From my limited experience with KDE and Gnome, KDE was less hardware intensive, faster and more intuitive for me to use(oh yes, I am a Windows user).
Also, KDE spent the extra effort to include an icelandic distribution, and not Gnome.
This may help explain the 70% figure.
Stackless Python is not about distributed processing at all. Stackless Python only means that the state info for the current thread of execution is not saved on the C stack as you go along, but maintained elsewhere. The best selling point (to us here at CCP at least) is the microthread support this allows, rather than create an operating system thread (and a seperate C stack) for every seperate task, we just allocate tiny Python microthreads, with little or no overhead.
Well, seeing as we wouldn't have to worry too much about revolt, what with living in another country and all, we could start with some gun control laws.;)
Strafe jumps and flick jumps sound like something from Tomb Raider, but it's new in a fps.
Okay, I may have been a bit harsh, but q3a could have brought something more new to the genre, couldn't it? The genre is pretty much stuffed, as it is.
Id seems be growing more into a 3d engine developer, what with everyone and their distant cousin (ok, ok, Soldier of Fortune and Half-Life, at least) licensing either the quake2 or quake3 engine (Funnily enough, they all swear they used only 10% of the engine code). With the new Doom, id perhaps are trying to change that.
Let's hope they will.
"There are a number of interesting new and original elements that no earlier FPS had, e.g. rocket jumps, strafe jumping, flick jumps..."
This sounds a bit like they mixed some Tomb Raider into it? Rocket jumps are not new in Quake 3, btw.
The point is, that id (and indeed, many other game companies) seems to have stagnated in their rush for technology. Sure, their games are pushing the boundaries of what 3d cards are capable of, and what 3d engines are capable of doing, but they don't make the games any different or fun to play. The games still feel like Wolfenstein where you can look up and down and jump around. Oh, and some better graphics.
Sequels are pretty hard to do. It's a fine line between giving people more of the same and giving people something new to experience. A good example is Diablo II. Diablo II plays much like Diablo I, but still manages to have something new for the player to experience. They don't make a good job on the technology front (seems like they're using the same graphics engine as Diablo I, and much of the same sounds) but still it's sold, like, four copies to each household. And even if I hated the graphics, and the poor performance (even on a 550 MHz pentium III with 256, I played the game through.
Well, yeah, this might also mean that some nerds I know (uh a friend of mine) may get to know what sex actually feels like. This would get them all addicted to sex with computers and bring down the open source movement!
This may not be allowed to happen! It's all a ploy from Microsoft. I know they started something about naked computers, trying to delude us nerds with imagery of steaming hot computer-flesh.
Call me paranoid, but I at least will continue to have sex^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H use just my keyboard.
Don't they realize that all the linux geeks who get windows bundled with their computers will return the cd's unopened for a refund? Or does that no longer work?
On another note, why is piracy suddenly such a big worry for Microsoft?
Re:Now if they only hurried up with Planescape 2..
on
Baldur's Gate 2 Gold
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· Score: 1
Thanks for the spoiler (am still playing Planescape: Torment;)) but if you want to know what the team behind PS:T are up to, visit http://www.dirty.org/BIS. They don't say much of anything there, though, but I expect it'll be a pleasant surprise if and when they do.
I think it is clear that aliens made him gay to prevent leaping advancements in computer science, including cryptography, securing their control of world banking achieved through their conquest of Switzerland.
But seriously (or perhaps not), he was given estrogen, so he may well have experienced PMS or some other radical mood swings his male mind wasn't built to cope with. Everyone knows women are wildly sentimental! He probably watched some sad movie, (perhaps Shane, which came out in 1953, it had a sad ending, seeing that Shane left the boy, cutting their clearly homoerotic relationship short), and overcome with tears decided to eat a poisoned apple.
Few people know that Alan Turing committed suicide after having hormonal treatments mandated by court to lessen his homosexual sex drive.
Incidentally, Kenneth H. Rosen's 'Discrete Mathematics And It's Applications, Third Edition' (ISBN 0-07-053965-0) provides great computer history-related biographical and historical footnotes. It's also a must-read for it's coverage of um, discrete mathematics.
This is a very good point. Noone seems to be able to say 'Linux has these interesting features (a list of features), but these features (listed here) are much better in Windows.'
It's either all or nothing; if you use Linux at all, you have to spell Microsoft with a dollar sign, disawow all their products, buy a Bill Gates voodoo doll and fill it with hairpins, etc. I happen to use both Linux and Windows. I use Linux on a low cost server machine, as a web server I don't have to fork out thousands of dollars for, while I use Windows on expensive workstations for work. I'm not about to change this, Windows will never (legally:)) replace Linux on my low (near-zero) cost server, and I don't plan to do any Direct3D debugging on a linux workstation.
All in all, it seems like some posters haven't grown out of the 'my daddy can beat your daddy' bickering we often see at kindergarten.
My daddy can't beat anyone. Unless they're disabled midgets. And even then, he'd complain about his back afterwards.
Come on, operating systems are just tools. You can't improve an operating system by bashing other operating systems. You do it by criticizing your own operating system's flaws, and attempt to repair them.
It's kinda hard to feel sorry for Sierra, seeing that they responded to the low sales of adventure games with mass layoffs.
But well, I guess the ship can't sail when the captain is a retard, and throwing some crew overboard always solves the problem.
There are still successful adventure games out there. Planescape: Torment, for one. I know, it's actually an AD&D game, but the storyline is so captivating that you can't let it go.
It's got what most adventure games lack: replay value. The thing is, once you finish an adventure game, you've just got a pretty box that cost you tens of dollars. It makes you feel stupid, and noone wants to feel stupid. It also encourages piracy, which again hurts sales.
How long does it take to finish an adventure game? 10 hours? 40 hours?
How long can you enjoy a well-executed FPS? How many manhours, worldwide, are spent playing Half-Life per day?
The point is, that if you want 10 hours of creative storytelling, you just go and buy a book for less than ten dollars.
Why does Slashdot have to support Napster? It's marginally ethical, as well as fractionally legal. One corporation keeps a database of all it's users, as well as the songs they're sharing, and seems to be rather keen on divulging that information to whoever asks for it. It's not open source. I have never bought a CD I've heard anything from through Napster, and Napster, to me, is just a cool way to download free music. I doubt that I'm the only one who thinks so. Hell, when I visit www.gamecopyworld.com I don't do it to backup my legally owned games. Why should we treat Napster in any way other than software pirates? All right, Napster may be a cool way for aspiring artists to get their sounds heard, and a cool way to trade concert bootlegs (which, btw, Metallica is all for), but the centralized database thing annoys me. As well as the internet startup hype they're receiving. And please, stop this 'loyal fans being oppressed by band-turned-corporate' bullcrap. If the bloody fan base is so bloody loyal, they can bloody well buy their CD's. There are legally accepted ways to hear the music first, such as radio stations and Shoutcast. Even though Offspring and Limp Bizkit got their breaks through internet mp3 sharing, surely the artist should be able to choose whether their music should be freely available or not?
'Security through obscurity'? Is the man in the middle ages? What kind of drooling idiot is this? What kind of idiot security model is he advocating? Internet security is like building a dam, unless you plug every damn hole the whole thing will come down on you. Does anyone see a future when every software manufacturer can be trusted for the security of their product (and more importantly, tell you immediately when they've found a hole)? I don't.
A sheep is the perfect companion. It can be used for some serious loving, as any welshman will tell you, it's wool will keep you warm, and you can eat it. You just can't beat sheep.
Yeah. And you'll actually be able to quickly and visually program any functionality into the damn thing. This can arguably be one of Windows' key route to success, since everyone and their grandmother could program very simple visual programs in Visual Basic. Can't people stop whining about this? I mean, it's not like anyone in the right frame of mind runs any X-application as root, anyway? (okay, I'm being sarcastic) Python has a sandbox feature (cryptically called rexec) that can restrict execution of running scripts. The 'easier scripting leads to more hackers and viruses' argument is just as lame as the 'open source leads to decreased security' one. Can we move on to more advanced arguments, such as 'why is this Gnome and KDE only? Why not aim it at Wine too?'
Did you know that the Atari ST had hardware rendering capabilities? An area in memory described the scene, and 50 (or, in America, 60!) times per second, the Atari ST's hardware output every pixel of the scene onto a display device, such as a monitor. Imagine the speeds achieved! 50 fps is still quite impressive.
I think it's high time to rid the world of the evil that is Oracle. Now that we have successfully split Microsoft in two halves it is time to target the next big software giant. Larry Ellison is bearded and can easily be likened to Lucifer. He also is a famous debaucherer and commits adultery wherever he goes. Oh well, at least he owns a private helicopter, or so I've heard. Anyways, this evidence clearly points out that he is Satan trying to find a fertile womb to plant his demonic sperm in, harvesting an Unholy Spawn of Satan that will lead his Armies of Oracle Business Partners (anyone read through the Business Partner Agreement? Notice the bit about providing able bodied men for the spreading of evil?) in Armageddon.
Since Larry Ellison is also a white male american, we can target him (and subsequently Oracle) for racial hatred (I mean, how many Oracle chair members are black? Asian? Hispanic? Female?) He also might be a redneck. I mean, does he own a gun? If he does, he's a right wing nazi pig, if he doesn't, he's a bloody treehugger extremist. Be creative.
I suggest, for consistency reasons, that we continue using bad guys from Star Trek, and use the Dominion as a base for Oracle.
It may, at first, seem difficult to split a software company that really markets only one product, but when you look at Oracle you really see the one true way to split it: Ora and Cle.
Well, I don't want to bash Python, but C# does produce natively executable code. Granted, C# seems to be written for a single platform (well, single line of platforms). At least, they had the decency to call it a new language, and not sodomize an existing language with their own extensions (which Inprise did with C Builder). What they have done is take some sane subset of C (although they could have let go of goto:)) and wiggled it around to make it suit their own operating system better. They seem to be rather lax in what exactly to include, however, and I honestly think there's something that could have been left out. There are some sweet things in there however, like the lock statement. Let's just hope this'll make Windows easier to program right.
1.7.2 Labeled statements and goto statements A labeled statement permits a statement to be prefixed by a label, and goto statements can be used to transfer control to a labeled statement. The example using System; class Test { static void Main() { goto H; W: Console.WriteLine("world"); return; H: Console.Write("Hello, "); goto W; } }
I don't claim to be brighter than Microsoft, but, eh, if I'd redesign a language, I'd have the common sense to strip out the butt ugly parts of it.
Whoa! look at the possibilities! If they'd put the network interface into a wearable glove, we could shake hands and play Counterstrike. Also, at big meetings, everyone could link their computers together by holding hands! Or everybody placing one of their hands on a hub, of course. Of course, this can never happen. Some lame American asshole will hurt some of his anatomy with his new wearable network interface and sue the company who manufactures it out of business. Unless they marketed it as a combination wearable network interface / kinky sex toy, I guess.
Well, I supposedly got lucky, and got an email saying that I could download 100 megabytes to stress test Diablo II. From what I saw, the game looks butt ugly! It looked like it was running in 640 x 480, in 256 colours. It probably was running in 800x600, but damn, I didn't buy a 19" monitor to see bigger pixels. The blood was the color of bright red lipstick and really stuck out... Not the usual dark red blood stains you get after chopping up a couple of neighbours, but bright glaring red. Didn't satisfy my homicidal urge like Half-Life or Counterstrike does... The only good thing I saw was this mention of a HardCore mode. This apparently makes Diablo a game where you don't get resurrected if you die. Apparently, this strikes the snobbish gaming community as new, but hey, Nethack, anyone? From what I saw of the player base, we can look forward to bouts of item farming when the game comes out. The player interaction seems to be limited to wankers starting a server described 'will pay 6k for perfect gem'. Well, I'm holding my bucks until something better comes along.
You Open Source advocates are worse than bloody IDG! Can't the man use the two words, 'open' and 'source' together without some fanatic lunatics going 'Mmmm I'm a nerd and this isn't Open Source(tm)'?
Who bloody gives a fuck? You can download the source code. You can fiddle with it. If you make anything you think you can make money off, you pay Lionhead Studios royalties. Sounds fair to me.
Slashdot Mirror
Isn't this a paradox? Surely everything should be free? Open Source Billing Software sounds like Vegetarian Slaughterhouse to me.
From my limited experience with KDE and Gnome, KDE was less hardware intensive, faster and more intuitive for me to use(oh yes, I am a Windows user).
Also, KDE spent the extra effort to include an icelandic distribution, and not Gnome.
This may help explain the 70% figure.
Stackless Python is not about distributed processing at all.
Stackless Python only means that the state info for the current thread of execution is not saved on the C stack as you go along, but maintained elsewhere. The best selling point (to us here at CCP at least) is the microthread support this allows, rather than create an operating system thread (and a seperate C stack) for every seperate task, we just allocate tiny Python microthreads, with little or no overhead.
Well, seeing as we wouldn't have to worry too much about revolt, what with living in another country and all, we could start with some gun control laws. ;)
Strafe jumps and flick jumps sound like something from Tomb Raider, but it's new in a fps.
Okay, I may have been a bit harsh, but q3a could have brought something more new to the genre, couldn't it? The genre is pretty much stuffed, as it is.
Id seems be growing more into a 3d engine developer, what with everyone and their distant cousin (ok, ok, Soldier of Fortune and Half-Life, at least) licensing either the quake2 or quake3 engine (Funnily enough, they all swear they used only 10% of the engine code). With the new Doom, id perhaps are trying to change that.
Let's hope they will.
This sounds a bit like they mixed some Tomb Raider into it? Rocket jumps are not new in Quake 3, btw.
The point is, that id (and indeed, many other game companies) seems to have stagnated in their rush for technology. Sure, their games are pushing the boundaries of what 3d cards are capable of, and what 3d engines are capable of doing, but they don't make the games any different or fun to play. The games still feel like Wolfenstein where you can look up and down and jump around. Oh, and some better graphics.
Sequels are pretty hard to do. It's a fine line between giving people more of the same and giving people something new to experience. A good example is Diablo II. Diablo II plays much like Diablo I, but still manages to have something new for the player to experience. They don't make a good job on the technology front (seems like they're using the same graphics engine as Diablo I, and much of the same sounds) but still it's sold, like, four copies to each household. And even if I hated the graphics, and the poor performance (even on a 550 MHz pentium III with 256, I played the game through.
Well, yeah, this might also mean that some nerds I know (uh a friend of mine) may get to know what sex actually feels like. This would get them all addicted to sex with computers and bring down the open source movement!
This may not be allowed to happen! It's all a ploy from Microsoft. I know they started something about naked computers, trying to delude us nerds with imagery of steaming hot computer-flesh.
Call me paranoid, but I at least will continue to have sex^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H use just my keyboard.
Don't they realize that all the linux geeks who get windows bundled with their computers will return the cd's unopened for a refund? Or does that no longer work?
On another note, why is piracy suddenly such a big worry for Microsoft?
Thanks for the spoiler (am still playing Planescape: Torment ;)) but if you want to know what the team behind PS:T are up to, visit http://www.dirty.org/BIS.
They don't say much of anything there, though, but I expect it'll be a pleasant surprise if and when they do.
But seriously (or perhaps not), he was given estrogen, so he may well have experienced PMS or some other radical mood swings his male mind wasn't built to cope with. Everyone knows women are wildly sentimental! He probably watched some sad movie, (perhaps Shane, which came out in 1953, it had a sad ending, seeing that Shane left the boy, cutting their clearly homoerotic relationship short), and overcome with tears decided to eat a poisoned apple.
Incidentally, Kenneth H. Rosen's 'Discrete Mathematics And It's Applications, Third Edition' (ISBN 0-07-053965-0) provides great computer history-related biographical and historical footnotes. It's also a must-read for it's coverage of um, discrete mathematics.
This is a very good point. :)) replace Linux on my low (near-zero) cost server, and I don't plan to do any Direct3D debugging on a linux workstation.
Noone seems to be able to say 'Linux has these interesting features (a list of features), but these features (listed here) are much better in Windows.'
It's either all or nothing; if you use Linux at all, you have to spell Microsoft with a dollar sign, disawow all their products, buy a Bill Gates voodoo doll and fill it with hairpins, etc.
I happen to use both Linux and Windows. I use Linux on a low cost server machine, as a web server I don't have to fork out thousands of dollars for, while I use Windows on expensive workstations for work. I'm not about to change this, Windows will never (legally
All in all, it seems like some posters haven't grown out of the 'my daddy can beat your daddy' bickering we often see at kindergarten.
My daddy can't beat anyone. Unless they're disabled midgets. And even then, he'd complain about his back afterwards.
Come on, operating systems are just tools. You can't improve an operating system by bashing other operating systems. You do it by criticizing your own operating system's flaws, and attempt to repair them.
It's kinda hard to feel sorry for Sierra, seeing that they responded to the low sales of adventure games with mass layoffs.
But well, I guess the ship can't sail when the captain is a retard, and throwing some crew overboard always solves the problem.
There are still successful adventure games out there. Planescape: Torment, for one. I know, it's actually an AD&D game, but the storyline is so captivating that you can't let it go.
It's got what most adventure games lack: replay value. The thing is, once you finish an adventure game, you've just got a pretty box that cost you tens of dollars. It makes you feel stupid, and noone wants to feel stupid. It also encourages piracy, which again hurts sales.
How long does it take to finish an adventure game? 10 hours? 40 hours?
How long can you enjoy a well-executed FPS? How many manhours, worldwide, are spent playing Half-Life per day?
The point is, that if you want 10 hours of creative storytelling, you just go and buy a book for less than ten dollars.
Why does Slashdot have to support Napster? It's marginally ethical, as well as fractionally legal. One corporation keeps a database of all it's users, as well as the songs they're sharing, and seems to be rather keen on divulging that information to whoever asks for it.
It's not open source.
I have never bought a CD I've heard anything from through Napster, and Napster, to me, is just a cool way to download free music. I doubt that I'm the only one who thinks so. Hell, when I visit www.gamecopyworld.com I don't do it to backup my legally owned games. Why should we treat Napster in any way other than software pirates?
All right, Napster may be a cool way for aspiring artists to get their sounds heard, and a cool way to trade concert bootlegs (which, btw, Metallica is all for), but the centralized database thing annoys me. As well as the internet startup hype they're receiving.
And please, stop this 'loyal fans being oppressed by band-turned-corporate' bullcrap. If the bloody fan base is so bloody loyal, they can bloody well buy their CD's. There are legally accepted ways to hear the music first, such as radio stations and Shoutcast.
Even though Offspring and Limp Bizkit got their breaks through internet mp3 sharing, surely the artist should be able to choose whether their music should be freely available or not?
'Security through obscurity'?
Is the man in the middle ages?
What kind of drooling idiot is this? What kind of idiot security model is he advocating?
Internet security is like building a dam, unless you plug every damn hole the whole thing will come down on you.
Does anyone see a future when every software manufacturer can be trusted for the security of their product (and more importantly, tell you immediately when they've found a hole)?
I don't.
A sheep is the perfect companion.
It can be used for some serious loving, as any welshman will tell you, it's wool will keep you warm, and you can eat it.
You just can't beat sheep.
Yeah.
And you'll actually be able to quickly and visually program any functionality into the damn thing. This can arguably be one of Windows' key route to success, since everyone and their grandmother could program very simple visual programs in Visual Basic.
Can't people stop whining about this? I mean, it's not like anyone in the right frame of mind runs any X-application as root, anyway? (okay, I'm being sarcastic)
Python has a sandbox feature (cryptically called rexec) that can restrict execution of running scripts.
The 'easier scripting leads to more hackers and viruses' argument is just as lame as the 'open source leads to decreased security' one.
Can we move on to more advanced arguments, such as 'why is this Gnome and KDE only? Why not aim it at Wine too?'
... that they spell pointer wrong?
Did you know that the Atari ST had hardware rendering capabilities? An area in memory described the scene, and 50 (or, in America, 60!) times per second, the Atari ST's hardware output every pixel of the scene onto a display device, such as a monitor. Imagine the speeds achieved! 50 fps is still quite impressive.
I think it's high time to rid the world of the evil that is Oracle. Now that we have successfully split Microsoft in two halves it is time to target the next big software giant. Larry Ellison is bearded and can easily be likened to Lucifer. He also is a famous debaucherer and commits adultery wherever he goes. Oh well, at least he owns a private helicopter, or so I've heard. Anyways, this evidence clearly points out that he is Satan trying to find a fertile womb to plant his demonic sperm in, harvesting an Unholy Spawn of Satan that will lead his Armies of Oracle Business Partners (anyone read through the Business Partner Agreement? Notice the bit about providing able bodied men for the spreading of evil?) in Armageddon.
Since Larry Ellison is also a white male american, we can target him (and subsequently Oracle) for racial hatred (I mean, how many Oracle chair members are black? Asian? Hispanic? Female?)
He also might be a redneck. I mean, does he own a gun? If he does, he's a right wing nazi pig, if he doesn't, he's a bloody treehugger extremist. Be creative.
I suggest, for consistency reasons, that we continue using bad guys from Star Trek, and use the Dominion as a base for Oracle.
It may, at first, seem difficult to split a software company that really markets only one product, but when you look at Oracle you really see the one true way to split it:
Ora and Cle.
Well, I don't want to bash Python, but C# does produce natively executable code. :)) and wiggled it around to make it suit their own operating system better. They seem to be rather lax in what exactly to include, however, and I honestly think there's something that could have been left out.
Granted, C# seems to be written for a single platform (well, single line of platforms).
At least, they had the decency to call it a new language, and not sodomize an existing language with their own extensions (which Inprise did with C Builder).
What they have done is take some sane subset of C (although they could have let go of goto
There are some sweet things in there however, like the lock statement.
Let's just hope this'll make Windows easier to program right.
Look at this:
1.7.2 Labeled statements and goto statements
A labeled statement permits a statement to be prefixed by a label, and goto statements can be used to transfer control to a labeled statement.
The example
using System;
class Test
{
static void Main() {
goto H;
W: Console.WriteLine("world");
return;
H: Console.Write("Hello, ");
goto W;
}
}
I don't claim to be brighter than Microsoft, but, eh, if I'd redesign a language, I'd have the common sense to strip out the butt ugly parts of it.
Whoa! look at the possibilities! If they'd put the network interface into a wearable glove, we could shake hands and play Counterstrike.
Also, at big meetings, everyone could link their computers together by holding hands! Or everybody placing one of their hands on a hub, of course.
Of course, this can never happen. Some lame American asshole will hurt some of his anatomy with his new wearable network interface and sue the company who manufactures it out of business.
Unless they marketed it as a combination wearable network interface / kinky sex toy, I guess.
Well, I supposedly got lucky, and got an email saying that I could download 100 megabytes to stress test Diablo II. From what I saw, the game looks butt ugly! It looked like it was running in 640 x 480, in 256 colours. It probably was running in 800x600, but damn, I didn't buy a 19" monitor to see bigger pixels. The blood was the color of bright red lipstick and really stuck out... Not the usual dark red blood stains you get after chopping up a couple of neighbours, but bright glaring red. Didn't satisfy my homicidal urge like Half-Life or Counterstrike does... The only good thing I saw was this mention of a HardCore mode. This apparently makes Diablo a game where you don't get resurrected if you die. Apparently, this strikes the snobbish gaming community as new, but hey, Nethack, anyone? From what I saw of the player base, we can look forward to bouts of item farming when the game comes out. The player interaction seems to be limited to wankers starting a server described 'will pay 6k for perfect gem'. Well, I'm holding my bucks until something better comes along.
You Open Source advocates are worse than bloody IDG! Can't the man use the two words, 'open' and 'source' together without some fanatic lunatics going 'Mmmm I'm a nerd and this isn't Open Source(tm)'?
Who bloody gives a fuck? You can download the source code. You can fiddle with it. If you make anything you think you can make money off, you pay Lionhead Studios royalties. Sounds fair to me.