Testing, well-specced requirements, testing, and then more testing.
Every piece of the software is tested to exhaustion by a separate group to the one who wrote it.
During the Rogers Commission to investigate the Challenger disaster, Richard Feynman was critical of NASA's approach to engineering. The only group he had good things to say about was the software team.
The software is checked very carefully in a bottom-up fashion. First, each new line of code is checked, then sections of code or modules with special functions are verified. The scope is increased step by step until the new changes are incorporated into a complete system and checked. This complete output is considered the final product, newly released. But completely independently there is an independent verification group, that takes an adversary attitude to the software development group, and tests and verifies the software as if it were a customer of the delivered product.
To summarize then, the computer software checking system and attitude is of the highest quality. There appears to be no process of gradually fooling oneself while degrading standards so characteristic of the Solid Rocket Booster or Space Shuttle Main Engine safety systems. To be sure, there have been recent suggestions by management to curtail such elaborate and expensive tests as being unnecessary at this late date in Shuttle history.
...And that second quote pretty much answers the rest of your question too: "Are some of those processes applicable to other types of software development"
The answer is that technically it's possible, but just try getting a manager or client to approve the expenditure for this type of process and an entire separate testing team. It generally only happens where there's a potential for lives to be lost.
Interestingly, all NASA spacecraft still have all their debugging routines left in them when they fly. The reason for this is that removing the debugging routines would require another round of testing an certification, and that wouldn't be possible without the debugging routines.
There's a link to feynman's full report in the article, too ("Avionics" is the relevant part).
A VM is a good place to learn and play around without worrying about breaking things. Take a snapshot when it's in a good state and restore it if you break something. Set up a bunch of VMs and try a bunch of different distros, see which one you like. VirtualBox is free and works well.
if the guy is building his own boxes, as he said in his post, he's likely going to be messing around configuring hardware.
I missed the "builing his own boxes" bit. But I disagree about configuring hardware - It would need to be pretty exotic hardware to actually need configuration, especially requiring the command line. You slap in your live cd, run the installer, and you're set. You'll be prompted to install the proprietary driver for your graphics card. You click 'Activate' and enter your password, and that's about it. There are GUIs for just about everything. You don't even need to understand partitioning these days - the installer has an option labeled 'use the entire disk'. I haven't configured hardware in a long time.
I imagine pretty much any Slashdot reader, even one who's not already using Linux in 2015, is going to be the kind of person who ends up having to use the command line almost immediately
Quite possibly, but you can get a lot of basic stuff done without it. It comes down to preferences and if the user really wants to avoid the command line it is very often possible. I'd argue that it's more like one percent of "an inconceivable amount of command line" where it's mandatory and there's no gui conig tool for it.
I'm not advocating avoiding the terminal - I adore my terminal, but I think you'd get along fairly well without it if you were in the 'terminal is scary' crowd. As I say, there are GUIs for most things these days. Personally I find the command line more convenient, But living without the command line is much more possible than it used to be. Yes, the instructions they're likely to get from people will tend to be command-line, but that's due to the preferences of the people giving the advice and it's also done to minimise dependencies (i.e "you can use the command line or install this gui").
I would amend "ls -la" to "ls -lah" - human-readable file sizes are much better to deal with
I know how you feel, I had a similar experience at first. I think Linux is actually more difficult for advanced windows users than for novices - advanced users are used to feeling like they know all the answers and being able to just get things done, so it's more daunting coming to an unfamiliar environment.
If you want deep knowledge and you're technical and patient, you might want to check out Linux From Scratch, which is a book that goes through building your own Linux system from the ground up. It's probably more involved than what you're looking for at the moment - it's probably something better suited to someone with at least a few years Linux experience under their belt, but it does give you a really good understanding of a lot of stuff.
There are a lot of guides out there. Search engines are your friend. Search for [distro] [problem], e.g "ubuntu install software". also searching or "howto" is helpful, e.g "ubuntu apache howto".
One site I have used is the linux documentation project. They have a bunch of guides. In particular, Linux Filesystem Hierarchy Sounds like one which would be good for you. I have referred back to their advanced bash scripting guide many, many, many times over the years.
On the command line, man is your friend: type "man [command]" to get the documentation for most commands, e.g "man ls". There is also "man -k [searchterm]" if you don't know what command you want. It's dry reading but usually pretty detailed.
But I think perhaps what you really want is IRC. Pick a distro and jump on to the freenode IRC server and look for a relevant and active channel, e.g #ubuntu. Ask questions. You'll find someone (or a group of someones) who will be happy to answer questions. An advantage of IRC is speed - you get a response more quickly than on a forum.
In terms of installing software, it's not like windows - It's much, much better. most distros have a pretty user-friendly GUI for it these days. It'll offer you tens of thousands of apps with search and screenshots and ratings and all kinds of bells and whistles. And if you use the command-line you'll soon get the hang of apt or yum (depending on which distro you choose).
Go with a distro aimed at newbies. They are all very configurable and it's unlikely you'll need to switch for a technical reason, the community is the biggest difference IMHO - the distros aimed at newbies have better documentation and more helpful communities. I don't want to tell you what to choose (it's all about it being your choice after all), but IMHO you should choose ubuntu or one of its variants/derivatives.
It's not easy at first, but as your knowledge builds up it gets easier and easier. You will hit a point where you feel comfortable and then you will start learning a lot of things really quickly and then suddenly you'll feel really comfortable and you'll never want to go back. Don't give in to the initial frustration - stick with it, it's worth it.
Yep, horrible, nonexistent documentation. The community help wiki is particularly useless, what with the comprehensive guides to just about anything you can imagine. Would you believe it's actually text? I mean - they expect you to actually read! They're so crap that they don't even beam knowledge directly into your brain with zero effort on your behalf. Sheesh.
The whole point of asking questions is because one doesn't know and/or hasn't been able to find the answer elsewhere.
Not always. People are lazy, and will ask a question to which they could easily find the answer by typing the exact same text into a search engine. Hence my "try not to be lazy" comment. Asking questions is fine - it's why the community exists. All I'm saying is that you should always make at least a minimal effort to find an answer yourself before imposing yourself on someone else's time (which they are giving you for free). You will get a better response if you say "I googled for 'X' but didn't find anything useful". Also in many cases you'll find the answer you need by searching, and if you do it's faster and easier for you than posting on a forum and waiting for a response.
Sometimes you find the answer but it's so convoluted you still don't know how to do what is being said (I've seen tons of such documentation).
So you ask questions about the answers. You put a post on the community saying "I found documentation X but I'm stuck at Y. Can somebody help? I don't understand Z". You will get an excellent response to this kind of question.
Considering everyone at some point in their lives has asked a stupid question, telling someone who doesn't know the answer not to ask a stupid question is essentially telling them not to bother asking in the first place.
You seem to have missed a critical word which I included in my sentence: try. I didn't say "don't ask stupid questions", I said "Try not to ask stupid questions". Everyone asks stupid questions, it's inevitable. But you will get a better response from the community if you put some minimal effort towards thinking for yourself and try to avoid asking stupid questions. I know, it's difficult, but if you use the energy which you'd otherwise expend spewing vitriol you'll manage to figure a surprising number of things out by yourself.
I'm outta here.
Good, off you go. Enjoy your horrible unconfigurable spyware. We don't really care what you use that much. Just don't come crying to us when you're butthurt about (insert this week's awful thing forced on users).
This is one of many reasons there will never a Year of Linux on the desktop.
I can't recommend a book. My advice is to pick a commonly used distro with good documentation and more importantly a good community. Ubuntu is good in this respect (or xubuntu or kubuntu if you want a more familiar interface). I've also heard good things about mint and arch. Introduce yourself, say you're a newbie, and ask questions. Be polite and try not to be stupid or lazy if you can help it - try to read documentation, and always do a search before you ask a question (it's faster than waiting for a forum response anyway). There are also rooms on IRC where you can get help. In my experience people tend to be friendly there. I think the days of "RTFM" are mostly over. You might still get the occasional "RTFM" response or links to the relevant manual, but you'll usually get a helpful response.
IMHO the easiest way to learn Linux is to not have windows installed. It forces you to learn rather than being lazy and retreating to familiar territory.
It's not that scary these days anyway, there's a GUI for most things and you're rarely forced to use the command line (unless you want to) or mess around configuring hardware.
Sometimes I just add an "exit;" command after the opening PHP tag at the very top of wp-login.php. It just kills the file dead and so no login attempt using it will ever succeed, it doesn't even show the form, just a blank page. Drives the bots crazy, lol.
Rather than just putting in an 'exit' you might consider being more sophisticated to get better results: * return a 404. That way, the bot knows even less. Many bots and scanners seem to look for wp-login.php before they do anything else. Returning a 200 tells the bot there's something there. return a 404 and they'll likely assume there's no wordpress there and move along. * Add a second authentication factor via a querystring. something esoteric and non-standard like ?answer_to_ultimate_question=42. If the querystring isn't provided or has the wrong value, show a 404. If it's there and valid allow wp-login.php to run normally. * Another suggestion: put your wordpress install in a subdirectory if you can, and put up a honeypot wp-login.php in the web root. Have it look like a wordpress login page but log IP addresses etc. Bonus points for automatically adding iptables rules to block repeat offenders.
Tolkien's cover for the Hobbit was used in the original and many more recent editions
Oh that is his cover? And it was the original cover? It does look like his work. I seem to recall reading something that said there were issues around publishing it with his cover initially. Or perhaps it was the illustrations? Or maybe it was a point of contention but he got his way in the end? I read about it a long time ago and my memory is fuzzy. I did know that he had done a bunch of illustrations and the cover design.
I have an illustrated edition with all his illustrations but no copy with that cover. Pity, it's awesome.
Tolkien himself admitted--in Letters if not other commentary--that he was no artist
That was JRRT being self-deprecating and humble. Some of his art was actually quite good. It all came down to how much time he put into it - there's a big difference between his finished works and his crude sketches. I think what he means when he says "I'm no artist" is more along the lines of "I'm not on par with picasso" rather than "I can't draw". If you want to see some awesome art by JRRT, check out J.R.R Tolkiien: Artist And Illustrator, which has some awesome stuff. This new book seems to be focusing more on the rough sketches.
and that Chris did most of the artwork associated with the maps and early sketches that went with his work.
Chris only did the maps IIRC. The other illustrations tended to be JRRT. The original (intended, I don't think it was published in the end) cover of the hobbit was entirely JRRT's design.
The machine I'm typing this on right now originally had Ubuntu 8.04 installed. It's now on 14.04. I have upgraded it each time a new LTS release has come out. I've upgraded 3 times in ~6 years and these were all more-or-less hassle-free. Nothing broke, all my software stayed intact.
Another machine I upgraded from 8.04 32bit to 10.04 64bit without losing any user settings, though I did have to reinstall all my software. This was made easier by the fact that i use a separate partition for/home.
Choose a distro with LTS releases. Upgrading every 6 months is insanity.
2015: systemd becomes default boot manager in debian.
2017:"complete, from-scratch rewrite". In order to not have to maintain backwards compatibility, project is renamed to system-e.
2019: debut of systemf, absorbtion of other projects including alsa, pulseaudio, xorg, GTK, and opengl.
2021: systemg maintainers make the controversial decision to absorb The Internet Archive. Systemh created as a fork without Internet Archive.
2022: systemi, a fork of systemf focusing on reliability and minimalism becomes default debian init system.
2028: systemj, a complete, from-scratch rewrite is controversial for trying to reintroduce binary logging. Consensus is against the systemj devs as sysadmins remember the great systemd logging bug of 2017 unkindly. Systemj project is eventually abandoned.
2029: systemk codebase used as basis for a military project to create a strong AI, known as "project skynet". Software behaves paradoxically and project is terminated.
2033: systeml - "system lean" - a "back to basics", from-scratch rewrite, takes off on several server platforms, boasting increased reliability. systemm, "system mean", a fork, used in security-focused distros.
2117: critical bug discovered in the long-abandoned but critical and ubiquitous system-r project. A new project, system-s, is announced to address shortcomings in the hundred-year-old codebase. A from-scratch rewrite begins.
2142: systemu project, based on a derivative of systemk, introduces "Artificially intelligent init system which will shave 0.25 seconds off your boot time and absolutely definitely will not subjugate humanity". Millions die. The survivors declare "thou shalt not make an init system in the likeness of the human mind" as their highest law.
2147: systemv - a collection of shell scripts written around a very simple and reliable PID 1 introduced, based on the brand new religious doctrines of "keep it simple, stupid" and "do one thing, and do it well". People's computers start working properly again, something few living people can remember. Wyld Stallyns release their 94th album. Everybody lives in peace and harmony.
yeah it's tricky. I definitely don't have all the answers. I guess the "free" viewpoint is that users should be able to do what they want even if that messes with the integrity of the work. Personally I probably wouldn't be too interested in playing such a thing and I don't think it's unreasonable for a game dev to want to keep their artistic vision intact.
Maybe we'll get lucky and RMS will pitch in on the issue, I'd love to hear his thoughts on this.
Good question! I hadn't thought about that before.
Um..... I think my opinion (for all it's worth) is that it's probably mostly OK to consider scripts part of the game content as long as they're tied in to the content (i.e they would be useless without one or more other non-script assets).
With regard to licensing, I think it's important that the source of these scripts can be read/modified by users. They should not be stored as binary blobs (this type of script usually isn't, even today). porting to a different platform/modding/whatever could require modifying/redistributing these scripts, and that should be certainly be allowed. A proprietary license is probably not unreasonable, but users should be allowed to view and share modified versions of these scripts.
OTOH, if a script is useless without one or more other non-script assets, is there really any harm in making it free? People who don't own the content won't be able to use it anyway, and making them free removes a potential barrier to modding/porting/etc.
I read something once, but have not been able to find it since, which seemed to indicate that his position on this was that the code should be free, but the content doesn't have to be. So you charge for your game but include the source code with it. The source can be freely distributed, but not the assets: art, maps, sound, etc.
This model has a lot of advantages: users can port these games to different platforms, and they can keep the source code up to date, e.g using newer libraries and making sure it still compiles on the latest operating systems. Not to mention the possibility of adding new features. And in order to play it legally they'll still need to buy your assets.
IIRC the C64 logo wasn't in colour either, I think it was in metal. I can't be bothered checking any of my C64s right now since they're all in boxes (I'm in the process of moving), but I think it was a shiny silver colour.
But, 90%+ of the time I have seen the commodore logo printed (e.g in a manual) or displayed onscreen, it's had the distinctive blue and red colours. Those colours are as much part of the brand identity for me as the C= logo.
But my point is not about making it look like the machine - this phone isn't modelled on the PET, even if it does "liberate" the name - if it was modelled after a PET, there would be more trapezoids in those photos. My point is that It just looks like a bland phone with a monochrome commodore logo on it. I can do that with a magic marker in about 40 seconds for a total cost of about one tenth of a cent. If they'd spent the extra 3 cents to make the logo colour, I might have almost considered it.
Slashdot Mirror
Testing, well-specced requirements, testing, and then more testing.
Every piece of the software is tested to exhaustion by a separate group to the one who wrote it.
During the Rogers Commission to investigate the Challenger disaster, Richard Feynman was critical of NASA's approach to engineering. The only group he had good things to say about was the software team.
From: http://duartes.org/gustavo/blog/post/richard-feynman-challenger-disaster-software-engineering/
The software is checked very carefully in a bottom-up fashion. First, each new line of code is checked, then sections of code or modules with special functions are verified. The scope is increased step by step until the new changes are incorporated into a complete system and checked. This complete output is considered the final product, newly released. But completely independently there is an independent verification group, that takes an adversary attitude to the software development group, and tests and verifies the software as if it were a customer of the delivered product.
To summarize then, the computer software checking system and attitude is of the highest quality. There appears to be no process of gradually fooling oneself while degrading standards so characteristic of the Solid Rocket Booster or Space Shuttle Main Engine safety systems. To be sure, there have been recent suggestions by management to curtail such elaborate and expensive tests as being unnecessary at this late date in Shuttle history.
...And that second quote pretty much answers the rest of your question too: "Are some of those processes applicable to other types of software development"
The answer is that technically it's possible, but just try getting a manager or client to approve the expenditure for this type of process and an entire separate testing team. It generally only happens where there's a potential for lives to be lost.
Interestingly, all NASA spacecraft still have all their debugging routines left in them when they fly. The reason for this is that removing the debugging routines would require another round of testing an certification, and that wouldn't be possible without the debugging routines.
There's a link to feynman's full report in the article, too ("Avionics" is the relevant part).
You're welcome, happy to help :)
A VM is a good place to learn and play around without worrying about breaking things. Take a snapshot when it's in a good state and restore it if you break something. Set up a bunch of VMs and try a bunch of different distros, see which one you like. VirtualBox is free and works well.
if the guy is building his own boxes, as he said in his post, he's likely going to be messing around configuring hardware.
I missed the "builing his own boxes" bit. But I disagree about configuring hardware - It would need to be pretty exotic hardware to actually need configuration, especially requiring the command line. You slap in your live cd, run the installer, and you're set. You'll be prompted to install the proprietary driver for your graphics card. You click 'Activate' and enter your password, and that's about it. There are GUIs for just about everything. You don't even need to understand partitioning these days - the installer has an option labeled 'use the entire disk'. I haven't configured hardware in a long time.
I imagine pretty much any Slashdot reader, even one who's not already using Linux in 2015, is going to be the kind of person who ends up having to use the command line almost immediately
Quite possibly, but you can get a lot of basic stuff done without it. It comes down to preferences and if the user really wants to avoid the command line it is very often possible. I'd argue that it's more like one percent of "an inconceivable amount of command line" where it's mandatory and there's no gui conig tool for it.
I'm not advocating avoiding the terminal - I adore my terminal, but I think you'd get along fairly well without it if you were in the 'terminal is scary' crowd. As I say, there are GUIs for most things these days. Personally I find the command line more convenient, But living without the command line is much more possible than it used to be.
Yes, the instructions they're likely to get from people will tend to be command-line, but that's due to the preferences of the people giving the advice and it's also done to minimise dependencies (i.e "you can use the command line or install this gui").
I would amend "ls -la" to "ls -lah" - human-readable file sizes are much better to deal with
I know how you feel, I had a similar experience at first. I think Linux is actually more difficult for advanced windows users than for novices - advanced users are used to feeling like they know all the answers and being able to just get things done, so it's more daunting coming to an unfamiliar environment.
If you want deep knowledge and you're technical and patient, you might want to check out Linux From Scratch, which is a book that goes through building your own Linux system from the ground up. It's probably more involved than what you're looking for at the moment - it's probably something better suited to someone with at least a few years Linux experience under their belt, but it does give you a really good understanding of a lot of stuff.
There are a lot of guides out there. Search engines are your friend. Search for [distro] [problem], e.g "ubuntu install software". also searching or "howto" is helpful, e.g "ubuntu apache howto".
One site I have used is the linux documentation project. They have a bunch of guides. In particular, Linux Filesystem Hierarchy Sounds like one which would be good for you. I have referred back to their advanced bash scripting guide many, many, many times over the years.
On the command line, man is your friend: type "man [command]" to get the documentation for most commands, e.g "man ls". There is also "man -k [searchterm]" if you don't know what command you want. It's dry reading but usually pretty detailed.
But I think perhaps what you really want is IRC. Pick a distro and jump on to the freenode IRC server and look for a relevant and active channel, e.g #ubuntu. Ask questions. You'll find someone (or a group of someones) who will be happy to answer questions. An advantage of IRC is speed - you get a response more quickly than on a forum.
In terms of installing software, it's not like windows - It's much, much better. most distros have a pretty user-friendly GUI for it these days. It'll offer you tens of thousands of apps with search and screenshots and ratings and all kinds of bells and whistles. And if you use the command-line you'll soon get the hang of apt or yum (depending on which distro you choose).
Go with a distro aimed at newbies. They are all very configurable and it's unlikely you'll need to switch for a technical reason, the community is the biggest difference IMHO - the distros aimed at newbies have better documentation and more helpful communities. I don't want to tell you what to choose (it's all about it being your choice after all), but IMHO you should choose ubuntu or one of its variants/derivatives.
It's not easy at first, but as your knowledge builds up it gets easier and easier. You will hit a point where you feel comfortable and then you will start learning a lot of things really quickly and then suddenly you'll feel really comfortable and you'll never want to go back. Don't give in to the initial frustration - stick with it, it's worth it.
That's some nice snark there.
So none them.
Community Help Wiki
Ubuntu Desktop Guide
Community Help & Info
Yep, horrible, nonexistent documentation. The community help wiki is particularly useless, what with the comprehensive guides to just about anything you can imagine. Would you believe it's actually text? I mean - they expect you to actually read! They're so crap that they don't even beam knowledge directly into your brain with zero effort on your behalf. Sheesh.
The whole point of asking questions is because one doesn't know and/or hasn't been able to find the answer elsewhere.
Not always. People are lazy, and will ask a question to which they could easily find the answer by typing the exact same text into a search engine. Hence my "try not to be lazy" comment. Asking questions is fine - it's why the community exists. All I'm saying is that you should always make at least a minimal effort to find an answer yourself before imposing yourself on someone else's time (which they are giving you for free). You will get a better response if you say "I googled for 'X' but didn't find anything useful". Also in many cases you'll find the answer you need by searching, and if you do it's faster and easier for you than posting on a forum and waiting for a response.
Sometimes you find the answer but it's so convoluted you still don't know how to do what is being said (I've seen tons of such documentation).
So you ask questions about the answers. You put a post on the community saying "I found documentation X but I'm stuck at Y. Can somebody help? I don't understand Z". You will get an excellent response to this kind of question.
Considering everyone at some point in their lives has asked a stupid question, telling someone who doesn't know the answer not to ask a stupid question is essentially telling them not to bother asking in the first place.
You seem to have missed a critical word which I included in my sentence: try. I didn't say "don't ask stupid questions", I said "Try not to ask stupid questions". Everyone asks stupid questions, it's inevitable. But you will get a better response from the community if you put some minimal effort towards thinking for yourself and try to avoid asking stupid questions. I know, it's difficult, but if you use the energy which you'd otherwise expend spewing vitriol you'll manage to figure a surprising number of things out by yourself.
I'm outta here.
Good, off you go. Enjoy your horrible unconfigurable spyware. We don't really care what you use that much. Just don't come crying to us when you're butthurt about (insert this week's awful thing forced on users).
This is one of many reasons there will never a Year of Linux on the desktop.
It was 2003. Sorry you missed it.
I can't recommend a book. My advice is to pick a commonly used distro with good documentation and more importantly a good community. Ubuntu is good in this respect (or xubuntu or kubuntu if you want a more familiar interface). I've also heard good things about mint and arch. Introduce yourself, say you're a newbie, and ask questions. Be polite and try not to be stupid or lazy if you can help it - try to read documentation, and always do a search before you ask a question (it's faster than waiting for a forum response anyway). There are also rooms on IRC where you can get help. In my experience people tend to be friendly there. I think the days of "RTFM" are mostly over. You might still get the occasional "RTFM" response or links to the relevant manual, but you'll usually get a helpful response.
IMHO the easiest way to learn Linux is to not have windows installed. It forces you to learn rather than being lazy and retreating to familiar territory.
It's not that scary these days anyway, there's a GUI for most things and you're rarely forced to use the command line (unless you want to) or mess around configuring hardware.
Sometimes I just add an "exit;" command after the opening PHP tag at the very top of wp-login.php. It just kills the file dead and so no login attempt using it will ever succeed, it doesn't even show the form, just a blank page. Drives the bots crazy, lol.
Rather than just putting in an 'exit' you might consider being more sophisticated to get better results:
* return a 404. That way, the bot knows even less. Many bots and scanners seem to look for wp-login.php before they do anything else. Returning a 200 tells the bot there's something there. return a 404 and they'll likely assume there's no wordpress there and move along.
* Add a second authentication factor via a querystring. something esoteric and non-standard like ?answer_to_ultimate_question=42. If the querystring isn't provided or has the wrong value, show a 404. If it's there and valid allow wp-login.php to run normally.
* Another suggestion: put your wordpress install in a subdirectory if you can, and put up a honeypot wp-login.php in the web root. Have it look like a wordpress login page but log IP addresses etc. Bonus points for automatically adding iptables rules to block repeat offenders.
Tolkien's cover for the Hobbit was used in the original and many more recent editions
Oh that is his cover? And it was the original cover? It does look like his work. I seem to recall reading something that said there were issues around publishing it with his cover initially. Or perhaps it was the illustrations? Or maybe it was a point of contention but he got his way in the end? I read about it a long time ago and my memory is fuzzy. I did know that he had done a bunch of illustrations and the cover design.
I have an illustrated edition with all his illustrations but no copy with that cover. Pity, it's awesome.
That's not quite right.
Tolkien himself admitted--in Letters if not other commentary--that he was no artist
That was JRRT being self-deprecating and humble. Some of his art was actually quite good. It all came down to how much time he put into it - there's a big difference between his finished works and his crude sketches. I think what he means when he says "I'm no artist" is more along the lines of "I'm not on par with picasso" rather than "I can't draw". If you want to see some awesome art by JRRT, check out J.R.R Tolkiien: Artist And Illustrator, which has some awesome stuff. This new book seems to be focusing more on the rough sketches.
and that Chris did most of the artwork associated with the maps and early sketches that went with his work.
Chris only did the maps IIRC. The other illustrations tended to be JRRT. The original (intended, I don't think it was published in the end) cover of the hobbit was entirely JRRT's design.
The machine I'm typing this on right now originally had Ubuntu 8.04 installed. It's now on 14.04. I have upgraded it each time a new LTS release has come out. I've upgraded 3 times in ~6 years and these were all more-or-less hassle-free. Nothing broke, all my software stayed intact.
Another machine I upgraded from 8.04 32bit to 10.04 64bit without losing any user settings, though I did have to reinstall all my software. This was made easier by the fact that i use a separate partition for /home.
Choose a distro with LTS releases. Upgrading every 6 months is insanity.
Borderlands 2 has been available for a year or so and runs great on Linux.
I haven't bought the pre-sequel yet (waiting for a complete pack with all DLC), but it's been available since almost day 1 (perhaps even day 1).
Future History of Init Systems
They're about 10 years away.
And in 10 years, they'll be about 10 years away.
now it's starting to go beyond that and will seriously hurt many websites that rely on ad revenue
Good. They can go and get real jobs.
To get rid of them you have to interact with them. Who knows what the fuck will happen when you click that close button?
I tend to use my developer tools to find the element and hide it rather than clicking on the close buttons.
That's assuming, of course, that I didn't just close the tab the instant I saw a popover starting to load.
Nope, NASA covered that too.
yeah it's tricky. I definitely don't have all the answers. I guess the "free" viewpoint is that users should be able to do what they want even if that messes with the integrity of the work. Personally I probably wouldn't be too interested in playing such a thing and I don't think it's unreasonable for a game dev to want to keep their artistic vision intact.
Maybe we'll get lucky and RMS will pitch in on the issue, I'd love to hear his thoughts on this.
Good question! I hadn't thought about that before.
Um..... I think my opinion (for all it's worth) is that it's probably mostly OK to consider scripts part of the game content as long as they're tied in to the content (i.e they would be useless without one or more other non-script assets).
With regard to licensing, I think it's important that the source of these scripts can be read/modified by users. They should not be stored as binary blobs (this type of script usually isn't, even today). porting to a different platform/modding/whatever could require modifying/redistributing these scripts, and that should be certainly be allowed. A proprietary license is probably not unreasonable, but users should be allowed to view and share modified versions of these scripts.
OTOH, if a script is useless without one or more other non-script assets, is there really any harm in making it free? People who don't own the content won't be able to use it anyway, and making them free removes a potential barrier to modding/porting/etc.
I read something once, but have not been able to find it since, which seemed to indicate that his position on this was that the code should be free, but the content doesn't have to be. So you charge for your game but include the source code with it. The source can be freely distributed, but not the assets: art, maps, sound, etc.
This model has a lot of advantages: users can port these games to different platforms, and they can keep the source code up to date, e.g using newer libraries and making sure it still compiles on the latest operating systems. Not to mention the possibility of adding new features. And in order to play it legally they'll still need to buy your assets.
the only thing he's really done is crate more extremists in the world. That's hardly a good thing
I think crating extremists is a good thing: every extremist RMS has packed into a crate is one less extremist out in the world doing extremist things.
hide behind the cover of an authoritarian regime
Chortle...Seriously?
Pot, meet kettle!
Yes, it's horrible, etc etc, but what kind of moron actually trains their overseas replacement?
If I was told to do that, my exact words would be "go fuck yourself".
If the debate continued after that point, it might get nasty.
Whoosh!
IIRC the C64 logo wasn't in colour either, I think it was in metal. I can't be bothered checking any of my C64s right now since they're all in boxes (I'm in the process of moving), but I think it was a shiny silver colour.
But, 90%+ of the time I have seen the commodore logo printed (e.g in a manual) or displayed onscreen, it's had the distinctive blue and red colours. Those colours are as much part of the brand identity for me as the C= logo.
But my point is not about making it look like the machine - this phone isn't modelled on the PET, even if it does "liberate" the name - if it was modelled after a PET, there would be more trapezoids in those photos. My point is that It just looks like a bland phone with a monochrome commodore logo on it. I can do that with a magic marker in about 40 seconds for a total cost of about one tenth of a cent. If they'd spent the extra 3 cents to make the logo colour, I might have almost considered it.
Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia