The Wine team should be applauded for trying to make EQ work but EQs time has been and gone. I played EQ for nearly 2 1/2 years and I have to say that in the beginning it was fun. But slowly (perhaps too slowly) it began to dawn on me that the game is actually incredibly, tediously boring. I bit the bullet and quit and I'm glad I did.
Starting a new character and levelling to about 15 is quite fun. But after that it is dull and repetitive. There is no sense of accomplishment or variety to the game, you go up a level, get a few new skills, kill different creatures, you twink, you camp (a lot), you craft, you sit around,/auc twink gear and you repeat over and over. Perhaps with new levels you get to visit different places and watch your experience bar slowly crawl through to the next level. Nothing you do affects the environment, the physics model sucks (creatures running through walls etc.) and the game engine is so grossly inefficient that its impossible to play in some zones. The user interface is also plain awful. Expansion packs helped a bit, but some such as the Shadows of Luclin so utterly fucked up performance (even if you didn't buy it) and a subscription rise were the final nail in the coffin. It was clear Verant were more interested in putting in new zones and ubergear than fixing fundamental and obvious problems in the game.
I'm not saying other MMPORPGs of the same generation are much better either. I tried Asherons Call (excruciatingly boring and crap graphics) and Dark Age of Camelot (beautiful UI & scenery but anally retentive looting and other misfeatures).
Still I guess that Wine would benefit from supporting EQ if only because whatever had to be implemented to support it will benefit other games and apps too. I recall that Wine couldn't do CreateProcess calls properly and perhaps that is what has changed to support the EQ launching mechanism.
That presumes this device is capable of supporting simultaneous access doesn't it? I find it hard to believe that Bluetooth let alone this device would support such a thing. Perhaps a glance at the Bluetooth spec would say, but given its extremely limited range and purpose I doubt it. Even if five users could be supported they'd all have to be huddled around this one device and the contention would be horrible.
If they want to do a network, why not use 802.11b? It would be much, much faster and more importantly is designed for such use. File sharing would be no more difficult than it is over normal ethernet.
Someone explain the point of this to me. What is so difficult about attaching a wire from your computer to a harddrive and getting better performance and being half the price?
I mean what is the point? I could perhaps imagine some highly convoluted situation where it might be useful but it just seems like a solution where no problem exists. Besides, this kind of thing would be utterly useless on a plane where any kind of wireless devices would have to be switched off anyway.
The answer is to buy a more fuel efficient vehicle. Alternatively, switch to DERV or a hybrid. The government offers subsidies for both.
At the end of the day, Europe has the sense to see that reliance on oil is a bad thing which is why they're making more than token efforts to change.
Part of the problem with human beings is that they are fundamentally selfish and lazy. If a government sets up a voluntary recycling scheme for paper, cans or bottles I bet nearly everyone would still throw their rubbish in the bin! If supermarkets sell thicker reusable carrier bags for a few pence, most people will still take the 'free' thinner ones. If there are two cars of similar price, most people will buy the one that looks nicer even if it has shittier mileage. People are selfish and lazy.
In such circumstances, a government has a duty to do what is best for everyone, even if in the short term it looks like they're a bunch of swingeing bastards. Pollution, refuse, energy consumption are all serious long term problems and the simple fact is people *won't* change unless you force them to. You can sermonise until you're blue in the face, but it won't work. How many people wore seatbelts (or car companies that even fitted them) until governments mandated car safety? Some issues have to be forced even in a free economy. Taxation can be extremely effective way to institute change.
Here in Ireland we get charged 15 cents for a plastic carrier bag and now everyone uses reusable bags. It stops something like 300 million bags being tossed into landfill every year. Places like Denmark, Germany charge a deposit in the price of glass and plastic bottles with the result that people not return their glass and plastic rather than toss it out.
Where perhaps the UK is going wrong is they're using the stick in the wrong way. Taxing petrol is an excellent way to annoy people, but perhaps taxing engine size, or petrol tank size would be better. Most people don't need a 2.0 liter engine - a 1.4 is more than adequate, so tax the people who choose something which is overly inefficient for their circumstances. The same with petrol tanks - tax the cars with bigger tanks because they will typically consume more fuel. Simultaneously subsidize the more efficient vehicles, especially those such as hybrids which get dramatically better performance than petrol engines.
Hint: Encryption systems only become revolutionary after they've been in the public domain for 5-10 years. Even then, they won't get used if there's a patent attached.
Lot's of crypto algorithms have a patent attached unfortunately. The RSA algorithm being the most famous, with all the fun issues that entailed.
Sorry but this isn't true. My Palm is an enormously useful thing to have around. I wouldn't make half the meetings and other deadlines that I must remember each week if the Palm weren't there to tell me. It also acts as an address book, notebook, alarm clock and more besides.
It was worth every penny to me and I don't see them as a fad at all. Clearly lots of people think the same way considering that there are more PDAs than ever on the market to choose from.
Personally I think PDAs will eventually 'converge' with mobile phones, mp3 players etc. but until the battery life and form factor of such hybrid devices (or PocketPC devices for that matter) comes anywhere close to my Palm, I'll stick with what I have.
It's not so much optimized for speed as trimmed of all unecessary bits. It still uses XUL and huge chunks of it have been ripped off wholesale, but without half the DLLs, half the typelibs and half the chrome and overlays of Mozilla it runs that much faster.
Once Mozilla & Phoenix are started and running side by side I don't see much difference. Phoenix is somewhat faster but I appreciate the richness of Mozilla, which does my mail/news/browsing from a single app.
There's room in the world for both of course, and Phoenix might find a use in situations where people don't need a mail/news client or some of the more complex features in Mozilla.
As I said, it *doesn't* just consist of GNU software. There are dozens of open source licences in the typical distro and many of the most useful apps are in fact not GNU at all.
As for calling why it should be just called Linux... it is for the same reason that Windows is called Windows, Unix is Unix, FreeBSD is FreeBSD and Mac OS is Mac OS irrespective of what other software is installed. Everyone except the FSF seems to manage fine with this concept.
I like many others have contributed thousands of hours and tens of thousands of lines of code to open source which is not FSF and not even GPL. Why should the FSF demand it be called GNU/Linux when *other* work is there too?
And it's not some unimportant parts we're talking about here. Massive chunks of Linux which make it a useful operating system are non-FSF and often non-GPL, this list would include the kernel, MySQL, Perl, Python, OpenSSH, Apache, XFree86, Mozilla, Ghostscript and more. Some might *use* the GPL but the copyright most definitely isn't FSF. I think it is utterly indefensible to tar the lot as GNU/Linux.
No one is denying GNU/FSF authors their credit or recognition - they should get it in the same way as the rest of us. There is no need for this outrageous and selfish glory grabbing. If RMS wants a wholly and holy GNU operating system he should pull his finger out of his arse and ship HURD. Until he'll have to make to with Linux which is a blend of all kind of copyrights and licences.
I'm not saying HURD failed because of the politics but it put a lot of people off. Let's face it HURD is RMS' baby and prospective volunteers must have sensed the kind the thing they'd be letting themselves in for. Even if that were not so, I think HURD looked extremely unattractive next to Linux.
As for gcc, I think the project leadership and necessity gave the drive for its development. Even so, gcc has been stuck in the mud for a long time too. I'm looking forward to trying 3.2 which is long overdue.
Mozilla certainly took a time to appear but I wouldn't call it a dismal failure by any measure. Certainly users are still small by IE standards, but remind yourself that Mozilla/NS7.0 is now the defacto browser on all new Linux platforms and Gecko is being used in numerous environments (Chimera, Galeon, numerous STBs etc.) and AOL software too. For example AOL of OS X is based on Gecko, so is Compuserve and probably AOL for Windows will follow at some point too. So already there are millions of users and many more to come.
When that last one happens, the shit will hit the fan for Microsoft:) It's only a matter of time.
The thing is that HURD had a big head start over Linux. The fact that it never attracted developers is IMHO in no small part to the perceived political nature of the FSF and RMS.
Development is meant to be fun and Linus clearly put that and pragmatism ahead of the stupid pigheaded politics that the FSF (& RMS) is associated with.
Ironically, HURD was around even before Linux was started. I suspect the reason Linux took off and HURD didn't has a lot to do with the leadership and goals for each project. Linus realizing that if you write a practical kernel 'they will come' and so they did while HURD well, just languished and wallowed in microkernel correctness hell.
Ten years later and HURD still isn't practical (what's the big deal I wonder) while Linux can drive anything from palm devices to super computers and mainframes.
It's no wonder RMS is so bitter and twisted these days:)
Blanket statements like that are unsupported by the evidence. The field is littered with supposedly "unbreakable" systems where all it took was a gummy finger cast or some other simple hack to fool it.
I think the reasoning goes (putting aside licence issues) that if gpg lives in the same process space as the app then if the app can be exploited then so can gpg or vice versa.
Fair enough but consider the alternative which is to invoke the command line gpg and read the results from a pipe. If the app is exploited then it can run gpg any way it please and furthermore all those command-line args, pipes and parsing provides lots of extra points of attacks for the hacker to exploit the app in the first place. So there is no significant reason to do it this way, it just makes stuff run slower and adds a big layer of complexity.
Have you read the FAQ on this point [gnupg.org]? Apparently many people have been able to get valuable work done with GnuPG as a CLI app, so saying it "desperately" needs to be an LGPL-covered library doesn't follow.
Yes it does follow (which I'll explain below), but their brief reasons are not doing a lib are pretty weak. Requiring each client to write a shim that constructs a command line argument, executes the gpg command and parses the data through a pipe is not going to makes things any safer. Writing such a shim and safe is hard. There are just so many extra potential extra points of attack that any benefit of running gpg in a seperate process are totally lost. Not only that, but stuff runs much slower which might not matter.
This makes it seem like your objection has to do with the license chosen, not whether the program is an executable or a library. And yet I see no argument supporting your desire to switch the license to the Lesser GNU GPL.
I could live with a shim if it was one hardened by countless clients hammering on it and developers. Unfortunately gpgme won't get that because it is GPL. What the hell is the point of a GPL library? It might be great for GNU zealots but even other open source projects such as Apache can't link to it.
Widespread adoption needs an LGPL library. It is that simple. I like GPG and I want to see it used pervasively but that's not going to happen while it's threatening to infect everything it touches.
GPG only runs from the command line meaning apps that wish to call it have to construct a command-line, invoke gpg and parse the results in a pipe. It desperately needs a LGPL lib to relieve this burden. The only lib so far is gpgme which is GPL making it pretty useless for this task.
Old versions are referred to as GNU Ghostscript to distinguish themselves from the AFPL Ghostscript version but the copyright remains with the author, not the FSF. Therefore what I said is true.
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Starting a new character and levelling to about 15 is quite fun. But after that it is dull and repetitive. There is no sense of accomplishment or variety to the game, you go up a level, get a few new skills, kill different creatures, you twink, you camp (a lot), you craft, you sit around,
I'm not saying other MMPORPGs of the same generation are much better either. I tried Asherons Call (excruciatingly boring and crap graphics) and Dark Age of Camelot (beautiful UI & scenery but anally retentive looting and other misfeatures).
Still I guess that Wine would benefit from supporting EQ if only because whatever had to be implemented to support it will benefit other games and apps too. I recall that Wine couldn't do CreateProcess calls properly and perhaps that is what has changed to support the EQ launching mechanism.
If they want to do a network, why not use 802.11b? It would be much, much faster and more importantly is designed for such use. File sharing would be no more difficult than it is over normal ethernet.
I mean what is the point? I could perhaps imagine some highly convoluted situation where it might be useful but it just seems like a solution where no problem exists. Besides, this kind of thing would be utterly useless on a plane where any kind of wireless devices would have to be switched off anyway.
At the end of the day, Europe has the sense to see that reliance on oil is a bad thing which is why they're making more than token efforts to change.
Part of the problem with human beings is that they are fundamentally selfish and lazy. If a government sets up a voluntary recycling scheme for paper, cans or bottles I bet nearly everyone would still throw their rubbish in the bin! If supermarkets sell thicker reusable carrier bags for a few pence, most people will still take the 'free' thinner ones. If there are two cars of similar price, most people will buy the one that looks nicer even if it has shittier mileage. People are selfish and lazy.
In such circumstances, a government has a duty to do what is best for everyone, even if in the short term it looks like they're a bunch of swingeing bastards. Pollution, refuse, energy consumption are all serious long term problems and the simple fact is people *won't* change unless you force them to. You can sermonise until you're blue in the face, but it won't work. How many people wore seatbelts (or car companies that even fitted them) until governments mandated car safety? Some issues have to be forced even in a free economy. Taxation can be extremely effective way to institute change.
Here in Ireland we get charged 15 cents for a plastic carrier bag and now everyone uses reusable bags. It stops something like 300 million bags being tossed into landfill every year. Places like Denmark, Germany charge a deposit in the price of glass and plastic bottles with the result that people not return their glass and plastic rather than toss it out.
Where perhaps the UK is going wrong is they're using the stick in the wrong way. Taxing petrol is an excellent way to annoy people, but perhaps taxing engine size, or petrol tank size would be better. Most people don't need a 2.0 liter engine - a 1.4 is more than adequate, so tax the people who choose something which is overly inefficient for their circumstances. The same with petrol tanks - tax the cars with bigger tanks because they will typically consume more fuel. Simultaneously subsidize the more efficient vehicles, especially those such as hybrids which get dramatically better performance than petrol engines.
Lot's of crypto algorithms have a patent attached unfortunately. The RSA algorithm being the most famous, with all the fun issues that entailed.
It was worth every penny to me and I don't see them as a fad at all. Clearly lots of people think the same way considering that there are more PDAs than ever on the market to choose from.
Personally I think PDAs will eventually 'converge' with mobile phones, mp3 players etc. but until the battery life and form factor of such hybrid devices (or PocketPC devices for that matter) comes anywhere close to my Palm, I'll stick with what I have.
Once Mozilla & Phoenix are started and running side by side I don't see much difference. Phoenix is somewhat faster but I appreciate the richness of Mozilla, which does my mail/news/browsing from a single app.
There's room in the world for both of course, and Phoenix might find a use in situations where people don't need a mail/news client or some of the more complex features in Mozilla.
One would hope they'll go away but I reckon they'll be rationalizing like mad in the next few days, to emerge even crazier than before.
As for calling why it should be just called Linux... it is for the same reason that Windows is called Windows, Unix is Unix, FreeBSD is FreeBSD and Mac OS is Mac OS irrespective of what other software is installed. Everyone except the FSF seems to manage fine with this concept.
Cut the bastards hands off for theft of service!
And it's not some unimportant parts we're talking about here. Massive chunks of Linux which make it a useful operating system are non-FSF and often non-GPL, this list would include the kernel, MySQL, Perl, Python, OpenSSH, Apache, XFree86, Mozilla, Ghostscript and more. Some might *use* the GPL but the copyright most definitely isn't FSF. I think it is utterly indefensible to tar the lot as GNU/Linux.
No one is denying GNU/FSF authors their credit or recognition - they should get it in the same way as the rest of us. There is no need for this outrageous and selfish glory grabbing. If RMS wants a wholly and holy GNU operating system he should pull his finger out of his arse and ship HURD. Until he'll have to make to with Linux which is a blend of all kind of copyrights and licences.
As for gcc, I think the project leadership and necessity gave the drive for its development. Even so, gcc has been stuck in the mud for a long time too. I'm looking forward to trying 3.2 which is long overdue.
When that last one happens, the shit will hit the fan for Microsoft
From every interview where he lamely refers to Linux as GNU/Linux and insists everyone else does too.
Development is meant to be fun and Linus clearly put that and pragmatism ahead of the stupid pigheaded politics that the FSF (& RMS) is associated with.
Ten years later and HURD still isn't practical (what's the big deal I wonder) while Linux can drive anything from palm devices to super computers and mainframes.
It's no wonder RMS is so bitter and twisted these days
Blanket statements like that are unsupported by the evidence. The field is littered with supposedly "unbreakable" systems where all it took was a gummy finger cast or some other simple hack to fool it.
Possibly they were a different brand, but they were Japanese in origin despite being on sale in Thailand, certainly not cheap knockoffs.
Jeez, these things were on sale for $10 in Thailand the last time I visited. What a markup!
Fair enough but consider the alternative which is to invoke the command line gpg and read the results from a pipe. If the app is exploited then it can run gpg any way it please and furthermore all those command-line args, pipes and parsing provides lots of extra points of attacks for the hacker to exploit the app in the first place. So there is no significant reason to do it this way, it just makes stuff run slower and adds a big layer of complexity.
Yes it does follow (which I'll explain below), but their brief reasons are not doing a lib are pretty weak. Requiring each client to write a shim that constructs a command line argument, executes the gpg command and parses the data through a pipe is not going to makes things any safer. Writing such a shim and safe is hard. There are just so many extra potential extra points of attack that any benefit of running gpg in a seperate process are totally lost. Not only that, but stuff runs much slower which might not matter.
This makes it seem like your objection has to do with the license chosen, not whether the program is an executable or a library. And yet I see no argument supporting your desire to switch the license to the Lesser GNU GPL.
I could live with a shim if it was one hardened by countless clients hammering on it and developers. Unfortunately gpgme won't get that because it is GPL. What the hell is the point of a GPL library? It might be great for GNU zealots but even other open source projects such as Apache can't link to it.
Widespread adoption needs an LGPL library. It is that simple. I like GPG and I want to see it used pervasively but that's not going to happen while it's threatening to infect everything it touches.
GPG only runs from the command line meaning apps that wish to call it have to construct a command-line, invoke gpg and parse the results in a pipe. It desperately needs a LGPL lib to relieve this burden. The only lib so far is gpgme which is GPL making it pretty useless for this task.
Super dense acidic, 400 degrees centigrade atmosphere. Gravity would be the least of your problems.
Old versions are referred to as GNU Ghostscript to distinguish themselves from the AFPL Ghostscript version but the copyright remains with the author, not the FSF. Therefore what I said is true.