(That has be said many, many times on this article) . . . . is of the subset of companies willing to consider opensourcing their software, very, very few would be willing to BSD license their code, as opposed to GPL licensing it.
At least with the GPL, they 'feel' like no competitor will 'abuse' their property (i.e. take it and not contribute it back).
That should tell you something about why most companies prefer the BSD license. It have very, *very* little to do with code they themselves are releasing.
This doesn't mean that John Q. programmer shouldn't ever use the BSD. But think carefully about what it means when someone says most companies prefer the BSD license.
Microsoft has said they prefer the BSD license. How many BSD licensed Microsoft packages are there?
I believe they use a combination of data from 'Really High Energy' (TM) Particle collisions and 'Really Far Away' (TM) objects to guess at conditions at time zero.
Most astronomers/cosmologists feverently hope and pray that conditions were actually fairly simple. While the argument holds a great deal of elegance, I'm not sure that it is accurate; you have to make a lot of assumptions to get to that position.
Really, I think its an unanswerable question. The evidence is just too faint; we can only guess at it and hope we get something approximating the truth.
To be honest, I wouldn't be surprised if they plan on the running the simulation backwards, at the same time, I'm not sure I'd trust the results then, either, you'd probably have to make a great deal of poorly founded assumptions as well. A lot of the problems come up when you're guessing at which cosmological constants are actually constants, and which ones are variables which appear to be constants over short (read millions of years) periods.
On the other hand, if we can get some good data (read hyperaccurate, allowing us to figure out some coefficents to countless significant digits), we might be able to go backwards far more effectively. That's what an experimental physists might say; I can't really be sure, I didn't spend much time as one before moving on to the world of dollars and sense.;-) I'm not really sure how far we are from getting this kind of data, either; but I do know NASA's been trying hard lately, building all kinds of satellites to attempt to experimentally measure such concepts as relativity.
Forgive me if I'm talking nonsense, I'm tired at the moment, and not really making a great deal of sense. That being said, this subject interests me greatly: Who doesn't like to ramble on about Life, the Universe, and Everything;-)
I believe you are thinking of this experiment incorrectly.
1. Scientists have observed certain aspects of the universe. Namely, physical properties of 'light' matter/energy, and gravitational properties of 'dark' matter. 2. These scientists then develop a hypothesis, in the form of: "Given the previously described aspects of light and dark matter, we believe that X, Y, and Z are the equations describing their behavior under various conditions. Some of the constants we observed in #1 actually only seem constant; given a long enough view of time, they are variable depending on the following factors A, B, and C, which change very, very slowly by human standards (on the order of hundreds of millions of years). 3. As such, they form the following hypothesis: "Initial conditions in the universe were such and such in order to produce the current conditions outlined in #1. The algorhthims proposed in #2 produce a configuration similar to the current state of the universe when extrapolated from time zero to the current time". 3. Given that hypothesis, they seek to run a simulation of these algorhithms from time zero to the current time. Keep in mind that a) it's very difficult to observe the passage of time in the universe (not impossible, very difficult), and b) you can see select static examples of various 'historical' points in the universe by observing astronomical phenomenom at various distances (we can guess at the original state of the universe by observing cosmic background radiation and objects exceedingly distant from us). 4. Test the hypothesis (and the equations in #2) through simulation, since, given our current level of technology, it would be difficult to test them by creating a new universe. Account for discrepancies in the simulation by modifying the assumptions of 2, and correcting the hypothesis of 3. 5. Rinse, lather, rinse, repeat.
It is very, very difficult to produce a neutral simulation; I'll give you that. Whenever you create a simulation you end up 'assuming' hundreds/thousands of things you really shouldn't be assuming; however, in some circumstances, you really do not have any choice. There are no other current avenues of exploration regarding the origin of the universe that really make any sense; we can make countless distant observations, and we have (and continue to) experiment with high-energy particle colliders. But we cannot form a universe in a test-tube (well, at least not yet *wink*), so a computer simulation is the next best thing.
They will not present this simulation as 'Map of the History of the Universe', at least not in academic circles. At the same time, however, it is fairly interesting data, and a potentially useful calcuation. It can be good to see extrapolations of equations for billions upon billons of iterations, as these levels of iterations are generally beyond the mind's eye. Sometimes, interesting trends will result.
Yes, there are plenty of 'shortcomings' to this style of research. But I do not think it is fair to dismiss it out of hand. Take it with a grain of salt, and look over the data for useful nuggets of information. As it is, merely building a simulation of this magnitude is an interesting exercise; the CS aspect of this research is fascinating in and of itself. The results regarding the dataset may or may not be useful; but not every experiment is perfect or even ideal, sometimes, its worthwhile to give even lackluster options a try.
I had the same problem as you, and then found that when I installed on a particular monitor that it looked absolutely beautiful.
The reason? That monitor was very close to the default value for displaysize in xorg.conf, 320 mm by 240 mm.
Once you set that correctly, your fonts will be immeasurably better. My systems easily compete with OS X and Windows in terms of font rendering quality, and everyone I show my systems to is quite shocked.
1. SuSE installs many, many fonts by default, and includes scripts that will download additional fonts from online repositories. It does this through its GUI updater utility, YoU. (YaST Online Update)
2. Configured your DisplaySize (in your xorg.conf) correctly! SuSE will try and detect DDC information and configure this in YaST, but it will pop up a warning if it is unable to. Most distributions simply leave this value at default. Your fonts will be *butt* ugly if DisplaySize is not set correctly in millimeters.
3. Freetype can perform the same exact font rendering that Windows/OS X use. See, Windows/OS X both interpret TrueType Bytecode, by using a patented software. You can enable the TrueType Bytecode support in Freetype by changing one option in the SRPM file, and then using rpmbuild to generate a Bytecode interpreter enabled version. Technically, this version is illegal, if you are in a country with software patents.
However, I find that the Freetype version without the bytecode interpreter actually has superior rendering as long as hinting and subpixel AA are enabled, and YOUR DISPLAYSIZE IS CORRECTLY CONFIGURED!
Having your DisplaySize incorrectly configured screws up fonts badly, and makes anti-aliasing function even worse.
This is why SuSE bugs you if it detects that the display size *might* be miss configured.
With my displaysized configured correctly X.org blows away both OS X and Windows in terms of font rendering. One of my good friends is an engineer from IBM, and he was complaining about the 'crappy' font rendering under X.org on his Thinkpad.
I showed him my desktop, and he was shocked. I revealed to him the solution, and he was shocked.
Stop messing with AA settings! Setting your displaysize correctly is the *best* thing you can do to improved your font rendering!
Oh, and before some wise-ass says, "Why don't you have to do this in Windows or Mac OS X?"
1. Windows renders its fonts at the same resolution no matter what resolution your screen is running at. X.org does not. That means the default font resolution on X.org may look good, but may not. Windows fonts always look good, but the size is not resolution or DPI dependant. That's why Dell's 1600x1200 laptop screens (14") were kind of annoying in Windows; you had to pump up the font sizes so large that the dialogues all looked funny, and some applications didn't work properly. This doesn't happen in X.org
2. Mac screens are all the same DPI. That's why the Powerbooks have weird screen resolutions. That's also why Mac font rendering isn't as good if you aren't using a monitor that correctly reports its display size to the rendering system through DDC information (incidentally, modern linux distributions can sometimes pick this data up as well, but many built-in monitors do not report it correctly.
As usual, X.org's implementation is superior. It's just that most setup tools do not correctly configure display size (except for SuSE's YaST2). Once its configured correctly, you get resolution independant font rendering of extremely high quality.
Do you have your screen dimensions setup correctly in your xorg.conf?
In milimeters? This matters, a lot.
If you run SuSE, you can set it using the GUI, YaST2. Anything else, and you'll need to edit your xorg.conf. Respond to me if you need instructions.
I've found that this makes a *huge* difference in font quality.
Also, you can recompile freetype to include the (patented and illegal) TrueType Bytecode interpreter. Google for it, its actually very easy. If you use an RPM distribution, you can install the source RPM, make 1 change to the spec file, and get the bytecode interpreter working.
I actually prefer to have it off; on my Dell 1901FP, using the correct screen dimensions, my fonts are crystal clear.
Actually, there are plenty of technologists who are also Gadget Guys.
The problem is, Wired has dropped the technologists entirely. Many of the *really* smart, very *productive* real geeks that I know still fawn over shiny new phones, flying cars, rocket ships, and slave-labor robots.
It's just that they wanna hear about technology in the development and already implemented phase.
Really, if you think about it, Wired does what most 'popular' magazines have done. They are 80% advertising, 20% discussion about the advertised products. Be it women's fashion, IT culture, cars, or porn, once magazines hit a certain reader base it really makes sense to cash out;-)
Don't expect everything 'mainstream' to work properly on the plethora of hardware/distribution combinations out there.
On SuSE linux (~8.2-9.3) Warcraft III in Cedega/Point2Play really is easy. No settings to configure, everything works out-of-box. I'm sorry to say that the current situation is unfortunate; the truth of that matter is that it will work out-of-box, but only with certain configurations, and there is no real way to improve that without greater unification among distributions (which, I believe, is a mixed blessing), and more support from hardware manufacturers (which will be extremely positive).
Also, Transgaming has made noises about going completely opensource, but this is really only likely if they get some large licensing deals, like funding support from RedHat, Mandriva, and/or SuSE, or if they are purchased by Crossover or something.
Want an overnight lan party game? Pick from the largest maps.
Want a quick, 5-20 minute office lunch game? Pick one of the (many) small maps.
Shooters are good too. Quake 2 will run almost anywhere.
Also, you could go for the one-game over many-lunches type of thing. Any multiplayer strategy game that supports saving. Like Master of Orion 2 (or 3, but 2 was awesome, and 3 was mediocre). Or Civ III play the world. Log on for lunch, play 5-20 turns, then go back to work.
There's also the Age of Empires games; they are quick and fun, as are the Age of Mythologies games.
Imagine if SCO had brought forth a lawsuit against a copyright holder arguing that the 'notion' of copyright itself was bunk, and that they could do whatever they wanted with the 'copyrighted' work, and sought a pre-emptive injunction against legal action.
Simultaneously, SCO would pursue thousands of individuals for violating their copyrights.
See the tension there? You can't argue in one court that other people are infringing your copyrights if you argue that copyrights don't exist.
SCO is doing this very thing; GPL=copyright! One of their arguments against IBM is that they are *not* bound by the GPL, because even though they released Linux themselves (when they were called Caldera), the GPL is not a valid or enforceable contract.
At the same time, they knowingly distribute products, and their *only* permission to distribute these products are permissions granted under the GPL.
Samba (and MySQL) should really step up to the plate and say 'you don't accept our license, and as such, you have no right to distribute our software. Pull it'. Not necessarily in court, but definitely as a registered letter.
SCO will then be left in the position of defending the GPL. This screws SCO.
"5. You are not required to accept this License, since you have not signed it. However, nothing else grants you permission to modify or distribute the Program or its derivative works. These actions are prohibited by law if you do not accept this License. Therefore, by modifying or distributing the Program (or any work based on the Program), you indicate your acceptance of this License to do so, and all its terms and conditions for copying, distributing or modifying the Program or works based on it."
Given then large degree of two-faced bullshit coming out of SCO, I cannot imagine it would be difficult for either the Samba team or the MySQL team to convice a judge that SCO has chosen to 'not accept' "This License", considering their sworn statements/testimony in court.
As such, they would not have a license to distribute either package. As such, it should not be of great difficulty to get an injunction against shipping these packages, nor should it be difficult to seek damages, along the lines of $100,000 per violation.
I meant without the mage, and solely relying on DoT's for damage.
Either way, I was out of my mind when I was thinking about that. Ran UBRS again last night. Yup, it'd be hopeless. While I was on fear duty one of those guards hit me for 3700. Plus, the groups of 3 dragonkin 4 orcs are really tough.
Especially the iron guards; those bastards have really high resistances.
2 warlocks keep the 2 bodyguards perma-feared. This is easy, especially if they are dark pact. Both warlocks place CoD on General Drak. 6400 damage per minute. Both warlocks keep corruption, siphon life running on Drak, as well as two succubus. That's another 200 dps.
Priest/Druid keep main tank alive. Priest drops SW: Pain on Drak, as well. Druid should utilize innerverate on the priest to keep mana ticking. Both soulstones should be utilized for the priest; if priest runs out of mana, allow them to die, insta-self-rez for 2200 health and 2800 mana.
Mage for DPS, as usual.
I'm not sure how much damage Drak takes; this might not be quick enough, and the Priest/Druid might run out of mana, I'm not sure.
Certainly not unimagenable.
With 2 more it should be easy; Either 2 more healers, to keep it up indefintely, or 2 more DPS, to bring him down faster.
I think it could be done; the cost just needs to be made prohibitive.
My suggestion, for WoW, at least, was the following:
1. Permit construction almost anywhere, except for a few locations (Kazzak's Spawn, Dark Portal, Tainted Scar, etc. ..). Prefab components only.
2. Rental costs start at a high base rate. Rental costs increase by a multiple of the area's traffic. Placing a house outside the main entrance to Orgrimmar (the main horde city) would be extremely expensive, on the order of thousands of gold a week. At most, even the uberguilds could only afford a small office, perhaps to do sales. Also, increasing heights of structures would cost more; you could have towers going to the sky, but they'd be more expensive.
3. Players could hire guards of various descriptions (humanoid mobs, undead mobs, some of the more intelligent beasts/elemental mobs, maybe some demon mobs) to defend their homes. These would incur a weekly cost, added on to your base rent. Some of the high-end structure might include an allowance for some guards (i.e. a guard tower component, complete with 2 hunter type mobs).
4. Players could have their rent reduced by up to a maximum of a 75% reduction by keeping non-soul-bound high-value loot in their residence. Values would be calculated by average AH values over the past month. A stack of arcanite bars, non-soul-bound purple (epic quality) loot, manufactured legendary loot, things of that nature. Unique artifact items. For smaller residences, blue-items of various qualities, or other high-value commodities, like stacks of fel-cloth. Or rare pets (black whelping).
5. Players would only get their rent reduced by marking their residence as a 'Free-For-All' area.
Voila! You have player made dungeons!
And the ability to put houses in weird places. I know I'd build my guild's building (or just my own private house), out in the middle of nowhere Eastern Plaguelands, or perhaps somewhere scary in the blasted lands. Somewhere nice and low traffic, so no one would see it.
I was in Alterac last night. Alliance was still maxed out with 40 players at 1 am.
Horde had dwindled to 15. We had been making good progress, but it gets rough when you're that outnumbered. Playing defense all the time is really boring.
There are many 5 man instances (with bosses) for level ranges from 15-60. You can also quest for the entire game from 1-60.
I'm not exactly sure what other kind of content they could create; sure, the quests get generic after 30 or so, but until that point they are very viable, and you can instance the rest of your way to 60.
I did, anyways, and I'm not hardcore, and couldn't stomach EQ past level 4.
Make sure your display size is correct, in MM. The first number is the horizontal.
I was *amazed* at how important that was. Get a ruler, go to google, convert your inches to mm, and be amazed at the brilliant Freetype font rendering.
With that correctly set, I find the Freetype anti-aliaser better than the bytecode renderer+Anti-aliasing.
(Bytecode processing is avaliable for Freetype, but disabled for patent reasons).
Slashdot Mirror
Which city? What ISP?
;-)
I'd love to have something like this in chicagoland.
I've got a 2 kidneys, a liver, and a left arm waiting for it
Situation 1: yes
Situation 2: What does 'used' by our code mean? Do you mean linked? In that case, 'our code' must also be under the GPL, I believe.
Of course, most 'GPL-land' libraries are released under the LGPL, which permits exactly that. (LGPL code can be linked to proprietary code).
(That has be said many, many times on this article)
. . . . is of the subset of companies willing to consider opensourcing their software, very, very few would be willing to BSD license their code, as opposed to GPL licensing it.
At least with the GPL, they 'feel' like no competitor will 'abuse' their property (i.e. take it and not contribute it back).
That should tell you something about why most companies prefer the BSD license. It have very, *very* little to do with code they themselves are releasing.
This doesn't mean that John Q. programmer shouldn't ever use the BSD. But think carefully about what it means when someone says most companies prefer the BSD license.
Microsoft has said they prefer the BSD license. How many BSD licensed Microsoft packages are there?
Yeah, you're probably right ;)
;-) I'm not really sure how far we are from getting this kind of data, either; but I do know NASA's been trying hard lately, building all kinds of satellites to attempt to experimentally measure such concepts as relativity.
;-)
I believe they use a combination of data from 'Really High Energy' (TM) Particle collisions and 'Really Far Away' (TM) objects to guess at conditions at time zero.
Most astronomers/cosmologists feverently hope and pray that conditions were actually fairly simple. While the argument holds a great deal of elegance, I'm not sure that it is accurate; you have to make a lot of assumptions to get to that position.
Really, I think its an unanswerable question. The evidence is just too faint; we can only guess at it and hope we get something approximating the truth.
To be honest, I wouldn't be surprised if they plan on the running the simulation backwards, at the same time, I'm not sure I'd trust the results then, either, you'd probably have to make a great deal of poorly founded assumptions as well. A lot of the problems come up when you're guessing at which cosmological constants are actually constants, and which ones are variables which appear to be constants over short (read millions of years) periods.
On the other hand, if we can get some good data (read hyperaccurate, allowing us to figure out some coefficents to countless significant digits), we might be able to go backwards far more effectively. That's what an experimental physists might say; I can't really be sure, I didn't spend much time as one before moving on to the world of dollars and sense.
Forgive me if I'm talking nonsense, I'm tired at the moment, and not really making a great deal of sense. That being said, this subject interests me greatly: Who doesn't like to ramble on about Life, the Universe, and Everything
I believe you are thinking of this experiment incorrectly.
1. Scientists have observed certain aspects of the universe. Namely, physical properties of 'light' matter/energy, and gravitational properties of 'dark' matter.
2. These scientists then develop a hypothesis, in the form of: "Given the previously described aspects of light and dark matter, we believe that X, Y, and Z are the equations describing their behavior under various conditions. Some of the constants we observed in #1 actually only seem constant; given a long enough view of time, they are variable depending on the following factors A, B, and C, which change very, very slowly by human standards (on the order of hundreds of millions of years).
3. As such, they form the following hypothesis: "Initial conditions in the universe were such and such in order to produce the current conditions outlined in #1. The algorhthims proposed in #2 produce a configuration similar to the current state of the universe when extrapolated from time zero to the current time".
3. Given that hypothesis, they seek to run a simulation of these algorhithms from time zero to the current time. Keep in mind that a) it's very difficult to observe the passage of time in the universe (not impossible, very difficult), and b) you can see select static examples of various 'historical' points in the universe by observing astronomical phenomenom at various distances (we can guess at the original state of the universe by observing cosmic background radiation and objects exceedingly distant from us).
4. Test the hypothesis (and the equations in #2) through simulation, since, given our current level of technology, it would be difficult to test them by creating a new universe. Account for discrepancies in the simulation by modifying the assumptions of 2, and correcting the hypothesis of 3.
5. Rinse, lather, rinse, repeat.
It is very, very difficult to produce a neutral simulation; I'll give you that. Whenever you create a simulation you end up 'assuming' hundreds/thousands of things you really shouldn't be assuming; however, in some circumstances, you really do not have any choice. There are no other current avenues of exploration regarding the origin of the universe that really make any sense; we can make countless distant observations, and we have (and continue to) experiment with high-energy particle colliders. But we cannot form a universe in a test-tube (well, at least not yet *wink*), so a computer simulation is the next best thing.
They will not present this simulation as 'Map of the History of the Universe', at least not in academic circles. At the same time, however, it is fairly interesting data, and a potentially useful calcuation. It can be good to see extrapolations of equations for billions upon billons of iterations, as these levels of iterations are generally beyond the mind's eye. Sometimes, interesting trends will result.
Yes, there are plenty of 'shortcomings' to this style of research. But I do not think it is fair to dismiss it out of hand. Take it with a grain of salt, and look over the data for useful nuggets of information. As it is, merely building a simulation of this magnitude is an interesting exercise; the CS aspect of this research is fascinating in and of itself. The results regarding the dataset may or may not be useful; but not every experiment is perfect or even ideal, sometimes, its worthwhile to give even lackluster options a try.
Just a note. After their various settlements, dividend, and other items, Microsoft retains about $20 billion in a cash reserve.
This does not include this settlement with IBM.
No Offense, but the other poster got it right.
;-)
Fonts in Linux rock.
Fonts on your misconfigured system suck
I had the same problem as you, and then found that when I installed on a particular monitor that it looked absolutely beautiful.
The reason? That monitor was very close to the default value for displaysize in xorg.conf, 320 mm by 240 mm.
Once you set that correctly, your fonts will be immeasurably better. My systems easily compete with OS X and Windows in terms of font rendering quality, and everyone I show my systems to is quite shocked.
1. SuSE installs many, many fonts by default, and includes scripts that will download additional fonts from online repositories. It does this through its GUI updater utility, YoU. (YaST Online Update)
2. Configured your DisplaySize (in your xorg.conf) correctly! SuSE will try and detect DDC information and configure this in YaST, but it will pop up a warning if it is unable to. Most distributions simply leave this value at default. Your fonts will be *butt* ugly if DisplaySize is not set correctly in millimeters.
3. Freetype can perform the same exact font rendering that Windows/OS X use. See, Windows/OS X both interpret TrueType Bytecode, by using a patented software. You can enable the TrueType Bytecode support in Freetype by changing one option in the SRPM file, and then using rpmbuild to generate a Bytecode interpreter enabled version. Technically, this version is illegal, if you are in a country with software patents.
However, I find that the Freetype version without the bytecode interpreter actually has superior rendering as long as hinting and subpixel AA are enabled, and YOUR DISPLAYSIZE IS CORRECTLY CONFIGURED!
Having your DisplaySize incorrectly configured screws up fonts badly, and makes anti-aliasing function even worse.
Yay! Someone else finally picked up on it!
This is why SuSE bugs you if it detects that the display size *might* be miss configured.
With my displaysized configured correctly X.org blows away both OS X and Windows in terms of font rendering. One of my good friends is an engineer from IBM, and he was complaining about the 'crappy' font rendering under X.org on his Thinkpad.
I showed him my desktop, and he was shocked. I revealed to him the solution, and he was shocked.
Stop messing with AA settings! Setting your displaysize correctly is the *best* thing you can do to improved your font rendering!
Oh, and before some wise-ass says, "Why don't you have to do this in Windows or Mac OS X?"
1. Windows renders its fonts at the same resolution no matter what resolution your screen is running at. X.org does not. That means the default font resolution on X.org may look good, but may not. Windows fonts always look good, but the size is not resolution or DPI dependant. That's why Dell's 1600x1200 laptop screens (14") were kind of annoying in Windows; you had to pump up the font sizes so large that the dialogues all looked funny, and some applications didn't work properly. This doesn't happen in X.org
2. Mac screens are all the same DPI. That's why the Powerbooks have weird screen resolutions. That's also why Mac font rendering isn't as good if you aren't using a monitor that correctly reports its display size to the rendering system through DDC information (incidentally, modern linux distributions can sometimes pick this data up as well, but many built-in monitors do not report it correctly.
As usual, X.org's implementation is superior. It's just that most setup tools do not correctly configure display size (except for SuSE's YaST2). Once its configured correctly, you get resolution independant font rendering of extremely high quality.
VMware 5.0 has it.
It's experimental, and you have to tweak a text file, but its there. Go search their forums, and its in their online help database.
Do you have your screen dimensions setup correctly in your xorg.conf?
In milimeters? This matters, a lot.
If you run SuSE, you can set it using the GUI, YaST2. Anything else, and you'll need to edit your xorg.conf. Respond to me if you need instructions.
I've found that this makes a *huge* difference in font quality.
Also, you can recompile freetype to include the (patented and illegal) TrueType Bytecode interpreter. Google for it, its actually very easy. If you use an RPM distribution, you can install the source RPM, make 1 change to the spec file, and get the bytecode interpreter working.
I actually prefer to have it off; on my Dell 1901FP, using the correct screen dimensions, my fonts are crystal clear.
Actually, there are plenty of technologists who are also Gadget Guys.
;-)
The problem is, Wired has dropped the technologists entirely. Many of the *really* smart, very *productive* real geeks that I know still fawn over shiny new phones, flying cars, rocket ships, and slave-labor robots.
It's just that they wanna hear about technology in the development and already implemented phase.
Really, if you think about it, Wired does what most 'popular' magazines have done. They are 80% advertising, 20% discussion about the advertised products. Be it women's fashion, IT culture, cars, or porn, once magazines hit a certain reader base it really makes sense to cash out
I'm guessing these are the same hibernation experiments that Science reported on earlier this year:8 /5721/518?rbfvrToken=62e863f05a35e285b63621e07f2b5 bf569fec959
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/30
In the print article the researches indicated they had performed similar tests on dogs and other animals. In many cases they replaced the animals blood, and then resupplied them with blood after a period of time.
Weird hardware, or a weird linux distribution.
Don't expect everything 'mainstream' to work properly on the plethora of hardware/distribution combinations out there.
On SuSE linux (~8.2-9.3) Warcraft III in Cedega/Point2Play really is easy. No settings to configure, everything works out-of-box.
I'm sorry to say that the current situation is unfortunate; the truth of that matter is that it will work out-of-box, but only with certain configurations, and there is no real way to improve that without greater unification among distributions (which, I believe, is a mixed blessing), and more support from hardware manufacturers (which will be extremely positive).
Also, Transgaming has made noises about going completely opensource, but this is really only likely if they get some large licensing deals, like funding support from RedHat, Mandriva, and/or SuSE, or if they are purchased by Crossover or something.
Oldie but goodie.
Maybe the best RTS game, ever.
Want an overnight lan party game? Pick from the largest maps.
Want a quick, 5-20 minute office lunch game? Pick one of the (many) small maps.
Shooters are good too. Quake 2 will run almost anywhere.
Also, you could go for the one-game over many-lunches type of thing. Any multiplayer strategy game that supports saving. Like Master of Orion 2 (or 3, but 2 was awesome, and 3 was mediocre). Or Civ III play the world. Log on for lunch, play 5-20 turns, then go back to work.
There's also the Age of Empires games; they are quick and fun, as are the Age of Mythologies games.
Flip it the other way around.
Imagine if SCO had brought forth a lawsuit against a copyright holder arguing that the 'notion' of copyright itself was bunk, and that they could do whatever they wanted with the 'copyrighted' work, and sought a pre-emptive injunction against legal action.
Simultaneously, SCO would pursue thousands of individuals for violating their copyrights.
See the tension there? You can't argue in one court that other people are infringing your copyrights if you argue that copyrights don't exist.
SCO is doing this very thing; GPL=copyright! One of their arguments against IBM is that they are *not* bound by the GPL, because even though they released Linux themselves (when they were called Caldera), the GPL is not a valid or enforceable contract.
At the same time, they knowingly distribute products, and their *only* permission to distribute these products are permissions granted under the GPL.
Samba (and MySQL) should really step up to the plate and say 'you don't accept our license, and as such, you have no right to distribute our software. Pull it'. Not necessarily in court, but definitely as a registered letter.
SCO will then be left in the position of defending the GPL. This screws SCO.
"5. You are not required to accept this License, since you have not signed it. However, nothing else grants you permission to modify or distribute the Program or its derivative works. These actions are prohibited by law if you do not accept this License. Therefore, by modifying or distributing the Program (or any work based on the Program), you indicate your acceptance of this License to do so, and all its terms and conditions for copying, distributing or modifying the Program or works based on it."
Given then large degree of two-faced bullshit coming out of SCO, I cannot imagine it would be difficult for either the Samba team or the MySQL team to convice a judge that SCO has chosen to 'not accept' "This License", considering their sworn statements/testimony in court.
As such, they would not have a license to distribute either package. As such, it should not be of great difficulty to get an injunction against shipping these packages, nor should it be difficult to seek damages, along the lines of $100,000 per violation.
Knowing, willfull infringement is a felony.
I meant without the mage, and solely relying on DoT's for damage.
Either way, I was out of my mind when I was thinking about that. Ran UBRS again last night. Yup, it'd be hopeless. While I was on fear duty one of those guards hit me for 3700. Plus, the groups of 3 dragonkin 4 orcs are really tough.
Especially the iron guards; those bastards have really high resistances.
This is how I'd try to do it with 5
1 main tank
2 warlocks
1 priest
1 druids
1 mage
2 warlocks keep the 2 bodyguards perma-feared. This is easy, especially if they are dark pact. Both warlocks place CoD on General Drak. 6400 damage per minute. Both warlocks keep corruption, siphon life running on Drak, as well as two succubus. That's another 200 dps.
Priest/Druid keep main tank alive. Priest drops SW: Pain on Drak, as well. Druid should utilize innerverate on the priest to keep mana ticking. Both soulstones should be utilized for the priest; if priest runs out of mana, allow them to die, insta-self-rez for 2200 health and 2800 mana.
Mage for DPS, as usual.
I'm not sure how much damage Drak takes; this might not be quick enough, and the Priest/Druid might run out of mana, I'm not sure.
Certainly not unimagenable.
With 2 more it should be easy; Either 2 more healers, to keep it up indefintely, or 2 more DPS, to bring him down faster.
Obviously, you'll need a really good main-tank.
I think it could be done; the cost just needs to be made prohibitive.
.). Prefab components only.
My suggestion, for WoW, at least, was the following:
1. Permit construction almost anywhere, except for a few locations (Kazzak's Spawn, Dark Portal, Tainted Scar, etc. .
2. Rental costs start at a high base rate. Rental costs increase by a multiple of the area's traffic. Placing a house outside the main entrance to Orgrimmar (the main horde city) would be extremely expensive, on the order of thousands of gold a week. At most, even the uberguilds could only afford a small office, perhaps to do sales. Also, increasing heights of structures would cost more; you could have towers going to the sky, but they'd be more expensive.
3. Players could hire guards of various descriptions (humanoid mobs, undead mobs, some of the more intelligent beasts/elemental mobs, maybe some demon mobs) to defend their homes. These would incur a weekly cost, added on to your base rent. Some of the high-end structure might include an allowance for some guards (i.e. a guard tower component, complete with 2 hunter type mobs).
4. Players could have their rent reduced by up to a maximum of a 75% reduction by keeping non-soul-bound high-value loot in their residence. Values would be calculated by average AH values over the past month. A stack of arcanite bars, non-soul-bound purple (epic quality) loot, manufactured legendary loot, things of that nature. Unique artifact items. For smaller residences, blue-items of various qualities, or other high-value commodities, like stacks of fel-cloth. Or rare pets (black whelping).
5. Players would only get their rent reduced by marking their residence as a 'Free-For-All' area.
Voila! You have player made dungeons!
And the ability to put houses in weird places. I know I'd build my guild's building (or just my own private house), out in the middle of nowhere Eastern Plaguelands, or perhaps somewhere scary in the blasted lands. Somewhere nice and low traffic, so no one would see it.
Second Life is like that.
You can go check it out; Parts of it are great, parts of it are very ugly.
A Tale in the Desert is supposed to be similar, as well.
I was in Alterac last night. Alliance was still maxed out with 40 players at 1 am.
Horde had dwindled to 15. We had been making good progress, but it gets rough when you're that outnumbered. Playing defense all the time is really boring.
The warsong BG is capped by level ranges.
21-30, 31-40, 41-50,51-60.
Rumor is that the new BG will be as well.
There are many 5 man instances (with bosses) for level ranges from 15-60. You can also quest for the entire game from 1-60.
I'm not exactly sure what other kind of content they could create; sure, the quests get generic after 30 or so, but until that point they are very viable, and you can instance the rest of your way to 60.
I did, anyways, and I'm not hardcore, and couldn't stomach EQ past level 4.
You can 5 man large portions of UBRS.
I've never tried 5 manning all of it, but I imagine that it might be possible.
Maybe 7 man....
One of the biggest issues in Linux (x.org) is to make sure that your monitor size is setup correctly (in mm) in your xorg.conf.
This is *very* *very* important, and makes a *huge* difference in the quality of your on-screen font rendering.
In this section:
Section "Monitor"
DisplaySize 381 228
HorizSync 15-48
Identifier "Monitor[0]"
ModelName "Unknown"
Option "DPMS"
VendorName "Unknown"
VertRefresh 30-61
UseModes "Modes[0]"
EndSection
Make sure your display size is correct, in MM. The first number is the horizontal.
I was *amazed* at how important that was. Get a ruler, go to google, convert your inches to mm, and be amazed at the brilliant Freetype font rendering.
With that correctly set, I find the Freetype anti-aliaser better than the bytecode renderer+Anti-aliasing.
(Bytecode processing is avaliable for Freetype, but disabled for patent reasons).