Sorry about the venom here, but I hate this reaction. Rockstar didn't deceive anyone about the content of the game. There is absolutely, positively no legitimate 1st party mechanism through which this content can be unlocked.
Hell, almost certainly the censor flag was added and the content blocked because the ESRB rejected it to begin with. What we're basically saying to game designers now is that they have to go through the game data of every game and make sure that nothing in INACTIVE data and code could possibly be construed as adult. That's just crazy. Think about what this could do to the ESRB content rating process. Are they they going to start requiring access to every individual piece of data on the disc and the associated tools to easily view said data regardless of its disposition in the game?
What blows me away even more is modding community. Good lord. The gall it takes to blame Rockstar just blows me away here. I wouldn't have blamed them either, but to suggest that Rockstar did something inappropriate or tried to set them up to do something inappropriate is f-ing ridiculous.
Others see the "no pictures of gay lovers" rule as applicable to all persons, gay or straight, and thus...
Come on, that's completely pointless argument. Within this context "gay lovers" is a synonym for wife or husband. You've moved the discrimination from one part of the sentence to the other. I invoke Catch-22.
As for "people with bad attitudes", it's par for the course to site a different reason for dismissal than the real reason. What discrimination is all about is the real reasoning, and I think that's pretty clear to everyone. Once again you've picked a technicality in the wording of the argument and completely failed to discuss the spirit.
above). Many sites use the hostname in the http query to determine which site to serve, in these cases you're out of luck. There may be DNS and web proxies that you can use but these are fleeting.
That's not completely true. You can just slap the domain you want in your hosts file with the appropriate ip and then just use the domain as normal.
Serious question. Why is evaluating a purchse based on the people involved in the product close minded?
I think it's the exact opposite, pointing out a person and insulting them probably isn't a good idea, but I haven't used a windows box at all since 2000 only because I think Microsoft is unethical. I don't see that as close minded at all. I see it as making an ethical purchase. Technical merit isn't the only thing in the universe.
Alright, I'd be the first to say that Enterprise, compaired to TNG is crap. But Enterprise compaired to much of the much WORSE crap out there is pretty darn stellar. We should be at least somewhat happy it's still around.
There's a lot of TV hours out there per-week. One of Enterprise isn't a plague on humanity, and it beats the living crap out of yet another our of reality TV.
Hey, I'm not even crazy and I'll bite. I'm not a peta member either, but I am a vegetarian.
The article's dumb - the losses assocaited with the turbines is much less than the deaths assocaited with other power sources. That's before persuing even the most simplistic of options to convince birds NOT to fly into the blades.
With that said, you bet I'd work harder to protect animals over people. People can protect themselves in most (reasonable) situations. The protections put in place for animals are created because animals are largely defenseless against whatever we decide to do to them. They can't even complain about it, much less lobby, fight, or vote. That means we have to work a lot harder to look after their interests then we do Joe or Jane.
And because I just can't let it go being the jerk that I am, a so called eco-conservationist would probably not advocate teraforming away a huge chunk of the natural ecosystems the planet has. Maybe you should whip out a dictionary and check out the word conservation again - it doesn't actually mean erradicate stuff you don't like by replacing it with stuff you happen to find pretty.
There's still 8x8 virtual desktops, and 32 layers. Customizable out the ass... and there's a project to bring the DR16 release up to recent gnome compatibility. look for 0.16.6-pre7
The Gui is gone to change window managers, but you can cheat and run "killall metacity && enlightenment &" at the prompt, then just save your session when you next exit X.
It doesn't work 100% with the newest gnome features, but I still find it much nicer than the box metacity builds around you.
For that matter, I suggest galeon over Epiphany. Since the split up of the galeon developers, and the start of Epiphany a lot of the features from galeon 1.2 are making there way back into 1.3.
The newer gnome releases seem to be great for average joe - but there are still options for those of us that like power over default EVERYTHING.
I think money and time are largest reasons games haven't been making big leaps forward. Right now I'm working as a rather bland game server developer professionally, and as a RPG game developer part-time at home, and I can tell you the only issues I'm constantly fighting are time and money. Not how to integrate creative game ideas, not optimization, not balance and not storyline. All the things that when focused on create a better game.
There's been a post already talking about greed in the commercial market, well that's partially true, but the simple fact is that a game is a huge piece of work, and only the best games make money for any extended period of time. That maks game development very difficult to be profitable with. Think of the difference between Office and a game isn't their inherit complexity - but the time that they can stay on the market and make money.
If you think that writing an application like Word or Excel is more complicated than writiing a 'good' game, you're wrong. In fact in many ways writing a good game can be more difficult because it requires SO MANY variables be perfectly in sync. Artists, developers, scripters... people work around bugs in Office, they return games that aren't fun. On top of which Office type things may be resold later with bug-fixes and inhancements whereas all of the assets in a game have to be redone, even if the engine doesn't.
And already considering all of these things, games only make between 50-70 bucks a sale, and the Office's of the world are making 3 to 5 hundred.
If you consider it for a moment, games are targetted (largely, not always) at the youngest market groups, the ones that are often most critical of gameplay, the shortest attention spans, and the least money. The last factor is especially noticable when you realize that no company ever mass purchased a game to standardize it on all their desktops.
Anyway, I could continue to rant about this for ages, but the truth is I want to get back to work. I'm already months behind on my personal game project, and there are months left on it.
Ok, no offence here... but if everyone had your opinions we'd still be using DOS and NES's. The current state of a situation is not a definition of the future state of a situation.
Or rather, because games are not widely available today doesn't mean they'll never be.
I really wish I had a nickle for every time someone said that real gamers only use Windows. It's one of the silliest ideas I've ever heard of. Obviously not every game company is going to drop everything and start porting games to a platform with only 1%,2%,5% (or whatever it is now) share of the desktop market. It's incremental. Everything is incremental in the market. As the market share increases for Linux desktops, so will software availablity. As that availability increases so will share.
I have no idea why people think that because it's a great idea to have Linux desktop machines, and Linux games on those machines, that magically the entire market should be converted over night. Nothing happens this way. Ever.
The move from Dos to Win3.x to Win95 was incremental too. When Win95 first came out you could have made the exact same argument about it vs. Dos. True many games would run under Win95 that were intended for Dos, but still in general the speed was better with a clean boot. So I heard the same things: real gamers use Dos, Windows is meant for business applications, not games... why would anyone want to use it for games?
It didn't even occur to me until I'd been looking at the screenshots for a bit, but in a completely independent act of nostalga I've been listening to the Doom & Doom II soundtrack all night, and it's still on now.
"Asking someone to give up these things is maybe asking a bit too much."
I'm sorry, but this kind of thing just makes me mad. I have to ask. Why? Why is it too much? Since when did movies and/or CD's become a necessity?
I suppose that this is going to come off aggressively, but it still needs to be said: history is full of people laying down their lives for what they believe. Now missing a pop-culture phenomenon movie is considered too much to preserve our rights and liberties.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not attacking you, per-say. This attitude is common in just about every category of day to day life and every time I hear it, it leaves the same taste in my mouth. People have lost touch with the reality of fighting for what they believe. I'm not talking about physical violence here, but half the population thinks that they wear a specifically coloured ribbon one day of the year and they are suddenly supporting the research of AIDS, or Cancer, or whatever.. No further commitment exists for them. The very idea of commiting their own time and energy to a task seems as alien as can be.
Anyway, I'm sorry about the rant, but the point I'm trying to get across is that people shouldn't fool themselves into thinking they have willpower or ethical integrity if the temptation of a loud shiny movie is enough to break them of their beliefs. It's just that simple.
A few people here are posting lists of good RPG's. I thought I'd add my 'me too' to the topic. The best RPG in years HAS to be Fallout and Fallout II.
Both games were huge, both games had good scripting and voice acting. Both games had acceptable graphics. In neither was the player left confused and directionless. The worlds had more than enough items/armor/weapons to keep the collector and rule-lawer busy. Player types could be widely diverse thanks to perks and primary skills. Virtually all problems could be solved in many different ways, usually a violent and non-violent way to take care of the slayer AND the scientist players. Karma had an actual affect and completely changed the way you had to interact with NPC's. Evil players were treated as evil characters, something missing from virtually all RPG's.
Even the subquests weren't always all available to all player types. Higher perception characters would realize when someone was upset vs. higher intelligence characters finding obscure information in computer archives.
I've played each literally 6 or 7 times to completion and I STILL find new subquests. And I'm anal about looking for them.
I honestly think the best RPG you're going to find with current technology / rule systems would be a mix of the psudo-realtime combat system and art from BOS and the storyline and game style of the original Fallouts.
Seriously though, why are most developers sticking with C at all? I know there are some portability issues with complicated templates and namespace mangling in C++, but I've never run into any problems from them porting code from Linux->Unix->Win32->Mac. What is the allure to sticking with C over C++?
I suppose most people think of C++ and they immediately think that everything has to be purist OOP development, but if you can forget that C++ is basically exactly what its title says, C plus extra flexability.
Besides, classes are effectively the same thing as having a pointer to a struct and passing it into procedures to do something with. A really common style in C programs. Except the passing around of the structure, and the new and delete's on them are all hidden in de/constructors and the 'this' pointer.
Ok, I'll buy into this 100%. I DID have these issues with Apache/PHP/MySQL for a while. I suppose it wasn't so bad because they're somewhat compartmentalized from the rest of the system. I can see that trying to build something like libgnome from source and using the rest of gnome as rpm's could be awful.
It is frustrating sometimes when, say, new versions of Mozilla come out and the standard rpm from redhat or ximian aren't released yet. It's tempting to compile it but I've found usually waiting is much less of a headache.
Generally, if I was (and I do, so I guess I should so 'when' I do, not if) setting someone up with a Linux install, I make sure Ximian's redcarpet is installed and I leave out any information about manual installs or the rpm command line.
I think that's the ideal scenario for your average Windows migrator.
This may seems stupid, or ignorent... or who the hell knows. But I've been using Red Hat since 5.2, and nothing else. Three generations of home computers and (luckily) two jobs both using Red Hat as a desktop machine. I have no idea what the heck rpm hell is supposed to be. I have never in the multi-years I've used rpms extensively experienced anything negative at all.
This may seem like a smart ass remark, but I really REALLY want to know what has been causing this opinion?
I guess the best solution would be for developers to come up with a dozen or so strategies and a system for switching/blending between them. Heck, maybe even have the developers run improvements and then upload them to all the users.
This does indeed seem like a good way to increase the challange of a game, but there are couple of downsides.
What's harder for one person is likely to be easier for someone else.
Eventually developers will stop working on unprofitable products
The whole process of an improving system is defeated if someone buys the game after many of the AI patches have already been released.
I don't pretend to know the best way to write it, but a learning system fixes all of the problems above.
By the way, this has already happened in a way, Soldier of Fortune Gold's final patch altered the AI and signifigently changed the overall gameplay.
The Patch is a fix for security flaws, something the DMCA has no problem with. (unless you happen to think breaking == fixed)
On the other hand, describing what those flaws are, and how they may be exploited IS in violation. So what you've said, "I doubt very much that the DMCA would apply to a description of a patch WITHOUT applying to the patch itself" is wrong in a couple of ways.
The presence of the patch actually weakens the legitimacy of the DMCA violation, not the other way around. The description, a laundry list of exploits, would be a much more valuable target. With that said, it's pretty clear no-one would even attempt to prosecute. The only reason this is being done as it is, is to call attention to a bad law.
As far as this being the wrong way, I think inconvinencing people and creating a dialog in the media is exactly the _right_ way to get the issue resolved.
There is such a thing as a generalization, which is what my post was.
It is 10.2, so maybe our definitions of snappy & sluggish are different. I find window resizes, scrolling, etc. sluggish. For that matter I find much of Gnome and KDE 'sluggish' (though, less so). As much as I hate to say it, I've never seen a snapper system (in terms of window manipulation anyway) then Win2k. That could have easily been underlying hardware too. It's just an impression.
As for samba, it was installed and handling the sharing fine. I was speaking specifically of the printer not being accessable with the configuration tools. Just to clarify, I have ZERO doubt that it can be made to work. The substance of the post was that users who get used to the high quality tools aren't going to know where to go if those tools don't cover the job. This is true of any system, but especially apparent in OSX in my opinion.
As for the "one"-ness as we're calling it, there's not much to argue here. A system where all of the code is available at all levels is going to be more configurable. That's not really something that can be argued. As to whether or not any given user will take advantage of that greater flexability is an entirely different debate.
Apparently the meat of my post wasn't really clear. I like OSX a lot. I really do. It's not for me, but I think it's the best solution possible for a great number of people.
My girlfriend just switched from WinXP to OSX with the new eMac they're selling. I switched to linux about three years ago from 98. I can happily say we have a Windows free apartment. I'm also the only linux desktop at work, much to the chagrin of my programming co-workers.:)
Having used Linux (Redhat, now 7.2) for long enough now I think I have a pretty good grip on things, and it can all be pretty smooth going after it gets up to speed, but my girlfriend's conversion was dead simple. It took her one afternoon to copy her files over and get all the software she needed installed, the usual suspects, Photoshop, Flash, Dreamweaver, Mozilla, etc.
She's actually in the other room now writing an essay for class with appleworks.
I have to say I'm a little jealous of how easy it was for her to start with it. I found myself saying the same thing over and over again, "Jeeze, that's the way software should work". I even have to say that it made me a little itch to convert myself.
With all that said, the negative is pretty bad too. Aqua is nice to look at, but it's sluggish. No matter what people tell you, it's sluggish. Resizing windows, moving things around, accessing the dock while other things are happenning, all sluggish. If you're an impatient bounce-between-six-apps-at-once kind of person it probably isn't for you. The other big thing I noticed is that while the tools for setting up the system are great, if they don't work you're in for a world of hurt.
A good example is trying to get access to a shared printer off of her old computer. The printer adding tool (whatever it's called) has a dropdown, which doesn't include smb shared printers. Since it's not in the dropdown, there is just about zero indication how to proceed. I know OSX uses samba for its interaction with windows shares, and I know that samba can use that shared printer... I have no idea how to sent that up on her system. And with the HEAVY emphasis placed on the UI, there is as much influance placed on NOT mucking with the system directly.
Anyway, I'd say if you want to just 'use' a computer, OSX is the way to go. If you're a power-user who want's to be 'one' with their machine, it probably isn't the route to go.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry about the venom here, but I hate this reaction. Rockstar didn't deceive anyone about the content of the game. There is absolutely, positively no legitimate 1st party mechanism through which this content can be unlocked.
Hell, almost certainly the censor flag was added and the content blocked because the ESRB rejected it to begin with. What we're basically saying to game designers now is that they have to go through the game data of every game and make sure that nothing in INACTIVE data and code could possibly be construed as adult. That's just crazy. Think about what this could do to the ESRB content rating process. Are they they going to start requiring access to every individual piece of data on the disc and the associated tools to easily view said data regardless of its disposition in the game?
What blows me away even more is modding community. Good lord. The gall it takes to blame Rockstar just blows me away here. I wouldn't have blamed them either, but to suggest that Rockstar did something inappropriate or tried to set them up to do something inappropriate is f-ing ridiculous.
Others see the "no pictures of gay lovers" rule as applicable to all persons, gay or straight, and thus...
Come on, that's completely pointless argument. Within this context "gay lovers" is a synonym for wife or husband. You've moved the discrimination from one part of the sentence to the other. I invoke Catch-22.
As for "people with bad attitudes", it's par for the course to site a different reason for dismissal than the real reason. What discrimination is all about is the real reasoning, and I think that's pretty clear to everyone. Once again you've picked a technicality in the wording of the argument and completely failed to discuss the spirit.
above). Many sites use the hostname in the http query to determine which site to serve, in these cases you're out of luck. There may be DNS and web proxies that you can use but these are fleeting.
That's not completely true. You can just slap the domain you want in your hosts file with the appropriate ip and then just use the domain as normal.
Serious question. Why is evaluating a purchse based on the people involved in the product close minded?
I think it's the exact opposite, pointing out a person and insulting them probably isn't a good idea, but I haven't used a windows box at all since 2000 only because I think Microsoft is unethical. I don't see that as close minded at all. I see it as making an ethical purchase. Technical merit isn't the only thing in the universe.
Alright, I'd be the first to say that Enterprise, compaired to TNG is crap. But Enterprise compaired to much of the much WORSE crap out there is pretty darn stellar. We should be at least somewhat happy it's still around.
There's a lot of TV hours out there per-week. One of Enterprise isn't a plague on humanity, and it beats the living crap out of yet another our of reality TV.
Hey, I'm not even crazy and I'll bite. I'm not a peta member either, but I am a vegetarian.
The article's dumb - the losses assocaited with the turbines is much less than the deaths assocaited with other power sources. That's before persuing even the most simplistic of options to convince birds NOT to fly into the blades.
With that said, you bet I'd work harder to protect animals over people. People can protect themselves in most (reasonable) situations. The protections put in place for animals are created because animals are largely defenseless against whatever we decide to do to them. They can't even complain about it, much less lobby, fight, or vote. That means we have to work a lot harder to look after their interests then we do Joe or Jane.
And because I just can't let it go being the jerk that I am, a so called eco-conservationist would probably not advocate teraforming away a huge chunk of the natural ecosystems the planet has. Maybe you should whip out a dictionary and check out the word conservation again - it doesn't actually mean erradicate stuff you don't like by replacing it with stuff you happen to find pretty.
Use enlightenment.
There's still 8x8 virtual desktops, and 32 layers. Customizable out the ass... and there's a project to bring the DR16 release up to recent gnome compatibility. look for 0.16.6-pre7
The Gui is gone to change window managers, but you can cheat and run "killall metacity && enlightenment &" at the prompt, then just save your session when you next exit X.
It doesn't work 100% with the newest gnome features, but I still find it much nicer than the box metacity builds around you.
For that matter, I suggest galeon over Epiphany. Since the split up of the galeon developers, and the start of Epiphany a lot of the features from galeon 1.2 are making there way back into 1.3.
The newer gnome releases seem to be great for average joe - but there are still options for those of us that like power over default EVERYTHING.
... but it's worth saying again.
I think money and time are largest reasons games haven't been making big leaps forward. Right now I'm working as a rather bland game server developer professionally, and as a RPG game developer part-time at home, and I can tell you the only issues I'm constantly fighting are time and money. Not how to integrate creative game ideas, not optimization, not balance and not storyline. All the things that when focused on create a better game.
There's been a post already talking about greed in the commercial market, well that's partially true, but the simple fact is that a game is a huge piece of work, and only the best games make money for any extended period of time. That maks game development very difficult to be profitable with. Think of the difference between Office and a game isn't their inherit complexity - but the time that they can stay on the market and make money.
If you think that writing an application like Word or Excel is more complicated than writiing a 'good' game, you're wrong. In fact in many ways writing a good game can be more difficult because it requires SO MANY variables be perfectly in sync. Artists, developers, scripters... people work around bugs in Office, they return games that aren't fun. On top of which Office type things may be resold later with bug-fixes and inhancements whereas all of the assets in a game have to be redone, even if the engine doesn't.
And already considering all of these things, games only make between 50-70 bucks a sale, and the Office's of the world are making 3 to 5 hundred.
If you consider it for a moment, games are targetted (largely, not always) at the youngest market groups, the ones that are often most critical of gameplay, the shortest attention spans, and the least money. The last factor is especially noticable when you realize that no company ever mass purchased a game to standardize it on all their desktops.
Anyway, I could continue to rant about this for ages, but the truth is I want to get back to work. I'm already months behind on my personal game project, and there are months left on it.
Except that with all scenes he stinks up, the movie would be about 15 minutes long.
Ok, no offence here... but if everyone had your opinions we'd still be using DOS and NES's. The current state of a situation is not a definition of the future state of a situation.
Or rather, because games are not widely available today doesn't mean they'll never be.
I really wish I had a nickle for every time someone said that real gamers only use Windows. It's one of the silliest ideas I've ever heard of. Obviously not every game company is going to drop everything and start porting games to a platform with only 1%,2%,5% (or whatever it is now) share of the desktop market. It's incremental. Everything is incremental in the market. As the market share increases for Linux desktops, so will software availablity. As that availability increases so will share.
I have no idea why people think that because it's a great idea to have Linux desktop machines, and Linux games on those machines, that magically the entire market should be converted over night. Nothing happens this way. Ever.
The move from Dos to Win3.x to Win95 was incremental too. When Win95 first came out you could have made the exact same argument about it vs. Dos. True many games would run under Win95 that were intended for Dos, but still in general the speed was better with a clean boot. So I heard the same things: real gamers use Dos, Windows is meant for business applications, not games... why would anyone want to use it for games?
Well, here we are, aren't we?
It didn't even occur to me until I'd been looking at the screenshots for a bit, but in a completely independent act of nostalga I've been listening to the Doom & Doom II soundtrack all night, and it's still on now.
Weird.
Just plain weird.
And scary.
"Asking someone to give up these things is maybe asking a bit too much."
I'm sorry, but this kind of thing just makes me mad. I have to ask. Why? Why is it too much? Since when did movies and/or CD's become a necessity?
I suppose that this is going to come off aggressively, but it still needs to be said: history is full of people laying down their lives for what they believe. Now missing a pop-culture phenomenon movie is considered too much to preserve our rights and liberties.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not attacking you, per-say. This attitude is common in just about every category of day to day life and every time I hear it, it leaves the same taste in my mouth. People have lost touch with the reality of fighting for what they believe. I'm not talking about physical violence here, but half the population thinks that they wear a specifically coloured ribbon one day of the year and they are suddenly supporting the research of AIDS, or Cancer, or whatever.. No further commitment exists for them. The very idea of commiting their own time and energy to a task seems as alien as can be.
Anyway, I'm sorry about the rant, but the point I'm trying to get across is that people shouldn't fool themselves into thinking they have willpower or ethical integrity if the temptation of a loud shiny movie is enough to break them of their beliefs. It's just that simple.
I've never heard of it. Thanks for the tip, I'll have to check it out.
A few people here are posting lists of good RPG's. I thought I'd add my 'me too' to the topic. The best RPG in years HAS to be Fallout and Fallout II.
Both games were huge, both games had good scripting and voice acting. Both games had acceptable graphics. In neither was the player left confused and directionless. The worlds had more than enough items/armor/weapons to keep the collector and rule-lawer busy. Player types could be widely diverse thanks to perks and primary skills. Virtually all problems could be solved in many different ways, usually a violent and non-violent way to take care of the slayer AND the scientist players. Karma had an actual affect and completely changed the way you had to interact with NPC's. Evil players were treated as evil characters, something missing from virtually all RPG's.
Even the subquests weren't always all available to all player types. Higher perception characters would realize when someone was upset vs. higher intelligence characters finding obscure information in computer archives.
I've played each literally 6 or 7 times to completion and I STILL find new subquests. And I'm anal about looking for them.
I honestly think the best RPG you're going to find with current technology / rule systems would be a mix of the psudo-realtime combat system and art from BOS and the storyline and game style of the original Fallouts.
Use C++, Auto pointers and STL.
Seriously though, why are most developers sticking with C at all? I know there are some portability issues with complicated templates and namespace mangling in C++, but I've never run into any problems from them porting code from Linux->Unix->Win32->Mac. What is the allure to sticking with C over C++?
I suppose most people think of C++ and they immediately think that everything has to be purist OOP development, but if you can forget that C++ is basically exactly what its title says, C plus extra flexability.
Besides, classes are effectively the same thing as having a pointer to a struct and passing it into procedures to do something with. A really common style in C programs. Except the passing around of the structure, and the new and delete's on them are all hidden in de/constructors and the 'this' pointer.
For a more amusing and accurate description of their opinion on ad-blocking browsers, check out this informative access denied page.
Blocked by Anti-Leech.com
Ok, I'll buy into this 100%. I DID have these issues with Apache/PHP/MySQL for a while. I suppose it wasn't so bad because they're somewhat compartmentalized from the rest of the system. I can see that trying to build something like libgnome from source and using the rest of gnome as rpm's could be awful.
It is frustrating sometimes when, say, new versions of Mozilla come out and the standard rpm from redhat or ximian aren't released yet. It's tempting to compile it but I've found usually waiting is much less of a headache.
Generally, if I was (and I do, so I guess I should so 'when' I do, not if) setting someone up with a Linux install, I make sure Ximian's redcarpet is installed and I leave out any information about manual installs or the rpm command line.
I think that's the ideal scenario for your average Windows migrator.
This may seems stupid, or ignorent... or who the hell knows. But I've been using Red Hat since 5.2, and nothing else. Three generations of home computers and (luckily) two jobs both using Red Hat as a desktop machine. I have no idea what the heck rpm hell is supposed to be. I have never in the multi-years I've used rpms extensively experienced anything negative at all.
This may seem like a smart ass remark, but I really REALLY want to know what has been causing this opinion?
Someone? Please?
God damn this is hammer on the head of the nail.
I really want to add something intelligent and creative to this parent to make this message seem less like a "me too", but he really nailed this one.
This does indeed seem like a good way to increase the challange of a game, but there are couple of downsides.
- What's harder for one person is likely to be easier for someone else.
- Eventually developers will stop working on unprofitable products
- The whole process of an improving system is defeated if someone buys the game after many of the AI patches have already been released.
I don't pretend to know the best way to write it, but a learning system fixes all of the problems above.By the way, this has already happened in a way, Soldier of Fortune Gold's final patch altered the AI and signifigently changed the overall gameplay.
Ximian Red Carpet does this as well as the Redhat network.
Nice pretty GUI that tells you all the patches you require, and lets you install/remove software from a checklist.
Given there's been more than one or two posts about how this is a really good idea, I think it's time to make something absolutely clear:
Do not, for the love of God, do this to your computer
I mean, people. Pay attention! It's in the humor section. The guy is 'removing nasty noise producting chips' with a dull pair of sissors.
Sanity now!
They aren't serious!
The Patch is a fix for security flaws, something the DMCA has no problem with. (unless you happen to think breaking == fixed)
On the other hand, describing what those flaws are, and how they may be exploited IS in violation. So what you've said, "I doubt very much that the DMCA would apply to a description of a patch WITHOUT applying to the patch itself" is wrong in a couple of ways.
The presence of the patch actually weakens the legitimacy of the DMCA violation, not the other way around. The description, a laundry list of exploits, would be a much more valuable target. With that said, it's pretty clear no-one would even attempt to prosecute. The only reason this is being done as it is, is to call attention to a bad law.
As far as this being the wrong way, I think inconvinencing people and creating a dialog in the media is exactly the _right_ way to get the issue resolved.
There is such a thing as a generalization, which is what my post was.
It is 10.2, so maybe our definitions of snappy & sluggish are different. I find window resizes, scrolling, etc. sluggish. For that matter I find much of Gnome and KDE 'sluggish' (though, less so). As much as I hate to say it, I've never seen a snapper system (in terms of window manipulation anyway) then Win2k. That could have easily been underlying hardware too. It's just an impression.
As for samba, it was installed and handling the sharing fine. I was speaking specifically of the printer not being accessable with the configuration tools. Just to clarify, I have ZERO doubt that it can be made to work. The substance of the post was that users who get used to the high quality tools aren't going to know where to go if those tools don't cover the job. This is true of any system, but especially apparent in OSX in my opinion.
As for the "one"-ness as we're calling it, there's not much to argue here. A system where all of the code is available at all levels is going to be more configurable. That's not really something that can be argued. As to whether or not any given user will take advantage of that greater flexability is an entirely different debate.
Apparently the meat of my post wasn't really clear. I like OSX a lot. I really do. It's not for me, but I think it's the best solution possible for a great number of people.
My girlfriend just switched from WinXP to OSX with the new eMac they're selling. I switched to linux about three years ago from 98. I can happily say we have a Windows free apartment. I'm also the only linux desktop at work, much to the chagrin of my programming co-workers. :)
Having used Linux (Redhat, now 7.2) for long enough now I think I have a pretty good grip on things, and it can all be pretty smooth going after it gets up to speed, but my girlfriend's conversion was dead simple. It took her one afternoon to copy her files over and get all the software she needed installed, the usual suspects, Photoshop, Flash, Dreamweaver, Mozilla, etc.
She's actually in the other room now writing an essay for class with appleworks.
I have to say I'm a little jealous of how easy it was for her to start with it. I found myself saying the same thing over and over again, "Jeeze, that's the way software should work". I even have to say that it made me a little itch to convert myself.
With all that said, the negative is pretty bad too. Aqua is nice to look at, but it's sluggish. No matter what people tell you, it's sluggish. Resizing windows, moving things around, accessing the dock while other things are happenning, all sluggish. If you're an impatient bounce-between-six-apps-at-once kind of person it probably isn't for you. The other big thing I noticed is that while the tools for setting up the system are great, if they don't work you're in for a world of hurt.
A good example is trying to get access to a shared printer off of her old computer. The printer adding tool (whatever it's called) has a dropdown, which doesn't include smb shared printers. Since it's not in the dropdown, there is just about zero indication how to proceed. I know OSX uses samba for its interaction with windows shares, and I know that samba can use that shared printer... I have no idea how to sent that up on her system. And with the HEAVY emphasis placed on the UI, there is as much influance placed on NOT mucking with the system directly.
Anyway, I'd say if you want to just 'use' a computer, OSX is the way to go. If you're a power-user who want's to be 'one' with their machine, it probably isn't the route to go.