MS-App announces the X-Box will be retooled to use Linux.
The CEO of the recently split Microsoft Applications Division, Gill Bates announced today that the much anticipated X-Box gaming console would no longer use a Windows/Direct-X based OS, and would instead switch to using Linux.
"Those ***damn Microsoft-OS-holes are charging us such large licence fees it would essentially double the cost of the platform," Bates said.
"Now that we're no longer tied down to that crappy OS, we're free to make sensible engineering decisions," Bates added.
This latest announcement continues the deluge of bad news the OS division of Microsoft has had since the split was finally upheld by the Supreme Court in their groundbreaking ruling a few months ago. "Time for Microsoft-OS to bend over and spread 'em for a change," read the decision.
I think that the number of times you replayed is a poor gauge for game quality. I have only played my favourite game of all time (Grim Fandango) three times through, but that is a lot for an Adventure game.
Strategy games, where there are a lot of random elements, are inherently more replayable than Adventures, RPGs, or even First Person Shooters.
I remember Arena, and Daggerfall attempted to apply the random-factor to RPGs, and in my opinion, it didn't work. The world was filled not with interesting people, but cookie cutter characters giving you cookie-cutter quests in cookie-cutter towns.
But just because the best RPGs and Adventures are only replayable a few times, it does not mean they're inherently inferior to Strategy games which can be replayed effectively infinitely.
I agree. The games industry is one of the biggest re-invent-the-wheel-every-time industries imaginable (With notable exceptions, such as the highly successful Lucasarts SCUMM engine, which was re-used with gradual improvements over a long period of time). Isn't this one of the things open-source is supposed to be so good at fixing?
If open-source engines can effectively seperate the art of game design from the programming of game engines, that has to be a good thing. Of course, the downside is that a game is then confined to what the pre-existing engine can do.
I suppose the much derided Daikatana used the Quake 2 engine, but that alone is not a good argument for the non-reuse of engines. Deus Ex uses the Unreal engine, and seems to be widely regarded as a great game.
How all this applies to non first-person-shooters is less certain. We've already seen that engine reuse can work well for Adventure games. Real Time Strategy should also work.
I guess the concern is for the more innovative games - the more a game deviates from the strict pre-defined genres that we have in the modern games industry, the bigger the programming penalty. This could hardly provoke more conformism than we have already, though.
I think I read once that this has to do with Britain being a civilization on a decline. A century ago, they controlled a huge portion of the globe, now they have very little.
If you look at art from various periods in history these types of pattern tend to repeat. I recall reading about one statue made when ancient greece was declining, so it had its arm pointing downward. When the broken arm was restored in the renaissance, it was mistakenly attached pointing upwards, because it was a period of great progress, and that way seemed more natural to the restorers.
It seems hard to believe the society in which you live can have such fundamental effects on your thought processes. Maybe it's just a crackpot theory. Maybe if I actually knew things instead of vaguely recalling hearing about them sometime in the past I would be more informative;-)
I always feel sorry for people with Douglas Adams' kind of fame. You can just imagine that he'd want to leap out and throttle people for asking such stupid questions, but if he does anything he gets a reputation for being an asshole. (Maybe I'm wrong, and he doesn't, but I sure would)
I feel sorry for famous people in general, actually, but cult-comedy fame and sci-fi fame seem to me to be particularly harrowing, and poor DNA has both. (To get the idea, imagine Monty-Python nuts screaming 'Albatross!' at you in the street combined with Star Trek nuts asking you about the specifications for a tricorder)
I want an open-source (Or at least free, or at least not $400) alternative to something like Adobe Illustrator.
Vector graphics are perfect for the web (Particularly if/when SVG gets wide support), and pretty cool in general, but AFAIK, there's no reasonably priced tool for dealing with them. Gimp's path support wasn't that great last time I looked - perhaps this would be a good direction for future development.
Clearly you missed the point of the game. In Myst you played a tetraplegic with a wand in your mouth and an electric wheelchair.
This explains why there were so many places you couldn't go (Ground was too rough for your wheelchair), it explains why you couldn't pick anything up, it explains why the only things you could interact with are levers and buttons, and it explains why you can't talk (Your mouth is full).
This game is a tremendous triumph for the differently abled, and I am saddened that so many people put it down.
I played Myst, and found it to be moderately difficult in terms of puzzles (Though most of the puzzles didn't make the remotest bit of sense in terms of why they were there), moderately pretty (Horribly dithered 256 colour graphics are not pretty to me), and woefully lacking in plot.
Of course, plot wasn't the point of the game - the puzzles were. It's more akin to Pandora's Box than Monkey Island. I guess that's what disappointed many adventure gamers.
Now, no-one forces anyone to play it. But what really annoys me is that it spawned a number of clones, with the idea that empty worlds with no people in them are the way to make adventure games. These 'deadworld' games, as someone at Lucasarts (Tim Schafer?) once called them, practically killed the traditional dialogue and plot driven adventure game that many people love so much. This is doubly sad, because I'm sure these newbie Myst players would have enjoyed Monkey Island or Grim Fandango much more had they been exposed to them.
In essence, the misclassification of Myst as an adventure game, had a horrible impact on 'real' adventure games (For want of a better name). Myst was a puzzle game, primarily, and had its imitators realised that, perhaps things would have been different.
(True story: I showed my bosses kid Monkey Island 1, and he declared it crappy because it was old and low res. I didn't like to point out that the old sega emulator games he was playing were not much different)
Everyone's saying the light is not travelling through the chamber, but clearly _something_ must be propagating through the chamber, otherwise how would the other side of the chamber know it needs to construct a new light wave? People are saying that what's being transmitted is not light, as if that explains anything.
Of course, as I understand it, FTL effects are nothing new. I remember learning in high-school of light diffraction involving a single photon, where light "knows" it's going to cancel itself out along a certain path, so it chooses not to travel along that path.
If Relativity says that no information can travel faster than c, and Quantum Mechanics has effects which seem to rely on information travelling faster than c (Though not necessarily information we as humans can use), then it seems to this lay-person that one of them must be wrong.
I am strangely reminded of 1984's doublethink. Does Physics require one to hold two mutually contradictory concepts in ones head at one time, and believe them both? More worrying... is it possible that this is indeed the correct way to view reality?
It's really sad. A couple of years ago, Lucasarts and Looking Glass were the only two companies that seemed to be making consistently great games any more. Then Star Wars Episode 1 came out, and Lucasarts began churning out dozens of mediocre Star Wars games and a bunch of their best guys left, and now Looking Glass is gone too. Other recent events such as Richard Garriott leaving Origin (Though arguably he's 'lost it'), Peter Molyneux saying he'll only do console games from now on, Ron Gilbert's Cavedog folding and him going back to doing kids games, Warren Spector's Deus Ex has tied him up for years...
All I can say is there had better be some new companies coming on the scene to take up the slack soon, because the PC game industry looks to be in serious trouble (From a quality POV)
Of course my fondest dream is that Tim Schafer, Richard Garriott, (Probably a couple of other big names I've forgotten) and a bunch of Looking Glass and Lucasarts ex-employees all get together in one super company and produce great titles. These days that seems unlikely with any designer with one successful game under his belt going out on his own and losing all the effort of building a great team. But a guy can dream, can't he?
I think there's an opportunity for Scully to become Spooky Scully when Mulder leaves. I would make a very interesting character development, showing how she's seen so much she can no longer be as skeptical as she once was, to the point where she can take Mulder's place when he leaves. Then they get a new guy to come in and be the skeptic.
I've a feeling they won't have the guts to do that, though.
I haven't been able to stand the X-Files for the last couple of seasons. I can't bear to watch shows about a conspiracy the writers seem to be making up as they go, and which can never be revealed unless the show finally ends.
Not to mention, how did they fake the one where the astronaught dropped a hammer and a feather and have them drop at the same speed (And not earth g speed either)
Frankly, Stallman brought it on himself when he decided to call it freenonotfreeasinnochargefreeasinfreespeech software. Every time someone says 'Free Software' they have to spend ten minutes explaining that it doesn't mean what the words 'Free Software' would normally mean to a native speaker of English encountering the words for the first time.
Open source is snappier, clearer, less ambiguous, and means close enough to the same thing that it doesn't matter to 99% of people. If this pisses Stallman off, so be it.
If Stallman wants to distinguish his philosophy from Open Source, he should come up with a better name for it.
Just look at cars of the '50s compared to today. TOS just occurred in one of those periods where design was in a black hole (Kinda like the '70s - present day)
Hell, this would be a great opportunity to really design stuff that's _different_ from standard Trek.
Step 1: Invent the replicator. Society's problems are mostly due to limited resources.
Step 2: Create an all-powerful 'federation' that runs everything. Trek stipulates a wise government - if it were that easy we would have done it already.
Step 3: Turn all the people into Trekdrones, who seem to be inherently happy. It's easy to _write_ happy people, harder to actually make it happen.
In short, Trek's vision of utopia is a well-run future filled with happy people who have everything they want or need. Gee, is that all it takes?
I always thought that the next Trek series should be about the hologram Professor Moriarty (From Next Gen) captaining a federation-captured romulan warbird... (Let's face it, anything's better than another boring federation starship design)
I think Federation has legs, though. Hopefully they will have a good idea of the overall plot from the beginning, ala Babylon 5.
Don't joke, man. They'll do it. They did it with Pacman...
Re:Thoughts on possible remedies
on
Microsoft Loses
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· Score: 1
Any solution based on rules on what MS can or cannot do seems boneheaded. They already BROKE the rules, what good is making more specific rules going to do?
It could go on forever. MS breaks rules. MS gets taken to court. MS loses. Court imposes more rules. MS breaks rules....
It's like saying the penalty for murder should be to sternly tell the murderer not to do it again, and add that they're not allowed to murder people by stabbing them in the chest with a big knife.
IIRC, Be says they consider every release since R3 to be a complete end-user version of the OS. They've just decided to use the terminology Release X.X rather than Version X.X - there will _never_ be a BeOS Version 1.0
The developer releases were _called_ developer releases. The preview releases were _called_ preview releases. It may be your opinion that later releases were not complete, but Be's naming scheme clearly indicates their position.
In the absence of a website, it's impossible to know whether the domain was registered in good faith as a site about cocaine, or not.
A domain name is a neutral word with no meaning - until it is used for something. Given that, the coca-cola company has to assume that the domain _could_ be a trademark violation.
It's not so much that not having a website entitles someone else to take the domain - it's that the existence of a website could conclusively vindicate the domain holder. As it is, the status is ambiguous.
Slashdot Mirror
MS-App announces the X-Box will be retooled to use Linux.
The CEO of the recently split Microsoft Applications Division, Gill Bates announced today that the much anticipated X-Box gaming console would no longer use a Windows/Direct-X based OS, and would instead switch to using Linux.
"Those ***damn Microsoft-OS-holes are charging us such large licence fees it would essentially double the cost of the platform," Bates said.
"Now that we're no longer tied down to that crappy OS, we're free to make sensible engineering decisions," Bates added.
This latest announcement continues the deluge of bad news the OS division of Microsoft has had since the split was finally upheld by the Supreme Court in their groundbreaking ruling a few months ago. "Time for Microsoft-OS to bend over and spread 'em for a change," read the decision.
I think that the number of times you replayed is a poor gauge for game quality. I have only played my favourite game of all time (Grim Fandango) three times through, but that is a lot for an Adventure game.
Strategy games, where there are a lot of random elements, are inherently more replayable than Adventures, RPGs, or even First Person Shooters.
I remember Arena, and Daggerfall attempted to apply the random-factor to RPGs, and in my opinion, it didn't work. The world was filled not with interesting people, but cookie cutter characters giving you cookie-cutter quests in cookie-cutter towns.
But just because the best RPGs and Adventures are only replayable a few times, it does not mean they're inherently inferior to Strategy games which can be replayed effectively infinitely.
I agree. The games industry is one of the biggest re-invent-the-wheel-every-time industries imaginable (With notable exceptions, such as the highly successful Lucasarts SCUMM engine, which was re-used with gradual improvements over a long period of time). Isn't this one of the things open-source is supposed to be so good at fixing?
If open-source engines can effectively seperate the art of game design from the programming of game engines, that has to be a good thing. Of course, the downside is that a game is then confined to what the pre-existing engine can do.
I suppose the much derided Daikatana used the Quake 2 engine, but that alone is not a good argument for the non-reuse of engines. Deus Ex uses the Unreal engine, and seems to be widely regarded as a great game.
How all this applies to non first-person-shooters is less certain. We've already seen that engine reuse can work well for Adventure games. Real Time Strategy should also work.
I guess the concern is for the more innovative games - the more a game deviates from the strict pre-defined genres that we have in the modern games industry, the bigger the programming penalty. This could hardly provoke more conformism than we have already, though.
I think I read once that this has to do with Britain being a civilization on a decline. A century ago, they controlled a huge portion of the globe, now they have very little.
;-)
If you look at art from various periods in history these types of pattern tend to repeat. I recall reading about one statue made when ancient greece was declining, so it had its arm pointing downward. When the broken arm was restored in the renaissance, it was mistakenly attached pointing upwards, because it was a period of great progress, and that way seemed more natural to the restorers.
It seems hard to believe the society in which you live can have such fundamental effects on your thought processes. Maybe it's just a crackpot theory. Maybe if I actually knew things instead of vaguely recalling hearing about them sometime in the past I would be more informative
I always feel sorry for people with Douglas Adams' kind of fame. You can just imagine that he'd want to leap out and throttle people for asking such stupid questions, but if he does anything he gets a reputation for being an asshole. (Maybe I'm wrong, and he doesn't, but I sure would)
I feel sorry for famous people in general, actually, but cult-comedy fame and sci-fi fame seem to me to be particularly harrowing, and poor DNA has both. (To get the idea, imagine Monty-Python nuts screaming 'Albatross!' at you in the street combined with Star Trek nuts asking you about the specifications for a tricorder)
I want an open-source (Or at least free, or at least not $400) alternative to something like Adobe Illustrator.
Vector graphics are perfect for the web (Particularly if/when SVG gets wide support), and pretty cool in general, but AFAIK, there's no reasonably priced tool for dealing with them. Gimp's path support wasn't that great last time I looked - perhaps this would be a good direction for future development.
Clearly you missed the point of the game. In Myst you played a tetraplegic with a wand in your mouth and an electric wheelchair.
This explains why there were so many places you couldn't go (Ground was too rough for your wheelchair), it explains why you couldn't pick anything up, it explains why the only things you could interact with are levers and buttons, and it explains why you can't talk (Your mouth is full).
This game is a tremendous triumph for the differently abled, and I am saddened that so many people put it down.
I played Myst, and found it to be moderately difficult in terms of puzzles (Though most of the puzzles didn't make the remotest bit of sense in terms of why they were there), moderately pretty (Horribly dithered 256 colour graphics are not pretty to me), and woefully lacking in plot.
Of course, plot wasn't the point of the game - the puzzles were. It's more akin to Pandora's Box than Monkey Island. I guess that's what disappointed many adventure gamers.
Now, no-one forces anyone to play it. But what really annoys me is that it spawned a number of clones, with the idea that empty worlds with no people in them are the way to make adventure games. These 'deadworld' games, as someone at Lucasarts (Tim Schafer?) once called them, practically killed the traditional dialogue and plot driven adventure game that many people love so much. This is doubly sad, because I'm sure these newbie Myst players would have enjoyed Monkey Island or Grim Fandango much more had they been exposed to them.
In essence, the misclassification of Myst as an adventure game, had a horrible impact on 'real' adventure games (For want of a better name). Myst was a puzzle game, primarily, and had its imitators realised that, perhaps things would have been different.
(True story: I showed my bosses kid Monkey Island 1, and he declared it crappy because it was old and low res. I didn't like to point out that the old sega emulator games he was playing were not much different)
My usual security paradigm is 'Something you lost, something you forgot, something you used to be'
Do you know how many freakin' passwords I have?
Everyone's saying the light is not travelling through the chamber, but clearly _something_ must be propagating through the chamber, otherwise how would the other side of the chamber know it needs to construct a new light wave? People are saying that what's being transmitted is not light, as if that explains anything.
Of course, as I understand it, FTL effects are nothing new. I remember learning in high-school of light diffraction involving a single photon, where light "knows" it's going to cancel itself out along a certain path, so it chooses not to travel along that path.
If Relativity says that no information can travel faster than c, and Quantum Mechanics has effects which seem to rely on information travelling faster than c (Though not necessarily information we as humans can use), then it seems to this lay-person that one of them must be wrong.
I am strangely reminded of 1984's doublethink. Does Physics require one to hold two mutually contradictory concepts in ones head at one time, and believe them both? More worrying... is it possible that this is indeed the correct way to view reality?
It's really sad. A couple of years ago, Lucasarts and Looking Glass were the only two companies that seemed to be making consistently great games any more. Then Star Wars Episode 1 came out, and Lucasarts began churning out dozens of mediocre Star Wars games and a bunch of their best guys left, and now Looking Glass is gone too. Other recent events such as Richard Garriott leaving Origin (Though arguably he's 'lost it'), Peter Molyneux saying he'll only do console games from now on, Ron Gilbert's Cavedog folding and him going back to doing kids games, Warren Spector's Deus Ex has tied him up for years...
All I can say is there had better be some new companies coming on the scene to take up the slack soon, because the PC game industry looks to be in serious trouble (From a quality POV)
Of course my fondest dream is that Tim Schafer, Richard Garriott, (Probably a couple of other big names I've forgotten) and a bunch of Looking Glass and Lucasarts ex-employees all get together in one super company and produce great titles. These days that seems unlikely with any designer with one successful game under his belt going out on his own and losing all the effort of building a great team. But a guy can dream, can't he?
I think there's an opportunity for Scully to become Spooky Scully when Mulder leaves. I would make a very interesting character development, showing how she's seen so much she can no longer be as skeptical as she once was, to the point where she can take Mulder's place when he leaves. Then they get a new guy to come in and be the skeptic.
I've a feeling they won't have the guts to do that, though.
I haven't been able to stand the X-Files for the last couple of seasons. I can't bear to watch shows about a conspiracy the writers seem to be making up as they go, and which can never be revealed unless the show finally ends.
Not to mention, how did they fake the one where the astronaught dropped a hammer and a feather and have them drop at the same speed (And not earth g speed either)
Frankly, Stallman brought it on himself when he decided to call it freenonotfreeasinnochargefreeasinfreespeech software. Every time someone says 'Free Software' they have to spend ten minutes explaining that it doesn't mean what the words 'Free Software' would normally mean to a native speaker of English encountering the words for the first time.
Open source is snappier, clearer, less ambiguous, and means close enough to the same thing that it doesn't matter to 99% of people. If this pisses Stallman off, so be it.
If Stallman wants to distinguish his philosophy from Open Source, he should come up with a better name for it.
Actually, in that particular period in earth's history, it was common for women to go topless.
Just look at cars of the '50s compared to today. TOS just occurred in one of those periods where design was in a black hole (Kinda like the '70s - present day)
Hell, this would be a great opportunity to really design stuff that's _different_ from standard Trek.
Step 1: Invent the replicator. Society's problems are mostly due to limited resources.
Step 2: Create an all-powerful 'federation' that runs everything. Trek stipulates a wise government - if it were that easy we would have done it already.
Step 3: Turn all the people into Trekdrones, who seem to be inherently happy. It's easy to _write_ happy people, harder to actually make it happen.
In short, Trek's vision of utopia is a well-run future filled with happy people who have everything they want or need. Gee, is that all it takes?
I always thought Dax was way sexier than 7 of 9...
Now Dax in 7's uniform. That would be a sight to see.
I always thought that the next Trek series should be about the hologram Professor Moriarty (From Next Gen) captaining a federation-captured romulan warbird... (Let's face it, anything's better than another boring federation starship design)
I think Federation has legs, though. Hopefully they will have a good idea of the overall plot from the beginning, ala Babylon 5.
Don't joke, man. They'll do it. They did it with Pacman...
Any solution based on rules on what MS can or cannot do seems boneheaded. They already BROKE the rules, what good is making more specific rules going to do?
It could go on forever. MS breaks rules. MS gets taken to court. MS loses. Court imposes more rules. MS breaks rules....
It's like saying the penalty for murder should be to sternly tell the murderer not to do it again, and add that they're not allowed to murder people by stabbing them in the chest with a big knife.
IIRC, Be says they consider every release since R3 to be a complete end-user version of the OS. They've just decided to use the terminology Release X.X rather than Version X.X - there will _never_ be a BeOS Version 1.0
The developer releases were _called_ developer releases. The preview releases were _called_ preview releases. It may be your opinion that later releases were not complete, but Be's naming scheme clearly indicates their position.
The main problem is that the movie studios feel the need to describe every movie he's in as "hilarious" even if it's not a comedy.
In the absence of a website, it's impossible to know whether the domain was registered in good faith as a site about cocaine, or not.
A domain name is a neutral word with no meaning - until it is used for something. Given that, the coca-cola company has to assume that the domain _could_ be a trademark violation.
It's not so much that not having a website entitles someone else to take the domain - it's that the existence of a website could conclusively vindicate the domain holder. As it is, the status is ambiguous.