... whereas FTP you need to set up netcat or something to listen. (Its also more complicated)...
Telnet is a very handy way of diagnosing FTP problems. If you're not happy with setting up listeners for the data connections, use PASV instead of PORT.
I'm all for protocols with which you can do this -- and FTP is one of them!
Unfortunately, the need for secure protocols is going to make this more difficult as time goes on. Don't expect something like OCSP to be human-readable. --
I find that laziness drives me to code on UNIX, because the UNIX little-tools-in-a-pipe philosophy usually means that I only have to write a tiny program to do what I want, and in general it only needs to handle input from STDIN and output from STDOUT, so I don't have to worry about
In a Windows environment, it's likely I'd feel the need to write some sort of GUI. Windows would not provide me with the rich set of CLI tools I'd need to wrap around my quick and easy program to make it fully functional. It's possible I'd have to write that functionality into my own program instead. Sure, you *can* install GNU sort, cut, awk, sed, tr, etc. on Windows, but by the time you've done so you may as well have installed Linux or BSD.
These things are amazing; a guy at work showed me a 350Meg model in a compactflash adapter, which is great for digital cameras, except I wonder what the battery drain would be like.
Linux already cross compiles and boots on MIPS. With the CE Linux varients i'm sure you can dump that on CD fairly quickly and use nice big VMU cards to store data/variables or whatever.
Interesting point, but since the DC uses an SH/4 CPU, not MIPS...
Meanwhile, though, there *is* an SH4 port of NetBSD:)
Keyboards are available for the Dreamcast, and they all have a modem on board. I guess the order of play would be:
Get NetBSD booting
Work out the modem interface
Get PPP talking to a second modem in a PC
Get a workable NetBSD distribution working, with the read-only filesystems on CDR, and writeable filesystems on NFS.
Firstly, I'd like to congratulate the people responsible for this: they've done a great job, and the remote dynamic debugger will be very handy to the few people who will be doing actual coding.
For those who just want to boot their own code, however, it seems like Datel have worked out how to produce a CD, unendorsed by Sega, which will boot on an unmodified Dreamcast. The coverdisk of this months DC-UK magazine (in the UK) has a demo disk. Not only that, but if you burn a CDR copy, that works too! There are ISO images on the net as we speak.
From that, I'm guessing it won't be long before people are hacking their own code into the Datel ISO, producing their own bootable Dreamcast CDs. I truly hope the OpenBSD/SH4 gang get back to work, now that they have a means to boot their own code.
Implications for piracy? Well, AFAIK still nobody can do a straight copy of a GD-ROM, so it'd take some heavy modification (stripping music, movies etc, coding around the fact that they're missing) so I don't expect to see widespread Dreamcast piracy any time soon. --
A realtime engine does not necessarily remove all constraints. A locked door is still a locked door; the engine can prevent you from wading into water, etc.
There are dozens of examples of realtime 3D games which present puzzles which rely on movement constraints: Sonic Adventure won't let you into the casino until you learn to spin-dash onto a ledge where there's a button which opens the door; Silent Hill sees you blocked by crevasses in the street, so you have to find your way through houses and their back yards instead.
Part of this is that the capabilities of the protagonist are carefully limited. Silent Hill's main character *can't* rocket-jump over the crevasse as he might in Quake.
Incidentally, DOOM!'s movement is severely limited compared to Quake's, and I'd argue it makes for a better (at least, more immediately enjoyable) game, when combined with sympathetic level design. --
I freely admit to not knowing as much about the BSD license as I do about the GPL: how much trouble, both technically and legally, would it be to merge the platform specific code from the various NetBSD ports into the FreeBSD tree?
(and would there be any point)
On a side note -- I presume "Gift-F" was the interviewer mishearing "#ifdef", right? So neither the author nor the editor bothered to understand their own sentence... --
Stop gnashing and wailing, and just vote with your pockets. Don't buy the Windows version of UT2, wait until a version for the platform you want comes out.
If you just can't wait, and buying the Windows version is acceptable to you -- well it looks like Epic made a sound commercial decision, doesn't it.
We have no right to "demand" that Epic do (or do not do) anything: we can only appeal to their pockets. --
Games like Populous, Magic Carpet, and Dungeon Keeper.
Amusingly, British Dreamcast magazine DC-UK has an interview with Molyneux this month, with a sidebar entitled "I'm Rubbish: Peter Molyneux" -- wherein he criticizes all his own games:
<paraphrasing>Populous -- "Very repetitive"; Dungeon Keeper -- "I think I made an awful lot of mistakes"; Theme Park -- "I don't think most people played past the first level" etc. </paraphrasing>
But you're forgetting that we haven't heard anything from Sega yet; we don't know if they support Bleem or not, just because Bleem for DC exists doesn't mean by any stretch of the imagination that Sega supports it.
Yes it does: to release a Dreamcast game commercially, you need to get a license from Sega. Bleem! would not have announced this product if they didn't already have a license to sell it. --
they *will* have MS's WinCE development libraries on their side
I doubt it: Dreamcast developers can choose between Windows CE, Sega's own lightweight OS, or they can write their own OS... the OS boots off the CD.
Windows CE games so far seem to suffer from a fair amount of overhead: since Bleem! will need all the resource it can get, I bet they develop on the Sega OS. --
The Beatles (the Britney Spears of their generation)
Only if (like the Beatles) Britters follows up several albums of pap, with something as revolutionary as Revolver (heh, revolutionary, gerrit), then keeps getting more and more creative until someone assasinates her.
I have a pleasant dream that one day the Spice Girls will do this (not the assassination bit...), but there's no sign of it happening yet... --
Pedantic nitpicking, but I'm fairly sure that the Super Gameboy contained a gameboy CPU (Z80?), rather than performing emulation.
Likewise, the PSX versions of some SNES games mentioned by another poster are likely to be ports, as opposed to being the original ROMs running emulators.
Whether this is relevant or not, I don't know:) --
I think this is certainly a cool development, but every time I think about the possibility of not actually owning something that is a significant part of my life, I get chills. Am I alone here, folks?
Maybe you are in a minority -- at the end of the day, the market will decide. If a sufficient number of people like you want a box and a physical medium and an instruction booklet, and are prepared to pay for them, then someone will be there to sell you those things, and make a profit. --
The best rebuttal, is to smile quietly, and continue to use and specify Free software wherever it is appropriate.
... and if proprietary software is the only viable solution to your needs, go with that instead.
If I can do my work using only (or even mostly) Free Software, then as far as I personally am concerned, Free Software has succeeded. "I got mine; don't worry 'bout his". --
Sim/Theme games in general are always the first to get suggested when "your ideas for games" are brought up.
Theme Park and Theme Hospital both prove that you can "sim" pretty much anything and get a fun game out of it. Sim Zoo, Sim School, Sim Office...
The sim game I'd most like to see is Sim/Theme Pub.... and here's a verbatim copy of a post I did elsewhere not so long ago...
I guess it would be a Theme Park type setup, with punters milling around:
getting upset by the queues
wanting a fag
upset by smokiness
liking/disliking the decor
wanting louder/quieter music
liking/disliking the jukebox selection
wanting/not wanting a DJ / dancefloor
liking/disliking the choice of drinks
getting less fussy as they drink more
drinking themselves into comas, getting you into trouble with the law
having fights
mooning / getting tits out (erm, maybe as a reward for good pub management)
drinking less because the food portions are too filling
wanting larger tables, to accomodate large groups
wanting more small tables for couples and small groups
hogging the pool table / dartboard / giant Jenga
clustering around the open fire
despising the open fire as too traditional and not trendy enough
trying novelty drinks (Aftershock, Red Bull and Anostura Bitters... mmmm..)
enjoying peace and quiet / pining for a more lively atmosphere
getting apoplectic with rage
... you get the picture
You'd probably have more than one pub on the go at once - perhaps you'd be trying to cater for all tastes in a given town. You'd have a spit'n' sawdust gigging pub, a wine bar, a novelty theme pub with crazy crap around the walls, a real ale pub and a trendy pre-club type bar (having worked up from one tiny local on the corner of a residential street).
Multiplayer you'd be competing for the same clientele and they'd wander from one pub to another.
On top of that you'd have Theme Park style research units, you might have to do some stock management (That always irritated me in Theme Park though: reordering stocks was just a chore... I think you ought to be able to set thresholds where if the stock drops to a certain level you automatically reorder... in a pub you'd have to adjust the thresholds by season...). --
Slashdot Mirror
On a related note, Gaming Age have MPEG movies of the Nintendo Dolphin version of Star Wars Episode 2 Racer, here!
--
Sure, it could be done, but why bother?
Most Windows users seem to prefer non-free software. Even if it's free-beer, they seem to prefer it to be warez.
So let them use Access or MS SQL Server -- if they wanted to use free software, they'd be using a free OS, right?
--
... whereas FTP you need to set up netcat or something to listen. (Its also more complicated) ...
Telnet is a very handy way of diagnosing FTP problems. If you're not happy with setting up listeners for the data connections, use PASV instead of PORT.
I'm all for protocols with which you can do this -- and FTP is one of them!
Unfortunately, the need for secure protocols is going to make this more difficult as time goes on. Don't expect something like OCSP to be human-readable.
--
I find that laziness drives me to code on UNIX, because the UNIX little-tools-in-a-pipe philosophy usually means that I only have to write a tiny program to do what I want, and in general it only needs to handle input from STDIN and output from STDOUT, so I don't have to worry about
In a Windows environment, it's likely I'd feel the need to write some sort of GUI. Windows would not provide me with the rich set of CLI tools I'd need to wrap around my quick and easy program to make it fully functional. It's possible I'd have to write that functionality into my own program instead. Sure, you *can* install GNU sort, cut, awk, sed, tr, etc. on Windows, but by the time you've done so you may as well have installed Linux or BSD.
--
These things are amazing; a guy at work showed me a 350Meg model in a compactflash adapter, which is great for digital cameras, except I wonder what the battery drain would be like.
Anyone know?
--
Interesting point, but since the DC uses an SH/4 CPU, not MIPS...
Meanwhile, though, there *is* an SH4 port of NetBSD
Keyboards are available for the Dreamcast, and they all have a modem on board. I guess the order of play would be:
--
Nobody in their right mind would attempt to write anything more than a simple demo on one of these, and I don't think that was ever the intention.
There's already a port of NetBSD to the Hitachi SH/3 -- with which the Dreamcast's Hitachi SH/4 is backwards-compatible.
GCC can output SH binaries.
Would you change your tune if someone used this "crack box" to turn a Dreamcast into a fully-fledged UNIX box?
What's more there is at least 1 100% homemade demo, and there are screenshots of it on the referenced site.
And finally, this box doesn't help you copy Sega's proprietary GD-ROM format, so quick and easy piracy is still out of reach.
--
Firstly, I'd like to congratulate the people responsible for this: they've done a great job, and the remote dynamic debugger will be very handy to the few people who will be doing actual coding.
For those who just want to boot their own code, however, it seems like Datel have worked out how to produce a CD, unendorsed by Sega, which will boot on an unmodified Dreamcast. The coverdisk of this months DC-UK magazine (in the UK) has a demo disk. Not only that, but if you burn a CDR copy, that works too! There are ISO images on the net as we speak.
From that, I'm guessing it won't be long before people are hacking their own code into the Datel ISO, producing their own bootable Dreamcast CDs. I truly hope the OpenBSD/SH4 gang get back to work, now that they have a means to boot their own code.
Implications for piracy? Well, AFAIK still nobody can do a straight copy of a GD-ROM, so it'd take some heavy modification (stripping music, movies etc, coding around the fact that they're missing) so I don't expect to see widespread Dreamcast piracy any time soon.
--
... is at http://www.worldrps.com
--
A realtime engine does not necessarily remove all constraints. A locked door is still a locked door; the engine can prevent you from wading into water, etc.
There are dozens of examples of realtime 3D games which present puzzles which rely on movement constraints: Sonic Adventure won't let you into the casino until you learn to spin-dash onto a ledge where there's a button which opens the door; Silent Hill sees you blocked by crevasses in the street, so you have to find your way through houses and their back yards instead.
Part of this is that the capabilities of the protagonist are carefully limited. Silent Hill's main character *can't* rocket-jump over the crevasse as he might in Quake.
Incidentally, DOOM!'s movement is severely limited compared to Quake's, and I'd argue it makes for a better (at least, more immediately enjoyable) game, when combined with sympathetic level design.
--
Its gotta be rock solid for all the folks in the Desktop publishing industry.
Why? The DTP industry seems to get by very happily on the less-than-stable current MacOS.
--
The article suggests that readers may be surprised by Linus/etc's reaction, because of an assumtion that free software is "vaguely socialist".
Since when has socialism meant "stealing is OK"?
--
I freely admit to not knowing as much about the BSD license as I do about the GPL: how much trouble, both technically and legally, would it be to merge the platform specific code from the various NetBSD ports into the FreeBSD tree?
(and would there be any point)
On a side note -- I presume "Gift-F" was the interviewer mishearing "#ifdef", right? So neither the author nor the editor bothered to understand their own sentence...
--
Stop gnashing and wailing, and just vote with your pockets. Don't buy the Windows version of UT2, wait until a version for the platform you want comes out.
If you just can't wait, and buying the Windows version is acceptable to you -- well it looks like Epic made a sound commercial decision, doesn't it.
We have no right to "demand" that Epic do (or do not do) anything: we can only appeal to their pockets.
--
Games like Populous, Magic Carpet, and Dungeon Keeper.
Amusingly, British Dreamcast magazine DC-UK has an interview with Molyneux this month, with a sidebar entitled "I'm Rubbish: Peter Molyneux" -- wherein he criticizes all his own games:
<paraphrasing>Populous -- "Very repetitive"; Dungeon Keeper -- "I think I made an awful lot of mistakes"; Theme Park -- "I don't think most people played past the first level" etc.
</paraphrasing>
Of course, *he* can say that -- we can't...
--
But you're forgetting that we haven't heard anything from Sega yet; we don't know if they support Bleem or not, just because Bleem for
DC exists doesn't mean by any stretch of the imagination that Sega supports it.
Yes it does: to release a Dreamcast game commercially, you need to get a license from Sega.
Bleem! would not have announced this product if they didn't already have a license to sell it.
--
they *will* have MS's WinCE development libraries on their side
I doubt it: Dreamcast developers can choose between Windows CE, Sega's own lightweight OS, or they can write their own OS... the OS boots off the CD.
Windows CE games so far seem to suffer from a fair amount of overhead: since Bleem! will need all the resource it can get, I bet they develop on the Sega OS.
--
The Beatles (the Britney Spears of their generation)
Only if (like the Beatles) Britters follows up several albums of pap, with something as revolutionary as Revolver (heh, revolutionary, gerrit), then keeps getting more and more creative until someone assasinates her.
I have a pleasant dream that one day the Spice Girls will do this (not the assassination bit...), but there's no sign of it happening yet...
--
Everything I've read here so far (at lazy +2 threshold, mind) discusses the common case of CGI scripts which generate HTML.
That's all very well, but the CGI interface allows you to generate any kind of MIME type you like.
Some of the CGI scripts I'm happiest with are written in GNUPlot, and display PNG graphs of live data.
I guess GIMP's Script-FU can be used for nifty CGI scripts; also NetPBM.
--
That's easy: if a Slashdot comment goes missing -- who gives a toss?
If a customer order goes missing -- well, it could be an important one, it could be money in the bank, lost.
Slashdot needs the speed, but not the performance; critical applications need the reliability, and are prepared to sacrifice performance. Easy.
--
Pedantic nitpicking, but I'm fairly sure that the Super Gameboy contained a gameboy CPU (Z80?), rather than performing emulation.
:)
Likewise, the PSX versions of some SNES games mentioned by another poster are likely to be ports, as opposed to being the original ROMs running emulators.
Whether this is relevant or not, I don't know
--
I think this is certainly a cool development, but every time I think about the possibility of not actually owning something that is a significant part of my life, I get chills. Am I alone here, folks?
Maybe you are in a minority -- at the end of the day, the market will decide. If a sufficient number of people like you want a box and a physical medium and an instruction booklet, and are prepared to pay for them, then someone will be there to sell you those things, and make a profit.
--
OK - I suppose it's wishful thinking to hope that users would realize by now not to open e-mail attachments they know nothing about...
As I understand it (second hand), if the mail shows up in a preview pane in Outlook Express, then the script runs without user intervention.
Now *that* is crappy design...
--
The best rebuttal, is to smile quietly, and continue to use and specify Free software wherever it is appropriate.
... and if proprietary software is the only viable solution to your needs, go with that instead.
If I can do my work using only (or even mostly) Free Software, then as far as I personally am concerned, Free Software has succeeded. "I got mine; don't worry 'bout his".
--
Theme Park and Theme Hospital both prove that you can "sim" pretty much anything and get a fun game out of it. Sim Zoo, Sim School, Sim Office...
The sim game I'd most like to see is Sim/Theme Pub.... and here's a verbatim copy of a post I did elsewhere not so long ago...
I guess it would be a Theme Park type setup, with punters milling around:
- getting upset by the queues
- wanting a fag
- upset by smokiness
- liking/disliking the decor
- wanting louder/quieter music
- liking/disliking the jukebox selection
- wanting/not wanting a DJ / dancefloor
- liking/disliking the choice of drinks
- getting less fussy as they drink more
- drinking themselves into comas, getting you into trouble with the law
- having fights
- mooning / getting tits out (erm, maybe as a reward for good pub management)
- drinking less because the food portions are too filling
- wanting larger tables, to accomodate large groups
- wanting more small tables for couples and small groups
- hogging the pool table / dartboard / giant Jenga
- clustering around the open fire
- despising the open fire as too traditional and not trendy enough
- trying novelty drinks (Aftershock, Red Bull and Anostura Bitters... mmmm..)
- enjoying peace and quiet / pining for a more lively atmosphere
- getting apoplectic with rage
- ... you get the picture
You'd probably have more than one pub on the go at once - perhaps you'd be trying to cater for all tastes in a given town. You'd have a spit'n' sawdust gigging pub, a wine bar, a novelty theme pub with crazy crap around the walls, a real ale pub and a trendy pre-club type bar (having worked up from one tiny local on the corner of a residential street).Multiplayer you'd be competing for the same clientele and they'd wander from one pub to another.
On top of that you'd have Theme Park style research units, you might have to do some stock management (That always irritated me in Theme Park though: reordering stocks was just a chore... I think you ought to be able to set thresholds where if the stock drops to a certain level you automatically reorder... in a pub you'd have to adjust the thresholds by season...).
--