In the starwars universe there are millions of worlds with billions of sentients, and yet even at its hight there seem to be approximately 100 jedi. So the density of jedi is not greater than 10^2 / 10^6 * 10^9 = one in ten trillion.
If even one player succeeds in becoming jedi, out of 300,000 players, it will mean there are 100,000,000 times as many Jedi as is realistic. An equivalent proportional error would be to say "the entire human population of the earth has flown into space on the space shuttle". Its not just wrong! Its insane!
Forget it, the only bundled item I want to see are the hardware specifications for their card, so that someone can build decent free drivers for them. Is it so much to ask that you know how to use what you're buying?
Simply shrink each and every audience member to be the size of a nickel, then have up to 104 of them stand on your keyboard. If they like something, have them jump, thus depressing their key.
Actually, I find Linux games to be superior in many ways to peecee games.
cost. You can't beat free.
license. You can't beat GNU-GPL.
accessability. Most PC+console games are geared towards gaming experts, who won't be happy unless they spend 100+ user-hours on a game. Otherwise how do they justify paying $50 for it? As a result the games are bloated and huge. If my girlfriend has to read an instruction manual to know how to play, she aint going to play it with me.
The underlying OS is non-evil, with reasonable redistribution rights.
Of course, no reboot.
Examples of games I have fun with are: Star Control 2 (aka UrQuaan Masters), glTron, Copter Commander, Xboard, Xpilot, Quake3 demo, and Tribes 2.
I hate the damn THX robot that shows up before movies to loudly announce the presence of THX sound. The stupid THX noise is so discordant, ugly, and more often than not too LOUD. it puts me in a bad mood before the movie even starts.
I'd better not hear it before I play my video games too, god dammit! Oh wait, something tells me not too many Linux games are going to have to worry about this. Whew.
Not to mention it looks hard to one-hand text messages or dialing. Often when I'm riding my bike I have my left hand on the handlebars and my phone in my right hand as I am touch typing text messages.
As much the Slashdot community hates child molesters and likes to dump on their flaws, I've realized one thing: child molesters means jobs in the law enforcement and social work sector. As a police detective, my job is, among other things, to make sure the latest threat to our children doesn't bring down a life in the city where I work. At least twice a week, my office has a meeting where we discuss the latest incident, organize a task force, and then do a rescue. I like to think that as long as child molesters keep on, er, molesting, I don't have to worry about losing my job. If there was some magical "perfect" society that never needed policing (note: there isn't) then we wouldn't need law enforcement now, would we?
Thanks to Joystick101 for pointing to a news piece discussing the in-development Gameboyboy add-on for the GameBoy. According to the article, "Gameboyboy is a game meter that can be inserted into a Nintendo GameBoy. The product operates independent of the video game system, but downloads video game programs that are contained within its circuitry into the GameBoy as a reward for maintaining good leveling speed in video games." The product hopes to help children with poor video game skills monitor their condition better, and the creator comments that his son "...always knew where his GameBoy was, but he always seemed to misplace his Gameboy."
The that guy says "HUMILIATION" in Quake3. Made all the more embarassing by the fact that my girlfriend quotes it at me when I do something dumb. Grrr! --
Well, at least the hard drives are off by a constant ratio. If I buy two 2 gig drives, they'll store as much as a 4 gig drive. If I take two 2x2s, and glue them together, I get somewhat less width than a 2x4. When human civilization collapses, in 1000,000,000 years, it will be because of all these little inconsistancies collectively making it impossible to actually engineer anything. Or did I mean 1024,0024,0024 years? Argh! Now I'm doing it!
I think microsoft has successfully reeducated people to the point where they expect to buy a new computer every 3 years. The people that are complaining about bloat are the more educated ones, that know it can be different. Thus they can also select the desktop environment that works for them.
Anywho, just a few 3d icons and special effects won't slow down that 400mhz/64mb machine, if it has a 2nd generation video card like a nvidia tnt, and the hardware accelleration is enabled. That's hardware that's unutilized.
I have a really substantial, insightful post for this discussion, however, before you can read it you must PayPal me 10 cents at the address in my profile. Thanks!
Productivity? Since when has that driven computer development? 3Dization will drive hardware sales, and hardware sales will drive 3Dization. Just as we finally have the compute power to do SVG icons, suddenly they are a must-have feature, which both KDE and Gnome go chasing. Lots of people complain that we don't need this, but they get ignored in the rush for eye-candy. : )
The Open source guys are targeting 1 ghz machines with a TNT video card, not a 2 ghz machine with a Geforce video card. That's okay, that's what the rest of the industry is doing to. It simply suprises me that they're not taking the opportunity to leapfrog a generation and go straight for something recently-produced computers are easily capable of.
Your above post is no less true if you replace "pseudo 3D" with "SVG". Which is my point really.
All these little "quality of life" improvements bought with so much developer time, seem just to be special cases of the ancient OpenGL 1.2 API. OpenGL uses the graphics hardware to its fullest. All these litte ad-hoc improvements we're making aren't necessarily doing that. When the general solution is (1) more efficient, (2) more general, and (3) will age better, I think it should be adopted!
How do "AA-fonts, SVG-icons, real alpha blending" have anything to do with 3D visualization? They're all 2D optimizations, so it's not obvious anyone is busting ass on 3D desktop tech.
Simple: they're all accellerated by a 3d graphics card.
My original post was misleading. What I'm interested in is why we're using 3d-accelleratable technologies like SVG, AA-fonts, and translucent menus in an ad-hoc way, when a unified, OpenGL-based approach would seem more, well, unified.
I was still imagining the basically Mac System 1 2d interface, just rendered with all the power of a modern video card.
I run OpenBox to avoid the overhead of KDE or GNOME, as well as for its better interface.
You use graphics and windows? Ugh, the bloat! The overhead! I used to only program using the linux console. No pesky bloated bitmapped graphics there, no sir-e-bob! But then I realized I was wasting countless processor cycles redrawing a 2d grid of characters. That's when I stepped up to a truly responsive system - the line editor! Its the shit, man! I can get 1,400,000 frames per second on my Pentium4/3200mhz with Geforce4 Pro Titanium Ultra. It is RESPONSIVE!!!
I think I'm a borderline case. I'm certainly not envolved with the core technologies, but I have written a decent free game (copter-commander), and I do publish the odd HOWTO and whatnot.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, now you're saying NPCs don't have the same chance to become Jedi as PCs? NPCs are people too, you insensitive clod!
In the starwars universe there are millions of worlds with billions of sentients, and yet even at its hight there seem to be approximately 100 jedi. So the density of jedi is not greater than 10^2 / 10^6 * 10^9 = one in ten trillion.
If even one player succeeds in becoming jedi, out of 300,000 players, it will mean there are 100,000,000 times as many Jedi as is realistic. An equivalent proportional error would be to say "the entire human population of the earth has flown into space on the space shuttle". Its not just wrong! Its insane!
Best /. article title, EVAR!
Forget it, the only bundled item I want to see are the hardware specifications for their card, so that someone can build decent free drivers for them. Is it so much to ask that you know how to use what you're buying?
Simply shrink each and every audience member to be the size of a nickel, then have up to 104 of them stand on your keyboard. If they like something, have them jump, thus depressing their key.
- cost. You can't beat free.
- license. You can't beat GNU-GPL.
- accessability. Most PC+console games are geared towards gaming experts, who won't be happy unless they spend 100+ user-hours on a game. Otherwise how do they justify paying $50 for it? As a result the games are bloated and huge. If my girlfriend has to read an instruction manual to know how to play, she aint going to play it with me.
- The underlying OS is non-evil, with reasonable redistribution rights.
- Of course, no reboot.
Examples of games I have fun with are: Star Control 2 (aka UrQuaan Masters), glTron, Copter Commander, Xboard, Xpilot, Quake3 demo, and Tribes 2.I hate the damn THX robot that shows up before movies to loudly announce the presence of THX sound. The stupid THX noise is so discordant, ugly, and more often than not too LOUD. it puts me in a bad mood before the movie even starts.
I'd better not hear it before I play my video games too, god dammit! Oh wait, something tells me not too many Linux games are going to have to worry about this. Whew.
Uh, perhaps he doesn't use it because it costs $300!!!!!
Not to mention it looks hard to one-hand text messages or dialing. Often when I'm riding my bike I have my left hand on the handlebars and my phone in my right hand as I am touch typing text messages.
As much the Slashdot community hates child molesters and likes to dump on their flaws, I've realized one thing: child molesters means jobs in the law enforcement and social work sector. As a police detective, my job is, among other things, to make sure the latest threat to our children doesn't bring down a life in the city where I work. At least twice a week, my office has a meeting where we discuss the latest incident, organize a task force, and then do a rescue. I like to think that as long as child molesters keep on, er, molesting, I don't have to worry about losing my job. If there was some magical "perfect" society that never needed policing (note: there isn't) then we wouldn't need law enforcement now, would we?
Thanks to Joystick101 for pointing to a news piece discussing the in-development Gameboyboy add-on for the GameBoy. According to the article, "Gameboyboy is a game meter that can be inserted into a Nintendo GameBoy. The product operates independent of the video game system, but downloads video game programs that are contained within its circuitry into the GameBoy as a reward for maintaining good leveling speed in video games." The product hopes to help children with poor video game skills monitor their condition better, and the creator comments that his son "...always knew where his GameBoy was, but he always seemed to misplace his Gameboy."
The that guy says "HUMILIATION" in Quake3. Made all the more embarassing by the fact that my girlfriend quotes it at me when I do something dumb. Grrr!
--
- photon.wav
- launch fighters.wav
By abusivively using the imperious "Launch Fighters" button, I incited panic in more than one opponent, causing them to DIE.Actually all the sounds for Star Control I/II pretty much rocked. Go download Star Control^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^HThe Ur-quan Masters, its Free(dom/Beer)!
--
"I'm ready to drop the hammer and unleash some indescriminate justice"
.sig for a while.
... and still you procrastinate."
I think the above was my
While playing a LAN game, I snorted coke up my nose the first time my Protoss Carrier Captain complained at me:
"Our enemies are legion
Well, at least the hard drives are off by a constant ratio. If I buy two 2 gig drives, they'll store as much as a 4 gig drive. If I take two 2x2s, and glue them together, I get somewhat less width than a 2x4. When human civilization collapses, in 1000,000,000 years, it will be because of all these little inconsistancies collectively making it impossible to actually engineer anything. Or did I mean 1024,0024,0024 years? Argh! Now I'm doing it!
I think microsoft has successfully reeducated people to the point where they expect to buy a new computer every 3 years. The people that are complaining about bloat are the more educated ones, that know it can be different. Thus they can also select the desktop environment that works for them.
Anywho, just a few 3d icons and special effects won't slow down that 400mhz/64mb machine, if it has a 2nd generation video card like a nvidia tnt, and the hardware accelleration is enabled. That's hardware that's unutilized.
I have a really substantial, insightful post for this discussion, however, before you can read it you must PayPal me 10 cents at the address in my profile. Thanks!
Productivity? Since when has that driven computer development? 3Dization will drive hardware sales, and hardware sales will drive 3Dization. Just as we finally have the compute power to do SVG icons, suddenly they are a must-have feature, which both KDE and Gnome go chasing. Lots of people complain that we don't need this, but they get ignored in the rush for eye-candy. : )
mod parent up please
The Open source guys are targeting 1 ghz machines with a TNT video card, not a 2 ghz machine with a Geforce video card. That's okay, that's what the rest of the industry is doing to. It simply suprises me that they're not taking the opportunity to leapfrog a generation and go straight for something recently-produced computers are easily capable of.
Your above post is no less true if you replace "pseudo 3D" with "SVG". Which is my point really.
All these little "quality of life" improvements bought with so much developer time, seem just to be special cases of the ancient OpenGL 1.2 API. OpenGL uses the graphics hardware to its fullest. All these litte ad-hoc improvements we're making aren't necessarily doing that. When the general solution is (1) more efficient, (2) more general, and (3) will age better, I think it should be adopted!
Simple: they're all accellerated by a 3d graphics card.
My original post was misleading. What I'm interested in is why we're using 3d-accelleratable technologies like SVG, AA-fonts, and translucent menus in an ad-hoc way, when a unified, OpenGL-based approach would seem more, well, unified.
I was still imagining the basically Mac System 1 2d interface, just rendered with all the power of a modern video card.
I think I'm a borderline case. I'm certainly not envolved with the core technologies, but I have written a decent free game (copter-commander), and I do publish the odd HOWTO and whatnot.