Anyone have any more information on the rumours of senior RedHat people leaving? It'll be interesting to see what happens to this quote on About RedHat:
Red Hat shares all of its software innovations freely with the open source community under the GNU General Public License (GPL).
since Cygnus certainly don't share all their products with the community.
Has Loki started porting games of different genres yet? So far it seems like the only ones that they've done are of a strategic bent (Don't get me wrong, strategy games are quite nice), but it seems to me that they are missing out on some of the other genres...
I personally wouldn't call Heretic II a strategy game, and I doubt anyone would call Soldier of Fortune a strategy game - apparently it is a Quake II-engine first person shoot-em-up with more and/or better gore than any other game ever. Or something like that. And of course there's Eric's Ultimate Solitare which is (according to reviews) pretty good, the kind of thing to get your Mum using Linux.
Meanwhile I want, make that need, a copy of RRTII - the number of hours I lost to Transport Tycoon when I should have been writing up my degree project is quite disgusting - but fun:-)
What is your background? Are you a techie, an admin person, or an other? Do you use Linux personally? If so, did you come from a Unix, Windows or other background?
And a related question: What is the primary system around your department?
Loki make it absolutely clear on their site (which seems to be down at the moment) that they don't really *want* to sell to the public, and that they'd prefer you bought from a retail (on-line or bricks-and-mortar) store. The only reason they sell direct is to make sure that people can *always* get hold of a copy of their games, even if it means paying a little more. This is probably more relevent to non-USA customers, as there are certainly countries in which there is a Linux community, but where there is no local Loki reseller.
In some ways, it is better to buy from traditional retailers anyway. Loki, for all their apparent success so far, are still trail-blazers, and in a strange way, you take away from their success when you buy direct from them. If (to mention an example national UK computer store) PC World sells 50 copies of CivCTP nationwide, while 1000 copies are bought direct and on-line, there is almost no chance that they'll carry the next product from that company. It is better for Loki to have huge retail sales, which are very visible, to give them a boost for the future. Plus, they are a development company, not a retail company, and handling direct orders (processing, packing, posting, etc.) can easily take up a lot of time which they would prefer to spend coding (and I'm sure we want them to spend more time coding as well...)
In their story on this, they sum up the issue perfectly. There is a serious and (for The Register) extremely restrained report, with a link at the bottom to a "Related Story". The related story is a more normal Register-style story concerning the 'hacking' of Hotmail, and it is somewhat less restrained when referring to Microsoft in the e-commerce realm. This is either The Register being typically witty or a very nice accidental comment.
How about: I bow to your superior mental 'uptime':-)
I sort of started with Slackware too. I bought (was bought) a PC in the summer of '95, and having moved from the ST world, I was used to shareware/freeware being a major source of software. I therefore went and bought three CD-ROMs (I had an 850Mb hard drive and I bought about 2Gb of compressed software - go figure) of shareware/freeware when I got my PC. I then went to Uni to do computer science, and the course was based on Unix (HP/UX). I found this wierd looking Linux thing on one of my CDs, and I tried to install it. It was kernel 0.99x, and it didn't work, but I liked the idea, so I went out and found sunsite. And the rest is history...
I downloaded the majority of Slackware onto floppies, one at a time, using a DOS FTP program provided by the Uni. That was fun.
I've been in the Linux 'world' for nearly 4 years now, which makes me an old-timer. In that time, I've learnt more about computers and Unix than I ever wanted to know:-) - which lead directly to my getting a job as a developer at a Unix vendor. I have met a lot of great people, both on-line and IRL. I have written and released a couple of GPLed programs (note to self: do some work on released software!).
This is what Richard Stallman is really working for. Freedom to learn and really use our own computers, and to allow communities to form around those systems.
We are lucky to be living in these times. I think that, in the future, computer science students will learn about the creation of software engineering in the 1970s, the genesis of the personal computer in the 1980s, and the explosion of the Internet and free software in the 1990s. That can only be a good thing.
Why did you have to go and announce this now? I saw someone mention this on the Redhat 6.1 Beta announcement discussion below and I started a download a while ago.
Now I know why my speed has dropped from over 50K/s to under 20K/s.
BBC News has some good video - they had an RAF plane flying above the clouds and beaming pictures down to Earth.
Dunno if you could download and save it though - high time someone reverse-engineered the RealAudio protocol(s), at least enough to save files from the 'net.
The eclipse looked pretty good here in Watford this morning. Apparently, there was cloud across most of southern England, and Watford was one of the few places which was (mostly) clear.
And I've seen that meteor shower before, one year when I was in Israel. We spent the night in the desert, outside, looking straight up at the clearest skies I've ever seen. Stunning!
Re:The nice thing about future Loki titles...
on
Heretic II for Linux
·
· Score: 1
Just to point out that CTV hasn't shipped in Europe yet. I ordered a copy from a mail order company in the UK around 6 weeks ago. While we over here read glowing reports and stories of people playing through the night, SuSE claims to have shipped their CDs a week ago, but they hadn't arrived at the mail order people when I spoke to them yesterday. They are pissed off at SuSE, who originally said they would be shipping in the middle of June, because the MO company now has legions of annoyed customers asking where their Civs are.
So, GO SUSE indeed, but they could stand to go a little quicker. It's not such a problem for long-standing Linux people like me and the MO company, but if they're trying to sell to the more traditional retailers they're gonna find themselves with problems.
Linux is not based on anything. The original motivation to write Linux may have come from Minix, and most of the interfaces come from Unix (now POSIX), but the code is clean.
Seriously, I do find it quite strange that many of the tops hits when searching for the name of my site are cached/. pages. I do wonder how much disk space they're using (wasting?) caching sites like/. which are so dynamic that there's not much point caching them
The regulatory system isn't *that* weak. A couple of months ago, when BT put down their ISDN prices, the regulator prevented them from making them lower. Why? Because the regulator is there to protect competition in the short run and consumer interest in the long run, rather than consumer interest in the short run. BT could happily (well, quite happily) offer free local calls now. Unfortunately, it would put *all* the smaller telcos (except maybe C&W) out of business because they couldn't compete with BTs economies of scale. By stopping BT from killing competition, they ensure the future of competition in British telecoms (as opposed to British Telecom).
That's the theory, anyway:-) As it happens, it is getting better, slowly but surely. I am on C&W at home, and local calls are about 0.7p per min evenings and slightly less at weekends. They have a *naughty* trick of charging more for 0845 numbers than local calls, but any friendly ISP will give you a geographic entry number anyway. I also get dial-in from work, either on a local number or 0800 (free) if I'm dialing it to actually do something professional:-) Plus C&W have a nice deal going (apparently for ever, so they way) at the moment of maximum charge 50p for long-distance calls on Saturdays. It officially doesn't apply to data calls, but I don't think they've noticed yet:-) It's nice to see 1400+ minute calls going down for 50p on my bill. I effectively pay 2 quid per month for unlimited access on Saturdays. Since I have net access all day every day at work and unlimited access at home on Saturday, I'm pretty happy. Plus I've just found a free ISP with geographical numbers (the C&W 50p deal doesn't apply to 0845 numbers), which should allow me to cancel my Demon account.
Re: h2g2 - sorry to say, I went a couple of times on the day it opened, and haven't been back since. It just didn't seem to have anything to hold me. That's life, I suppose
I choose both. I managed to persuade my bosses that adapting an existing GPLed program was easier than buying in something from outside. Hence, I write free code and get paid for it. Cool, eh? (No, I'm not Canadian:-)
In a similar way, they dumped on all the other application vendors with Win98. Win98 has built-in support for dynamic re-compilation, ish, whereby it can move around modules in an object file to let it load more efficiently (all this is IIRC). The application needs to 'register' itself as being able to be manipulated in this way, and, I assume, needs some kind of compilation options. MS Office *97* has support for this API.
Office 97 came out well before Win98, but it supports a technology which means it will run more efficiently under Win98. This means that Win98 is the best platform on which to run Office, and that Office is (or was at Win98 release time) the best office suite to run under Win98.
I saw it yesterday and e-mailed linuxgames.com. I'm sure I wasn't the only one:-) To be honest, the only impressive thing about the screenshots is that they were running on Linux. They looked almost exactly the same as the screenshots of the game running on Windows, which are available all over the place.
The majority of the computer world, and the vast majority of the Linux world, is male. They want to get as balanced a sample of the population as possible, so they are probably more likely to select females than males (to even up the ratio). I don't know any of this, I'm guessing:-)
I'm glad to see you've re-established systalk. I hope it can get back to being as useful and fun as it used to be.
Oh yeah, and once you have some info on what (non-PERL or DNS hackers) I can do to help, I'll volunteer. I don't really need the service any more, but it is a damn good idea and should be supported.
This link isn't quite all there, but I'm sure you could hack together some controlling software to take it the rest of the way.
It's an article about Tescos(UK supermarket) shipping Palm Pilots with built-in barcode scanners, so you can make a shopping list by scanning the products in your kitchen cupboards. You then upload your shopping list and it gets delivered. I just wish it was my local Tescos and that I hadn't already bought a Palm III.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone have any more information on the rumours of senior RedHat people leaving?
since Cygnus certainly don't share all their products with the community.It'll be interesting to see what happens to this quote on About RedHat:
Yup, you got it right. 2330 GMT (aka Zulu aka UTC).
I personally wouldn't call Heretic II a strategy game, and I doubt anyone would call Soldier of Fortune a strategy game - apparently it is a Quake II-engine first person shoot-em-up with more and/or better gore than any other game ever. Or something like that. And of course there's Eric's Ultimate Solitare which is (according to reviews) pretty good, the kind of thing to get your Mum using Linux.
Meanwhile I want, make that need, a copy of RRTII - the number of hours I lost to Transport Tycoon when I should have been writing up my degree project is quite disgusting - but fun :-)
What is your background? Are you a techie, an admin person, or an other? Do you use Linux personally? If so, did you come from a Unix, Windows or other background?
And a related question: What is the primary system around your department?
Loki make it absolutely clear on their site (which seems to be down at the moment) that they don't really *want* to sell to the public, and that they'd prefer you bought from a retail (on-line or bricks-and-mortar) store. The only reason they sell direct is to make sure that people can *always* get hold of a copy of their games, even if it means paying a little more. This is probably more relevent to non-USA customers, as there are certainly countries in which there is a Linux community, but where there is no local Loki reseller.
In some ways, it is better to buy from traditional retailers anyway. Loki, for all their apparent success so far, are still trail-blazers, and in a strange way, you take away from their success when you buy direct from them. If (to mention an example national UK computer store) PC World sells 50 copies of CivCTP nationwide, while 1000 copies are bought direct and on-line, there is almost no chance that they'll carry the next product from that company. It is better for Loki to have huge retail sales, which are very visible, to give them a boost for the future. Plus, they are a development company, not a retail company, and handling direct orders (processing, packing, posting, etc.) can easily take up a lot of time which they would prefer to spend coding (and I'm sure we want them to spend more time coding as well...)
In their story on this, they sum up the issue perfectly. There is a serious and (for The Register) extremely restrained report, with a link at the bottom to a "Related Story". The related story is a more normal Register-style story concerning the 'hacking' of Hotmail, and it is somewhat less restrained when referring to Microsoft in the e-commerce realm. This is either The Register being typically witty or a very nice accidental comment.
I sort of started with Slackware too. I bought (was bought) a PC in the summer of '95, and having moved from the ST world, I was used to shareware/freeware being a major source of software. I therefore went and bought three CD-ROMs (I had an 850Mb hard drive and I bought about 2Gb of compressed software - go figure) of shareware/freeware when I got my PC. I then went to Uni to do computer science, and the course was based on Unix (HP/UX). I found this wierd looking Linux thing on one of my CDs, and I tried to install it. It was kernel 0.99x, and it didn't work, but I liked the idea, so I went out and found sunsite. And the rest is history...
I downloaded the majority of Slackware onto floppies, one at a time, using a DOS FTP program provided by the Uni. That was fun.
This is what Richard Stallman is really working for. Freedom to learn and really use our own computers, and to allow communities to form around those systems.
We are lucky to be living in these times. I think that, in the future, computer science students will learn about the creation of software engineering in the 1970s, the genesis of the personal computer in the 1980s, and the explosion of the Internet and free software in the 1990s. That can only be a good thing.
Why did you have to go and announce this now? I saw someone mention this on the Redhat 6.1 Beta announcement discussion below and I started a download a while ago.
Now I know why my speed has dropped from over 50K/s to under 20K/s.
Dunno if you could download and save it though - high time someone reverse-engineered the RealAudio protocol(s), at least enough to save files from the 'net.
The eclipse looked pretty good here in Watford this morning. Apparently, there was cloud across most of southern England, and Watford was one of the few places which was (mostly) clear.
And I've seen that meteor shower before, one year when I was in Israel. We spent the night in the desert, outside, looking straight up at the clearest skies I've ever seen. Stunning!
So, GO SUSE indeed, but they could stand to go a little quicker. It's not such a problem for long-standing Linux people like me and the MO company, but if they're trying to sell to the more traditional retailers they're gonna find themselves with problems.
Linux is not based on anything. The original motivation to write Linux may have come from Minix, and most of the interfaces come from Unix (now POSIX), but the code is clean.
They re-spidered my site this afternoon.
/. pages. I do wonder how much disk space they're using (wasting?) caching sites like /. which are so dynamic that there's not much point caching them
Seriously, I do find it quite strange that many of the tops hits when searching for the name of my site are cached
The regulatory system isn't *that* weak. A couple of months ago, when BT put down their ISDN prices, the regulator prevented them from making them lower. Why? Because the regulator is there to protect competition in the short run and consumer interest in the long run, rather than consumer interest in the short run.
:-) :-) Plus C&W have a nice deal going (apparently for ever, so they way) at the moment of maximum charge 50p for long-distance calls on Saturdays. It officially doesn't apply to data calls, but I don't think they've noticed yet :-) It's nice to see 1400+ minute calls going down for 50p on my bill. I effectively pay 2 quid per month for unlimited access on Saturdays. Since I have net access all day every day at work and unlimited access at home on Saturday, I'm pretty happy.
BT could happily (well, quite happily) offer free local calls now. Unfortunately, it would put *all* the smaller telcos (except maybe C&W) out of business because they couldn't compete with BTs economies of scale. By stopping BT from killing competition, they ensure the future of competition in British telecoms (as opposed to British Telecom).
That's the theory, anyway
As it happens, it is getting better, slowly but surely. I am on C&W at home, and local calls are about 0.7p per min evenings and slightly less at weekends. They have a *naughty* trick of charging more for 0845 numbers than local calls, but any friendly ISP will give you a geographic entry number anyway. I also get dial-in from work, either on a local number or 0800 (free) if I'm dialing it to actually do something professional
Plus I've just found a free ISP with geographical numbers (the C&W 50p deal doesn't apply to 0845 numbers), which should allow me to cancel my Demon account.
Did you give that book to your sister?
Re: h2g2 - sorry to say, I went a couple of times on the day it opened, and haven't been back since. It just didn't seem to have anything to hold me. That's life, I suppose
I choose both. I managed to persuade my bosses that adapting an existing GPLed program was easier than buying in something from outside. Hence, I write free code and get paid for it. Cool, eh? :-)
(No, I'm not Canadian
In a similar way, they dumped on all the other application vendors with Win98. Win98 has built-in support for dynamic re-compilation, ish, whereby it can move around modules in an object file to let it load more efficiently (all this is IIRC). The application needs to 'register' itself as being able to be manipulated in this way, and, I assume, needs some kind of compilation options. MS Office *97* has support for this API.
Office 97 came out well before Win98, but it supports a technology which means it will run more efficiently under Win98. This means that Win98 is the best platform on which to run Office, and that Office is (or was at Win98 release time) the best office suite to run under Win98.
Bastards
I want to log in to h-t-t-p-colon-slash-slash-slash-dot-dot-dot-slash
I saw it yesterday and e-mailed linuxgames.com. I'm sure I wasn't the only one :-)
To be honest, the only impressive thing about the screenshots is that they were running on Linux. They looked almost exactly the same as the screenshots of the game running on Windows, which are available all over the place.
#define CD_BLOCK_OFFSET CD_MSF_OFFSET
to the top of the source file on my 2.2.2 system (yes I know I'm a version behind
I took this from the 2.0.36 sources. I'll e-mail them now and tell them.
The majority of the computer world, and the vast majority of the Linux world, is male. They want to get as balanced a sample of the population as possible, so they are probably more likely to select females than males (to even up the ratio). :-)
I don't know any of this, I'm guessing
I'm glad to see you've re-established systalk. I hope it can get back to being as useful and fun as it used to be.
Oh yeah, and once you have some info on what (non-PERL or DNS hackers) I can do to help, I'll volunteer. I don't really need the service any more, but it is a damn good idea and should be supported.
I think you mean commodore C= don't you?
Anyway, the ST was (and is) better.
It's an article about Tescos(UK supermarket) shipping Palm Pilots with built-in barcode scanners, so you can make a shopping list by scanning the products in your kitchen cupboards. You then upload your shopping list and it gets delivered. I just wish it was my local Tescos and that I hadn't already bought a Palm III.