The BBC is for profit in the sense that any money it makes from sales gets ploughed back into programme making. I think they're trying to be more commercial overseas so that they don't have to keep asking for the TV licence to be hiked.
Aside from insisting you have XP and IE (Vista W2K or any other OS won't do nor any other browser), the thing doesn't even work when I install the proper software. I can see the listings but no download button. The thing is a mess with DRM wrapper files, horribly complicated, broken & proprietary HTML/JS driving it all, and a standalone downloader that automatically runs at startup with no obvious way to stop this behaviour. It really is an overly complicated and broken mess.
While I recognize their desire to protect their content, I wonder what the hell made them choose this pig's dinner of a solution.
They would be better off to deliver watermarked content in an open format such as H264 that plays just about anywhere. They could require users to register their TV licence in order to get the service, after which they can use it from any OS or browser within reasonable restrictions. Basically people should be able to do what they like with the content, short of sharing it. If they share it, use the watermark to look-up their address and send the heavies round.
I'm on a high horse for hating the game for a whole list of reasons that I cited? Well excuse me for having an opinion and stating it in a discussion thread.
I still don't get it. Uwe Boll films make almost no money at all, have no distribution deals and no TV rights since they are unwatchable crap. Tomb Raider might also be unwatchable crap but it was assured of all those things. All that applies to a Boll movie is the German loophole which gives you 10% tax back. So you sink 10 million into filming Postal and get 1 million back from the 10% tax rebate. What good is that if you subsequently lose your 10 million investment because the movie is a complete flop?
No, the point of ANY GAME is to be fun, involving or thought provoking. Postal 2 was none of those things. It was a badly designed piece of shit with atrocious loading times, crashes, arbitrary deaths, box-like and nausea inducing levels, wave upon wave of tedious enemies, juvenile humour and no redeeming features of any kind. It was a terrible game and I feel sullied to have even played it.
I never played Postal, but Postal 2 was a wretched, immature piece of crap masquerading as a game. It wasn't funny, it wasn't playable. It's only "redeeming" feature was its shock value and even that got tiresome with about 10 minutes of play.
Then why on earth do game companies grant him permission, knowing it'll suck? Those things are bad enough to destroy a franchise just by association.
The same reason that otherwise competent actors appear in his dreck - filthy lucre.
I expect the reasoning for both is that nobody is going to see the crap (which is only being made for some tax scam anyway), so why not take the money?
We've all heard how Boll is exploiting some tax loophole by watching expensive & unwatchable flops, but how do the investors make money? There must be a site that explains it in detail what is happening. And given that, why haven't the German government closed this loophole to but this jerk out of business?
StarOffice 8 might have received considerably more QA testing that OpenOffice and has some value added content, but two years of bug fixes and enhancements say OpenOffice is better.
The situation is a bit like Netscape was with Mozilla. If I recall, Netscape 6 was based off Mozilla 0.7 or 0.8. But by the time it had been tested and released, Mozilla was already several versions beyond. As long as you were prepared to trade off stability, you were better off sticking with the open source version because it was usually faster and had more features.
Re:Per-distro comparisons?
on
Hardening Linux
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· Score: 3, Insightful
I think a dist security roundup would be an awesome thing. Do a default install of Mandrive, RedHat, Ubuntu etc. and then run nmap, examine their password policy, see what "dangerous" apps are installed by default and so on. Dists should be named and shamed if they have a single port open.
Mono will still allow some programs written for.NET to run on other platforms, or a free platform on Windows.
Some being the operative world. Real world.NET applications are infested with Pinvokes, ActiveX and dependencies on ASP.NET (IIS) and MS SQL Server. Unless you are dealing with an open source.NET application (e.g. NUnit), the chances of the app running on Mono are close to zero. So while Mono is cool technology, it is essentially useless if you were expecting.NET code to just run on Linux.
This is in stark contrast to Java where the APIs are pretty rich and invoking native code has have never been encouraged. Most calls to JNI are in runtimes (e.g. to invoke native theme engines) and not the application level. Java code generally does run anywhere, often requiring no more than copying the.jar from one machine to the other. Hence the reason that GCJ & Kaffe have had better luck supporting Java than Mono has with.NET. That isn't to say they're perfect though - running Eclipse on GCJ brings a whole new definition to pain and suffering.
The "hostility" is simply that very few if any games sell out anywhere, let alone everywhere, or even justify a day 1 purchase. Preordering is simply a ploy for Gamestop and other stores to lock you into a sale, hang onto your deposit earning interest and in the case of no-shows to keep it altogether. Why not just order it online a few days before release if you want the game? Or wait a few days for the hype to clear and the reviews to appear to tell you if you're making a good buy?
Halo 3 is going to be stocked to the rafters in every single games store in the known universe. Preordering is a complete waste of time for any software title let alone that game. In the event that it sells out, MS will push a button and 100,000 copies will be stamped out in no time.
Preordering is understandable for hardware where supply and demand can get out of whack and take months to coincide, but software - no way.
No I don't hate it, and yes its completely unnecessary. I live in Ireland in a provincial town and I have absolutely no problem whatsoever getting any game from 2 or 3 outlets. If I can manage it I refuse to believe that anywhere in the US has problems. I can understand "preordering" from an online retailer and possibly bricks & mortar a few days before release if you absolutely must have it on the 1st day. But anymore is utterly absurd. Anyone who preorders Halo 3 a full six weeks before release is an idiot, sucked into the hype without having the slightest clue if the game is any good or not.
Fine, you want the game. Why not order 2-3 days in advance of the release date. Chances are high to total that you will get it on release day. And if it arrives a day or two late, so what?
In the highly unlikely event of the game selling out, MS could push a button and produce 100,000 more in a single day. I really don't understand why anyone pre-orders so far in advance. The game will available everywhere with no difficulty at all. Preorder is a total and utter waste of time.
I didn't buy a PS2 for the DVD player, but it was certainly an attractive feature for me. I spent 6 months in rented accommodation while contracting and I appreciated a single box which could do multiple things. Which is partly why I am so attracted to the PS3 - it is by far a more rounded system than the Wii and even tops the 360 in most respects. I despise having 2 or 3 devices attached to my TV when one is more than capable of replacing them. I think even the Wii should offer DVD playback and it's a wonder that it doesn't.
That's a pretty stupid remark. If you have a game spanning multiple consoles you are not going to waste time maintaining demo code across platforms when showing it on one will do.
In itself it does not suggest there are problems or bugs in the PS3 version and frankly only someone who hasn't a clue about development would even leap to such conclusions in the absence of evidence.
Yeah, wtf? It's almost as if they bought it to just play video games...
Some might, some (including myself) bought it as an all round multimedia console that even does Linux AND a games console.
I really don't get how anyone could not know that their PS3 does BluRay or HD. But if this survey is true then it sounds like a perfect sales opportunity for Sony - stuff the box with some colourful brochures that extol the virtues of Bravia TV sets & Blu Ray content. Hell, perhaps they should even bundle a Blu Ray disc with some content worth watching, e.g. some TV show episodes, pop music videos or even a movie.
In the various BSD flavors you can mount volumes "noatime", which is generally safe and does a pretty good job of keeping things moving. If you really need atime updates you can always remount the volume, but frankly not many people use it from what I've seen (maybe tail -f?).
I wish Unix (including Linux) would be more proactive about culling options which are not used by the majority and have such a detrimental effect. If the disk performance leaps by 10% by not using atime, it seems a no-brainer that noatime should be the default. If some app uses atime, it should be fixed or deprecated. There is no real excuse for dragging the whole system's performance for the sake of some crummy mail app.
Aye, I've heard the same; which, of course, seems just a tad silly, 'cause I can turn around and download the REAL DOSBox for free, and play without Steam... Or better yet, grab one of the COUNTLESS engine ports/updates for Wolf3d/Doom and play a BETTER version of the games...
Yes you can do that. So what's the problem? Pay Steam if you don't own the original and want hassle free installation, or do it yourself.
I expect DOSBox was already capable of running Quake, and any modifications by Steam are probably just in the configuration file to set its memory, Soundblaster, game image and so on.
Actually it's software assisted emulation since the GS part of the PS2's EE+GS chip still remains. Software is used to emulate the instruction set and the PS2 BIOS but the graphics still go through hardware.
Anyway, the emulation is okay. I don't have any complaints from using emulation in the EU PS3 for 5 months now. I agree that if you have some weird collection of titles you may be best to get the 60Gb model (or just keep your PS2), but the 80Gb model still has pretty good BC.
This 7GB meme seems to be simple anti-Microsoft bashing with no foundation in reality.
Really? Here are some leaked specs of the 360. But feel free to disagree. Here is one way to prove otherwise - find a torrent site hosting 360 games and locate a torrent containing an uncompressed iso that exceeds 7gb. I suggest Blue Dragon since that spans 3 discs making it fairly likely that disks 1 & 2 are close to full and therefore indicative of the maximum capacity.
Actually the PGR devs said the DVD wasn't enough for their plans IN THEIR OWN FORUM - "You won't see different times of day per city because this involves recreating all the textures again (one for day and one for night). Whilst this wasn't a problem for our dev team, it was a problem fitting all this data onto a single DVD. So we've worked around the problem by providing different lighting models per city. For example, Macau is always in the daytime, but if you play it during a storm everything looks darker and more foreboding. If you play during a blizzard then things are slightly tinged blue and everything seems more frozen. Of course, playing this track in sunshine will make everything appear bright and yellowy." This is an an unambiguous and obvious statement of the limitations of DVD-9.
Game developers are clearly feeling the pinch with DVD-9 and this is no surprise considering the size is increasingly inadequate.
Slashdot Mirror
The BBC is for profit in the sense that any money it makes from sales gets ploughed back into programme making. I think they're trying to be more commercial overseas so that they don't have to keep asking for the TV licence to be hiked.
While I recognize their desire to protect their content, I wonder what the hell made them choose this pig's dinner of a solution.
They would be better off to deliver watermarked content in an open format such as H264 that plays just about anywhere. They could require users to register their TV licence in order to get the service, after which they can use it from any OS or browser within reasonable restrictions. Basically people should be able to do what they like with the content, short of sharing it. If they share it, use the watermark to look-up their address and send the heavies round.
I'm on a high horse for hating the game for a whole list of reasons that I cited? Well excuse me for having an opinion and stating it in a discussion thread.
I still don't get it. Uwe Boll films make almost no money at all, have no distribution deals and no TV rights since they are unwatchable crap. Tomb Raider might also be unwatchable crap but it was assured of all those things. All that applies to a Boll movie is the German loophole which gives you 10% tax back. So you sink 10 million into filming Postal and get 1 million back from the 10% tax rebate. What good is that if you subsequently lose your 10 million investment because the movie is a complete flop?
No, the point of ANY GAME is to be fun, involving or thought provoking. Postal 2 was none of those things. It was a badly designed piece of shit with atrocious loading times, crashes, arbitrary deaths, box-like and nausea inducing levels, wave upon wave of tedious enemies, juvenile humour and no redeeming features of any kind. It was a terrible game and I feel sullied to have even played it.
I never played Postal, but Postal 2 was a wretched, immature piece of crap masquerading as a game. It wasn't funny, it wasn't playable. It's only "redeeming" feature was its shock value and even that got tiresome with about 10 minutes of play.
The same reason that otherwise competent actors appear in his dreck - filthy lucre.
I expect the reasoning for both is that nobody is going to see the crap (which is only being made for some tax scam anyway), so why not take the money?
We've all heard how Boll is exploiting some tax loophole by watching expensive & unwatchable flops, but how do the investors make money? There must be a site that explains it in detail what is happening. And given that, why haven't the German government closed this loophole to but this jerk out of business?
StarOffice 8 might have received considerably more QA testing that OpenOffice and has some value added content, but two years of bug fixes and enhancements say OpenOffice is better.
The situation is a bit like Netscape was with Mozilla. If I recall, Netscape 6 was based off Mozilla 0.7 or 0.8. But by the time it had been tested and released, Mozilla was already several versions beyond. As long as you were prepared to trade off stability, you were better off sticking with the open source version because it was usually faster and had more features.
I think a dist security roundup would be an awesome thing. Do a default install of Mandrive, RedHat, Ubuntu etc. and then run nmap, examine their password policy, see what "dangerous" apps are installed by default and so on. Dists should be named and shamed if they have a single port open.
Some being the operative world. Real world .NET applications are infested with Pinvokes, ActiveX and dependencies on ASP.NET (IIS) and MS SQL Server. Unless you are dealing with an open source .NET application (e.g. NUnit), the chances of the app running on Mono are close to zero. So while Mono is cool technology, it is essentially useless if you were expecting .NET code to just run on Linux.
This is in stark contrast to Java where the APIs are pretty rich and invoking native code has have never been encouraged. Most calls to JNI are in runtimes (e.g. to invoke native theme engines) and not the application level. Java code generally does run anywhere, often requiring no more than copying the .jar from one machine to the other. Hence the reason that GCJ & Kaffe have had better luck supporting Java than Mono has with .NET. That isn't to say they're perfect though - running Eclipse on GCJ brings a whole new definition to pain and suffering.
Halo 3 is going to be stocked to the rafters in every single games store in the known universe. Preordering is a complete waste of time for any software title let alone that game. In the event that it sells out, MS will push a button and 100,000 copies will be stamped out in no time.
Preordering is understandable for hardware where supply and demand can get out of whack and take months to coincide, but software - no way.
No I don't hate it, and yes its completely unnecessary. I live in Ireland in a provincial town and I have absolutely no problem whatsoever getting any game from 2 or 3 outlets. If I can manage it I refuse to believe that anywhere in the US has problems. I can understand "preordering" from an online retailer and possibly bricks & mortar a few days before release if you absolutely must have it on the 1st day. But anymore is utterly absurd. Anyone who preorders Halo 3 a full six weeks before release is an idiot, sucked into the hype without having the slightest clue if the game is any good or not.
Fine, you want the game. Why not order 2-3 days in advance of the release date. Chances are high to total that you will get it on release day. And if it arrives a day or two late, so what?
In the highly unlikely event of the game selling out, MS could push a button and produce 100,000 more in a single day. I really don't understand why anyone pre-orders so far in advance. The game will available everywhere with no difficulty at all. Preorder is a total and utter waste of time.
I didn't buy a PS2 for the DVD player, but it was certainly an attractive feature for me. I spent 6 months in rented accommodation while contracting and I appreciated a single box which could do multiple things. Which is partly why I am so attracted to the PS3 - it is by far a more rounded system than the Wii and even tops the 360 in most respects. I despise having 2 or 3 devices attached to my TV when one is more than capable of replacing them. I think even the Wii should offer DVD playback and it's a wonder that it doesn't.
In itself it does not suggest there are problems or bugs in the PS3 version and frankly only someone who hasn't a clue about development would even leap to such conclusions in the absence of evidence.
Some might, some (including myself) bought it as an all round multimedia console that even does Linux AND a games console.
I really don't get how anyone could not know that their PS3 does BluRay or HD. But if this survey is true then it sounds like a perfect sales opportunity for Sony - stuff the box with some colourful brochures that extol the virtues of Bravia TV sets & Blu Ray content. Hell, perhaps they should even bundle a Blu Ray disc with some content worth watching, e.g. some TV show episodes, pop music videos or even a movie.
That really means nothing in itself. It's probably easier to QA and maintain a single platform for demo purposes.
I wish Unix (including Linux) would be more proactive about culling options which are not used by the majority and have such a detrimental effect. If the disk performance leaps by 10% by not using atime, it seems a no-brainer that noatime should be the default. If some app uses atime, it should be fixed or deprecated. There is no real excuse for dragging the whole system's performance for the sake of some crummy mail app.
Yes you can do that. So what's the problem? Pay Steam if you don't own the original and want hassle free installation, or do it yourself.
I expect DOSBox was already capable of running Quake, and any modifications by Steam are probably just in the configuration file to set its memory, Soundblaster, game image and so on.
Anyway, the emulation is okay. I don't have any complaints from using emulation in the EU PS3 for 5 months now. I agree that if you have some weird collection of titles you may be best to get the 60Gb model (or just keep your PS2), but the 80Gb model still has pretty good BC.
Really? Here are some leaked specs of the 360. But feel free to disagree. Here is one way to prove otherwise - find a torrent site hosting 360 games and locate a torrent containing an uncompressed iso that exceeds 7gb. I suggest Blue Dragon since that spans 3 discs making it fairly likely that disks 1 & 2 are close to full and therefore indicative of the maximum capacity.
Game developers are clearly feeling the pinch with DVD-9 and this is no surprise considering the size is increasingly inadequate.