governments care about, sadly.
The future probably lies with private spaceflight and not organizations like NASA or the Russian Space Agency. Private spaceflight is a recent area, and the first Virgin Galactic flights are planned for 2009. With help from enthusiastic billionaires and various organizations, private space flight has a good chance at developing more rapidly than government spaceflight has.
Here's an interesting bit from the achievement stats. Apparently many players didn't actually finish the game. There are numerous achievements that you will get if you get to a certain point in the game. Let's see:
Acid Reflex: 81%. While you *may*, I believe, get through those levels without killing an acid antlion, it's extremely difficult. With 19% of players not getting this achievement, I'd bet that's at least 17% that never got far enough, and that's close to the beginning of the game.
Twofer: 63%, and you'll get this achievement when you progress far enough. Ditto for "Meet the Hunters", 61% - here it looks like a third of players didn't make it this far.
Gunishment and Quiet Mountain Getaway, 59% and 58%. Looks like those who make it past the first third or so of the game mostly continue to go forward. You can complete the game without getting Gunishment but it's tricky and is a glitch.
Finally: Defense of the Armament, at 48%. You get the achievement for winning the game's last (and truly spectacular) battle. So it'd seem like half the players who started the game didn't finish it, interesting.
The GUI shift could well be bigger (maybe it will with Win7). Anyone who's worked with Win95 knows to launch applications through the start menu and to move folders through drag&drop in explorer windows. I've only used Vista briefly but much of the basic GUI your average user is familiar with is still in place.
You can't compare the XP-Vista change to the 3.1-95 change. 3.1 didn't have a start menu and didn't have a close button in the upper-right corner of every app. People had to, quite literally, relearn how to start and close applications. So the basics haven't changed with Vista.
In medical research in particular, human tests are always needed. You got to test every drug on a human at some point. However, there is a big, big difference in the way it's done now. Tests aren't done on concentration camp inmates that are considered absolutely disposable. Tests are done on well-paid volunteers, with attempts to minimize the risks and if the results aren't good the test subject isn't left to die while they take the next one.
No way. It's great to get more understanding of the world and of humans. But that's exactly the pretext on which Mengele or Unit 731 operated. The logic was that, since these experiments contribute to our understanding, moral issues could be overlooked.
I seem to recall reading that it's something Hruschev wanted built. A bomb to destroy the human civilization if the Soviet Union was about to lose a war with the US.
It shouldn't. It's not something that is made by primitive techniques from low-tech materials. Clay pots are just that, condoms aren't. Unless, of course, you consider polyurithane a low-tech material.
Just like the sibling - yes, I would damn well complain if I "found out" - it's illegal here, too, to have CCTV recording on premises without having a clear sign to that end that is visible before you get recorded, such as on the entrance.
In five-or-so years, Windows 7 will already be out. Vista may never catch on that way. It could well be that most Windows users will stick with XP, as now, and then make the upgrade to 7 along with a fraction of Vista users - leaving Vista an OS that never became dominant because Win7 becomes dominant in about four years from now. Just like ME, really - some people upgraded to it from 98, but it spent its entire lifespan as a minority OS, and Win2K, not ME, replaced 98 as the dominant OS.
Like the TFA says, they save millions by using free software. Showing that your hardware is stable also brings you extra cash. Recruiting extra specialists and devoting extra resources to help what's a tiny part of your user base is not financially profitable, so they don't.
Even people aren't very good at recognizing suspicious behaviour. People who are anxious, sick, excited or waiting for someone who's very late all can, and do, get mistakenly flagged as "suspicious" by people.
Learn to recognize such behaviour before hoping to teach computers to do so.
Yep. Even before, Valve as good as admitted before that episodes aren't working as they expected. They wanted to put release them at 6-9 month intervals. Ep2 now comes at about 15 months after Ep1, which was itself delayed twice.
I don't mind the slow development. Episode One featured improved graphics and top-notch gameplay, was well worth it. I'd much rather have that than a mediocre episode after 6 months. But then again, maybe it'd be better to delay even further and create a full sequel. There's a trilogy of episodes for HL2. Ep3 won't be out earlier than late 2008. It could even be 2009 - at any rate, it'll be about 4 years after the release of Half-Life 2, a timeframe in which sequels can and are made.
By all means Valve, keep the quality and keep delaying releases if that's what the quality requires - just don't pretend to really have episodic gaming.
The vast majority of Russian schools has pirated software installed. They can't afford to buy licenses for MS products, and frankly the government doesn't view it as a high priority either, Russia still doesn't respect copyrights too much. At the same time, they've been actually cracking down on pirates lately (due to international pressure, in part). So I expect that going Linux in schools is by far the easiest way of going legal in Russia - licenses are just really not an option.
And keep in mind that MS actually dropped the idea of a complete GUI overhaul in Vista. Chances are they'll still do such an overhaul for Vienna.
I wonder how the users will respond. On the one hand, your average user takes a lot of time to adapt to a complete GUI change. On the other hand, sometimes these changes are really good (think Windows 3.1 -> Windows 95).
Doom 3, though, has been OpenGL from the start. So when they decided to do a Linux port, it wasn't that complicated. If they truly decide to develop Rage in DirectX, a port would be much harder, requiring lots of rewrites... not something you just spontaneously decide to do around shipping time.
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From personal experience:
.NET apps may actually run natively if you use Mono. I've found Wine .NET support to be so-so. DirectX is well-supported. DX8 is fully supported, DX9 is for the most part. I've played Half-Life 2 successfully with Wine, although for the Episodes, you need to turn HDR off - that's an example of a missing DX9 feature in Wine. Sometimes you may take a performance hit if software fallbacks are required.
- You can run a Windows installer, that's the normal way of installing software under Wine, in fact. Standard installers work fine most of the time.
- You need to override some DLLs for some application - fortunately it's easily done through wineconfig, and the Wine App DB is helpful in specifying settings that improve the compatibility for a certain app. Generally, installers that want to put stuff into c:\windows aren't a problem as Wine maintains a virtual C: drive.
- Some
- Photoshop runs well. In fact, Photoshop is one of the applications that Wine 1.0 is supposed to run perfectly.
- Performance is very application-specific. Sometimes they'll run at Windows performance levels or even better. HL2 performed as well as on Windows for me, while Civilization 4 performs somewhat worse, and Oblivion (though it's been a long time since I ran it) performed considerably worse. The small utility applications I often use Wine for run as well as on Windows.
As a user, one of the bigger problems I notice with Wine are regression bugs. It's not uncommon for an app to work well in one version, be very much broken in the next, and so on. It's something frequently experienced with Deus Ex - sometimes Wine runs it perfectly, sometimes it crashes after startup. Wine generally avoids implementing application-specific code to make certain applications work properly, which sometimes makes compatibility difficult.
The article explicitly says: "The new spot's size has not been announced. The Great Red Spot is roughly as wide as the entire Earth." And from the photo, the new one definitely isn't half the size of the Great Red Spot.
In fact, back then, it wouldn't even fully run on high-end hardware, you truly needed some bleeding edge stuff. There was compression on something (I can't remember what it was) that would be used for performance reasons unless 500+ MB of VRAM were available, which wasn't the case then. Today, Crysis is at least as resource-hungry, relatively speaking, as Doom3 was then, but it gets a lot of praise, and actually runs relatively worse in my experience.
And indeed, hard to see how Doom3 was a misstep. It received very good reviews and I think it's a success because it did what it tried to. There's the complaint of old-skool, repetitive gameplay... but that is largely what was promised. iD had intended the game to be a throwback to the old Doom style of play all along, and they did that. I know many disliked that in 2004 but you can hardly complain that they delivered something other than what was promised.
I would speculate now that Doom4 will also have rather old-skool gameplay. It'll probably be more modern than Doom3's but old-skool compared to whatever other shooters are out at the time. I would be extremely surprised - if intrigued - if iD decided to also try for some big gameplay innovation. At least we can be reasonably sure that the game will look absolutely amazing.
Absolutely, not preaching is the key. Don't start talking about modifying the source, freely studying it, etc. - that gives the impression that this software is for enthusiasts only. Always emphasize the practical advantages. That means, saying that the software is free as in beer and showcasing the funcionality. For someone who's using IE (in particular, IE6), install Firefox, show tabs, show DownthemAll, show Adblock, show CustomizeGoogle - they'll be sold.
Likewise, when trying to get "normal" users to install Ubuntu, tell them that they'll never need to install an antivirus or fight spyware. Yes, being free is important, but emphasize the functional advantages over the lack of cost or, say, the lack of activation - because the fact is that many people are happy with their versions where activation is, uh, "deactivated".
Wouldn't fly with hardware companies. They cooperate with MS and other software corporations, and the hardware manufacturers would be pretty pissed off if new software didn't require more processing power. That's the upgrade cycle for you. Look at WinXP, its hardware requirements amount to what is, by now, an ancient computer. The hardware companies can be satisfied knowing that Vista will force people to buy new hardware. Personally though, I would love a lite version of Windows. I don't use Windows much these days but I find it already has too much stuff I don't need (WinXP) and it's too fat for an OS I just need to run games and occasionally other apps. My Windows folder is now approaching the 4.5 GB mark - well smaller than Vista is but still not quite a "lite" OS.
Is there any information yet on whether Spirit and Opportunity might see anything if there actually is impact - such as maybe seeing the dust rise or even capturing a glimpse of the asteroid in the Martian atmosphere?
Too late in every sense. We've been transmitting our location for 50 years, and it's also too late to do anything even if someone is coming after us. If you assume a civilization that has the capability of interstellar travel, it can be taken for granted that their technology would be so far ahead that they'd be able to eliminate Earth's defenses and occupy it within hours. If there is a hostile civilization with sufficient technology out there, we're fucked anyway. Our hope would be that:
1. By the time it'd be possible to track us down with those signals, we'll reach a sufficient level of technology to defend our planet (or will have died off by then);
or
2. The hostile civilization would, for whatever reason, not consider an invasion of Earth to be worth the time and resources.
*sigh*
Yeah, I often think something like that when reading about manned spaceflight. Or when reading sci-fi. It's sad, we really haven't moved forward much in terms of space exploration. We've had space flight for 50 years. Compare the advances in information technology over the last 50 years to space advances. Heck, much of the sci-fi written 50 years ago seems to have very primitive information technology by modern standards.
I know that space is extremely expensive, but it's a new frontier for mankind. If NASA had the budget of the Pentagon, we'd probably be much further down the road by now. But governments aren't going to do that. There's not much value for them in space exploration, ultimately. Sending man to Mars won't increase your military power. Even if the planet had mountains of gold, colonization to gather it would eat up all the profits. It's not that profitable, economically or militarily, and that's what governments care about, sadly.
The future probably lies with private spaceflight and not organizations like NASA or the Russian Space Agency. Private spaceflight is a recent area, and the first Virgin Galactic flights are planned for 2009. With help from enthusiastic billionaires and various organizations, private space flight has a good chance at developing more rapidly than government spaceflight has.
Yeah... always good to see people getting their priorities right. How about trying to fight the problem of shops selling booze to kids?
And yes I know this is a study by a group studying media.
Here's an interesting bit from the achievement stats. Apparently many players didn't actually finish the game. There are numerous achievements that you will get if you get to a certain point in the game. Let's see:
Acid Reflex: 81%. While you *may*, I believe, get through those levels without killing an acid antlion, it's extremely difficult. With 19% of players not getting this achievement, I'd bet that's at least 17% that never got far enough, and that's close to the beginning of the game.
Twofer: 63%, and you'll get this achievement when you progress far enough. Ditto for "Meet the Hunters", 61% - here it looks like a third of players didn't make it this far.
Gunishment and Quiet Mountain Getaway, 59% and 58%. Looks like those who make it past the first third or so of the game mostly continue to go forward. You can complete the game without getting Gunishment but it's tricky and is a glitch.
Finally: Defense of the Armament, at 48%. You get the achievement for winning the game's last (and truly spectacular) battle. So it'd seem like half the players who started the game didn't finish it, interesting.
The GUI shift could well be bigger (maybe it will with Win7). Anyone who's worked with Win95 knows to launch applications through the start menu and to move folders through drag&drop in explorer windows. I've only used Vista briefly but much of the basic GUI your average user is familiar with is still in place.
You can't compare the XP-Vista change to the 3.1-95 change. 3.1 didn't have a start menu and didn't have a close button in the upper-right corner of every app. People had to, quite literally, relearn how to start and close applications. So the basics haven't changed with Vista.
In medical research in particular, human tests are always needed. You got to test every drug on a human at some point. However, there is a big, big difference in the way it's done now. Tests aren't done on concentration camp inmates that are considered absolutely disposable. Tests are done on well-paid volunteers, with attempts to minimize the risks and if the results aren't good the test subject isn't left to die while they take the next one.
No way. It's great to get more understanding of the world and of humans. But that's exactly the pretext on which Mengele or Unit 731 operated. The logic was that, since these experiments contribute to our understanding, moral issues could be overlooked.
So when will I be able to add my email to a "do not spam" list?
I seem to recall reading that it's something Hruschev wanted built. A bomb to destroy the human civilization if the Soviet Union was about to lose a war with the US.
It shouldn't. It's not something that is made by primitive techniques from low-tech materials. Clay pots are just that, condoms aren't. Unless, of course, you consider polyurithane a low-tech material.
Just like the sibling - yes, I would damn well complain if I "found out" - it's illegal here, too, to have CCTV recording on premises without having a clear sign to that end that is visible before you get recorded, such as on the entrance.
Is "techno-babel" when a thousand geeks all speak different languages?
In five-or-so years, Windows 7 will already be out. Vista may never catch on that way. It could well be that most Windows users will stick with XP, as now, and then make the upgrade to 7 along with a fraction of Vista users - leaving Vista an OS that never became dominant because Win7 becomes dominant in about four years from now. Just like ME, really - some people upgraded to it from 98, but it spent its entire lifespan as a minority OS, and Win2K, not ME, replaced 98 as the dominant OS.
Like the TFA says, they save millions by using free software. Showing that your hardware is stable also brings you extra cash. Recruiting extra specialists and devoting extra resources to help what's a tiny part of your user base is not financially profitable, so they don't.
Sometimes things are that simple.
Even people aren't very good at recognizing suspicious behaviour. People who are anxious, sick, excited or waiting for someone who's very late all can, and do, get mistakenly flagged as "suspicious" by people.
Learn to recognize such behaviour before hoping to teach computers to do so.
Yep. Even before, Valve as good as admitted before that episodes aren't working as they expected. They wanted to put release them at 6-9 month intervals. Ep2 now comes at about 15 months after Ep1, which was itself delayed twice.
I don't mind the slow development. Episode One featured improved graphics and top-notch gameplay, was well worth it. I'd much rather have that than a mediocre episode after 6 months. But then again, maybe it'd be better to delay even further and create a full sequel. There's a trilogy of episodes for HL2. Ep3 won't be out earlier than late 2008. It could even be 2009 - at any rate, it'll be about 4 years after the release of Half-Life 2, a timeframe in which sequels can and are made.
By all means Valve, keep the quality and keep delaying releases if that's what the quality requires - just don't pretend to really have episodic gaming.
The vast majority of Russian schools has pirated software installed. They can't afford to buy licenses for MS products, and frankly the government doesn't view it as a high priority either, Russia still doesn't respect copyrights too much. At the same time, they've been actually cracking down on pirates lately (due to international pressure, in part). So I expect that going Linux in schools is by far the easiest way of going legal in Russia - licenses are just really not an option.
And keep in mind that MS actually dropped the idea of a complete GUI overhaul in Vista. Chances are they'll still do such an overhaul for Vienna.
I wonder how the users will respond. On the one hand, your average user takes a lot of time to adapt to a complete GUI change. On the other hand, sometimes these changes are really good (think Windows 3.1 -> Windows 95).
Doom 3, though, has been OpenGL from the start. So when they decided to do a Linux port, it wasn't that complicated. If they truly decide to develop Rage in DirectX, a port would be much harder, requiring lots of rewrites... not something you just spontaneously decide to do around shipping time.