Right, dumb question: Name 5 popular games out there that you consider would be suitable for a ten-year-old, if only it wasn't for that darned evil Satanic message.
Doom? In the early, good levels, where you don't get the cheesy inverted crosses, you're mostly shooting a bunch of guys with machine guns, watching their blood spray everywhere. Hardly suitable for kids anyway, is it?
You see, most of the really good games of the last couple of years (I'm talking the likes of Mario, Frequency, Zelda, Gran Tourismo 3, Project Gotham, Amped, Super Monkey Ball and Ikaruga to pick a random personal 8) are fine for kids. The rest (say Halo and Vice City to round out a top ten) are so violent and clearly aimed at adults that quibbling about "Christian themes" seems the least thing Christians, or any responsible parent, should be worrying about.
"As someone who was taking care of a minor who was religiously sensitive I understand some of the issues, and was appaled that most games tout religious content in some way."
You're hardly the only person to claim this here, but it sounds like you've had to do some checking out of this. I keep seeing "most games" being bandied about, but the only games I can think of right now are the collected works of id, the Diablo games, and possibly Eternal Darkness (though I've not played that).
I've got a just about complete collection of the current platforms, and yet I can't think of a single game I've bought in the last two years that includes imagery of this type. When everything from Pikmin via Amped, Frequency, Ikaruga and PGR to Halo manage to be devoid of satanic images, and I generally regard most FPS games as unsuitable for any kid liable to have problems with the odd inverted cross in the background anyway, I don't see the big problem.
"Why does it matter if Caldera provided the hardware? Unless there was a specific aggreement that was signed, Caldera/Sco would have no rights to the code"
Ah. Here is the other end of the stick, I think the grandparent poster may have been vague. SCO are claiming that IBM broke the law by putting oh so dangerous SMP code in Linux. In fact, SCO, when working as Caldera directly helped a foreign national do that instead. Its not that they think the code is theirs, but that they are claiming its IBM's, and that the information was illegal.
Therefore IBM broke the law. Breaking the law is apparently against some clause in their contract together, and so IBM broke the contract. That is what is being sued for today. Tomorrow may be completely different, of course.
1) Its pretty complex. Both SCO and IBM have a massive pile of paperwork to defend their arguments, it all involves questions about who did what first, with the involvement of whom, and whether or not what Caldera did before they were SCO, and what Sequent did before they were IBM counts. There is easily enough room to drag this on for ages, even if they are unlikely to win. This is important, because
2) SCO need to get themselves bought out. Soon. Thats the only good reason I can see for picking a fight with a patents superpower, rather than clobbering poor old Linus or Redhat, where they might actually stand a chance through superior lawyerpower. They want to make it cheaper to get bought than for IBM to fight it, and they can retire with fat payoffs.
Ah. I've just seen the other reply, and gone and checked the update.
To clarify, then, they are saying that, basically, RedHat Enterprise Linux, whether that be a workstation or server, should be purchased per machine.
The don't mention RedHat Linux 9, the current "buy it and install as much as you want, but you won't be getting services" download. Like I said, if you want the version with services, buy it. If you don't don't.
Unfortunately, I've lost the quote another poster used; do enough digging and I believe you'll find it up there in a reply to someone. In short, "Installed Server" is earlier defined as meaning specifically an installed instance of RedHat Advanced Server, i.e. the big expensive version that comes with full support services, not the free download or the cheap home user box with 90 day support.
Basically, they are saying that if you want to install the version that says "I'm Advanced Server, and should be supported" then you need to buy the support. Otherwise everyone buys one expensive box and claims that the server thats down is always the one with support on it.
Earlier up the EULA from the quoted section it explicitly states that "installed servers" means "Machines with RedHat Advanced Server edition" installed, not just any old edition of Linux.
The version you're downloading from the website isn't RHAS, so that doesn't count.
The big expensive box they sell as RHAS comes with support. They can't tell, when you raise a support call, if the RHAS machine is the one you've paid for, or one you've installed later, and without this language, you can guarantee that the 1 licensed machine is bound to be the one they have a support call for, not one of the others. So RedHat have said that if you want to install the version with all the supported stuff on, then its a copy per machine. Sounds fair enough to me.
The problem with Services contracts for Linux boxes is that you're allowed to install as many machines as you want (obviously - its GPL software). When clients only take out a service contract for some of their machines, then they have to have a certain amount of cover in their contracts to deal with the fact that you can pretty much guarantee that, out of the 5 servers you have, its always the one with the Service Contract that has the problem.
Creative server registering of this type has been catching them out for a while, so they are trying to minimise it with that change.
"we all know that Descarte's duality is bogus, right?"
Of course, at this point we all start mentioning the fact that Popper, when arguing against the "two worlds" theory called his third world the Neosphere, and start running around saying its all planned from the start.
Forgetting for a moment "ananke"'s valid point that VAT is usually much larger than US sales tax (though, as I don't generally find myself in the flyover states I think of it as closer to 10% than 5%), its slightly amusing the thinking on this.
In Europe, all prices are normally listed inclusive of tax, as to list a low price and find out it actually costs you more at the till is thought deceptive.
In the US, all prices are normally listed exclusive of tax, as US citizens are thought to prefer their taxes where they can see them, and hiding the value of Sales tax is thought deceptive. There is also the argument that it varies from State to State, but the EU seems to cope with listing different costs in Euros between countries without any hassle.
Sorry, no offense to you personally, but f*ck local vendors. F*ck 'em. Right in the ear.
Not because international vendors are any cheaper (though they usually are), but because local product isn't any good.
Personally, I only import a couple of things:
1) Thinkgeek.com t-shirts. Plain don't exist in the UK, so shopping locally would get me nowhere.
2) Games. If Nintendo Europe were to get off their lazy rip-off arses and actually release Animal Crossing here in the UK we'd no doubt end up with yet another crap 17.5% slower than intended version. Apparently, though we're not allowed it here in the UK, because they don't want to spend the time and effort to translate it into French, German and Spanish. Because that makes sense, obviously.
3) Films. If its not the BBFC cutting them to avoid offending Daily Mail readers, or the Studios deciding that picture quality is less important to me than a Dutch dubbed track, and that I don't care about the extras that the US release has, its PAL. Our crummy television standard can't play films at the correct speed any more than it can play games properly.
Its not about the money, its about how crap the UK goods are.
SCO aren't really in a position to fake dates on their code either. The lawsuit is saying that IBM put code they licensed from SCO into the Linux kernel.
So they actually need to demonstrate that the code was in the source tree passed to licensees at that time; any licensee could call them on it if they faked. Also, the publically available, mirrored across the planet, changelogs for Linux must show the change happening sometime after that date.
Re:Ill get it out of the way
on
Mac OS X Hints
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· Score: 2, Informative
Actually, Windows does use the scroll button, and its rather handy. If you've got a massive virtual area in the window, its much easier to click it and scroll the contents by moving the mouse around than just wheel for the next 10 minutes because its a popular/. story (for example).
Actually, stuff emulators and pointless trinkets, I'm looking forward to the DC release of the latest King Of Fighters game (2002?), which is released soon.
As far as I remember the Dreamcast Quake 3 could play against PC owners; does this mean that the "central server" part of the online game was just a GameSpy server list? I suspect it shouldn't be too difficult to get that title speaking to a standard PC Q3A server.
Re:Sorry, I'm just not that excited this time arou
on
Gran Turismo 4 Preview
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· Score: 5, Insightful
I'm really not sure about damage now. A couple of years ago while playing GT2 I'd have probably agreed, but not after GT3.
Yes, lack of damage is a problem with the realistic look they have going on. Hell, before we even get to damage I'd like to start by having rally cars that don't look shiny and clean after 10 laps of dirt racing. But its what comes with it thats the problem.
Far more than with GT2, progress in GT3 is boringly slow. Without the second-hand market, you spend ages doing the same tracks over and over again at first earning a few pennies to pay for meagre upgrades to the car. Cash is really boringly tight.
So if you could write off the $100,000 worth of Lotus Elise on the first corner and have to start saving all over again, you'd be going straight for the "revert to saved" option the moment you recieved any damage in any case.
If you want to see spectacular crashes, buy Burnout 2 (its a more fun game all round, too, but you didn't hear me say that). If you want to play Gran Tourismo's career mode, you're better off without damage that you'll never see again after the first time.
Without trying to put too much of a pro or anti spin on either style of game, the likes of Le Mans are very much Racing games. The thrill is from trying to beat the other drivers in a race to the finish line.
In the GTA series, its very much a Driving game. The aim is to improve your own driving, with all the emphasis going on the handling model and beating your own lap times by either exploiting the best out of the handling, or tuning the car to go faster. Unless you're playing multiplayer the opposition ends up being fairly redundant, to be honest.
If you're the kind of gearhead that likes tuning cars GT is wonderful. If you're the kind of person who is more interested in beating the other racers, you'd be better off with F355 Challenge or MotoGP.
Yes, I know the guy is almost certainly a troll, but this won't take long.
"Part of this license states that any changes to the kernel are to be made freely available. Unfortunately for us, this meant that the great deal of time and money we spent "touching up" Linux to work for this investment firm would now be available at no cost to our competitors."
Sorry, thanks for playing. It merely states that you have to make the source available to those you give binaries. You can make all the changes you want to the kernel for a client, as long as you give that client the source as well. No-one else need have it.
In the instance of kernel changes, it makes a hell of a lot of sense, too. Lets assume for a moment that you weren't a troll. This company would have a custom kernel, but without the new modified kernel source they couldn't install anything else that would also patch the kernel, or even rebuild when bugfixes are released.
I'm just guessing, but it sounds like you're talking about Rockstar North's Midnight Club 2, which just made the port from PS2 to XBox last week. This article is about whatever the mighty David Jones has going at his new company. He created DMA Design back in the Amiga days (Menace being his first game), before selling it to Take 2. They rebranded it as Rockstar North after GTA3.
"They should have had the Crew of the Osiris there"
Quite apart from the fact that Square's animation sucked as much during Osiris as is did during The Spirits Within (they are great at designing human CG models, but can't make them move realistically at all in my view), its far too recent to be included in the nominations, even if shorts count (which I doubt).
"Actually, if something stinks like shit you don't have to shit your own mound beside it before you're allowed to say that it stinks like shit."
Of course, the problem with the metaphor is that it implies that your own mound will also be shit.
If you believe thats the case here, then presumably the whole idea of a jargon file is crap. In which case, ESR wasn't ruining everything, as it was shit to start with. So who cares?
Slashdot Mirror
Right, dumb question: Name 5 popular games out there that you consider would be suitable for a ten-year-old, if only it wasn't for that darned evil Satanic message.
Doom? In the early, good levels, where you don't get the cheesy inverted crosses, you're mostly shooting a bunch of guys with machine guns, watching their blood spray everywhere. Hardly suitable for kids anyway, is it?
You see, most of the really good games of the last couple of years (I'm talking the likes of Mario, Frequency, Zelda, Gran Tourismo 3, Project Gotham, Amped, Super Monkey Ball and Ikaruga to pick a random personal 8) are fine for kids. The rest (say Halo and Vice City to round out a top ten) are so violent and clearly aimed at adults that quibbling about "Christian themes" seems the least thing Christians, or any responsible parent, should be worrying about.
"As someone who was taking care of a minor who was religiously sensitive I understand some of the issues, and was appaled that most games tout religious content in some way."
You're hardly the only person to claim this here, but it sounds like you've had to do some checking out of this. I keep seeing "most games" being bandied about, but the only games I can think of right now are the collected works of id, the Diablo games, and possibly Eternal Darkness (though I've not played that).
I've got a just about complete collection of the current platforms, and yet I can't think of a single game I've bought in the last two years that includes imagery of this type. When everything from Pikmin via Amped, Frequency, Ikaruga and PGR to Halo manage to be devoid of satanic images, and I generally regard most FPS games as unsuitable for any kid liable to have problems with the odd inverted cross in the background anyway, I don't see the big problem.
I'm sitting next to an AIX box. How long until it explodes in my face?
Stretching it to breaking point, the logical conclusion is "Hatch's attempts at music offend my ears. I should shoot him so he won't sing any more".
Hmmm.
In other news, a certain section of slashdot contains the combination lock for my bike. I insist that everyone stop publishing these digits.
Obviously, I can't tell you what my combination is, so you'll just have to take it all down.
SCO could actually try this, couldn't they? Madness.
"Why does it matter if Caldera provided the hardware? Unless there was a specific aggreement that was signed, Caldera/Sco would have no rights to the code"
Ah. Here is the other end of the stick, I think the grandparent poster may have been vague. SCO are claiming that IBM broke the law by putting oh so dangerous SMP code in Linux. In fact, SCO, when working as Caldera directly helped a foreign national do that instead. Its not that they think the code is theirs, but that they are claiming its IBM's, and that the information was illegal.
Therefore IBM broke the law. Breaking the law is apparently against some clause in their contract together, and so IBM broke the contract. That is what is being sued for today. Tomorrow may be completely different, of course.
As I see it, its a combination of two things.
1) Its pretty complex. Both SCO and IBM have a massive pile of paperwork to defend their arguments, it all involves questions about who did what first, with the involvement of whom, and whether or not what Caldera did before they were SCO, and what Sequent did before they were IBM counts. There is easily enough room to drag this on for ages, even if they are unlikely to win. This is important, because
2) SCO need to get themselves bought out. Soon. Thats the only good reason I can see for picking a fight with a patents superpower, rather than clobbering poor old Linus or Redhat, where they might actually stand a chance through superior lawyerpower. They want to make it cheaper to get bought than for IBM to fight it, and they can retire with fat payoffs.
Ah. I've just seen the other reply, and gone and checked the update.
To clarify, then, they are saying that, basically, RedHat Enterprise Linux, whether that be a workstation or server, should be purchased per machine.
The don't mention RedHat Linux 9, the current "buy it and install as much as you want, but you won't be getting services" download. Like I said, if you want the version with services, buy it. If you don't don't.
Unfortunately, I've lost the quote another poster used; do enough digging and I believe you'll find it up there in a reply to someone. In short, "Installed Server" is earlier defined as meaning specifically an installed instance of RedHat Advanced Server, i.e. the big expensive version that comes with full support services, not the free download or the cheap home user box with 90 day support.
Basically, they are saying that if you want to install the version that says "I'm Advanced Server, and should be supported" then you need to buy the support. Otherwise everyone buys one expensive box and claims that the server thats down is always the one with support on it.
Earlier up the EULA from the quoted section it explicitly states that "installed servers" means "Machines with RedHat Advanced Server edition" installed, not just any old edition of Linux.
The version you're downloading from the website isn't RHAS, so that doesn't count.
The big expensive box they sell as RHAS comes with support. They can't tell, when you raise a support call, if the RHAS machine is the one you've paid for, or one you've installed later, and without this language, you can guarantee that the 1 licensed machine is bound to be the one they have a support call for, not one of the others. So RedHat have said that if you want to install the version with all the supported stuff on, then its a copy per machine. Sounds fair enough to me.
The problem with Services contracts for Linux boxes is that you're allowed to install as many machines as you want (obviously - its GPL software). When clients only take out a service contract for some of their machines, then they have to have a certain amount of cover in their contracts to deal with the fact that you can pretty much guarantee that, out of the 5 servers you have, its always the one with the Service Contract that has the problem.
Creative server registering of this type has been catching them out for a while, so they are trying to minimise it with that change.
"we all know that Descarte's duality is bogus, right?"
Of course, at this point we all start mentioning the fact that Popper, when arguing against the "two worlds" theory called his third world the Neosphere, and start running around saying its all planned from the start.
See how easy it is to read things into stuff?
Forgetting for a moment "ananke"'s valid point that VAT is usually much larger than US sales tax (though, as I don't generally find myself in the flyover states I think of it as closer to 10% than 5%), its slightly amusing the thinking on this.
In Europe, all prices are normally listed inclusive of tax, as to list a low price and find out it actually costs you more at the till is thought deceptive.
In the US, all prices are normally listed exclusive of tax, as US citizens are thought to prefer their taxes where they can see them, and hiding the value of Sales tax is thought deceptive. There is also the argument that it varies from State to State, but the EU seems to cope with listing different costs in Euros between countries without any hassle.
Sorry, no offense to you personally, but f*ck local vendors. F*ck 'em. Right in the ear.
Not because international vendors are any cheaper (though they usually are), but because local product isn't any good.
Personally, I only import a couple of things:
1) Thinkgeek.com t-shirts. Plain don't exist in the UK, so shopping locally would get me nowhere.
2) Games. If Nintendo Europe were to get off their lazy rip-off arses and actually release Animal Crossing here in the UK we'd no doubt end up with yet another crap 17.5% slower than intended version. Apparently, though we're not allowed it here in the UK, because they don't want to spend the time and effort to translate it into French, German and Spanish. Because that makes sense, obviously.
3) Films. If its not the BBFC cutting them to avoid offending Daily Mail readers, or the Studios deciding that picture quality is less important to me than a Dutch dubbed track, and that I don't care about the extras that the US release has, its PAL. Our crummy television standard can't play films at the correct speed any more than it can play games properly.
Its not about the money, its about how crap the UK goods are.
SCO aren't really in a position to fake dates on their code either. The lawsuit is saying that IBM put code they licensed from SCO into the Linux kernel.
So they actually need to demonstrate that the code was in the source tree passed to licensees at that time; any licensee could call them on it if they faked. Also, the publically available, mirrored across the planet, changelogs for Linux must show the change happening sometime after that date.
Actually, Windows does use the scroll button, and its rather handy. If you've got a massive virtual area in the window, its much easier to click it and scroll the contents by moving the mouse around than just wheel for the next 10 minutes because its a popular /. story (for example).
Actually, stuff emulators and pointless trinkets, I'm looking forward to the DC release of the latest King Of Fighters game (2002?), which is released soon.
As far as I remember the Dreamcast Quake 3 could play against PC owners; does this mean that the "central server" part of the online game was just a GameSpy server list? I suspect it shouldn't be too difficult to get that title speaking to a standard PC Q3A server.
I'm really not sure about damage now. A couple of years ago while playing GT2 I'd have probably agreed, but not after GT3.
Yes, lack of damage is a problem with the realistic look they have going on. Hell, before we even get to damage I'd like to start by having rally cars that don't look shiny and clean after 10 laps of dirt racing. But its what comes with it thats the problem.
Far more than with GT2, progress in GT3 is boringly slow. Without the second-hand market, you spend ages doing the same tracks over and over again at first earning a few pennies to pay for meagre upgrades to the car. Cash is really boringly tight.
So if you could write off the $100,000 worth of Lotus Elise on the first corner and have to start saving all over again, you'd be going straight for the "revert to saved" option the moment you recieved any damage in any case.
If you want to see spectacular crashes, buy Burnout 2 (its a more fun game all round, too, but you didn't hear me say that). If you want to play Gran Tourismo's career mode, you're better off without damage that you'll never see again after the first time.
Without trying to put too much of a pro or anti spin on either style of game, the likes of Le Mans are very much Racing games. The thrill is from trying to beat the other drivers in a race to the finish line.
In the GTA series, its very much a Driving game. The aim is to improve your own driving, with all the emphasis going on the handling model and beating your own lap times by either exploiting the best out of the handling, or tuning the car to go faster. Unless you're playing multiplayer the opposition ends up being fairly redundant, to be honest.
If you're the kind of gearhead that likes tuning cars GT is wonderful. If you're the kind of person who is more interested in beating the other racers, you'd be better off with F355 Challenge or MotoGP.
Yes, I know the guy is almost certainly a troll, but this won't take long.
"Part of this license states that any changes to the kernel are to be made freely available.
Unfortunately for us, this meant that the great deal of time and money we spent "touching up" Linux to work for this investment firm would now be available at no cost to our competitors."
Sorry, thanks for playing. It merely states that you have to make the source available to those you give binaries. You can make all the changes you want to the kernel for a client, as long as you give that client the source as well. No-one else need have it.
In the instance of kernel changes, it makes a hell of a lot of sense, too. Lets assume for a moment that you weren't a troll. This company would have a custom kernel, but without the new modified kernel source they couldn't install anything else that would also patch the kernel, or even rebuild when bugfixes are released.
I'm just guessing, but it sounds like you're talking about Rockstar North's Midnight Club 2, which just made the port from PS2 to XBox last week. This article is about whatever the mighty David Jones has going at his new company. He created DMA Design back in the Amiga days (Menace being his first game), before selling it to Take 2. They rebranded it as Rockstar North after GTA3.
I'm not certain, but I'm pretty sure that Jones had left DMA before Vice City was written, so I wouldn't hold him responsible for that one.
"They should have had the Crew of the Osiris there"
Quite apart from the fact that Square's animation sucked as much during Osiris as is did during The Spirits Within (they are great at designing human CG models, but can't make them move realistically at all in my view), its far too recent to be included in the nominations, even if shorts count (which I doubt).
"Actually, if something stinks like shit you don't have to shit your own mound beside it before you're allowed to say that it stinks like shit."
Of course, the problem with the metaphor is that it implies that your own mound will also be shit.
If you believe thats the case here, then presumably the whole idea of a jargon file is crap. In which case, ESR wasn't ruining everything, as it was shit to start with. So who cares?