You had me there for a second. But no, ATI has kept their promise with no 9800 drivers for Linux. Whoever modded grandparent down is a dick. What's the point of a game for Linux to someone who cannot play it because Linux does not support their hardware? In other news, Nvidia does have drivers for their latest hardware, created by them.
They are closed source, which is why I had been supporting ATI all this time, but now that ATI has gone 180degrees on us Nvidia is the last Linux-friendly video card company so I guess we have to take what we can.
Actually, I would say he is probably using Mandrake. That dependency hunt sounds awful familiar, and is one reason I abandoned RPM forever long ago.
I'd be more inclined to say people who say it is easy to get games to work on Linux are the ones who use Windows. People who actually try to use LInux for games are the ones who complain. Although it is funny because his speech about taking a week to get a game working remind me very much of what it was like to try playing games on DOS (and later, again, on Win95) a few years back. So probably in a few years this won't be as much of a problem on Linux.
However, that will not be the case if we stick our heads in the sand and ignore the criticism.
Honestly, since, again, the whole point of this game was the ability to make and host your own modules I would consider the experience pretty crippled.
Thanks for the information about the server though.
You cannot play this game without the toolset because that is how it works. A DM creates modules and hosts them on his/her box and you connect to it and play. This means one of the people you play with has to run windows.
NOt only that, but you still cannot serve/host scenarios for NeverWinter Nights on a Linux box, nor create adventures on one. YOu still need Windows for that, though someone has claimed to get the scenario editor thingie to work with winex.
I agree essentially. I also think that easy tools make smart people more productive. I wonder, actually, how difficult it would be to write command line tools for dealing with MS administration, given that much of what you would need to do has a documented api. I especially like what you said about the GUI tools being front ends for the command line.
Mac OS X is actually an example of what I don't want to do in this regard. IN the beginning, there were command line tools in Next to do things and flatfiles, etc. These things are still there, of course. BUt Apple's philosophy was to make sure you can use the GUI to accomplish everything you can in the commandline. This is a good goal, but they also have things you can do in teh GUI and not in the commandline since the everse was not also a goal. Given their market I am understanding of this, but I wish it were different.
Windows is much worse. It seems that the commandline tools, such as they are, are more an afterthought than anything. Much of what you would need is only available as an expensive third party add-on (though many simply break the winternals and microsoft eulas, yet another example of Microsoft only being bearable if you are a pirate).
On linux, there are many gui attempts and most do simply manipulate the flatfiles that really do configuration. Of course the extent to which this is not the case, or to which said files get moved around or given dfferent syntax for the GUI tools, leads to almost as bad a situation as Microsoft. Sometimes it is unclear what GUI tools are really doing to the system, and I think that is not good. Unfortunately people like RedHat seem to think documenting the GUI after rewriting the whole etc directory and compiling nonstandard settings into the binaries is good enough. I disagree. I think the whole damn system from LILO/GRUB/Whatever to login/xdm -> SomeWindowManager should be clearly documented, especially when you change things from how everyone else does it. Of course I am free to write said docs if I really care enough;).
I should have been more careful when I said "content creation." It is clear from your post that you are very aware of Linux superiority in the area of creating web content (at least in terms of java/perl/html/php/etc) as long as you don't care about flash. I was thinking in my post about creating documents worthy of publishing (as in, send to dead tree publisher and they can generate my bound book), music, and films, which I used to think could not be done on LInux and which I am not yet sure can be done on Linux nearly so easily as on a Mac. (I know the process is dead simple and well documented on a Mac for all of these things, but the process on Linux is not well known, nor are the tools to do it, and it is something of an undocumented dark art still since most Linux users are not using Linux for that.)
Yes, and it is not necessarily a bad idea. It is just that whereas it was purported to be a "poor man's copyright registration" I have read that this si an urban legend and you may not be protecting yourself legally this way after all. Now that copyright is automatic it is probably less of a concern, but when it was not, this was a particularly dangerous urban legend.
IANAL, but I understand there are some legal arguments against this even now. Perhaps the postmark is not sufficient proof that the letter was really mailed on a given date. I know it is relatively trivial to obtain equipment that will generate a valid postmark and also trivial to predate one, though IIRC that is technically illegal. I don't know if this is the only reason this is not considered protection enough, but I would consider putting the material in some controlled escrow situation like a bank myself. Of course if all I could afford was a stamp, I would probably do this anyway. But it is a mistake to think this is anywhere near the protection provided by a for-real registered copyright.
Re:If MS were to use such strategies, would anyone
on
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Dude. who would pay for Lunix? Okay, maybe I would. But I am a lunatic.
The pathetic Task Manager that comes with Windows 9x doesn't show much, but the process and thread lists are certainly readable (though with different APIs under 9x and NT).
You are correct, but I have actually been able to find many programs which will not show up in NT/Win2k process viewer, but are certainly running. Sometimes they show up in the applications tab and not in processes, sometimes in neither. But another utility that looks at the nt process table was sometimes able to show them. I am not sure exactly what causes this phenomenon, and must plead insufficient knowlege of NT internals. I do know, however that viruses take advantage of this deficiency in Windows.
I have never seen a program run on unix that ps did not show. Also, whereas zombies are sometimes apparently unkillable in some unixes (that is nasty crap! there should *NOT* be unkillable processes IMHO) in Windows it is pretty normal to have a number of processes running which Windows will simply not allow Administrator to kill, with a message akin to "No, I am not going to let you go there today." This is part of the bad design philosophy, IMHO in Windows. Hide things from the user (even Administrator), don't let them do stuff if the OS does not feel like it today.
I also found it is pretty trivial to create undeletable files on Win2k. For some reason some applications are able to save files with names that are too long for the command line and gui tools fo rmanipulating files to process. YOu cannot rename them, mv them, copy them, or anything. They will say there forever until you reformat the drive. Sloppy coding without thinking strikes again. If they had used the same code to check filenames when manipulating them in every application including the OS tools, this would be impossible. Apparently they don't.
I completely understand. In fact I do advocate Macs for content creation and as an example of a computer as art. I think it is too bad Linux is not more like OSX in some ways (or aiming for something better than OSX). I have actually had ideas about how to achieve this, but I have not put any code where my mouth is yet unfortunately:(.
Content creation tools for the Mac abound and it si a stable platform. I had meant to check out some of the Linux alternatives, and I am hoping to find at leats some where they are trying to beat the Mac ones. But right now the Mac works and lots of people use it for that purpose.
I also disagree with the idea common here that making something easy means it is for "stupid people." Why would smart people intentionally make things hard on themselves? That is just silly. I use Linux because of the power it gives me, not because I think the difficulty increases my dick size. I would prefer that many administration tasks would be easier to handle, and indeed have learned how to easily handle them from the command line, but I believe it is not wrong to want a gui control panel so long as this panel truly gives control and does not muck things up such that I can't get under the hood and fix its mistakes (or make a change that I can do faster in vi than I can by loading a gui).
They have also said that any lawyer worth his salt will advise companies to dump all their Linux, fast. They sent letters to 1500 companies "reminding" them that "using Linux is illegal."
The catch-22 here is if they do not stop selling guns to gun dealers who are selling guns to criminals they can be sued by gun control activists. But if they do stop selling guns to these gun dealers the gun dealers can sue them.
There is the small matter of the $120+Million Microsoft gave them for the DRDOS settlement. Besides, aren't they supposed to have given SCO more money as well? Even if not, It seems that SCO thinks they will since they have already publicly stated that Microsoft is "not in the clear" since the license they bought only covers bits of Services for Unix. If they are able to make their story about BSD being tainted stick, they might yet make MS license the bits of Windows from BSD.
Many would recommend Manufacturing Consent. I did not read this book however, I saw the documentary movie of the same name, which was made in Canada because it could not be made in the USA. It is interesting that while Chomsky is a Linguist by trade, his forays into Political and Social Sciences seem to be far more respected than his Linguistics. Of course for many Chomsky counts as an all-around nutter. I think he has some interesting things to say and whereas you may or may not agree with his opinions, he makes some interesting points about the media, information in general, how society disseminates it and people absorb it.
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You had me there for a second. But no, ATI has kept their promise with no 9800 drivers for Linux. Whoever modded grandparent down is a dick. What's the point of a game for Linux to someone who cannot play it because Linux does not support their hardware? In other news, Nvidia does have drivers for their latest hardware, created by them.
They are closed source, which is why I had been supporting ATI all this time, but now that ATI has gone 180degrees on us Nvidia is the last Linux-friendly video card company so I guess we have to take what we can.
Dude.. you just made my day, and significantly reduced the launches of nethack and xbill on my box ;) +5 informative!
Actually, I would say he is probably using Mandrake. That dependency hunt sounds awful familiar, and is one reason I abandoned RPM forever long ago.
I'd be more inclined to say people who say it is easy to get games to work on Linux are the ones who use Windows. People who actually try to use LInux for games are the ones who complain. Although it is funny because his speech about taking a week to get a game working remind me very much of what it was like to try playing games on DOS (and later, again, on Win95) a few years back. So probably in a few years this won't be as much of a problem on Linux.
However, that will not be the case if we stick our heads in the sand and ignore the criticism.
Thanks for the informative post! People who use *nix would do well to harness the power of the *vi* editors.
Honestly, since, again, the whole point of this game was the ability to make and host your own modules I would consider the experience pretty crippled.
Thanks for the information about the server though.
Considering there are no linux drivers for any Radeon after 8500 and ATI has promised there never ever will be, I would guess windows.
You cannot play this game without the toolset because that is how it works. A DM creates modules and hosts them on his/her box and you connect to it and play. This means one of the people you play with has to run windows.
NOt only that, but you still cannot serve/host scenarios for NeverWinter Nights on a Linux box, nor create adventures on one. YOu still need Windows for that, though someone has claimed to get the scenario editor thingie to work with winex.
I agree essentially. I also think that easy tools make smart people more productive. I wonder, actually, how difficult it would be to write command line tools for dealing with MS administration, given that much of what you would need to do has a documented api. I especially like what you said about the GUI tools being front ends for the command line.
Mac OS X is actually an example of what I don't want to do in this regard. IN the beginning, there were command line tools in Next to do things and flatfiles, etc. These things are still there, of course. BUt Apple's philosophy was to make sure you can use the GUI to accomplish everything you can in the commandline. This is a good goal, but they also have things you can do in teh GUI and not in the commandline since the everse was not also a goal. Given their market I am understanding of this, but I wish it were different.
Windows is much worse. It seems that the commandline tools, such as they are, are more an afterthought than anything. Much of what you would need is only available as an expensive third party add-on (though many simply break the winternals and microsoft eulas, yet another example of Microsoft only being bearable if you are a pirate).
On linux, there are many gui attempts and most do simply manipulate the flatfiles that really do configuration. Of course the extent to which this is not the case, or to which said files get moved around or given dfferent syntax for the GUI tools, leads to almost as bad a situation as Microsoft. Sometimes it is unclear what GUI tools are really doing to the system, and I think that is not good. Unfortunately people like RedHat seem to think documenting the GUI after rewriting the whole etc directory and compiling nonstandard settings into the binaries is good enough. I disagree. I think the whole damn system from LILO/GRUB/Whatever to login/xdm -> SomeWindowManager should be clearly documented, especially when you change things from how everyone else does it. Of course I am free to write said docs if I really care enough ;).
I should have been more careful when I said "content creation." It is clear from your post that you are very aware of Linux superiority in the area of creating web content (at least in terms of java/perl/html/php/etc) as long as you don't care about flash. I was thinking in my post about creating documents worthy of publishing (as in, send to dead tree publisher and they can generate my bound book), music, and films, which I used to think could not be done on LInux and which I am not yet sure can be done on Linux nearly so easily as on a Mac. (I know the process is dead simple and well documented on a Mac for all of these things, but the process on Linux is not well known, nor are the tools to do it, and it is something of an undocumented dark art still since most Linux users are not using Linux for that.)
Yes, and it is not necessarily a bad idea. It is just that whereas it was purported to be a "poor man's copyright registration" I have read that this si an urban legend and you may not be protecting yourself legally this way after all. Now that copyright is automatic it is probably less of a concern, but when it was not, this was a particularly dangerous urban legend.
IANAL, but I understand there are some legal arguments against this even now. Perhaps the postmark is not sufficient proof that the letter was really mailed on a given date. I know it is relatively trivial to obtain equipment that will generate a valid postmark and also trivial to predate one, though IIRC that is technically illegal. I don't know if this is the only reason this is not considered protection enough, but I would consider putting the material in some controlled escrow situation like a bank myself. Of course if all I could afford was a stamp, I would probably do this anyway. But it is a mistake to think this is anywhere near the protection provided by a for-real registered copyright.
Dude. who would pay for Lunix? Okay, maybe I would. But I am a lunatic.
The pathetic Task Manager that comes with Windows 9x doesn't show much, but the process and thread lists are certainly readable (though with different APIs under 9x and NT).
You are correct, but I have actually been able to find many programs which will not show up in NT/Win2k process viewer, but are certainly running. Sometimes they show up in the applications tab and not in processes, sometimes in neither. But another utility that looks at the nt process table was sometimes able to show them. I am not sure exactly what causes this phenomenon, and must plead insufficient knowlege of NT internals. I do know, however that viruses take advantage of this deficiency in Windows.
I have never seen a program run on unix that ps did not show. Also, whereas zombies are sometimes apparently unkillable in some unixes (that is nasty crap! there should *NOT* be unkillable processes IMHO) in Windows it is pretty normal to have a number of processes running which Windows will simply not allow Administrator to kill, with a message akin to "No, I am not going to let you go there today." This is part of the bad design philosophy, IMHO in Windows. Hide things from the user (even Administrator), don't let them do stuff if the OS does not feel like it today.
I also found it is pretty trivial to create undeletable files on Win2k. For some reason some applications are able to save files with names that are too long for the command line and gui tools fo rmanipulating files to process. YOu cannot rename them, mv them, copy them, or anything. They will say there forever until you reformat the drive. Sloppy coding without thinking strikes again. If they had used the same code to check filenames when manipulating them in every application including the OS tools, this would be impossible. Apparently they don't.
Sorry I was trying to be funny. I also included an emoticon so you could get me back ;).
Thanks for the link, though...
I completely understand. In fact I do advocate Macs for content creation and as an example of a computer as art. I think it is too bad Linux is not more like OSX in some ways (or aiming for something better than OSX). I have actually had ideas about how to achieve this, but I have not put any code where my mouth is yet unfortunately :(.
Content creation tools for the Mac abound and it si a stable platform. I had meant to check out some of the Linux alternatives, and I am hoping to find at leats some where they are trying to beat the Mac ones. But right now the Mac works and lots of people use it for that purpose.
I also disagree with the idea common here that making something easy means it is for "stupid people." Why would smart people intentionally make things hard on themselves? That is just silly. I use Linux because of the power it gives me, not because I think the difficulty increases my dick size. I would prefer that many administration tasks would be easier to handle, and indeed have learned how to easily handle them from the command line, but I believe it is not wrong to want a gui control panel so long as this panel truly gives control and does not muck things up such that I can't get under the hood and fix its mistakes (or make a change that I can do faster in vi than I can by loading a gui).
What is funny is that this method is also an urban legend in the US. Wow what wings such legends have!
They have also said that any lawyer worth his salt will advise companies to dump all their Linux, fast. They sent letters to 1500 companies "reminding" them that "using Linux is illegal."
They're shooting themselves in the foot, and remove their shoes beforehand!
Well, they're lawyers, so they probably wear expensive Italian leather shoes OJ wouldn't be caught killing people with, or something.
The catch-22 here is if they do not stop selling guns to gun dealers who are selling guns to criminals they can be sued by gun control activists. But if they do stop selling guns to these gun dealers the gun dealers can sue them.
There is the small matter of the $120+Million Microsoft gave them for the DRDOS settlement. Besides, aren't they supposed to have given SCO more money as well? Even if not, It seems that SCO thinks they will since they have already publicly stated that Microsoft is "not in the clear" since the license they bought only covers bits of Services for Unix. If they are able to make their story about BSD being tainted stick, they might yet make MS license the bits of Windows from BSD.
Is it just me, or should we smuggle 1 billion copies of '1984' into China?
We could always disguise them as pirated copies of Office XP...
The car does not need a driver. Her name's Christine. :)
You should forward it all to Junis.
Look, they're free speech advocates who went through the US Public UnEducation system. Have a heart, you insensitive clod! :)
Many would recommend Manufacturing Consent. I did not read this book however, I saw the documentary movie of the same name, which was made in Canada because it could not be made in the USA. It is interesting that while Chomsky is a Linguist by trade, his forays into Political and Social Sciences seem to be far more respected than his Linguistics. Of course for many Chomsky counts as an all-around nutter. I think he has some interesting things to say and whereas you may or may not agree with his opinions, he makes some interesting points about the media, information in general, how society disseminates it and people absorb it.
90% of everything is shit, except Slashdot where it's nearer 99%
I thought slashdot was going for five 9's of shittiness (99.999%). Maybe they are shitty at being shitty? Or just slacking again? :)