PvP problems need in-game logical solutions. You could just ban PvP, but don't do that. Whatever behavior it is that you find unacceptable, make it unpleasant to perform.
In the game ADOM (a roguelike) you can gain a lot of useful items quickly by killing shopkeepers. However, attacking a shopkeeper Dooms you, and being Doomed makes going on hugely more difficult (oh yeah, and shop keepers are really powerful for all but highly advanced characters.)
The game could have just made shopkeepers invincible, or made it so they could not be attacked, but it didn't. Instead it made the player want to not attack the shopkeepers by assigning negative properties to the action.
Why do you not commit crimes IRL? For some it is a sense of morality, but for others it is simple fear of the law. In a MMOG the "law" *IS NOT* just the game ruleset which says, e.g., "players cannot attack other players." The RL equivalent to that is: "Why do people not breath dirt? Because it's impossible."
How law is best implimented is highly game-dependant. In an EQ-type envitonment maybe an automatic lucrative bounty for player killers would be in order. To prevent scumming new accounts for cash you could make the bounty higher the farther the killer is level-wise from the victim. Combatting other unpleasant behavior can be handled similarly..
There is no reason a functioning society cannot be created in a video game and a lot of reasons why one must be.
This is exactly why Linux is better than Solaris and will win.
Step 1:Linux does not have the feature.
Then, after a while...
Step 2: Linux has the feature, but it's hard to use, broken, buggy, incomplete, or not robust enough.
Go to sleep for a while, check again, and...
Step 3: Linux has the feature but it is missing major component X or Y which just everybody is doing now, what a piece of crap!
Hang on a while longer...
Step 4: Yep, Linux does that. It takes a bit of work, but it does that.
And if you still don't like it, you wait another little while and find that...
Step 5: Linux not only has the feature but automatically sets everything up for you with no user intervention required.
When Linux hits step 5 Solaris will still have the great support for the feature that it has today. Linus is right, Solaris is a joke: it's static, or at best slow moving.
What's wrong with Linux today is something so perfect you take it for granted in two years. If it's missing today, make it three.
So go ahead, buy Solaris today if you need it today. There's nothing wrong with that. But soon you wont need to buy Solaris to get what it offers today, and Sun just cannot keep adding features faster than Linux gets features. Sooner or later Linux will naturally pull up alongside, give Solaris a disinterested look, and accelerate ahead.
Wriitng interfaces to suit some impossible generic-user ideal is fruitless and moronic.
When writing UIs you should always target ONE user, and not a hypothetical user. Take one specific user and set it up how they like it. Then you know you're satisfying at least one person all the time.
ALL choices pertaining to which options to leave and which to remove are bad. You are not chosing between "easier" and "more powerful" you are chosing between "one set of options" and "another ser of options." Whether it is easier is entirely dependant on which specific end user is trying to change which specific options and whether they find it simple.
By aiming for a generic user ideal you are guaranteed to satisfy no one totally. You will probably raise the general level of irriattion among your userbase. There is no generic user, it is only a figment of your imagination which seems (sometimes) like it out to exist.
I am in favor of always chosing myself as the one user, but it can be anyone. Pick your grandmother, to use a classic example. Is your application targeted at both the luser and the moderately skilled user? Then pick a moderately skilled user, and let 'em tell you what it should look like.
Satisfy one person well and you will raise the overal satisfaction of the entire userbase. Satisfy no one specifically and you will lower the overall satisfaction of that userbase.
And rememever: Whether an option is needless is entirely dependant on whether I was looking for it. f I was, it was needed. Yhink about that the next time some GNOME wonk complains about confusing arrays of useless options in your program.
a similar thing happens to me with my nvidia card. I once did a strace on X when it was taking all that CPU and found that it was spewing sigalarm()'s. I would also submit a bug report, except that it would read: Sometimes when doing 3d accelerated stuff, or just any time, something will go wrong, the system will lock up, X will start using all the CPU, and I have to kill it from a remote ssh." Which is about as helpful as "It doesn't work.
I learned of HTML::Template in last years perl-advent, and at the moment it's an essential module in some in-house software I would otherwise not be being paid to develop.
I will be watching this years closely for any useful tidbits.
OS/2 is more stable, has better 16-bit legacy support,and is backed by IBM, the megacorporation that invented the architecture it runs on.
Windows 95 is buggier and is backed by Microsoft, the megacorporation which invented the API people have been making millions writing software for.
If you go with OS/2 you can run all OS/2 programs, all Win 3.x programs, (nearly) all DOS programs, and most Windows 95 programs.
Windows 95 has an enhanced superset API. On Windows 95 you can run nearly all OS/2 programs, all Win 3.x programs, (nearly) all DOS programs, and all Windows 95 programs.
Platform 2: You risk not being able to run some new programs if they're coded specifically for any OS/2 APIs which Windows doesn't have (I think this was essentially none).
Platform 1: You risk not being able to run new programs written for the OS which is owned by the current marketshare leader.
Everyone chooses Windows 95.
Firefox:Mozilla platform. IE: MS platform Netscp: Firefox platform, some of the IE platform.
The IE platform you don't get (BHOs is all, I think) you really don't need.
So? This is the thing about stable interfaces: if the interface changes in a way which breaks module support, it's not stable. Maybe the nvidia module shouldn;t have used information the kernel supplied, but it's not nVidia's fault that the information was available and useful.
Having a stable kernel ought to be some guarantee of a basic level of interface stability, IMNSHO.
I use stock kernels I wget from kernel.org under Debian sid. I upgrade to each new stable kernel quickly (for fun) and sometimes to not-so-stable kernels, for more fun.
One thing was refering to: There was a #define exported by the Linux kernel which (it seems) really shouldn't have been. The nvidia module used it,and when the definite was suddenly not there any more in 2.6.9, nvidia wouldn't compile. My workaround was to modify some nvidia header files to set the value to what it was in my kernel header files. The only other option would have been to use 2.6.8.1 until nVidia released an updated version of the module, which was obviously out of the question
I have little personal experience with YaST, but I doubt it can configure everything. For example, can it adjust swappiness? I'm not claiming it should, but it isn't "one big option menu" which controls everything if there are things you can't control with it.
If we're talking about one pretty comprehensive option menu, like the Windows collection of control panels, than many distros qualify.
Specialized markets are already handling this problem: They create a patchset which tracks the latest stable kernel and maintain it independantly of the main tree. I see no big problem with this model. The Linux main tree will continue to work well enough for everyone in general and groups with special (anf conflicting) needs will patch it to their liking without upsetting anybody else.
I second that. After having the nvidia driver broken four times I'm starting to get frustrated.
And, besides, we're approaching the time Linux kernel's typically fork: a few versions into to the series, the developers are starting to feel restricted by what they can't change in a stable kernel.
I just want to know how crap like this makes it to Slashdot. You'd think Taco would know better.
You can get this today, with the possible exception of your "one big option menu." A big menu with all options doesn't even exist in XP, since the control panel does not control everything.
What you don't explain to my satisfaction is what accepting large patch sets into the Linux kernel has to do with easy Linux configuration.
Changes to the Linux kernel rarely require the user, or even the sysadmin, to learn anything.
The Linux kernel forks all the time. 2.5 was a fork of 2.4 when big patches couldn't be merged otherwise. This is all terribly normal, the article was obviously written by an uninformed outsider. 2.6 will fork into 2.7, which most people wont use while big changes are made, and eventually 2.7 will become 2.8, and then for a while there will be one version. Until the next "fork," also known in Linux land as a "development version."
On the one hand, doing Evil Dead's plot again (this will make the fourth time, for those of you counting) will be good... if Bruce Campbell stars. If not, maybe not
On the other hand, I keep seeing them say "We know horro flicks are popular... we know what horror fans want... we want to make a great horror flick..." and in this I see what could be a big problem: Evil Dead wasn't a horror movie! While there were some tense moments and while it did contain many horror movie staples, it was essentially a comedy from the start. The comedy nature was more subtle (and gently satirical) in Evil Dead I, and more obvious in Evil Dead II.
If the makers of this rereremake are trying to make a horror movie, they could pyull it off and it could do well. If they're trying to make a comedy/mock-horror, as the original two were, then they'll have a definite hit among Evil Dead fans--but will probably turn off the major audience that didn't like the first two to begin with.
I have always wondered what an attempt at seriously doing the plot of Evil Dead II would be like. It helps that you have a built in sequel.
I work as a computer technician for the local school system. My big complaint in the still largely Windows 98 world drivers are a pain. You throw an image on a machine and... oops! Wrong image. The drivers aren't right! Do I spend the time to grab the right drivers, or spend the time to reimage with the right image? Unless the image I had happened to have the right NIC drivers I just have to reimage.
With WinXP it's slightly better, but still a pain in a lot of cases,
You know what I do when a user says "My sound isn't working!" and it's because the driver isn't installed correctly? I pop in my liveCD, today it was SimplyMEPIS, and it detects the hardware. I can then go to KDEs device manager or (more likely) just lspci to find the make/model of the card. I can then go and grab the right windows driver, reboot and install it.
Figuring out which driver to use for a sound card which as listed as (say) "Intel AC '97" is nearly impossble. It has ALWAYS been easier to just let Linux figure it out.
Linux live CDs are my "It works everywhere!" item. BartsPE doesn't do it for me since half the time it wont detect the NIC and do DHCP. With my liveCD I can easily say "Yes, the card is bad," or "You need the driver for Weird Chip 81627, not Weird Chip 81630" and I can do it quickly.
I don't like Windows. The driver support just isn't there.
1) It's DB engine is primative and a joke making all databases created for it fundamentally inferior.
2) It dumbs down databases making DBAs annoyed that their boss' can say "My 12 year old sun threw together a database that works fine in 20 minutes! Why am I paying you?"
The first argument is the only one which is good. You do NOT want to use a technically inferior DB.
The second argument is NOT good. For some people, for some things, you really do not need a DBA. The fact that people CAN build databases without really understanding them is not fundamentally bad, it's an empowerment and fundamentally good... so long as it is understood (as, of course, it some times will not be) that a DB designed by an amature in a WYZIWYG DB app is not the same as a DB designed by a professional, just as some kids VB bitmap editor is not Photoshop.
Free software, in my view, is ultimately about empowerment: My ability to do more. Not necessarily without knowing more, but without spending more, and without being forced to do it someone else's way. To empower more people it can be necessary to allow for people to do more while knowing the same or less (see some aspects of the GNOME philosophy of late). That isn't bad, in fact it's definitively good.
So, just as a WYZIWYG html editor is not bad just because FrontPage blows, a GUI database designer is not bad just because Access blows.
Slashdot Mirror
PvP problems need in-game logical solutions. You could just ban PvP, but don't do that. Whatever behavior it is that you find unacceptable, make it unpleasant to perform.
In the game ADOM (a roguelike) you can gain a lot of useful items quickly by killing shopkeepers. However, attacking a shopkeeper Dooms you, and being Doomed makes going on hugely more difficult (oh yeah, and shop keepers are really powerful for all but highly advanced characters.)
The game could have just made shopkeepers invincible, or made it so they could not be attacked, but it didn't. Instead it made the player want to not attack the shopkeepers by assigning negative properties to the action.
Why do you not commit crimes IRL? For some it is a sense of morality, but for others it is simple fear of the law. In a MMOG the "law" *IS NOT* just the game ruleset which says, e.g., "players cannot attack other players." The RL equivalent to that is: "Why do people not breath dirt? Because it's impossible."
How law is best implimented is highly game-dependant. In an EQ-type envitonment maybe an automatic lucrative bounty for player killers would be in order. To prevent scumming new accounts for cash you could make the bounty higher the farther the killer is level-wise from the victim. Combatting other unpleasant behavior can be handled similarly..
There is no reason a functioning society cannot be created in a video game and a lot of reasons why one must be.
This is exactly why Linux is better than Solaris and will win.
Step 1:Linux does not have the feature.
Then, after a while...
Step 2: Linux has the feature, but it's hard to use, broken, buggy, incomplete, or not robust enough.
Go to sleep for a while, check again, and...
Step 3: Linux has the feature but it is missing major component X or Y which just everybody is doing now, what a piece of crap!
Hang on a while longer...
Step 4: Yep, Linux does that. It takes a bit of work, but it does that.
And if you still don't like it, you wait another little while and find that...
Step 5: Linux not only has the feature but automatically sets everything up for you with no user intervention required.
When Linux hits step 5 Solaris will still have the great support for the feature that it has today. Linus is right, Solaris is a joke: it's static, or at best slow moving.
What's wrong with Linux today is something so perfect you take it for granted in two years. If it's missing today, make it three.
So go ahead, buy Solaris today if you need it today. There's nothing wrong with that. But soon you wont need to buy Solaris to get what it offers today, and Sun just cannot keep adding features faster than Linux gets features. Sooner or later Linux will naturally pull up alongside, give Solaris a disinterested look, and accelerate
ahead.
My computer until three months ago was a PII-350. I had no complaints, except that mozilla rendered some pages slowly.
I upgraded for one reason only: Doom 3. Hail id, baby.
It probably doesn't make it easier for new users.
Wriitng interfaces to suit some impossible generic-user ideal is fruitless and moronic.
When writing UIs you should always target ONE user, and not a hypothetical user. Take one specific user and set it up how they like it. Then you know you're satisfying at least one person all the time.
ALL choices pertaining to which options to leave and which to remove are bad. You are not chosing between "easier" and "more powerful" you are chosing between "one set of options" and "another ser of options." Whether it is easier is entirely dependant on which specific end user is trying to change which specific options and whether they find it simple.
By aiming for a generic user ideal you are guaranteed to satisfy no one totally. You will probably raise the general level of irriattion among your userbase. There is no generic user, it is only a figment of your imagination which seems (sometimes) like it out to exist.
I am in favor of always chosing myself as the one user, but it can be anyone. Pick your grandmother, to use a classic example. Is your application targeted at both the luser and the moderately skilled user? Then pick a moderately skilled user, and let 'em tell you what it should look like.
Satisfy one person well and you will raise the overal satisfaction of the entire userbase. Satisfy no one specifically and you will lower the overall satisfaction of that userbase.
And rememever: Whether an option is needless is entirely dependant on whether I was looking for it. f I was, it was needed. Yhink about that the next time some GNOME wonk complains about confusing arrays of useless options in your program.
a similar thing happens to me with my nvidia card. I once did a strace on X when it was taking all that CPU and found that it was spewing sigalarm()'s. I would also submit a bug report, except that it would read: Sometimes when doing 3d accelerated stuff, or just any time, something will go wrong, the system will lock up, X will start using all the CPU, and I have to kill it from a remote ssh." Which is about as helpful as "It doesn't work.
A PDF makes a bad slideshow. A OOo reader would read all OOo formats, just not re-save them. You could do your slideshow on boxen without OOo.
Is that compelling enough? For me the "it would be cool" thing is reason enough.
I learned of HTML::Template in last years perl-advent, and at the moment it's an essential module in some in-house software I would otherwise not be being paid to develop.
I will be watching this years closely for any useful tidbits.
Step one:
Get the (subtitled in english) episodes of Hikaru no Go. There aren't too many, a mere few dozen.
Step two:
Watch three episodes. Play go. Repeat until episodes are exhausted.
Step three.
Go back to the tutorials which will now make a lot of sense.
Seriously.
One word: OS/2
Would you run OS/2, or Windows 95?
Well...
OS/2 is more stable, has better 16-bit legacy support,and is backed by IBM, the megacorporation that invented the architecture it runs on.
Windows 95 is buggier and is backed by Microsoft, the megacorporation which invented the API people have been making millions writing software for.
If you go with OS/2 you can run all OS/2 programs, all Win 3.x programs, (nearly) all DOS programs, and most Windows 95 programs.
Windows 95 has an enhanced superset API. On Windows 95 you can run nearly all OS/2 programs, all Win 3.x programs, (nearly) all DOS programs, and all Windows 95 programs.
Platform 2: You risk not being able to run some new programs if they're coded specifically for any OS/2 APIs which Windows doesn't have (I think this was essentially none).
Platform 1: You risk not being able to run new programs written for the OS which is owned by the current marketshare leader.
Everyone chooses Windows 95.
Firefox:Mozilla platform.
IE: MS platform
Netscp: Firefox platform, some of the IE platform.
The IE platform you don't get (BHOs is all, I think) you really don't need.
Everyone chooses... Netscape.
It's not an illogical strategy.
Rip off? This is open source! Around hear we call it a fork.
Maybe you should upgrade to a better distro?
There is no disro better than Debian.
So? This is the thing about stable interfaces: if the interface changes in a way which breaks module support, it's not stable. Maybe the nvidia module shouldn;t have used information the kernel supplied, but it's not nVidia's fault that the information was available and useful.
Having a stable kernel ought to be some guarantee of a basic level of interface stability, IMNSHO.
I use stock kernels I wget from kernel.org under Debian sid. I upgrade to each new stable kernel quickly (for fun) and sometimes to not-so-stable kernels, for more fun.
One thing was refering to: There was a #define exported by the Linux kernel which (it seems) really shouldn't have been. The nvidia module used it,and when the definite was suddenly not there any more in 2.6.9, nvidia wouldn't compile. My workaround was to modify some nvidia header files to set the value to what it was in my kernel header files. The only other option would have been to use 2.6.8.1 until nVidia released an updated version of the module, which was obviously out of the question
I have little personal experience with YaST, but I doubt it can configure everything. For example, can it adjust swappiness? I'm not claiming it should, but it isn't "one big option menu" which controls everything if there are things you can't control with it.
If we're talking about one pretty comprehensive option menu, like the Windows collection of control panels, than many distros qualify.
Specialized markets are already handling this problem: They create a patchset which tracks the latest stable kernel and maintain it independantly of the main tree. I see no big problem with this model. The Linux main tree will continue to work well enough for everyone in general and groups with special (anf conflicting) needs will patch it to their liking without upsetting anybody else.
I second that. After having the nvidia driver broken four times I'm starting to get frustrated.
And, besides, we're approaching the time Linux kernel's typically fork: a few versions into to the series, the developers are starting to feel restricted by what they can't change in a stable kernel.
I just want to know how crap like this makes it to Slashdot. You'd think Taco would know better.
You can get this today, with the possible exception of your "one big option menu." A big menu with all options doesn't even exist in XP, since the control panel does not control everything.
What you don't explain to my satisfaction is what accepting large patch sets into the Linux kernel has to do with easy Linux configuration.
Changes to the Linux kernel rarely require the user, or even the sysadmin, to learn anything.
The Linux kernel forks all the time. 2.5 was a fork of 2.4 when big patches couldn't be merged otherwise. This is all terribly normal, the article was obviously written by an uninformed outsider. 2.6 will fork into 2.7, which most people wont use while big changes are made, and eventually 2.7 will become 2.8, and then for a while there will be one version. Until the next "fork," also known in Linux land as a "development version."
On the one hand, doing Evil Dead's plot again (this will make the fourth time, for those of you counting) will be good... if Bruce Campbell stars. If not, maybe not
On the other hand, I keep seeing them say "We know horro flicks are popular... we know what horror fans want... we want to make a great horror flick..." and in this I see what could be a big problem: Evil Dead wasn't a horror movie! While there were some tense moments and while it did contain many horror movie staples, it was essentially a comedy from the start. The comedy nature was more subtle (and gently satirical) in Evil Dead I, and more obvious in Evil Dead II.
If the makers of this rereremake are trying to make a horror movie, they could pyull it off and it could do well. If they're trying to make a comedy/mock-horror, as the original two were, then they'll have a definite hit among Evil Dead fans--but will probably turn off the major audience that didn't like the first two to begin with.
I have always wondered what an attempt at seriously doing the plot of Evil Dead II would be like. It helps that you have a built in sequel.
You are absolutely correct and I thank you.
I work as a computer technician for the local school system. My big complaint in the still largely Windows 98 world drivers are a pain. You throw an image on a machine and... oops! Wrong image. The drivers aren't right! Do I spend the time to grab the right drivers, or spend the time to reimage with the right image? Unless the image I had happened to have the right NIC drivers I just have to reimage.
With WinXP it's slightly better, but still a pain in a lot of cases,
You know what I do when a user says "My sound isn't working!" and it's because the driver isn't installed correctly? I pop in my liveCD, today it was SimplyMEPIS, and it detects the hardware. I can then go to KDEs device manager or (more likely) just lspci to find the make/model of the card. I can then go and grab the right windows driver, reboot and install it.
Figuring out which driver to use for a sound card which as listed as (say) "Intel AC '97" is nearly impossble. It has ALWAYS been easier to just let Linux figure it out.
Linux live CDs are my "It works everywhere!" item. BartsPE doesn't do it for me since half the time it wont detect the NIC and do DHCP. With my liveCD I can easily say "Yes, the card is bad," or "You need the driver for Weird Chip 81627, not Weird Chip 81630" and I can do it quickly.
I don't like Windows. The driver support just isn't there.
There are two theoeries as to why Access is bad:
1) It's DB engine is primative and a joke making all databases created for it fundamentally inferior.
2) It dumbs down databases making DBAs annoyed that their boss' can say "My 12 year old sun threw together a database that works fine in 20 minutes! Why am I paying you?"
The first argument is the only one which is good. You do NOT want to use a technically inferior DB.
The second argument is NOT good. For some people, for some things, you really do not need a DBA. The fact that people CAN build databases without really understanding them is not fundamentally bad, it's an empowerment and fundamentally good... so long as it is understood (as, of course, it some times will not be) that a DB designed by an amature in a WYZIWYG DB app is not the same as a DB designed by a professional, just as some kids VB bitmap editor is not Photoshop.
Free software, in my view, is ultimately about empowerment: My ability to do more. Not necessarily without knowing more, but without spending more, and without being forced to do it someone else's way. To empower more people it can be necessary to allow for people to do more while knowing the same or less (see some aspects of the GNOME philosophy of late). That isn't bad, in fact it's definitively good.
So, just as a WYZIWYG html editor is not bad just because FrontPage blows, a GUI database designer is not bad just because Access blows.
On the contrary, PySol is the best solitaire suite, bar none.
Never heard of it. Is it a new shell?
echo whatever | caesar 13
It's faster to type. Or do you not have BSDGames?