I have been watching the development of SDL since I first saw it mentioned on Freshmeat (at 0.7). I have been on the SDL mailing list ever since, and I can tell you that SDL is probably your best bet for a fast, lightweight, cross-platform game programming library that's not going to get in your way. Right now it runs on (Source compatible) Linux, FreeBSD, Windows (Using Direct X), BeOS, and Mac. I can also tell you that there are tons of people on the SDL mailing lists, and they're not all Loki employees.
I took a look at a lot of other game programming libraries when I was first investigating SDL, I didn't just jump blindly into it. SDL isn't the answer to all game writing woes, and it could even be too low level for what a lot of people want, but it is fast, light, and since it's written in C, it can be incorporated into most anything.
If you want more information on SDL, I would recommend checking out their website: libsdl.org. It lists quite a few of the projects (Both game and otherwise) that SDL is being used in. I counted more than a hundred. A few of the highlights:
Most of the Loki games.
Descent 1x, 2x Freecraft OpenUT Several DOOM and Quake projects
Also, for those of you who want something a little higher-level, SDL has several game programming libraries built on top of it:
BUILD Engine GUIlib PowerPak
Everyone who says that Linux is not suited to run on a hand-held or palm-top platform are forgetting something very crucial to this whole situation (And I suspect that is because most of us came from a desktop background).
Linux is not a distribution. Linux is not a filesystem, or a set of drivers. Linux is not a desktop OS, not even a server OS for that matter, though with a few additions it makes an exelent one.
Linux is a kernel, plain and simple. Linux is the heart of the Red Hat distribution I run on my workstation, server, gateway, and webserver and the Debian distribution that Slashdot runs on top of.
The Linux kernel is extremely well designed, clean and flexible. Because source is available and doesn't suffer from years of being tightly coupled to a single (Or maybe two or three) hardware platforms, it can be ported up or down relatively easily. Linux hardware drivers are relatively easily to write, and it is not designed with any particular interface in mind.
Everyone who complains about "Why would I need a command-line on my palm-top" has missed the point. Everyone who says "running X on a hand-held... ew!" has also missed the boat.
Linux is the kernel. It is easily extensible, so any drivers that need to be written can be. Any GUI can also be wrapped around it, so the UI on the hand-held can be designed however it is needed. Don't want X? Don't put it on. Don't want the CLI, don't install it. It's up to you.
I dunno. Loki seems to have done pretty well, as had ID (Marketing blunders aside). And if a game writer uses SDL that really eases the programmer's problems and handles most of the cross-platform headaches and compatibility issues for them. They can even include SDL in with their game if they want (It's less than 400k for the Linux library).
Getting games running on Linux is fscking easy. The tough part is getting people over the it-isn't-windows-it's-too-hard syndrome that holds so many of them back.
After reading the IRC chat log with BioDudes and a couple people from the Creatures shop (Sorry, forgot the company name), I see a couple of problems, and have a couple of real concerns. Let me illustrate:
How many game-buyers don't have a credit card for some reason (Under-age being the primary one)? How many Linux users are willing to shell out money for their games? How many of those are willing to wait (days, weeks, months, years) for the Linux release to be made?
I seem to be in the minority there. I own practically all the Loki games released to date, and am growing despondant about the lack of recent releases. I waited for Descent 3 to be released for Linux. I will always purchase a Linux game over pirating a Linux game, but I seem to be the only one I know.
And unfortunately the Linux game market is not big enough to support the rampant piracy that I've seen running through the Windows game market.
Yeah, man. There are tons of BBS's still around. Mine is one of them, and I know there are plenty of others because several of the newsgroups I read are nothing but BBS ads anymore.
Check out www.thedirectory.org. They've got listings for telnet and dial-in BBS's.
You're right. The American Dream has always been self-sufficiency and self-reliance. The lone "cowboy" living by the sweat of his own brow.
But in the 21st Century, and after decades of corporate brow-beating, the people are starting to realize that the same rights allowed the lone inventor in his garage struggling to make the next revolutionary step forward do not apply to multi-national, money-grubbing, customer-raping corporations whos only god is "The Bottom Line" and who have stated that in persuit of profit will gladly turn aside any moral obligations they may have to the Arts, Society, Humanity, and anything else.
Besides, I resent your implication that anything anti-corporate is un-American and shouldn't even be aired in this country. Regardless of what some over-stuffed bastards in any the state or national capital say, I still have the right to air my grevances in a public forum. And I will excercise that right!
After spending the last several years in the tech support industry, it is my feeling that electronic anything (banking, books, buying/selling) has a long way to go before it's accepted by the masses, but not for the reasons most of the Slashdot crowd would expect.
To put it quite simply, most people who grew up before computers cannot deal well with anything computerized. I call it CISS (prounounced "kiss") which stands for Computer Induced Stupidity Syndrome. This is the phenomenon of otherwise completely normal, intelligent human individuals become blithering idiots when placed in front of a computer. Their brain shuts off. I have tried to find a cause for this but I have yet to pin it down.
In the case of electronic books it should be simple. Hell my four-year-old Palm Pilot Professional can read all of the Baen Free Library books (With minor modifications) and I've already read two of the books with it.
So why can't other people do the same? Like I said, I don't know. Maybe it's resentment. They don't like the idea of electronic books. Everyone has a bit of ludite in them and most of the people I know who didn't grow up with computers somehow think an electronic version of something will be somehow less than the original version. Maybe it's fear. They're afraid that with all the news they've heard about all these companies excercising insane levels of control over something they've already "sold" to the public, electronic books will be another SDMI or worse. Maybe it makes them feel their own mortality. They realize that something new is coming out and some primitive part of them starts gibbering and raising a clammour.
Whatever it is, I fear the only way to get past it is to "replace" these people with their children, a generation who have grown up with computers and who seem to exhibit an amazing resistance to CISS.
After having tried to use Usenet to get various binary files, I can say this is less feasable than Gnutella is. Any file I've ever seen that has been split into multi-parts has almost invariably had at least one part missing, thereby destroying the whole attempt. I have had exactly FOUR multi-part files come through successfully and that is after five years and trying several news servers as well as multiple servers at the same time.
This kind of ignorance isn't becoming to a reader of Slashdot, nor to the people who moderated this up.
What these people are promoting isn't making these M-Rated games into R-Rated games. What they're proposing is turning them into NC-17-Rated games. Now before anyone starts ranting about "It's only ratings!" let me ask you this. How often do you see NC-17 movies advertised, or even hear of their existance? To be blunt, most Hollywood production studios (like game studios) won't touch anything with that much stigma attached to it. What we'll get is games where the blood has been removed, the frags dulled to the point where they seem silly and destroy the mood the game designers were going for.
And one more thing. If you wouldn't be comfortable letting your 13-year-old play those kinds of games, don't let him! Yes, that means you'll have to be the ogre, not some faceless government burocrasy. I would trust my younger brothers (16 and 14) playing Quake 3 or Unreal Tournament because I know they're intelligent enough to realize that this is a game. And myself--being well over the age of 18--do not want my choices stunted or taken away from me by some clueless old fart who thinks everyone should listen to sweet music and think happy thoughts all the time.
I just patched the OpenSSH 2.2.0pl1 RPMS that I've been using. For anyone using OpenSSH 2.1 or 2.2 (As long as you've already got OpenSSL 0.9.5a or later) you can grab the rpms (and the src rpm) from here.
I'm sure this is going to come accross as a Linux-loving "penguinista" who feels insulted, but a few errors and omisisons in this article have bothered me.
First, as many people have pointed out, his Netfinity 5100 does not have 768gb of RAM, but instead mb, but what I have not seen his his understatement of the ftp.cdrom.com server. It is not a PPro 200 with 1gb RAM and a RAID5, it's (by its own admission) a Xeon 500 with 4gb RAM and a 500gb RAID5 (And I seem to remember something about it being multi-processor, but I can't confirm that).
Also, yes the FreeBSD community are having their own party and more power to 'em. But one of the things I like about the Linux community's party is the guest list. We invite everyone and they can all bring something. The FreeBSD party seems to have gotten a little snooty in their admissions process and what people can bring to their little soiree (I know I spelled that wrong so shaddap). Also the FreeBSD party has two, count 'em two barbeques (If we're to stick to the block-party metaphore), one Intel IA32 and one Alpha. Linux has how many now? Let's see. Off the top of my head, IA32, IA64, ARM, Crusoe, M68k, PPC, Sparq, Sparq64, and for the company cook-out, S390. And those are just the "official" hardware. So when the venerable IA32 finally dies its justified death we won't have to scrap everything and start over.
Yeah we've paid a little speed price for that, but what we lack in speed we make up for in style. I love the modularization of the later kernels, and I use it heavily. Yeah it might add a little bit to my overhead, but I can load and unload all the drivers I need when I need them. I am not aware of any other OS where I can turn on my scanner and then load the SCSI driver and have it find the device without a reboot.
And we're still the "new kid on the block" as they like to point out, but we're also the second biggest game in town anymore (Behind the one in the North West).
And as many wise men have mentioned, technological superiority alone will win you nothing in the end.
> I remember the first time I booted windows95.
> The first thing I cried out is "Where is all the
> bootup information??" . From beeing readily
> available before, now most of it was hidden.
It's still all there. All you had to do was hit ESC and you could see all of it. But let's be honest, how often do you need to? Unless something's wrong there's no reason to watch the same messages over and over again.
> I don't want a penguin displayed during the
> bootup. I want the information, as it reveals if
> something isn't the way it should be, without
> having to fiddle with logging and other
> bullshit.
Fine. Here's an idea, don't load the patch. Then you'll have all your purist kernel messages, and the rest of us can customize our boot process. (BTW, I used that patch in an earlier kernel and it does still show you all the regular kernel messages, it just has Tux in the upper left corner).
Besides, there's always `dmesg`.
> Eye candy is nice, but not when it removes
> possibly Very Important Information.
I don't get it. How is it removing information? Just because you don't have to see it when the system boots doesn't mean it's missing, has been removed, or otherwise taken away from you. If you'd actually investigated some of this instead of instantly deciding it's evil and ranting against it, you'd realize that it's not as bad as you think it is.
Hell for some people it could be quite enjoyable. Think of all the people who use GTK+, enlightenment, Windowmaker, IceWM, or Blackbox themes. Now they can theme their kernel boot sequence. Choice.
Well, id's experience and problems were solely id's. Because id had some bad experiences does not mean Neverwinter Nights will.
In fact, id brought about a lot of their own problems. They shipped the Linux box later than the Windows box (You know how much gamers hate to wait for a platform release. They'd sooner boot Windows than wait for the Linux release. The only reason MacOS gamers wait is because they can't run Windows games on their hardware). Plus they jumped the gun by shipping a Linux-only box. Most retailers don't give a fart in a high wind about anything that's not going to make them bucketloads of cash (read: Windows). They didn't care about those of us who prefer gaming with the penguin. I tried and tried to find Loki games at any store, even the ones listed on their website, but NO ONE had any Linux games. I finally gave up and bought online. Even to this day, I've only seen ONE Linux game at a store (Quake 3 ironically).
NWN will ship with all four binaries in the box, so I can buy it right next to my Windows-only roommates. That will lower production costs for Bioware because they won't have to produce three of everything. As long as their dev team has been paying attention to cross-platform coding rules and make the four versions interoperable, it might even save them money.
To throw in my own two cents here, there are several reasons why wireless companies aren't doing well (Failing, slugishness, etc).
1) Infastructure. Most wireless services I'm aware of require quite a few receiving towers scattered around a relatively small area (Say, a valley 20m by 14m). Even the ones using microwave need several to cover something that small. Those towers are definately NOT CHEAP. And the funny thing is that the physical construction isn't even the majority of the cost. Running a fat enough connection to the tower to handle its users will cost both your testicles and your right arm in zoning costs and permits.
2) Limited user base. For several reasons, the potential user base for wireless communications is significantly limited compared to cable, DSL, or phone service. How many people reading this message live in a dwelling that they own? How many live in an apartment building with restrictive rules about what they can do? The place I'm living now won't let me put a dish on the roof, and that's the only way I can get wireless. Unles my complex installs something for me and becomes my ISP, I'm stuck (And just for the record, they're not going to do that. I can't even get 56k in this place. They split phone lines into 32k chunks to save construction costs.)
3) Cost. Half of the people I work with use "free" ISPs. They won't shell out even $20 a month for an Internet feed, let alone $50-$100. And NO wireless company can live on $20 a month.
So in conclusion, we're going to see a major shakedown and hard times ahead for wireless companies. Some may survive, and once they start expanding, they should do extremely well. Until that time, there is nothing anyone can do.
"Best" and "Best of Breed" are two different ideas. "Best of breed" generally means it's the best of the few things some editor somewhere tested. Yes, we know that Linux is arguably a better desktop than Windows (Smoother, faster, more stable, more powerful), but Windows still dominates the market, and Microsoft has been adding some more glitz to it in the last few $100 revisions. Windows is designed to do one thing, while Linux is designed such that extending it to do something new is fairly clean and easy (As evidenced by Linux's advancement far beyond Linus' goals).
Considering the rest of The Matrix's setup, the dual NICs are probably for bandwidth. One NIC (100mb/sec) for the connection to the Internet and the other NIC (100mb/sec) to share between themselves so no matter how full the Internet side gets, the servers can still swap data between themselves.
Yes, you COULD send a Perl script as an attachment, but no Linux mail reader that I know of would automatically launch it when the message was opened or even PREVIEWED.
That is EXACTLY what happened at my employer's company. Most of the people who got hit with it did not even know how to turn off the damn preview pane that Outlook comes DEFAULT with.
We have had virii run through our network before. Most of our people know to NOT run anything called "LOVE-LETTER-FOR-YOU.vbs". Certainly not the 27 people who accidentally DID send it out when they received it from their supervisors / HR people / others who DO have incoming e-mail access.
Or did you not know of the embedding that comes STANDARD in Outlook now?
Well, mainly because most people don't think of securing Linux. They think of other things (speed, stability, performance, support, toys, etc). However, there are a couple of different projects aiming at security on Linux...
The first I can think of is Kaos Linux. It's a volunteer-run distro (I don't think they've made a release yet) that is aiming to be the OpenBSD of Linux distros. I used to have the URL but I've been up WAY too long for my brain to be able to pull up that kind of information.
The other is the Bastille Linux Project (May not be the OFFICIAL name, but you should be able to find it) which is just a patch to harden up some things in Red Hat Linux. They've actually reached 1.0 I believe.
If you want more information, go to Freshmeat.net and browse the console/os section of the appindex. It should have something that grabs ya.
Quake3 slow? What are you running it on? I'm running Quake3 on a P3/450 w/128mb RAM and a Voodoo2 video card and I get over 40fps. It's rock solid anywhere and it doesn't chew up every spare slice of RAM I've got.
Hello? Is this thing on? The Voodoo[123] cards are the BEST supported 3D cards on Linux. They ARE supported both by Glide_V2 and _V3 and by Mesa, and by XFree86! Linux's hardware support is growing by leaps and bounds. nVidia, Diamond, Creative Labs, 3Dfx, Matrox, and others are releasing specs and drivers for their cards for Linux on a regular basis. Hell John Carmack is working on the Utah-GLX drivers! We couldn't ASK for anything more.
p.s. Linux has had software raid for more than two years now... Better than NT's.
Look closer. Yes, it's still first person aim and shoot. But it's a lot more tactical than id games. You are a mechanized warrior with all sorts of armorments and implements of mass distruction. It's more of a First Person Simulation than anything else.
As for a really new, innovative game... Don't hold your breath. Game companies don't want new, innovative, or different. They want proven money-makes that they can churn out in a few months (Why do you think they like using game engines made by other companies? Saves on the R&D cost.
The little companies that are operating on venture capital and dreams are the ones to watch out for. The problem with that is that the big companies do watch out for them. They snap them up when they have a promissing title, and they clamp their iron fists around it. They only allow it to go to markets that THEY deem worthy (Read: "Lucrative").
As if! The money-grubbing tight-asses at Sierra Interactive doesn't give a rat's ass about us, or the Mac market for that matter. All they want is numbers, which (Sadly) only the Windows world can supply right now... I saw Homeworld. I played the demo. I was blown away. But I'm not going to reboot every damn time I want to kill three hours drooling over eye candy.
You're right, we do have a problem, but you're putting the blame in the wrong place. It's not Loki's fault that were isn't a StarCraft or Diablo for Linux. If you want to bitch, bitch at Blizzard. They're the stingy bastards who don't see enough of a Linux market to ALLOW Loki to port StarCraft, WarCraft, Diablow(2) to Linux. As for the makers of Bioware, they consider Balder's Gate a lost cause (As all game companies do once they've shipped a title and gotten their initial revenue). But in their defense, they're developing Neverwinter Nights for Win, Mac, and (wait for it) Linux all at the same time.
How can they claim privacy on something that is published and sold to the world at large? This is not like peaking into their windows or reading their mail. They sold (licensed) this software, it is no longer "private".
As for why they want the ISP logs, they want to violate the privacy of anyone who downloaded their little "secret".
How do you figure the DCMA is not a conspiracy? The MPAA, RIAA, software companies, ASP's, ISV's, VAR's, and a host of other TLA's want nothing more than to turn us into a herd of corn-fed consumers who happily suck down anything they put before us, then do it again in six months to three years. The MPAA and especially RIAA are more than willing to bitch slap their own golden geese to keep their eggs flowing. Restricting us to a narrow list of things we can do with "their" property is exactly what they want, and whether or not there was direct communication between them (I believe there was), they have conspired to strip us bare, all the while telling us we like it.
As for Napster being a bandwidth hog, many of us will only accept first-hand accounts from real university admins who have lived through this, not second/third/fourth hand recollections, half-truths, and rumors! I am willing to acknowledge that it is a big bandwidth hog, but then again so is your netgame of Quake, or listening to an internet radio station, making a voice-over-IP call, or browsing a graphic-heavy webpage.
Banning is not the answer. It is an arms race which can only end in tears, mutual distruction. Banning is a cheap-shot, cop-out, circle-jerk answer. The only real answer is bandwidth limiting and restrictions, not outright denial. But they won't do that. Another conspiracy?
What's in it for Apple now? They don't get a whole lot of registrations out of the downloadable version of QuickTime, just piss off a whole lot of people with that screen that pops up every time QuickTime starts. Besides, they're missing out on the whole Linux segment of the market right now.
Slashdot Mirror
I have been watching the development of SDL since I first saw it mentioned on Freshmeat (at 0.7). I have been on the SDL mailing list ever since, and I can tell you that SDL is probably your best bet for a fast, lightweight, cross-platform game programming library that's not going to get in your way. Right now it runs on (Source compatible) Linux, FreeBSD, Windows (Using Direct X), BeOS, and Mac. I can also tell you that there are tons of people on the SDL mailing lists, and they're not all Loki employees.
I took a look at a lot of other game programming libraries when I was first investigating SDL, I didn't just jump blindly into it. SDL isn't the answer to all game writing woes, and it could even be too low level for what a lot of people want, but it is fast, light, and since it's written in C, it can be incorporated into most anything.
If you want more information on SDL, I would recommend checking out their website: libsdl.org. It lists quite a few of the projects (Both game and otherwise) that SDL is being used in. I counted more than a hundred. A few of the highlights:
Most of the Loki games.
Descent 1x, 2x
Freecraft
OpenUT
Several DOOM and Quake projects
Also, for those of you who want something a little higher-level, SDL has several game programming libraries built on top of it:
BUILD Engine
GUIlib
PowerPak
Everyone who says that Linux is not suited to run on a hand-held or palm-top platform are forgetting something very crucial to this whole situation (And I suspect that is because most of us came from a desktop background).
Linux is not a distribution. Linux is not a filesystem, or a set of drivers. Linux is not a desktop OS, not even a server OS for that matter, though with a few additions it makes an exelent one.
Linux is a kernel, plain and simple. Linux is the heart of the Red Hat distribution I run on my workstation, server, gateway, and webserver and the Debian distribution that Slashdot runs on top of.
The Linux kernel is extremely well designed, clean and flexible. Because source is available and doesn't suffer from years of being tightly coupled to a single (Or maybe two or three) hardware platforms, it can be ported up or down relatively easily. Linux hardware drivers are relatively easily to write, and it is not designed with any particular interface in mind.
Everyone who complains about "Why would I need a command-line on my palm-top" has missed the point. Everyone who says "running X on a hand-held... ew!" has also missed the boat.
Linux is the kernel. It is easily extensible, so any drivers that need to be written can be. Any GUI can also be wrapped around it, so the UI on the hand-held can be designed however it is needed. Don't want X? Don't put it on. Don't want the CLI, don't install it. It's up to you.
I dunno. Loki seems to have done pretty well, as had ID (Marketing blunders aside). And if a game writer uses SDL that really eases the programmer's problems and handles most of the cross-platform headaches and compatibility issues for them. They can even include SDL in with their game if they want (It's less than 400k for the Linux library).
Getting games running on Linux is fscking easy. The tough part is getting people over the it-isn't-windows-it's-too-hard syndrome that holds so many of them back.
After reading the IRC chat log with BioDudes and a couple people from the Creatures shop (Sorry, forgot the company name), I see a couple of problems, and have a couple of real concerns. Let me illustrate:
How many game-buyers don't have a credit card for some reason (Under-age being the primary one)? How many Linux users are willing to shell out money for their games? How many of those are willing to wait (days, weeks, months, years) for the Linux release to be made?
I seem to be in the minority there. I own practically all the Loki games released to date, and am growing despondant about the lack of recent releases. I waited for Descent 3 to be released for Linux. I will always purchase a Linux game over pirating a Linux game, but I seem to be the only one I know.
And unfortunately the Linux game market is not big enough to support the rampant piracy that I've seen running through the Windows game market.
Yeah, man. There are tons of BBS's still around. Mine is one of them, and I know there are plenty of others because several of the newsgroups I read are nothing but BBS ads anymore.
Check out www.thedirectory.org. They've got listings for telnet and dial-in BBS's.
You're right. The American Dream has always been self-sufficiency and self-reliance. The lone "cowboy" living by the sweat of his own brow.
But in the 21st Century, and after decades of corporate brow-beating, the people are starting to realize that the same rights allowed the lone inventor in his garage struggling to make the next revolutionary step forward do not apply to multi-national, money-grubbing, customer-raping corporations whos only god is "The Bottom Line" and who have stated that in persuit of profit will gladly turn aside any moral obligations they may have to the Arts, Society, Humanity, and anything else.
Besides, I resent your implication that anything anti-corporate is un-American and shouldn't even be aired in this country. Regardless of what some over-stuffed bastards in any the state or national capital say, I still have the right to air my grevances in a public forum. And I will excercise that right!
There. I'm done troll-feeding for today.
After spending the last several years in the tech support industry, it is my feeling that electronic anything (banking, books, buying/selling) has a long way to go before it's accepted by the masses, but not for the reasons most of the Slashdot crowd would expect. To put it quite simply, most people who grew up before computers cannot deal well with anything computerized. I call it CISS (prounounced "kiss") which stands for Computer Induced Stupidity Syndrome. This is the phenomenon of otherwise completely normal, intelligent human individuals become blithering idiots when placed in front of a computer. Their brain shuts off. I have tried to find a cause for this but I have yet to pin it down. In the case of electronic books it should be simple. Hell my four-year-old Palm Pilot Professional can read all of the Baen Free Library books (With minor modifications) and I've already read two of the books with it. So why can't other people do the same? Like I said, I don't know. Maybe it's resentment. They don't like the idea of electronic books. Everyone has a bit of ludite in them and most of the people I know who didn't grow up with computers somehow think an electronic version of something will be somehow less than the original version. Maybe it's fear. They're afraid that with all the news they've heard about all these companies excercising insane levels of control over something they've already "sold" to the public, electronic books will be another SDMI or worse. Maybe it makes them feel their own mortality. They realize that something new is coming out and some primitive part of them starts gibbering and raising a clammour. Whatever it is, I fear the only way to get past it is to "replace" these people with their children, a generation who have grown up with computers and who seem to exhibit an amazing resistance to CISS.
After having tried to use Usenet to get various binary files, I can say this is less feasable than Gnutella is. Any file I've ever seen that has been split into multi-parts has almost invariably had at least one part missing, thereby destroying the whole attempt. I have had exactly FOUR multi-part files come through successfully and that is after five years and trying several news servers as well as multiple servers at the same time.
This kind of ignorance isn't becoming to a reader of Slashdot, nor to the people who moderated this up.
What these people are promoting isn't making these M-Rated games into R-Rated games. What they're proposing is turning them into NC-17-Rated games. Now before anyone starts ranting about "It's only ratings!" let me ask you this. How often do you see NC-17 movies advertised, or even hear of their existance? To be blunt, most Hollywood production studios (like game studios) won't touch anything with that much stigma attached to it. What we'll get is games where the blood has been removed, the frags dulled to the point where they seem silly and destroy the mood the game designers were going for.
And one more thing. If you wouldn't be comfortable letting your 13-year-old play those kinds of games, don't let him! Yes, that means you'll have to be the ogre, not some faceless government burocrasy. I would trust my younger brothers (16 and 14) playing Quake 3 or Unreal Tournament because I know they're intelligent enough to realize that this is a game. And myself--being well over the age of 18--do not want my choices stunted or taken away from me by some clueless old fart who thinks everyone should listen to sweet music and think happy thoughts all the time.
I just patched the OpenSSH 2.2.0pl1 RPMS that I've been using. For anyone using OpenSSH 2.1 or 2.2 (As long as you've already got OpenSSL 0.9.5a or later) you can grab the rpms (and the src rpm) from here.
I'm sure this is going to come accross as a Linux-loving "penguinista" who feels insulted, but a few errors and omisisons in this article have bothered me.
First, as many people have pointed out, his Netfinity 5100 does not have 768gb of RAM, but instead mb, but what I have not seen his his understatement of the ftp.cdrom.com server. It is not a PPro 200 with 1gb RAM and a RAID5, it's (by its own admission) a Xeon 500 with 4gb RAM and a 500gb RAID5 (And I seem to remember something about it being multi-processor, but I can't confirm that).
Also, yes the FreeBSD community are having their own party and more power to 'em. But one of the things I like about the Linux community's party is the guest list. We invite everyone and they can all bring something. The FreeBSD party seems to have gotten a little snooty in their admissions process and what people can bring to their little soiree (I know I spelled that wrong so shaddap). Also the FreeBSD party has two, count 'em two barbeques (If we're to stick to the block-party metaphore), one Intel IA32 and one Alpha. Linux has how many now? Let's see. Off the top of my head, IA32, IA64, ARM, Crusoe, M68k, PPC, Sparq, Sparq64, and for the company cook-out, S390. And those are just the "official" hardware. So when the venerable IA32 finally dies its justified death we won't have to scrap everything and start over.
Yeah we've paid a little speed price for that, but what we lack in speed we make up for in style. I love the modularization of the later kernels, and I use it heavily. Yeah it might add a little bit to my overhead, but I can load and unload all the drivers I need when I need them. I am not aware of any other OS where I can turn on my scanner and then load the SCSI driver and have it find the device without a reboot.
And we're still the "new kid on the block" as they like to point out, but we're also the second biggest game in town anymore (Behind the one in the North West).
And as many wise men have mentioned, technological superiority alone will win you nothing in the end.
> I remember the first time I booted windows95.
> The first thing I cried out is "Where is all the
> bootup information??" . From beeing readily
> available before, now most of it was hidden.
It's still all there. All you had to do was hit ESC and you could see all of it. But let's be honest, how often do you need to? Unless something's wrong there's no reason to watch the same messages over and over again.
> I don't want a penguin displayed during the
> bootup. I want the information, as it reveals if
> something isn't the way it should be, without
> having to fiddle with logging and other
> bullshit.
Fine. Here's an idea, don't load the patch. Then you'll have all your purist kernel messages, and the rest of us can customize our boot process. (BTW, I used that patch in an earlier kernel and it does still show you all the regular kernel messages, it just has Tux in the upper left corner).
Besides, there's always `dmesg`.
> Eye candy is nice, but not when it removes
> possibly Very Important Information.
I don't get it. How is it removing information? Just because you don't have to see it when the system boots doesn't mean it's missing, has been removed, or otherwise taken away from you. If you'd actually investigated some of this instead of instantly deciding it's evil and ranting against it, you'd realize that it's not as bad as you think it is.
Hell for some people it could be quite enjoyable. Think of all the people who use GTK+, enlightenment, Windowmaker, IceWM, or Blackbox themes. Now they can theme their kernel boot sequence. Choice.
Well, id's experience and problems were solely id's. Because id had some bad experiences does not mean Neverwinter Nights will.
In fact, id brought about a lot of their own problems. They shipped the Linux box later than the Windows box (You know how much gamers hate to wait for a platform release. They'd sooner boot Windows than wait for the Linux release. The only reason MacOS gamers wait is because they can't run Windows games on their hardware). Plus they jumped the gun by shipping a Linux-only box. Most retailers don't give a fart in a high wind about anything that's not going to make them bucketloads of cash (read: Windows). They didn't care about those of us who prefer gaming with the penguin. I tried and tried to find Loki games at any store, even the ones listed on their website, but NO ONE had any Linux games. I finally gave up and bought online. Even to this day, I've only seen ONE Linux game at a store (Quake 3 ironically).
NWN will ship with all four binaries in the box, so I can buy it right next to my Windows-only roommates. That will lower production costs for Bioware because they won't have to produce three of everything. As long as their dev team has been paying attention to cross-platform coding rules and make the four versions interoperable, it might even save them money.
To throw in my own two cents here, there are several reasons why wireless companies aren't doing well (Failing, slugishness, etc).
1) Infastructure. Most wireless services I'm aware of require quite a few receiving towers scattered around a relatively small area (Say, a valley 20m by 14m). Even the ones using microwave need several to cover something that small. Those towers are definately NOT CHEAP. And the funny thing is that the physical construction isn't even the majority of the cost. Running a fat enough connection to the tower to handle its users will cost both your testicles and your right arm in zoning costs and permits.
2) Limited user base. For several reasons, the potential user base for wireless communications is significantly limited compared to cable, DSL, or phone service. How many people reading this message live in a dwelling that they own? How many live in an apartment building with restrictive rules about what they can do? The place I'm living now won't let me put a dish on the roof, and that's the only way I can get wireless. Unles my complex installs something for me and becomes my ISP, I'm stuck (And just for the record, they're not going to do that. I can't even get 56k in this place. They split phone lines into 32k chunks to save construction costs.)
3) Cost. Half of the people I work with use "free" ISPs. They won't shell out even $20 a month for an Internet feed, let alone $50-$100. And NO wireless company can live on $20 a month.
So in conclusion, we're going to see a major shakedown and hard times ahead for wireless companies. Some may survive, and once they start expanding, they should do extremely well. Until that time, there is nothing anyone can do.
"Best" and "Best of Breed" are two different ideas. "Best of breed" generally means it's the best of the few things some editor somewhere tested. Yes, we know that Linux is arguably a better desktop than Windows (Smoother, faster, more stable, more powerful), but Windows still dominates the market, and Microsoft has been adding some more glitz to it in the last few $100 revisions. Windows is designed to do one thing, while Linux is designed such that extending it to do something new is fairly clean and easy (As evidenced by Linux's advancement far beyond Linus' goals).
Considering the rest of The Matrix's setup, the dual NICs are probably for bandwidth. One NIC (100mb/sec) for the connection to the Internet and the other NIC (100mb/sec) to share between themselves so no matter how full the Internet side gets, the servers can still swap data between themselves.
Yes, you COULD send a Perl script as an attachment, but no Linux mail reader that I know of would automatically launch it when the message was opened or even PREVIEWED.
That is EXACTLY what happened at my employer's company. Most of the people who got hit with it did not even know how to turn off the damn preview pane that Outlook comes DEFAULT with.
We have had virii run through our network before. Most of our people know to NOT run anything called "LOVE-LETTER-FOR-YOU.vbs". Certainly not the 27 people who accidentally DID send it out when they received it from their supervisors / HR people / others who DO have incoming e-mail access.
Or did you not know of the embedding that comes STANDARD in Outlook now?
Well, mainly because most people don't think of securing Linux. They think of other things (speed, stability, performance, support, toys, etc). However, there are a couple of different projects aiming at security on Linux...
The first I can think of is Kaos Linux. It's a volunteer-run distro (I don't think they've made a release yet) that is aiming to be the OpenBSD of Linux distros. I used to have the URL but I've been up WAY too long for my brain to be able to pull up that kind of information.
The other is the Bastille Linux Project (May not be the OFFICIAL name, but you should be able to find it) which is just a patch to harden up some things in Red Hat Linux. They've actually reached 1.0 I believe.
If you want more information, go to Freshmeat.net and browse the console/os section of the appindex. It should have something that grabs ya.
Quake3 slow? What are you running it on? I'm running Quake3 on a P3/450 w/128mb RAM and a Voodoo2 video card and I get over 40fps. It's rock solid anywhere and it doesn't chew up every spare slice of RAM I've got.
Hello? Is this thing on? The Voodoo[123] cards are the BEST supported 3D cards on Linux. They ARE supported both by Glide_V2 and _V3 and by Mesa, and by XFree86! Linux's hardware support is growing by leaps and bounds. nVidia, Diamond, Creative Labs, 3Dfx, Matrox, and others are releasing specs and drivers for their cards for Linux on a regular basis. Hell John Carmack is working on the Utah-GLX drivers! We couldn't ASK for anything more.
p.s. Linux has had software raid for more than two years now... Better than NT's.
Look closer. Yes, it's still first person aim and shoot. But it's a lot more tactical than id games. You are a mechanized warrior with all sorts of armorments and implements of mass distruction. It's more of a First Person Simulation than anything else.
As for a really new, innovative game... Don't hold your breath. Game companies don't want new, innovative, or different. They want proven money-makes that they can churn out in a few months (Why do you think they like using game engines made by other companies? Saves on the R&D cost.
The little companies that are operating on venture capital and dreams are the ones to watch out for. The problem with that is that the big companies do watch out for them. They snap them up when they have a promissing title, and they clamp their iron fists around it. They only allow it to go to markets that THEY deem worthy (Read: "Lucrative").
I'm not bitter. Honestly.
As if! The money-grubbing tight-asses at Sierra Interactive doesn't give a rat's ass about us, or the Mac market for that matter. All they want is numbers, which (Sadly) only the Windows world can supply right now... I saw Homeworld. I played the demo. I was blown away. But I'm not going to reboot every damn time I want to kill three hours drooling over eye candy.
You're right, we do have a problem, but you're putting the blame in the wrong place. It's not Loki's fault that were isn't a StarCraft or Diablo for Linux. If you want to bitch, bitch at Blizzard. They're the stingy bastards who don't see enough of a Linux market to ALLOW Loki to port StarCraft, WarCraft, Diablow(2) to Linux. As for the makers of Bioware, they consider Balder's Gate a lost cause (As all game companies do once they've shipped a title and gotten their initial revenue). But in their defense, they're developing Neverwinter Nights for Win, Mac, and (wait for it) Linux all at the same time.
How can they claim privacy on something that is published and sold to the world at large? This is not like peaking into their windows or reading their mail. They sold (licensed) this software, it is no longer "private".
As for why they want the ISP logs, they want to violate the privacy of anyone who downloaded their little "secret".
Baron Thompsonov you naive little man.
How do you figure the DCMA is not a conspiracy? The MPAA, RIAA, software companies, ASP's, ISV's, VAR's, and a host of other TLA's want nothing more than to turn us into a herd of corn-fed consumers who happily suck down anything they put before us, then do it again in six months to three years. The MPAA and especially RIAA are more than willing to bitch slap their own golden geese to keep their eggs flowing. Restricting us to a narrow list of things we can do with "their" property is exactly what they want, and whether or not there was direct communication between them (I believe there was), they have conspired to strip us bare, all the while telling us we like it.
As for Napster being a bandwidth hog, many of us will only accept first-hand accounts from real university admins who have lived through this, not second/third/fourth hand recollections, half-truths, and rumors! I am willing to acknowledge that it is a big bandwidth hog, but then again so is your netgame of Quake, or listening to an internet radio station, making a voice-over-IP call, or browsing a graphic-heavy webpage.
Banning is not the answer. It is an arms race which can only end in tears, mutual distruction. Banning is a cheap-shot, cop-out, circle-jerk answer. The only real answer is bandwidth limiting and restrictions, not outright denial. But they won't do that. Another conspiracy?
What's in it for Apple now? They don't get a whole lot of registrations out of the downloadable version of QuickTime, just piss off a whole lot of people with that screen that pops up every time QuickTime starts. Besides, they're missing out on the whole Linux segment of the market right now.