I wonder if "Fuckedcompany" will end up on its own list;)
I know this is in jest, but I couldn't help but respond. Fucked Company won't ever be on Fucked Company, because Pud has a clue -- Fucked Company isn't a company at all. He's ripped on fucked companies time and time again for hiring a shitload of people to do nothing, while he runs a successful site essentially by himself (I'm sure there are a few more FC "employees", but I doubt they number more than 10 or 20, certainly not in the 100s or 1000s that many dot-bombs felt they needed).
<obvious>Besides, if Fucked Company gets fucked, who would run the Fucked Company list to list them?</obvious>
I've seen this attitude a lot, and in more areas than just gaming. People will always rave about the "Good ol' days", while simultaneously blowing off all but a very few of the current crop of <whatever we're talking about>.
What people fail to realize is that when you look back on the past, you don't remember all the failures. You only remember the successes. Yes, all the successful games had great gameplay (and lots of them had groundbreaking graphics, for their time -- such as Final Fantasy 6j/3us and Chrono Trigger, to name a few from the recent past). However, for every one of these great games, there are tons of bombs. Anybody remember the Home Alone games on the NES and SNES? How about the deluge of bad Simpsons-inspired NES games? Or to get away from the licensed games, what about the "original" clunkers, like Vortex (a StarFox rip off, and one of the few games to utilize the original SuperFX chipset)?
The point here is that while most of today's games may be crap, we're going to look back in five years and only see the "good" games (for whatever definition of good), like Half-Life, Unreal Tournament, Quake 3, Tribes (to get the FPS games out of the way), Black & White, the Fallout series, the later Final Fantasies (oddly, everybody thinks FFVII just plain sucked, yet I really enjoyed it -- had a great story), and more. We'll all have forgotten about games like SiN, Soldier of Fortune, Frogger 3D, and all the other lamer games. And of course there will be a few that will take on "Atari ET" status, like Daikatana, and most likely Duke Nukem 4Ever (assuming it ever ships).
Looking back on the past fondly is one thing, but to hold up the worst of today's games to the best of yesterday's and proclaim that all of today's games suck is just being naive. Don't live in the past. Seek out the good games of today. I guarantee you that you'll find more than a few worth spending some change on.
The brains trust involved was reportedly not happy with the "Windification" of their work.
"Windification" is bit of a misnomer, here. The NT guys were the ones who designed and developed the win32 API. The only "windification" would be the addition of the Win3.x GUI (and later, the win95 GUI). Popular folklore has the NT team wanting to keep the old win3.x UI for NT4, but luckily calmer heads prevaled.
I'd be suprised if there's much of OS2 at all in NT.
The only OS2 in NT is a small compatibility layer, long the lines of NT's POSIX compatibility layer. Aside from that, OS2 and NT have nothing to do with each other.
"Store information in your Passport wallet that will help you make faster, safer online purchases at any Passport express purchase site." - from Passport.com main page.
Passport's auth services (which sites like hotmail use) and Passport's wallet service are two different things. Having a Passport account does not mean having a wallet account, though setting up your wallet information does require having a passport account. However, my statements still stand, in that Passport is, at its core, nothing more than a centralized authentication server. Choosing to use other services provided by Passport (not to be confused with services provided by third parties using Passport for authentication) is just that -- a choice. Just as using Passport at all is a choice. However, it's possible (and I'd guess most common) to use Passport without using Passport Wallet.
Really now, do we need a Microsoft database full of your credit card and personal information? Passport is just another tool to help you be a good little consumer.
Please, people, consider learning about what you're talking about before you go spewing at the mouth. Passport.com has nothing to do with taking your credit card, or keeping more than a minimal amount of information, or anything like that. Passport is nothing more than a service designed to provide a single authentication mechanism for any service that wishes to use it (there may be licensing fees, I don't know). If Site X uses Passport for authentication and then asks you for your credit card number, Site Y that also uses Passport has no way of getting that credit card number. Why? Because (and pay attention, this is the kicker) Passport only provides authentication. Passport doesn't store that credit card number. All passport does is map an e-mail and password to a Passport ID. What tenant sites do with that is up to them.
If you're still all hot and bothered from the little TOS problem with Passport a while back, please realize that has been fixed, with both an explanation and apology from Microsoft.
I really don't get it. Microsoft screws up, and/.'ers bash them. Microsoft acknowledges the problem, fixes it, and apologizes, and they still get bashed. And they continue to be bashed for problems that haven't existed for a while. I guess I'll never understand that.
It seems that over the internet we either get to protect our 1st amendment rights with opt-out or our 4th amendment rights with opt-in. Is there a way to protect both?
How does opt-out protect First Amendment rights? I seem to recall that the First Amendment says that the government can't interfere with your right to say what you please. That does not mean that you're guaranteed a place to say it. Oh, sure, you have the right to free assembly. That doesn't mean you have to right to fill up a person's mailbox (electronic and snail) with crap until that person tells you not to do it.
You want free speech? Get a web page, and post all your blatherings there. Take a look at Something Awful's Awful Link of the Day archive to see what kind of spew is available on the web.
Screen size, soft input pad
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PDAs, PDAs
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· Score: 1
It's nice to see a PalmOS-based PDA take a cue from a competitor. Being an avid Pocket PC user myself, I'm a big fan of the soft input panel. I wonder if the Handera offering will have multiple panel modes (soft keyboard, for instance), or just stick to the single Graffiti pad? And now that the screen real estate is there, why not some true handwriting recognition software? Microsoft's Transcriber software is very good, and makes very few errors (with a little bit of tweaking, and very minor re-learning of how to write certain characters).
Of course, the larger screen size might break older Palm-based apps, so it may be both a boon and a bane. Only time will tell.
By the Great Spirit, do we really need another XML grammar?
You do realize that's what XML is about, right? By itself, XML is no more useful than plain old SGML (though the syntax is nicer). Without grammars, XML is pointless for sharing data. Sure, you can use XML to do menial little things like handle configuration for an application, but where it really shines is the ability to specify a set of rules for makring up different types of data. Having multiple grammars Just Makes Sense (tm), as a single grammar can't be expected to gracefully handle all the many different applications for XML.
As for server downtime causing parser problems, I see two ways around it -- either distribute your schema so that others can download it and use it locally with their parsers, or have some method of "certifying" schemas, which would then be hosted somewhere stable like w3c.org. As the latter most likely won't happen save for the most visible of schemas, I think the former has the most potential. Sure, there are potential versioning problems, but those can be worked around.
as far as I know there isn't anything you can't do with the Unreal Tournament....your only limit is your knowledge of Java.
The Unreal engine has absolutely nothing to do with Java, at all. Perhaps you're thinking about UnrealScript, the scripting language used by the Unreal engine (and thus, all Unreal-based games, like Unreal, UT, Deus Ex, Wheel of Time, Rune, etc). Uscript is java-ish, but it's still a whole different beast, with a lot of neat concepts (like the inclusion of "states", which few (no?) other languages have, but make game scripting very easy).
That said, there's not been a whole lot of unique games written with the Unreal technology. Sure, Deus Ex and Wheel of Time have some unique concepts, but at the core, they're still FPS games (though with more strategy than something like UT. On top of that, Deus Ex is just a poor copy of System Shock 2 with nicer graphics). Show me an innovative 3rd-person game using the Unreal engine (well, there's that DS9 game, but I rarely consider Star Trek stuff to be "innovative", and there's Rune, but that's just your standard hack&slash game with great graphics). Epic has a whole lot of potential in their Unreal technology, but they don't have any truly innovative licensees yet. Let's hope they get some, eh?
The only sticky point here is how dependent they get on a particular graphics chip, but if they're smart they'll go through the OS to access the video card and not put too many vendor-specific calls to it (so I can have an NVidia instead of an ATI chip, for instance).
You've apparently been out of the console scene for way too long. The point of a console is that you can write games specific to the hardware in the box, because
It gives you much more control over what you want done (think all the way back to the Atari days, where games would use sync tricks to do fancy graphics that couldn't be done otherwise)
It gives you much more performance. Writing directly to the hardware, while not necessarily simple on the code side of things, is much more efficient than going through even something like SDL, which abstracts out that hardware. Most game development houses will use a console's abstraction API for their first-gen game, while at the same time building up their own internal library that is just a bare skim of code above the hardware, and will use that for all subsequent games. Witness the Playstation. The reason why games have gotten more and more advanced since the 1995 release date is because nobody relies on Sony's high-level APIs anymore (which is also why the PS2 has shit for games now, because Sony, in their infinite wisdom, decided to forgo the high-level API, thus forcing companies to develop their internal tools before they could even write first-gen games, when they could've just written to the API and worked on their tools while still having a revenue stream from an early-release title)
And finally, because everybody has the same hardware. The developers don't have to worry about whether you have a GeForce3, or a TNT1, or a Radeon, or a crappy old Voodoo3. They know you have whatever's in the box. Same for sound hardware, input devices (to an extent, anyway, but that's why good console companies require both software and hardware developers to get a license for "quality assurance"), memory cards, and so on. A console where all the consoles could be different is no console at all. At that point, it's a PC in a small box with a TV for a monitor.
Oddly enough, these TuxBox guys don't seem to "get it", either, since their FAQ page explicitly says that anybody can change out the hardware of the console. Console developers develop for consoles because they like having a stable hardware platform. No console developer worth anything will target a "console" that has the same compatibility issues as a PC.
Alternatively, look at the Quake3 engine games. FAKK2, Alice, and Elite Force, to name a few. Sure, Elite Force is just your standard FPS with a Star Trek theme, but FAKK2 is more like "Tomb Raider meets a nice engine with great gameplay and control". And Alice is just freakin' weird. Or what about the LithTech engine? Lots of different stuff going on with that. Sure, it can do the standard FPS (Shogo, Blood2, No One Lives Forever), but it can do a whole lot more as well (Sanity, for instance).
In today's game market, where everybody's expected to up the ante from what's come before, licensing an engine (including good support from the engine developers, and the source code to add your own features) is a great way to get a game up and running quickly without spending massive amounts of time and money on Yet Another Game Engine, so you can focus more on gameplay, art, and advanced engine features.
Half-Life is in a weird situation, when it comes to game engines, as it's based on an amalgamation of the Quake 1 and Quake 2 engines. Valve can't legally license out that engine for other developers to use. What they can do, however, is hire teams of mod developers to modify the game (Counter-Strike, Gunman), and then publish that themselves (TFC and Op-For don't count, since they're in-house works by Valve).
If I were a developer, I would get a bunch more excited about a locked-down Linux console platform than a Linux-on-the-desktop platform.
The problem here is that the TuxBox isn't going to be locked-down. From the TuxBox FAQ page:
What do you mean "open source"?
The TuxBox, like many other open source projects, will be customizable. If you wanted to upgrade a certain piece of hardware, that would be possible on the Tuxbox. Open source will also mean that the everyday developer can contribute code and hardware/software suggestions, and take part in the development of the TuxBox.
In other words, it looks like this is just going to be a small form-factor PC that connects to your TV, with none of a console's traditional benefits (uniform architecture across *all* units).
And I'm dubious that Microsoft will allow the X-box to just connect to any ethernet hookup, they could more easily force you to get MSN, after all, they HAVE the infrastructure for MSN in place, whereas Sony does not run an ISP to the best of my knowledge. (Doesn't stop them from using another isp as a partner.)
Microsoft has mentioned in several places that they won't require you to use a specific ISP for the XBox. (I'm too lazy to do a web search. Try here.) What you will have to do is pay a subscription fee on The Zone for premium content (hey, kinda like their PC games Asheron's Call and Allegiance, eh?). Nothing wrong with that, as they'll surely offer free games over The Zone, as well (again, like they do with their PC games -- Crimson Skies, Allegiance, Starlancer, etc).
Moral: The stereotype that everyone in the OSS world is a cheapskate, pirating hippy with delusions of godhood who won't buy games is flat-out wrong; a lie straight from the FUD mines of the Dark Lords of Redmond.
One person does not break a stereotype. If anything, you can be considered the exception that proves the rule. If I had a dime for everytime I've heard, "Why should I buy applications/drivers/games/distributions for linux? Linux is free, so everything for linux should be free," I'd be able to buy a nice car, paying cash upfront.
Like it or not, there are a lot of morons out there that don't get the whole concept of "paying people for stuff they make, so those people can feed themselves and their families". Don't believe me? Go do a web search for warez. Look at all those results! Look at the popularity of Napster, and the upsurge of Napster replacements (different product domain, same concept. And don't give me bullshit about "the artists aren't getting money anyway", since they get at least something when you buy a CD, compared to the nothing they get when you download an mp3). Get on an IRC network (your pick, it really doesn't matter), and lurk in the warez channels. Or even lurk in the legitimate channels. Look at usenet once in a while. In short, the stereotype exists for a reason, and while it may be unfair, it's not untrue.
Your anecdotal evidence of 98 is meaningless. My Dad ONLY uses Word and has thus never seen Windows 95 crash in several years of use. Big deal.
Interestingly enough, your anecdotal evidence is also meaningless, exactly because it is only anecdotal evidence. You show me ten people who've had the above problems with Windows, and I'll show you fifty who've had problems with Linux. It may not be the same set of problems, but problems are still problems.
Fund an independent study of the usability and stability of Windows vs Linux in a game-playing environment, and then come back with the results. Until then, nobody cares about your meaningless anecdotal evidence.
Re:Port or not a port? You decide.
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Agenda VR3 Review
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Windows CE, of course, isn't a straight port of Windows 9x or NT code but it is a port of the interface. And while this interface is fine for a 800 by 600 or greater desktop, it's far too clunky for a handheld display a fraction of that size - the Start menu, dialog boxes, the whole windowing metaphor are all inappropriate for something that small. This is where Microsoft has fundementally got it wrong and Palm has got it right.
Microsoft realized they got this wrong. Look at a Windows Powered Pocket PC, and you'll see they've changed the interface quite significantly. There are still things like a "start menu", and app menus, and dialogs and such, but they're cleaner, easier to use, and, most importantly, faster. As well, Auto PC has never used the win32-ish interface that most people think of when they here "Windows CE". Nor do any Dreamcast games that use WinCE (admitedly very few games use WinCE, but that's a different discussion), nor the upcoming (are they out yet?) Microsoft Powered Handheld PC (the revamp of the old clamshell machines, targetting mainly at business customers), nor the upcoming CE-powered cell phone. In short, Microsoft learned, and advanced their design.
If Microsoft had truly wanted to develop a new modular OS for embedded systems it would have started with a truly clean slate and given us a new OS suitable for the task. It chose not to do so because protecting Windows was a higher priority than creating the best product avaiable.
Consider reading the book I referenced in my previous post (you should be able to find it at any bookstore, so just sit down at the store and read the first few chapters). If you did so, you'd realize that the reason behind bringing over the win32 API was not to protect the desktop operating system, but instead the leverage the developer workforce that already knows win32 programming. By using a subset of win32, they significantly reduced the learning time neccessary for programmers to write apps for Windows CE. True, not every single function was ported, and there are other functions that are CE-specific (and have no analog in normal win32), so there's still a curve, but it's much shallower than learning a new API.
Rather than blindly bashing on things you don't understand, why not try learning about them instead?
I've yet to hear a really lucid explanation of why I should want my apps and personal data floating in an amorphous cloud, but maybe that's just me.
The whole point here is the whole "Any device, anywhere" view that Microsoft has been driving at for a while now (Auto PC, Pocket PC, Tablet PCs, Web TV, upcoming Stinger cell phone, and so on). If you think about it, it's really not much different than keeping your mail on an ISP's mail server and just pulling it with imap on whatever machine you're going to read it from, except that the vision is more than mail -- it's digital pictures, digital music, contact info, free/busy info (aka, calendaring info), and more. The apps don't live in the cloud, only the data does (well, apps may keep a replicating copy in the cloud, but you don't run the app from the cloud -- it runs from whatever device it can run on). In fact, the only app neccessary for most of this is a web browser -- the rich clients are about enriching the experience, not creating the experience.
At the same time, you won't need a 24/7 internet connection to be able to work on your documents that live in the cloud. Local replication will make sure you have the latest copy of the data (as of the last time you were online) that you can work with and modify to your heart's content locally. Then the next time you connect to the net, it gets propped to the cloud, where you can then access the revised information from anywhere (PDA, laptop, cell phone, auto pc, internet kiosk, wherever). This does bring up some interesting security issues, but then those same issues exist with the current model of ISP mail servers holding mail that you then retrieve with imap, just on a smaller scale.
Re:Is Linux really the OS you want on your handhel
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Agenda VR3 Review
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Handhelds have smaller displays, less memory and are put to different uses than desktop or notebook PCs. Because of this, porting over a desktop OS to a handheld isn't always the great idea that it originally seems - Windows CE anyone?
Windows CE (also known as Windows Powered * PC, where * is Pocket, Handheld, Auto, and Cell phone, and whatever else) is not a port of Windows (any version, 9x or NT). It's a complete rewrite from the ground up. The misconception comes from the fact that Windows CE supports a subset of the Win32 API (look around on MSDN sometime and you'll see a lot of functions that either aren't supported by CE or have limited functionality -- the goal was to reduce the number of APIs that have duplicate functionality).
Windows CE is actually very nice OS -- extremely modular, able to take advantage of several hardware platforms (MIPS, SH3/4, ARM, PPC, and x86), and written explicitly for embedded systems. Most people seem to dislike Windows CE (prior to Pocket PC, anyway) due to the clunky gui. What most people don't realize, though, is that it's not difficult for a development house to replace the gui with something nicer-looking (look at the AutoPC, for instance, or the Pocket PCs, which run Windows CE 3.0), thanks to the modular nature of Windows CE. For an interesting read about the origins of Windows CE, check out Inside Microsoft Windows CE (John Murray, Microsoft Press). It's a bit old (September 1998), but it gives a good account of how Windows CE was originally supposed to be a stripped down NT, but ended up being written from scratch.
I will buy a Geforce 3 someday aswell... probably within the next 8 months.. but it wont be the first generation, otherwise known as "MX" version of the card... I will wait to buy the "Pro" or "Ultra" version of the card wich will cost as much then as this first gen card does now.
The MX chipsets from nVidia are not first-run chipsets. They're the economy chipset, with half the number of pipelines and neutered in other ways. These are the cards that your average Joe buys, when he doesn't want to spend more than $150 on a card, yet thinks he needs the "latest and greatest". The funny thing is that a GeForce 256 GTS is about the same price as a GeForce 2 MX, yet the GeForce 256 will perform better because it's not been castrated.
nVidia has various different chipsets that span the market vertically, from the MX for average Joes, to the GO for mobile users, to the Pro and Ultra (where the Ultra is typically a 6-month refresh) for the gamers, to the Quadro for graphics professionals. Check out www.nvidia.com for more info on their product lines.
The guy just took it bending over again from the legal system
Bullcrap. He may be a "nice guy", but he's a moron. He cracked into several different computers, and didn't even bother to cover his tracks (of course, if he had, he'd still get caught and the penalties would be even worse). No sympathy for the cracker morons.
25fps average means that he's going to run into many places where the framerates fall to unplayable numbers. As well, remember that movies have nifty real-life things like motion blur that compensate somewhate for the low framerates.
<rant> The simple fact of the matter is that the human eye needs roughly 60fps to see non-jerky motion (NTSC is 30Hz interlaced for an effective 60Hz, PAL is 25Hz interlaced. movies are 24fps, and there's noticeable flicker and jerkiness during long pans). Higher framerates are necessary for games to produce lifelike motion, since motion blur is still expensive in CPU terms (and isn't supported by any graphics accelerator I know of). So, the "insanely high" framerates of 150+ fps are averages which means you should pretty much always have framerates that look smooth. As well, when you see such "ridiculus" numbers, you would also do well to remember that they're usually measured at the lowest resolution, bit depth, and image complexity level as possible. </rant>
One thing you should keep in mind is that SDL is currently undergoing a complete rewrite and architecture change for SDL version 1.3 which will include the SDL 2.0 API. It's currently a year and a half from stable release (says cheif SDL ninja Sam Lantinga), so it's a long time to wait but you might want to keep that in mind as you are designing your project.
Does SDL have a method to maintain backwards-compatibility with newer versions? For instance, DirectX has been re-architected several times, yet software written to earlier versions (even as far back as v1) will run just fine on the latest (DX8 as of now). Can SDL do this, or will each major version require either rewriting old code or keeping around old libs?
How would one even go about doing something like this (without doing lib versioning. I know that's possible, but it's not always practical) in a unix environment? DirectX maintains interface coherency by using COM, but COM is much lighter than CORBA, so CORBA's probably not an option (performance issues). What other possibilities exist? Maybe using an object model from some other project like KDE's KOM, Mozilla's XPCOM, and what else?
Gee, can anyone think of an upcoming console that has a 733MHz processor and a GeForce3? Bingo! The XBox.
Just a few points.
The XBox does not use a GeForce3. It uses the "NV25" chipset, which is a generation ahead of the GeForce3 (which is the NV20 chipset)
It's only a MHz war if both sides participate, which brings us to...
Don't expect to see Microsoft changing system specs now. They're too far along to change any specs if they want to make the upcoming Christmas season. On top of that, it doesn't really matter if they change their specs at all, because the current hardware will best most PC games out there because unlike a PC, you can go all the way down to the metal with an XBox and not have to worry about incompatibilities.
nVidia released new XFree86 drivers for their line of chipsets, including the GeForce 3, on March 15th. They should work with any XFree86 4.0.x, so you needn't be upgrading just for GeForce 3 support, especially since these drivers include 3D, while 4.0.3's are 2D-only.
Slashdot Mirror
I know this is in jest, but I couldn't help but respond. Fucked Company won't ever be on Fucked Company, because Pud has a clue -- Fucked Company isn't a company at all. He's ripped on fucked companies time and time again for hiring a shitload of people to do nothing, while he runs a successful site essentially by himself (I'm sure there are a few more FC "employees", but I doubt they number more than 10 or 20, certainly not in the 100s or 1000s that many dot-bombs felt they needed).
<obvious>Besides, if Fucked Company gets fucked, who would run the Fucked Company list to list them?</obvious>
I've seen this attitude a lot, and in more areas than just gaming. People will always rave about the "Good ol' days", while simultaneously blowing off all but a very few of the current crop of <whatever we're talking about>.
What people fail to realize is that when you look back on the past, you don't remember all the failures. You only remember the successes. Yes, all the successful games had great gameplay (and lots of them had groundbreaking graphics, for their time -- such as Final Fantasy 6j/3us and Chrono Trigger, to name a few from the recent past). However, for every one of these great games, there are tons of bombs. Anybody remember the Home Alone games on the NES and SNES? How about the deluge of bad Simpsons-inspired NES games? Or to get away from the licensed games, what about the "original" clunkers, like Vortex (a StarFox rip off, and one of the few games to utilize the original SuperFX chipset)?
The point here is that while most of today's games may be crap, we're going to look back in five years and only see the "good" games (for whatever definition of good), like Half-Life, Unreal Tournament, Quake 3, Tribes (to get the FPS games out of the way), Black & White, the Fallout series, the later Final Fantasies (oddly, everybody thinks FFVII just plain sucked, yet I really enjoyed it -- had a great story), and more. We'll all have forgotten about games like SiN, Soldier of Fortune, Frogger 3D, and all the other lamer games. And of course there will be a few that will take on "Atari ET" status, like Daikatana, and most likely Duke Nukem 4Ever (assuming it ever ships).
Looking back on the past fondly is one thing, but to hold up the worst of today's games to the best of yesterday's and proclaim that all of today's games suck is just being naive. Don't live in the past. Seek out the good games of today. I guarantee you that you'll find more than a few worth spending some change on.
"Windification" is bit of a misnomer, here. The NT guys were the ones who designed and developed the win32 API. The only "windification" would be the addition of the Win3.x GUI (and later, the win95 GUI). Popular folklore has the NT team wanting to keep the old win3.x UI for NT4, but luckily calmer heads prevaled.
The only OS2 in NT is a small compatibility layer, long the lines of NT's POSIX compatibility layer. Aside from that, OS2 and NT have nothing to do with each other.
Passport's auth services (which sites like hotmail use) and Passport's wallet service are two different things. Having a Passport account does not mean having a wallet account, though setting up your wallet information does require having a passport account. However, my statements still stand, in that Passport is, at its core, nothing more than a centralized authentication server. Choosing to use other services provided by Passport (not to be confused with services provided by third parties using Passport for authentication) is just that -- a choice. Just as using Passport at all is a choice. However, it's possible (and I'd guess most common) to use Passport without using Passport Wallet.
Please, people, consider learning about what you're talking about before you go spewing at the mouth. Passport.com has nothing to do with taking your credit card, or keeping more than a minimal amount of information, or anything like that. Passport is nothing more than a service designed to provide a single authentication mechanism for any service that wishes to use it (there may be licensing fees, I don't know). If Site X uses Passport for authentication and then asks you for your credit card number, Site Y that also uses Passport has no way of getting that credit card number. Why? Because (and pay attention, this is the kicker) Passport only provides authentication. Passport doesn't store that credit card number. All passport does is map an e-mail and password to a Passport ID. What tenant sites do with that is up to them.
If you're still all hot and bothered from the little TOS problem with Passport a while back, please realize that has been fixed, with both an explanation and apology from Microsoft.
I really don't get it. Microsoft screws up, and /.'ers bash them. Microsoft acknowledges the problem, fixes it, and apologizes, and they still get bashed. And they continue to be bashed for problems that haven't existed for a while. I guess I'll never understand that.
Funny, to get B&W to work in Windows 2000 for me, all I had to do was "install the damn thing". And it worked, imagine that!
How does opt-out protect First Amendment rights? I seem to recall that the First Amendment says that the government can't interfere with your right to say what you please. That does not mean that you're guaranteed a place to say it. Oh, sure, you have the right to free assembly. That doesn't mean you have to right to fill up a person's mailbox (electronic and snail) with crap until that person tells you not to do it.
You want free speech? Get a web page, and post all your blatherings there. Take a look at Something Awful's Awful Link of the Day archive to see what kind of spew is available on the web.
It's nice to see a PalmOS-based PDA take a cue from a competitor. Being an avid Pocket PC user myself, I'm a big fan of the soft input panel. I wonder if the Handera offering will have multiple panel modes (soft keyboard, for instance), or just stick to the single Graffiti pad? And now that the screen real estate is there, why not some true handwriting recognition software? Microsoft's Transcriber software is very good, and makes very few errors (with a little bit of tweaking, and very minor re-learning of how to write certain characters).
Of course, the larger screen size might break older Palm-based apps, so it may be both a boon and a bane. Only time will tell.
You do realize that's what XML is about, right? By itself, XML is no more useful than plain old SGML (though the syntax is nicer). Without grammars, XML is pointless for sharing data. Sure, you can use XML to do menial little things like handle configuration for an application, but where it really shines is the ability to specify a set of rules for makring up different types of data. Having multiple grammars Just Makes Sense (tm), as a single grammar can't be expected to gracefully handle all the many different applications for XML.
As for server downtime causing parser problems, I see two ways around it -- either distribute your schema so that others can download it and use it locally with their parsers, or have some method of "certifying" schemas, which would then be hosted somewhere stable like w3c.org. As the latter most likely won't happen save for the most visible of schemas, I think the former has the most potential. Sure, there are potential versioning problems, but those can be worked around.
The Unreal engine has absolutely nothing to do with Java, at all. Perhaps you're thinking about UnrealScript, the scripting language used by the Unreal engine (and thus, all Unreal-based games, like Unreal, UT, Deus Ex, Wheel of Time, Rune, etc). Uscript is java-ish, but it's still a whole different beast, with a lot of neat concepts (like the inclusion of "states", which few (no?) other languages have, but make game scripting very easy).
That said, there's not been a whole lot of unique games written with the Unreal technology. Sure, Deus Ex and Wheel of Time have some unique concepts, but at the core, they're still FPS games (though with more strategy than something like UT. On top of that, Deus Ex is just a poor copy of System Shock 2 with nicer graphics). Show me an innovative 3rd-person game using the Unreal engine (well, there's that DS9 game, but I rarely consider Star Trek stuff to be "innovative", and there's Rune, but that's just your standard hack&slash game with great graphics). Epic has a whole lot of potential in their Unreal technology, but they don't have any truly innovative licensees yet. Let's hope they get some, eh?
You've apparently been out of the console scene for way too long. The point of a console is that you can write games specific to the hardware in the box, because
Oddly enough, these TuxBox guys don't seem to "get it", either, since their FAQ page explicitly says that anybody can change out the hardware of the console. Console developers develop for consoles because they like having a stable hardware platform. No console developer worth anything will target a "console" that has the same compatibility issues as a PC.
Alternatively, look at the Quake3 engine games. FAKK2, Alice, and Elite Force, to name a few. Sure, Elite Force is just your standard FPS with a Star Trek theme, but FAKK2 is more like "Tomb Raider meets a nice engine with great gameplay and control". And Alice is just freakin' weird. Or what about the LithTech engine? Lots of different stuff going on with that. Sure, it can do the standard FPS (Shogo, Blood2, No One Lives Forever), but it can do a whole lot more as well (Sanity, for instance).
In today's game market, where everybody's expected to up the ante from what's come before, licensing an engine (including good support from the engine developers, and the source code to add your own features) is a great way to get a game up and running quickly without spending massive amounts of time and money on Yet Another Game Engine, so you can focus more on gameplay, art, and advanced engine features.
Half-Life is in a weird situation, when it comes to game engines, as it's based on an amalgamation of the Quake 1 and Quake 2 engines. Valve can't legally license out that engine for other developers to use. What they can do, however, is hire teams of mod developers to modify the game (Counter-Strike, Gunman), and then publish that themselves (TFC and Op-For don't count, since they're in-house works by Valve).
The problem here is that the TuxBox isn't going to be locked-down. From the TuxBox FAQ page:
In other words, it looks like this is just going to be a small form-factor PC that connects to your TV, with none of a console's traditional benefits (uniform architecture across *all* units).
Microsoft has mentioned in several places that they won't require you to use a specific ISP for the XBox. (I'm too lazy to do a web search. Try here.) What you will have to do is pay a subscription fee on The Zone for premium content (hey, kinda like their PC games Asheron's Call and Allegiance, eh?). Nothing wrong with that, as they'll surely offer free games over The Zone, as well (again, like they do with their PC games -- Crimson Skies, Allegiance, Starlancer, etc).
One person does not break a stereotype. If anything, you can be considered the exception that proves the rule. If I had a dime for everytime I've heard, "Why should I buy applications/drivers/games/distributions for linux? Linux is free, so everything for linux should be free," I'd be able to buy a nice car, paying cash upfront.
Like it or not, there are a lot of morons out there that don't get the whole concept of "paying people for stuff they make, so those people can feed themselves and their families". Don't believe me? Go do a web search for warez. Look at all those results! Look at the popularity of Napster, and the upsurge of Napster replacements (different product domain, same concept. And don't give me bullshit about "the artists aren't getting money anyway", since they get at least something when you buy a CD, compared to the nothing they get when you download an mp3). Get on an IRC network (your pick, it really doesn't matter), and lurk in the warez channels. Or even lurk in the legitimate channels. Look at usenet once in a while. In short, the stereotype exists for a reason, and while it may be unfair, it's not untrue.
Interestingly enough, your anecdotal evidence is also meaningless, exactly because it is only anecdotal evidence. You show me ten people who've had the above problems with Windows, and I'll show you fifty who've had problems with Linux. It may not be the same set of problems, but problems are still problems.
Fund an independent study of the usability and stability of Windows vs Linux in a game-playing environment, and then come back with the results. Until then, nobody cares about your meaningless anecdotal evidence.
Microsoft realized they got this wrong. Look at a Windows Powered Pocket PC, and you'll see they've changed the interface quite significantly. There are still things like a "start menu", and app menus, and dialogs and such, but they're cleaner, easier to use, and, most importantly, faster. As well, Auto PC has never used the win32-ish interface that most people think of when they here "Windows CE". Nor do any Dreamcast games that use WinCE (admitedly very few games use WinCE, but that's a different discussion), nor the upcoming (are they out yet?) Microsoft Powered Handheld PC (the revamp of the old clamshell machines, targetting mainly at business customers), nor the upcoming CE-powered cell phone. In short, Microsoft learned, and advanced their design.
Consider reading the book I referenced in my previous post (you should be able to find it at any bookstore, so just sit down at the store and read the first few chapters). If you did so, you'd realize that the reason behind bringing over the win32 API was not to protect the desktop operating system, but instead the leverage the developer workforce that already knows win32 programming. By using a subset of win32, they significantly reduced the learning time neccessary for programmers to write apps for Windows CE. True, not every single function was ported, and there are other functions that are CE-specific (and have no analog in normal win32), so there's still a curve, but it's much shallower than learning a new API.
Rather than blindly bashing on things you don't understand, why not try learning about them instead?
The whole point here is the whole "Any device, anywhere" view that Microsoft has been driving at for a while now (Auto PC, Pocket PC, Tablet PCs, Web TV, upcoming Stinger cell phone, and so on). If you think about it, it's really not much different than keeping your mail on an ISP's mail server and just pulling it with imap on whatever machine you're going to read it from, except that the vision is more than mail -- it's digital pictures, digital music, contact info, free/busy info (aka, calendaring info), and more. The apps don't live in the cloud, only the data does (well, apps may keep a replicating copy in the cloud, but you don't run the app from the cloud -- it runs from whatever device it can run on). In fact, the only app neccessary for most of this is a web browser -- the rich clients are about enriching the experience, not creating the experience.
At the same time, you won't need a 24/7 internet connection to be able to work on your documents that live in the cloud. Local replication will make sure you have the latest copy of the data (as of the last time you were online) that you can work with and modify to your heart's content locally. Then the next time you connect to the net, it gets propped to the cloud, where you can then access the revised information from anywhere (PDA, laptop, cell phone, auto pc, internet kiosk, wherever). This does bring up some interesting security issues, but then those same issues exist with the current model of ISP mail servers holding mail that you then retrieve with imap, just on a smaller scale.
Windows CE (also known as Windows Powered * PC, where * is Pocket, Handheld, Auto, and Cell phone, and whatever else) is not a port of Windows (any version, 9x or NT). It's a complete rewrite from the ground up. The misconception comes from the fact that Windows CE supports a subset of the Win32 API (look around on MSDN sometime and you'll see a lot of functions that either aren't supported by CE or have limited functionality -- the goal was to reduce the number of APIs that have duplicate functionality).
Windows CE is actually very nice OS -- extremely modular, able to take advantage of several hardware platforms (MIPS, SH3/4, ARM, PPC, and x86), and written explicitly for embedded systems. Most people seem to dislike Windows CE (prior to Pocket PC, anyway) due to the clunky gui. What most people don't realize, though, is that it's not difficult for a development house to replace the gui with something nicer-looking (look at the AutoPC, for instance, or the Pocket PCs, which run Windows CE 3.0), thanks to the modular nature of Windows CE. For an interesting read about the origins of Windows CE, check out Inside Microsoft Windows CE (John Murray, Microsoft Press). It's a bit old (September 1998), but it gives a good account of how Windows CE was originally supposed to be a stripped down NT, but ended up being written from scratch.
The MX chipsets from nVidia are not first-run chipsets. They're the economy chipset, with half the number of pipelines and neutered in other ways. These are the cards that your average Joe buys, when he doesn't want to spend more than $150 on a card, yet thinks he needs the "latest and greatest". The funny thing is that a GeForce 256 GTS is about the same price as a GeForce 2 MX, yet the GeForce 256 will perform better because it's not been castrated.
nVidia has various different chipsets that span the market vertically, from the MX for average Joes, to the GO for mobile users, to the Pro and Ultra (where the Ultra is typically a 6-month refresh) for the gamers, to the Quadro for graphics professionals. Check out www.nvidia.com for more info on their product lines.
Bullcrap. He may be a "nice guy", but he's a moron. He cracked into several different computers, and didn't even bother to cover his tracks (of course, if he had, he'd still get caught and the penalties would be even worse). No sympathy for the cracker morons.
25fps average means that he's going to run into many places where the framerates fall to unplayable numbers. As well, remember that movies have nifty real-life things like motion blur that compensate somewhate for the low framerates.
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The simple fact of the matter is that the human eye needs roughly 60fps to see non-jerky motion (NTSC is 30Hz interlaced for an effective 60Hz, PAL is 25Hz interlaced. movies are 24fps, and there's noticeable flicker and jerkiness during long pans). Higher framerates are necessary for games to produce lifelike motion, since motion blur is still expensive in CPU terms (and isn't supported by any graphics accelerator I know of). So, the "insanely high" framerates of 150+ fps are averages which means you should pretty much always have framerates that look smooth. As well, when you see such "ridiculus" numbers, you would also do well to remember that they're usually measured at the lowest resolution, bit depth, and image complexity level as possible.
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Does SDL have a method to maintain backwards-compatibility with newer versions? For instance, DirectX has been re-architected several times, yet software written to earlier versions (even as far back as v1) will run just fine on the latest (DX8 as of now). Can SDL do this, or will each major version require either rewriting old code or keeping around old libs?
How would one even go about doing something like this (without doing lib versioning. I know that's possible, but it's not always practical) in a unix environment? DirectX maintains interface coherency by using COM, but COM is much lighter than CORBA, so CORBA's probably not an option (performance issues). What other possibilities exist? Maybe using an object model from some other project like KDE's KOM, Mozilla's XPCOM, and what else?
Gee, can anyone think of an upcoming console that has a 733MHz processor and a GeForce3? Bingo! The XBox.
Just a few points.
nVidia released new XFree86 drivers for their line of chipsets, including the GeForce 3, on March 15th. They should work with any XFree86 4.0.x, so you needn't be upgrading just for GeForce 3 support, especially since these drivers include 3D, while 4.0.3's are 2D-only.
Get your redhot drivers here.