I'm confident it's going to be a success is due to our use of 3rd party libraries to aid in development but how long it takes depends on how much help we recieve.
I hate to break it to you, but games don't succeed because of 3rd party library use. In the case of a driving simulator, success is two-fold:
The gameplay is good. This depends on your physics engine, and the type of driving game you're building. If the driving mechanics aren't there, or don't "feel right", you're screwed. ("feel" depends on the type of racer -- an arcade title will have a completely different feel than a hardcore sim, and your audience will be able to tell the difference)
Licensing. A few games have succeeded without licenses, but those typically have another draw. For example, the Burnout series was successful enough to have two sequels, without car licenses, but that's because the game is not a driver but a crasher. It doesn't matter that you can't crash a Ferrari, because what you're crashing doesn't matter. It's how you do it. Also, while you're a small little startup, it doesn't matter that you're using car licenses without authorization, because it's likely you're not going to go anywhere. If you do succeed, you'll need to re-evaluate that decision. If you don't have the bucks (or a major publisher backing you) to buy all of the licenses, you're going to have to go back to the drawing board and design your own set of cars. If you don't think that far enough ahead, you're likely to get Foxed.
If you or anybody you know are C++ gurus and have a love for driving and/or Open Source Software please consider lending a hand.
Relatively speaking, developing the engine is easy. As you said yourself, the use of third-party libraries lets you concentrate on the important parts. What you really should be looking for are artists that are willing to work pro-bono (good luck finding anyone good!), or finding a way to pay an artist to work for you. From your screenshots, it's obvious that you need major help with models and textures. While you might think it simple to model a car (lots of reference material), you'd be surprised at how difficult it can be. And if you miss a detail here or there, expect to have raving fanboys breathing down your neck about why you put the trim piece from a 2003 Caragon on a 1999 version, or why you have a BBS wheel that's only made in 18" sizes on a car that can only handle 15" wheels.
All of that said, good luck to you. You're entering a market with very stiff competition, and if you can pull it off then more power to you.
How soon people forget Loki. They took your premise of, "People will pay for good ports of Windows games," and built a business around it. Guess what? People didn't pay. Whether it was because the game world moves so fast that something even six months old is relegated to the bargain bin, or because the typical view of, "Linux is free, and thus any software for Linux should be free as well," held by many Linux users did them in is hard to say. I suspect it's a mixture of both, and other pressures. The moral of the story is that people won't pay for game ports, at least not in the numbers you need to break even, let alone profit at the porting business. If the port doesn't sim-ship with the Windows product, you're screwed. Even if it does ship at the same time, you need some massive marketing to let folks know that there's a Linux version. If you bundle it in with the Windows version, you have no way of tracking how many sales are for the Linux version, and if you have separate versions you risk pissing off your customer base ("I bought this game, but it doesn't work on my Windows machine." "You bought the Linux version. Install Linux or exchange it for the Windows version." "You suck. I'm not buying your games anymore. I'll just warez them and play them for free.").
Now we're into a catch-22. You need to get games ported to Linux to bootstrap Linux game development, but you can't get enough people to buy the port to sustain a business. What Linux needs is a couple dedicated professional gaming studios writing Linux-only games (similar to Bungie and the Mac back in the Marathon days). Good luck selling that one in a market where if your game doesn't sim-ship on PC (Windows), PS2, Gamecube, XBox, and GBA, you're not going to make a profit (and even if you do pull it off, you still may not make a profit).
None of this is to say that Linux can't be a games platform. Anything can be a games platform (calculators, wrist-watches, set-top boxes like Tivo, you name it, chances are games have been written for it). More, Linux does support popular 3D accelerators, it supports OpenGL and has a decent framework for other bits (input/output, audio, networking, 2D graphics) in the form of SDL. Everything is there except for the marketshare to make it profitable, and the professional development studios to make commercial-quality games on Linux as a first-class platform. I don't know how you get there from here, but I'd suggest talking with others in a similar situation (*cough*Apple*cough*) and see what develops. Too bad the decentralized nature of OSS makes it difficult for a key set of players to be indentified for those types of discussions.
In the meantime, you're going to have to continue booting into "winblows" (hey, real mature there, buddy!) to play the latest mega blockbusters. And I don't want to hear any crap about how games "used to be so much better". If you want to start that discussion, you'll first need to relinquish your rose-colored glasses and recognize that the majority of games (movies, music, books, web sites,...) have always sucked, will continue to suck, and the only reason why the past seems "better" is because you've forgotten all the shit that came before.
Is that most programs end up in the "beta" stage. There's only enough incentive to get a program working to do whatever you needed it to do, and then move on.
Really? A quick look at sourceforge shows 14799 projects in beta, while there are a total of 38186 projects in a pre-beta state. Compare that to the 13509 total projects in a post-beta state. Most telling, the largest single development status is Planning, with 15049 projects in that state. Making the assumption that sourceforge is representative of the open source development world, I'd draw that conclusion that over half (based on a total of 66494 total active projects on sourceforge at the time of this writing) of all open source projects don't even get to a usable state (another assumption: a project in a beta state is far enough along to be used by more than the development team and uber power users).
Of course, this all depends on how one defines beta, and since sourceforge developers get to set their own statuses, what they think may be beta code is really mature, or production/stable could actually be alpha. Take the numbers with a grain of salt.
I agree that selling software actually labeled as beta is a bad idea, but don't we already pay for software that require constant patching, such as the latest release versions of Windows, Microsoft Office, and nearly all of the latest games? Does release software even live up to the quality expected?
"Beta" is supposed to mean that major functionality can still change. Aside from XP SP2 (which really should be thought of as a new version, similar to 98 SE) and games (which have market pressure forcing them to hit fixed deadlines, whether or not the code is complete -- miss Christmas and you're screwed for a year), I've not seen "final" software make major functionality changes. Security patches and major bug fixes are to be expected because nobody's perfect. Aside from a few notable games (*cough*Battlecruiser 3000AD*cough*), the final release of the software you listed is completely usable out of the box (ignoring security patches, which is a legitimate gripe). That's supposed to be the difference between Beta and Final. At some point you need to man up, take a stand, and call a version "finished". Yes, it may be missing features you wanted. Yes, it may have some minor annoying little bugs (if there are known major bugs, it's too soon to call it "done"), but you ship it anyway and start working on that for the next version.
Open source software can get by without ever calling a final release as long as it follows the doctrine of "release early and often", but just because the developers still call it 0.1 doesn't mean that it's not 1.0 for all intents and purposes. They just didn't step up and call it done.
Leaving things in beta like Google does is pretty silly, IMHO. At least Microsoft was willing to step up to the plate and call the new MSN Search "done" recently, rather than leaving it in perpetual beta-ness. Will Google ever do the same for Gmail, Froogle, Google News, Google Groups, etc?
DirectX ONLY runs on Windows (TM), and is the industry standard
(Assuming the industry you're referring to is the gaming industry.) I think id and any developer licensing id's engines would disagree with you. Of course, DirectX is more than just 3D rendering, but there's competition in that space as well from SDL, OpenAL, Apple's Quick* framework, etc.
-NTFS _was_ only useable by windows.
NTFS has been readable by Linux for a very long time. That it's not writeable is questionable, but we're also talking about a very small usage scenario -- the need for a dual-booter to access their NTFS volumes from Windows. At the same time, ext2 also has write problems under Windows, so this isn't a one-way street.
MS Office only runs on windows
Actually, MS Office runs perfectly well on Macs, and has done so for years (before it ran on Windows, even).
MS programs inherently run 5x faster than any competitors programs (something to do with APIs)
Bullshit. Yes, there are undocumented kernel-level APIs. I really doubt most Microsoft apps use those, however. If you mean "start up" when you say "run", that's partially true. IE starts up quickly because it's part of Explorer, the Windows shell, and thus already resident in memory. Office doesn't start up quickly the first time you run it, but it does on subsequent runs because it doesn't fully close when you stop it. For example, run Outlook, set it to use Word as the email editor, and send an email. Now, look at Task Manager. Winword.exe is still running, even though there's no window open. There's nothing stopping other applications from doing this same trick. For example, Mozilla can be configured to start a stub at boot, which makes starting the app that much faster. None of this affects how well the applications run post-startup.
I dont even think that you could argue that the poster implicitly tried to pass of the summary as his own work. Slashdot summaries of single articles generally dont add anything new (and frequently get it wrong). It is an abstract of the article. Since a well written introduction should itself be an abstract of the rest of the article, what makes a better abstract then a polished intro?
The problem is one of attribution. By using the phrase, "Donna writes," Slashdot is attributing the written summary to her. She obviously made some attempt at not copying the abstract verbatim, but it was half-assed and wouldn't stand up to scrutiny. Compare that with this article summary:
Saint Aardvark writes "Here's a page on the fun you can have with a remote control Abrams tank and a wireless video camera. "I really wanted a way to look for under house leaks and stuff and, in the manner of a responsible home owner, get early warning so I could increase the effectiveness of... Ok, that's a lie. In reality, I wanted an excuse to put a camera on my R/C tank and drive it around scary tunnels, and this just happened to fit my purposes perfectly." Movies included!"
The submitter Saint Aardvark wrote a one-sentence summary, and then properly quoted from the article (by enclosing the quoted bit in quotation marks, with citation provided by the article link). Here's a sample of what Donna could've written:
The second
article in a series on migrating Linux from x86 to PowerPC has been posted on IBM developerWorks. "This installment of "Migrating from x86 to PowerPC" discusses detailed similarities and differences between booting Linux on an x86-based platform (typically a PC-compatible SBC) and a custom embedded platform based around PowerPC, ARM, and others. It discusses suggested hardware and software designs and highlights the tradeoffs of each. It also describes important design pitfalls and best practices."
That summarizes the story in a single sentence (it's the second article in a series on some topic), cites the article, and properly quotes the abstract for more information. Alternatively, she could've just prefaced the quoted abstract with "From the (linked article), "..."," and still been okay. Even then, had she not done that, the Slashdot editors could've easily written, "Donna quotes, "..."," rather than, "Donna writes," and still been okay. As it is, none of that was done, and the implication is that Donna wrote the abstract. She didn't.
This article discusses detailed similarities and differences involved in booting Linux on an x86-based platform (typically a PC-compatible SBC) and a custom embedded platform based around PowerPC, ARM, and others. It discusses suggested hardware and software designs and highlights the tradeoffs of each. It also describes important design pitfalls and best practices.
And from the actual article:
This installment of "Migrating from x86 to PowerPC" discusses detailed similarities and differences between booting Linux on an x86-based platform (typically a PC-compatible SBC) and a custom embedded platform based around PowerPC, ARM, and others. It discusses suggested hardware and software designs and highlights the tradeoffs of each. It also describes important design pitfalls and best practices.
Replacing the string "This installment of "Migrating from x86 to PowerPC"" with "This article" and replacing the word "between" with the phrase "involved in" is not sufficient to serve as summarization in the submitter's own words. Somehow I have a hard time believing that the submitter "Donna" and the article author Lewin Edwards are one and the same person. If I'm wrong, then fine. You can't plagiarize yourself. If I'm correct, then Slashdot's done it again. The article summary isn't an original work by Donna, but a minor modification of the article author's own summary, and should be properly attributed as such.
Face it: the only scorching hot thing you want with a chip is salsa. Any other overheating is potentially counterproductive, and can be downright damaging to the microprocessor -- or other components. This article uncovers potential ways to chill the chips."
and from the first paragraph of the article itself
Face it: the only scorching hot thing you want with a chip is salsa. Any other overheating is potentially counterproductive, and can be downright damaging to the microprocessor -- or other components. In this Power Architecture challenge, developers warm up to the idea of how to cool down the hotter processors. From the weird to the wonderful, readers uncover potential ways to chill the chips.
Aside from the removal of one sentence and a slight re-wording of the last, this is word for word the introduction to the article. If you were to submit this in a paper for a college (or even high school!) class, you'd be a good candidate for a plagiarism investigation.
Once again, Slashdot editors, there's a very simple way to deal with this -- change the author attribution. Rather than saying, "DonnaMai writes...", use "DonnaMai quotes..." or "DonnaMai poorly paraphrases...". By properly citing the summary as a quotation or paraphrasing* of the article, you would avoid the impression of plagiarism.
* Yes, paraphrasing is allowed by fair use. In fact, if you're going to summarize an article, you want to paraphrase. However, paraphrasing is not, "Copy a sentence with a changed word here, drop a sentence there." You need to write a summarization in your own words, not take the article's words and (poorly) "massage" them so that they're not 100% identical (90% identical is still a problem).
If it takes me an hour of research to save $10 I have lost much more than I've gained.
But if you buy 5 (hundred/thousand/million?) of the thing on which you saved $10 and it only cost you an hour to save that $10, did you still lose more than you gained?
Hmm...since Cairo is out and Avalon isn't, the Penguin now has a step up on Redmond in terms of graphics. Granted, Avalon includes some other spiffy 3d eye candy, but this is a first where the Linux GUI beats out the Windows one.
What's your definition of "out"? From the Cairo download page, "Cairo is still under active development. The API is rapidly approaching stability, but is not quite there yet, so there is not yet any official "release" of cairo." So, Cairo is not a 1.0 release, or even a.01 release. Dev snapshots are available, in an unstable form (the API is "approaching" stability). How does this differ from the available technologypreview of Avalon (aside from the openness of the source, of course)?
Both are still in pre-release stages. Both are available in a publicly-consumable form even though they've not reached API stability yet. Declaring one or the other the "winner" is still premature.
Oh, yeah, and Avalon will be available on XP and 2k3, not just Longhorn.
Since when is Mercenaries a sequel? The article calls it Pandemic Studios' follow up to "its innovative strategy game Full Spectrum Warrior." Since when is a "follow-up" game a sequel? And what makes this a "follow-up", other than being developed by the same studio? Is Full Spectrum Warrior a follow-up to Pandemic's earlier games like Clone Wars or Triple Play Does that mean Full Spectrum Warrior is a sequel to a baseball title? By that rationale, id's Doom 3 is a sequel to their previous title Quake 3 Arena. Does this seem silly to anybody else?
seriously, what is up lately that the people submitting articles can't even bother to write their own summary? i can't even think of how many articles on slashdot in the last two weeks have been just a copy/paste of the first paragraph of the page they were linking to.
If the submitter (or the editors, if the submitter didn't) would only properly attribute his summary as a quote of the article, there wouldn't be any problem with doing this. However, once again, Slashdot gets it wrong, attributing the first paragraph of the article to someone named "codermarc" when it was really written by Larry Greenemeier. One of these days this is going to bite Slashdot in the ass when they get dragged into court for copyright infringement.
Fair use allows you to quote selected portions of a work, so long as you properly attribute the passages to their proper author. Slashdot doesn't. It's easy to blame this on the submitter, since he's the one submitting the first paragraph as a "summary", but it's the editors' problem as soon as they post the story. (btw, "editor, n, 1. One who edits, especially as an occupation," from dictionary.com, which pretty much sums up what Slashdot editors don't do)
It's simple, guys! If the summary is the first paragraph of the submitted article, change "codermarc writes..." to "codermarc quotes from the article (link here)...". Simple, effective, and correct. The editors do read the linked articles before posting them, right? Right?... sigh
It's a shame that people are so attached to their horrid Microsoft Outlook email client. Otherwise, two problems could be solved in one fell swoop: Have users SSH into the ISP email server, and use a simple client like Pine to send and receive their email.
First, this setup would enforce strong user authentication, as the parent wisely suggested. Secondly, it would eliminate that whole host of attacks against bad email clients (eg. Outlook) that the average computer user inexplicably blames on their ISP.
I'm going to assume you mean "Outlook Express" when you say "Outlook", otherwise your argument has no merit. Even then, Outlook Express isn't as bad as you make it out to be. For example, both Outlook and OE support SMTP-AUTH, via SSL or not (as well as both POP3 and IMAP-v4 over SSL). That addresses your first problem, which at this point is an ISP issue rather than an MTA issue. Your second point is really only valid for OE, and then only if you've never bothered to use Windows Update (in which case you're asking for other problems anyway). Outlook has blocked bad attachments since a service pack for Outlook 2000 (there have been two versions of Outlook since then, XP/2002 and 2003). Outlook 2003 (which is the only version I have installed right now, so I can only speak to other versions on memory) will also block malicious content in the body of the message itself (scripts, images linked to external sites, etc). If you're still getting infected by email viruses while using Outlook, you're either running a ridiculously old version, or you're explicitly overriding Outlook's protection mechanisms.
Moving everybody back to pine (or better, mutt, but that's my own personal preference) via ssh is not an acceptable solution. Forcing everybody through a webmail interface is only slightly better, but even that is not very desirable (see the new Outlook Live service from Microsoft that lets you read your hotmail email via Outlook rather than the web page, or RPC over HTTP in Exchange 2003 that lets you access corporate email without a VPN rather than using OWA).
Yes, and it looks like ass. However, notice that I held up GTA:SA as an example of expanded environments compared to previous iterations in this console generation, and not as a paragon of graphical goodness.
Have you seen Resident Evil 4 on a good TV ?
Nope, but then I'm not really interested in RE4, which is beside the point.
I'm talking the kind of TV you can connect your computer DVI output on and play in widescreen.
My TV is about a year too old to have a DVI input, and it only supports 480p and 1080i (no 720p), but for all that it's well-calibrated and looks good. I've not hooked a PC up to it, but my XBox (and to a lesser extent, GameCube) looks good running on the TV in 480p or 1080i.
Playing NFS Underground 2 on it is incredible. Now, a friend of yours bring his console to show you his favorite game.. Both of you will notice the VERY LOW QUALITY that they render on. XBox, GameCube or PS2, none of them give a good quality render "out of the box".
The PS2 renders with "very low quality" textures because it doesn't have the VRAM for better. The XBox, assuming you're playing a game built for the XBox and not a PS2 port (ie, skip anything from EA), can do much higher texture resolutions than either the PS2 or Gamecube, and while it's not on par with the current bleeding edge of PC hardware, it's pretty damned good for four year old hardware.
Perhaps you can buy some GPU update for them somewhere but I never heard about it;) That low quality isn't that apparent on a 27" TV but when your DVI is connected at 720p you see the difference. On the stability issue, when did you really had a crash in a game ? I've not for the six months I've had my current computer, neither with the current geforce 6 nor with the previous geforce 4...
It seems you've misunderstood my "stability" argument. I was not talking about lack of crashes, but instead the stability of the platform itself. The point here is that games designed for a console have a single, stable hardware target (as in the target doesn't change, not that the hardware doesn't crash), be it a PS2, Gamecube, or XBox. A GPU upgrade would destabilize this situation by adding another component that not everyone may have. If you're a PC game developer, you don't have the luxury of a single target. You have to build a test matrix of different CPUs, video cards, memory configurations, operating systems, etc. That's also a major reason why console games typically have much better QA than PC gamess (no, it's not because PC games are more easily patched), because the test requirements are increased exponentially.
From a development perspective, more time spent with the same hardware breeds familiarity. Because the hardware will not change from underneath you, you can learn the tricks of the hardware, and write to it directly without having to deal with an abstraction layer because you have to support both nVidia and ATI video cards, or Intel and AMD CPUs, or Pentium 3s and Pentium 4s. While there is less raw power in the hardware than with a PC, there is far more power to finesse a solution, because you don't have to worry about oddball hardware in 239047293879877892 different configurations.
The problem (one that will not go away) with consoles is that for the lifetime (~6 years for the PS2) of the console its specs will not get any better, so PC gaming will surpass it.
On the other hand, due to the hardware staying static for 5-6 years, developers become more and more proficient with the platform and are able to eek out more than you would expect (see Gran Turismo 4, for example, which will do 60fps 1080i on an aging PS2, or compare FFIX on the PSOne to FFVII in terms of graphics, or compare GTA:SA with GTA3 on the PS2 in terms of huge levels with barely noticeable load times). Compare almost any launch title on any console to games shipping near that same console's end of life and you'll find vastly increased graphics, AI, larger levels, etc (of course within reason -- load times that are tied to the speed of the optical drive won't increase, but by becoming more familiar with the platform developers are better able to stream content or compress files so that load times effectively increase).
In that same time period, while PCs may make huge jumps in GPU or CPU power, games still have to be written to a common-denominator set of hardware that is typically 2-3 years old. A good developer can scale their technology well enough that you can have something like HL2 that runs acceptably well on DX7-level hardware (ie, ~3-5 years old) while still blowing you away on DX9-level hardware (current). How long did it take to build something like Half-Life 2 or Doom 3? 4-5 years (id started working on Doom 3 in 2000, and Valve supposedly was working on HL2 even before that). It only took 3 years to develop Halo 2 (assuming that Bungie started on it immediately after the 2001 launch of Halo, which is doubtful -- I'm sure the guys needed a nice long vacation, and got it), including a full multi-player and single-player experience (Doom 3 and HL2 are very much single-player-only, and no CS:S doesn't count since it's the same damn game as 7 years ago with prettier graphics), a full story (regardless of what people think about the ending, I felt it was a good second chapter, setting up a third Halo), and even a brand new engine (yes, the Halo 2 engine is all-new). Bungie had the benefit of targetting a single, stable hardware platform, while id and Valve had to run their games through huge test matrices of various different CPU configurations, memory configurations, OS configurations, video card configurations, hard drive configurations, sound card configurations, you name it.
Consoles developers will always have stability on their side, and if you ask any console game developer they'll tell you they would gladly sacrifice the ability to target the current bleeding edge hardware (that fewer than 1% of the target market will have anyway, so you can't write to it exclusively) in exchange for the stability provided by a console platform (bitching about the PS2's awkwardness to develop against aside, anyway).
Hell, even id built Doom 3 with the XBox in mind, making sure that the technology they were developing would be possible on the XBox even as they scaled it up to hardware two or three times as powerful as the lowly 'Box.
Toyota wanted $45 for the blank. And $95 to "program the key for the car". My brother has a Mitsubishi, they wanted even more.
You think that's expensive? Bah. Buy a German car that uses laser-cut keys (Porsche, VW, BMW, etc). If I need to replace a key for my car, it'll cost > $200 just to get a new key cut and shipped from Germany (because dealers don't have the equipment or the necessary information to cut the blanks), and that's before the dealer charges labor to associate the new key with the car.
So far she has been told NOT to sign the back of any credit cards by Visa, MasterCard, two police officers, three retail stores, and our bank. Each one volunteered this information without her asking, each stated this should force the clerks to ask for ID. My wife commented that the wording was so similar in each case, that she believed they read the same script. I was present when one officer repeated this recommendation (less than an hour ago) - he said word for word exactly what my wife told me earlier.
But what did Visa or MasterCard tell your wife? Unless the police officers were actually FBI, or members of an elite fraud-fighting team (doubtful), I wouldn't trust them. I wouldn't trust retail stores either (from the lowiest cashier on up to the general manager of the store, most retail establishments are pretty damned clueless). Finally, I wouldn't trust the bank unless you spoke to the local fraud expert. A teller at a window or a loan agent just isn't qualified to give this kind of fraud-prevention advice.
Think about the advice your wife was given. If she doesn't sign the cards, any thief will simply sign them for her, completely cancelling the benefit of making a cashier ask for ID. Of course, if she signs them with "See ID", the card is no longer valid, so that's out as well. No, the proper approach is to sign the card with your authorized signature, and immediately call the card issuer in the event of a theft. The quicker you call, the quicker they can cancel the card and send you a new one with a new number. If you don't realize your card has been stolen for a few hours, you're not totally out of luck. Still call and cancel the card. All card issuers have a limit on the amount of charges you can be held accountable for in the case of theft, assuming you can't prove you didn't make the purchases (your card was used in a town halfway across the state from where you live, for example).
Common sense makes it very obvious how to handle a credit card.
Do sign the card so a thief can't
Don't invalidate the card with "See ID" or similar
Don't leave the card unsigned
Do immediately call in a lost or stolen card as soon as you realize it's gone. Even if you think you just lost it, you're better off cancelling the card and getting a new one than trying to backtrack to wherever you left it
Do be smart about receipts, when you get the chance. Store copies often have your full card number on them, including expiration date. If you're in a scenario where you can scratch that out (restaurant, signing a triplicate receipt rather than one that prints a second customer copy, etc), make sure you do.
Don't have more cards than absolutely necessary, and if you must have special store cards (for financing deals on big ticket purchases), don't carry them around. The chance of you actually needing that Sears, Best Buy, Home Depot, etc card at any given time is very low, and if you do need it any worthwhile store can look up your account using another form of ID (driver's license, passport). Get a Visa or MasterCard and a Discover or AmEx for normal usage, and leave any specialty cards at home where they're safe from loss or theft.
I don't think he meant he signs them on the writable strip, I think he meant he writes that with a felt tip marker under his regular signature or something. That's what I do anyway;)
You're a minority, then. Every card I've ever seen (I worked retail through high school and college) with "ASK FOR ID", "See ID", "CID", or similar on it has done so in lieu of a proper authorized signature. In that case, the card is invalid and the Post Office is completely within their rights to reject it as payment.
Out of curiosity, how often are you asked for your ID when using your card? 1 in 5? 1 in 10? 1 in 100? Less? Never?
My girlfriend works for a financial institution. She has also learned to do what you mention. However, there are places that will not accept your card if not properly signed, and ASK FOR ID is not a proper signature. Fortunately, these places are far and few between. If more people signed their cards in this manner, maybe they'd come around.
The problem is that most credit cards are not valid without the cardholder's signature (actually, I'm pretty sure all credit cards are invalid unless signed, but not all credit cards say, "Authorized Signature. Not valid unless signed," on the back). Unless your full name happens to be "ASK FOR ID", your card with that signature is no longer valid. Any place accepting credit cards as a form of payment can legally decline your card as payment if you have not properly signed it. That most places accept your card anyway is due to a number of reasons:
Low-paid cashiers just don't care
Poor employee education on the proper acceptance of legal tender
Many places don't even look at the back of the card, so they don't know if it's signed or not
Even when you have "ASK FOR ID" on your card, 99% of the time you'll never be asked for your ID. That 1% of the time, you can just say, "Sorry, I don't have my ID on me," and I don't know of any cashier that would then turn down your sale.
A long time ago, I worked in a store that did refuse unsigned and "ASK FOR ID"-signed credit cards (it was a Best Buy store, and they had that policy for a few years -- I'm sure they've dropped it by now, but I thought it was a good policy). When I got an unsigned credit card, I asked the customer to sign it (and verified against a driver's license), or I would refuse them sale. When I got an "ASK FOR ID"-signed card, I flat-out refused it. In every single case, my supervisor backed me up. Unless the customer had another form of payment, they weren't leaving the store with the merch they wanted to buy. Now, I know Best Buy is not known for having the best customer service, but in this one instance I think they were right and the customer truly was wrong.
They're a good deal for the bandwidth too. There aren't too many other ISPs that care about giving you a large pipe to upload with.
Really? I wonder why they tried to charge me $260/mo for 1.5/384 ADSL, then? This was a few years back, around the time Concentric/XO was going under. I had been on XO, and figured it was time to switch before the company disappeared out from under me. So, I switched to Speakeasy for whatever the price for 1.5/384 ADSL was back then ($79 or $99, something like that). Everything went smoothly, and in fact they didn't even bother charging me for the first three months (their fault for not putting me in their billing system, but just because it was there fault doesn't mean I didn't owe them money). When I finally called them on it (who wants to get a $1000 bill at the end of the year when they realize they hadn't been billing me?), not only did they want to charge me for the months they screwed, but they wanted to charge at a rate of $260/mo. Apparently the loop XO was using for their $99/mo 1.5/384 ADSL was a $260/mo loop for Speakeasy to reuse. Good of them to tell me that when I switched!
Speakeasy's not much in the service department, either. After the whole ADSL fiasco, I ended up switching to an SDSL line instead. It worked well, except for weekly outages of a few hours or so. Every time that happened, I'd call up Speakeasy, sit on hold for 2-5 hours, and just when I finally got a live person on the phone my DSL line would come back up. Great. They wouldn't troubleshoot the line unless it was down when they talked to me, so I was never able to get anything done about it. That went on for a year and a month (hey, that's exactly the same amount of time it took for the warranty on the modem to run out!). Finally, some bright tech suggested it was the SDSL modem (never mind that I had suggested that before and they blew me off, and unlike cable modems you can't exactly go out to the store and buy your own SDSL modem). And because the modem was out of warranty, I would have to pay to replace it (something like $200). Well, fuck that. We fought for about a week, with me pointing out all of the many different times I called on this issue, showing that the problem existed while the warranty was in effect, and they eventually relented.
I was forced to move to cable when I bought a house, as it was outside of DSL area (17,000ft from the CO). I had other issues with the cable connection (for future reference: If your cable connection is up during the day and goes down at night, following a heat/cold cycle, have the cable tech check the outside lines for water damage), but I'm so happy I'm off of DSL. The SDSL upload was awesome, and I still miss my block of static IPs, but Comcast's service has been excellent aside from the water damage incident (can't really blame them for that, can I?).
The new Galactica is much better than I thought it would be but I still miss Space: Above and Beyond.
Yes! Best. Space TV show. Evar. (okay, I'll submit to Babylon 5 beating out S:AaB, but just barely and only because it was allowed to run longer.) Too bad it got screwed by Fox's typical "Let's move good shows around and pre-empt them for sports" policies. Thankfully they didn't do that with 24, and because of that it's now into a richly deserved and very good (IMHO) fourth season.
See, Fox? See what happens when you give a show a chance? You screwed with Space: Above and Beyond, Firefly, Family Guy, and so many others. Perhaps you've finally found your way now, giving 24 a chance and bringing back Family Guy (however limited). Let's see more! Drop the "Who Wants to Marry your Millionaire Midget Daddy 911" bullshit and get back to making excellent dramas and comedies. Your F/X subsidiary has it right with The Shield, Nip/Tuck, and Rescue Me.
angkor writes
"Kryptos is a sculpture located on the grounds of CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Installed in 1990, its thousands of characters contain encrypted messages, of which three have been solved (so far). There is still a fourth section at the bottom consisting of 97 or 98 characters which remains uncracked."
And from the actual page:
Kryptos is a sculpture located on the grounds of CIA Headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Installed in 1990, its thousands of characters contain encrypted messages, of which three have been solved (so far). There is still a fourth section at the bottom consisting of 97 or 98 characters which remains uncracked.
So, unless angkor is the author of the page over at elonka.com, he's plagiarised the article for his summary. Now, I understand that this can be a difficult call to make, since the article is clearly cited. However, the language of the summary ("angkor writes...") and lack of explicit citation ("the article says...") leads one to believe that angkor is writing an original summary of the submitted article, which is clearly not the case.
Sadly, this is not the first time this has ever happened on Slashdot (in fact, it happens in nearly every posted article). Come on, people. If you're going to submit a story, either summarize the article in your own words or attribute your summary text to the article. And editors, pull your thumbs out of your asses and actually edit your site once in a while. In a case like this, it's pretty damned obvious that the article summary is just part of the first paragraph of TFA, and so rather than attributing the summary to the article submitter ("angkor writes..."), use other language that makes clear the quoting ("angkor quotes from the article...").
there is a solution that might be pretty interesting (at least for some developers). bootable cds (or dvds...) that contain basic linux system with good hw detection (think knoppix) and the game itself.
people might dislike rebooting just to play game and then again to go back to their workspace
I think what you just described is traditionally known as a "console video game system", where games are shipped on their own, "bootable" CDs or DVDs and nothing else is running on the system at the same time as the game. Unlike a console, however, your solution doesn't reduce the hardware test matrix at all. Sure, you're removing a dimension or two from the test matrix by removing OS and installed or running apps from the equation, but you still have a huge hardware matrix (video card x CPU x amount of RAM x type of RAM x hard drive speed x type of hard drive x...). At the same time adding complexities to the finished product that you've already noted -- difficulty in patching (and like it or not, consumers expect patches, even if you think your game is perfect right out of the box), driver updates, future-proof-ness (ie, you can't anticipate the drivers necessary for video cards even three years from now, so you'll either have to reissue the game again for free to all owners, allow the user to recreate his own bootable media, or abandon the game; none of those are really appealing options), etc.
I don't see the self-contained, bootable game industry coming to PC any time soon. It works for consoles, because that's how consoles were designed to do just one thing from the very start. A PC is a multi-purpose tool, and as such I shouldn't have to save my work, close all my apps, and reboot just to play a game (yes, games recommend you do that, but I typically don't and suffer no problems).
Having games like tuxracer and supertux is a huge improvement over the linux gaming situation 3 years ago, and they are necessary to prove to people that yes, games *can* be written for linux, which is necessary before big games will be.
Games can be written for linux, just as games can be written for pretty any computer ever made. Hell, Spacewar was written on a PDP-11, and there are numerous games for handheld calculators and the like. The question here is can commercial games be profitable on linux. At the moment, the answer would appear to be, "No." Why? Well, big developers like id and Epic have ported their games to linux, and even though those two developers provide the engines for probably 90% of the non-sport, non-RPG games out there, you rarely hear of licensees porting to linux. Where's Splinter Cell or Rainbow Six 3 for linux? Both of those (actually, most of Ubi's current lineup) are based on Epic's Unreal engine, which has been ported to linux several times over if you consider the engine "new" for different games like Unreal Tournament, UT2003, and UT2004. You won't see them, because the money's not there. It doesn't matter if it's possible or even easy to port. The fact of the matter is that it takes some amount of time to target another platform (even if the engine itself is written in a platform-neutral way, which really is the case with many commercial games these days since many target multiple consoles as well as PC). More time means a later ship date and more money spent on development (and potentially lost money in sales, if they have to slip significantly to accomodate the port), all to support a platform with a very small marketshare. It's all numbers. For PC gaming, you're talking ~95% of the market on Windows, ~1-2% on lnux, and ~3-4% on Mac (and that's probably generous). Is it any wonder that both linux and Mac get shafted on games?
Loki tried to make a business out of porting games for developers that didn't have the time or expertise to do it themselves. They failed. Granted, it's been a few years since Loki imploded, and we did get some good technology out of the endeavor like SDL, but I think it's a pretty safe bet that a similar effort today would die just as Loki did before. Games have a very short half-life (pardon the pun), and if the ports don't ship at the same time, nobody will really care. (Yes, I know there will be the few platform zealots that will wait and wait for a port to their OS, but by and large if you can't buy the game within six months of release, you're probably never going to buy it.)
I'm not even going to mention the difficulties surrounding multiple distros of linux (how should commercial games be packaged? RPM? deb? tarballs? some proprietary installer that doesn't play nice with any distro?) or multiple platforms (it's nice that your game works on linux, but is that for x86, PPC, sparc, alpha, or what?). I'll leave that for a different post, except to say that even if the linux market was large enough to matter, the test matrix for such a game would be hell.
Drop the apostrophe in "it's", unless you meant "slower than it is already glacial performance". That doesn't make any sense to me, but perhaps it does to you.
there aren't any CS departments that base their courses on Java, who cares about java
As horrible as the idea may be, there are a number of CS departments that made the Java switch during the big Java boom of the late 90s. My alma mater did the switch, though luckily I was always at least a semester ahead of Java changes.
Seriously, we really need a suite of JAVA tools, like word processors, spreadsheets, web browsers, etc... No more of this "well, it works on Windows, if you want it on Linux or Mac though we'll have to sit down and write it all over again, and probably introduce a ton of bugs....." stuff.
Just as soon as Java gets a good, cross-platform widget set, this can start happening. AWT and Swing aren't it. SWT is the right way to go, IMHO, but since it's not built into Java, it'll never have as much acceptance as AWT or Swing, and Java on the client will continue to be judged by those crappier toolkits.
What good is a program that depends on exact versions of 50 libraries (yeah, like I'll be able to reinstall that in 5 years and have even an outside shot at it working) and only works on a couple platforms, if you're lucky.
Java has the same problem. The Java base librraries are good, but there will always be something you want or need to do that the default set of libraries doesn't supply. What do you do? Well, just like a C programmer, you find a library that has already done what you need, and you use that. As for portability across platforms, you still have to worry about differences in the JRE for each environment and if you make any assumptions about a particular platform (paths, for instance). Java gives you the possibility of being portable, but it doesn't guarantee it.
when you make your own custom hacked windowing system to speed the process (Mozilla), it ends up being a slow RAM hog, even more so than it would be if it was written in JAVA, or another portable language to begin with.
The problem is not writing your own custom hacked windowing system (which XUL isn't -- it's a custom hacked widget set; the difference being that a widget set is the stuff inside the window, while a windowing system handles the windows themselves and doesn't much care what's inside), but writing your own custom hacked system stupidly. Mozilla's XUL is written stupidly, because it doesn't use native widgets (hey, sounds like Swing!). If the Mozilla developers would lose the ego, they would find that there are a number of good cross-platform widget sets (Qt, wxWindows (or wxWidgets, I guess they're calling it now), or even GTK+, though that would be my very last choice for a cross-platform widget set). Instead, the Mozilla team created Firefox when people complained about the weight of the Mozilla suite, yet they left XUL in place. At least there's Galeon, K-Meleon, and even Konqueror (since it can use Gecko as a rendering engine) available as native-widget web browsers.
Slashdot Mirror
I hate to break it to you, but games don't succeed because of 3rd party library use. In the case of a driving simulator, success is two-fold:
Relatively speaking, developing the engine is easy. As you said yourself, the use of third-party libraries lets you concentrate on the important parts. What you really should be looking for are artists that are willing to work pro-bono (good luck finding anyone good!), or finding a way to pay an artist to work for you. From your screenshots, it's obvious that you need major help with models and textures. While you might think it simple to model a car (lots of reference material), you'd be surprised at how difficult it can be. And if you miss a detail here or there, expect to have raving fanboys breathing down your neck about why you put the trim piece from a 2003 Caragon on a 1999 version, or why you have a BBS wheel that's only made in 18" sizes on a car that can only handle 15" wheels.
All of that said, good luck to you. You're entering a market with very stiff competition, and if you can pull it off then more power to you.
How soon people forget Loki. They took your premise of, "People will pay for good ports of Windows games," and built a business around it. Guess what? People didn't pay. Whether it was because the game world moves so fast that something even six months old is relegated to the bargain bin, or because the typical view of, "Linux is free, and thus any software for Linux should be free as well," held by many Linux users did them in is hard to say. I suspect it's a mixture of both, and other pressures. The moral of the story is that people won't pay for game ports, at least not in the numbers you need to break even, let alone profit at the porting business. If the port doesn't sim-ship with the Windows product, you're screwed. Even if it does ship at the same time, you need some massive marketing to let folks know that there's a Linux version. If you bundle it in with the Windows version, you have no way of tracking how many sales are for the Linux version, and if you have separate versions you risk pissing off your customer base ("I bought this game, but it doesn't work on my Windows machine." "You bought the Linux version. Install Linux or exchange it for the Windows version." "You suck. I'm not buying your games anymore. I'll just warez them and play them for free.").
Now we're into a catch-22. You need to get games ported to Linux to bootstrap Linux game development, but you can't get enough people to buy the port to sustain a business. What Linux needs is a couple dedicated professional gaming studios writing Linux-only games (similar to Bungie and the Mac back in the Marathon days). Good luck selling that one in a market where if your game doesn't sim-ship on PC (Windows), PS2, Gamecube, XBox, and GBA, you're not going to make a profit (and even if you do pull it off, you still may not make a profit).
None of this is to say that Linux can't be a games platform. Anything can be a games platform (calculators, wrist-watches, set-top boxes like Tivo, you name it, chances are games have been written for it). More, Linux does support popular 3D accelerators, it supports OpenGL and has a decent framework for other bits (input/output, audio, networking, 2D graphics) in the form of SDL. Everything is there except for the marketshare to make it profitable, and the professional development studios to make commercial-quality games on Linux as a first-class platform. I don't know how you get there from here, but I'd suggest talking with others in a similar situation (*cough*Apple*cough*) and see what develops. Too bad the decentralized nature of OSS makes it difficult for a key set of players to be indentified for those types of discussions.
In the meantime, you're going to have to continue booting into "winblows" (hey, real mature there, buddy!) to play the latest mega blockbusters. And I don't want to hear any crap about how games "used to be so much better". If you want to start that discussion, you'll first need to relinquish your rose-colored glasses and recognize that the majority of games (movies, music, books, web sites, ...) have always sucked, will continue to suck, and the only reason why the past seems "better" is because you've forgotten all the shit that came before.
Really? A quick look at sourceforge shows 14799 projects in beta, while there are a total of 38186 projects in a pre-beta state. Compare that to the 13509 total projects in a post-beta state. Most telling, the largest single development status is Planning, with 15049 projects in that state. Making the assumption that sourceforge is representative of the open source development world, I'd draw that conclusion that over half (based on a total of 66494 total active projects on sourceforge at the time of this writing) of all open source projects don't even get to a usable state (another assumption: a project in a beta state is far enough along to be used by more than the development team and uber power users).
Of course, this all depends on how one defines beta, and since sourceforge developers get to set their own statuses, what they think may be beta code is really mature, or production/stable could actually be alpha. Take the numbers with a grain of salt.
"Beta" is supposed to mean that major functionality can still change. Aside from XP SP2 (which really should be thought of as a new version, similar to 98 SE) and games (which have market pressure forcing them to hit fixed deadlines, whether or not the code is complete -- miss Christmas and you're screwed for a year), I've not seen "final" software make major functionality changes. Security patches and major bug fixes are to be expected because nobody's perfect. Aside from a few notable games (*cough*Battlecruiser 3000AD*cough*), the final release of the software you listed is completely usable out of the box (ignoring security patches, which is a legitimate gripe). That's supposed to be the difference between Beta and Final. At some point you need to man up, take a stand, and call a version "finished". Yes, it may be missing features you wanted. Yes, it may have some minor annoying little bugs (if there are known major bugs, it's too soon to call it "done"), but you ship it anyway and start working on that for the next version.
Open source software can get by without ever calling a final release as long as it follows the doctrine of "release early and often", but just because the developers still call it 0.1 doesn't mean that it's not 1.0 for all intents and purposes. They just didn't step up and call it done.
Leaving things in beta like Google does is pretty silly, IMHO. At least Microsoft was willing to step up to the plate and call the new MSN Search "done" recently, rather than leaving it in perpetual beta-ness. Will Google ever do the same for Gmail, Froogle, Google News, Google Groups, etc?
(Assuming the industry you're referring to is the gaming industry.) I think id and any developer licensing id's engines would disagree with you. Of course, DirectX is more than just 3D rendering, but there's competition in that space as well from SDL, OpenAL, Apple's Quick* framework, etc.
NTFS has been readable by Linux for a very long time. That it's not writeable is questionable, but we're also talking about a very small usage scenario -- the need for a dual-booter to access their NTFS volumes from Windows. At the same time, ext2 also has write problems under Windows, so this isn't a one-way street.
Actually, MS Office runs perfectly well on Macs, and has done so for years (before it ran on Windows, even).
Bullshit. Yes, there are undocumented kernel-level APIs. I really doubt most Microsoft apps use those, however. If you mean "start up" when you say "run", that's partially true. IE starts up quickly because it's part of Explorer, the Windows shell, and thus already resident in memory. Office doesn't start up quickly the first time you run it, but it does on subsequent runs because it doesn't fully close when you stop it. For example, run Outlook, set it to use Word as the email editor, and send an email. Now, look at Task Manager. Winword.exe is still running, even though there's no window open. There's nothing stopping other applications from doing this same trick. For example, Mozilla can be configured to start a stub at boot, which makes starting the app that much faster. None of this affects how well the applications run post-startup.
The problem is one of attribution. By using the phrase, "Donna writes," Slashdot is attributing the written summary to her. She obviously made some attempt at not copying the abstract verbatim, but it was half-assed and wouldn't stand up to scrutiny. Compare that with this article summary:
The submitter Saint Aardvark wrote a one-sentence summary, and then properly quoted from the article (by enclosing the quoted bit in quotation marks, with citation provided by the article link). Here's a sample of what Donna could've written: That summarizes the story in a single sentence (it's the second article in a series on some topic), cites the article, and properly quotes the abstract for more information. Alternatively, she could've just prefaced the quoted abstract with "From the (linked article), "..."," and still been okay. Even then, had she not done that, the Slashdot editors could've easily written, "Donna quotes, "..."," rather than, "Donna writes," and still been okay. As it is, none of that was done, and the implication is that Donna wrote the abstract. She didn't.From the Slashdot submission:
And from the actual article: Replacing the string "This installment of "Migrating from x86 to PowerPC"" with "This article" and replacing the word "between" with the phrase "involved in" is not sufficient to serve as summarization in the submitter's own words. Somehow I have a hard time believing that the submitter "Donna" and the article author Lewin Edwards are one and the same person. If I'm wrong, then fine. You can't plagiarize yourself. If I'm correct, then Slashdot's done it again. The article summary isn't an original work by Donna, but a minor modification of the article author's own summary, and should be properly attributed as such.From the Slashdot summary
and from the first paragraph of the article itselfAside from the removal of one sentence and a slight re-wording of the last, this is word for word the introduction to the article. If you were to submit this in a paper for a college (or even high school!) class, you'd be a good candidate for a plagiarism investigation.
Once again, Slashdot editors, there's a very simple way to deal with this -- change the author attribution. Rather than saying, "DonnaMai writes ...", use "DonnaMai quotes ..." or "DonnaMai poorly paraphrases ...". By properly citing the summary as a quotation or paraphrasing* of the article, you would avoid the impression of plagiarism.
* Yes, paraphrasing is allowed by fair use. In fact, if you're going to summarize an article, you want to paraphrase. However, paraphrasing is not, "Copy a sentence with a changed word here, drop a sentence there." You need to write a summarization in your own words, not take the article's words and (poorly) "massage" them so that they're not 100% identical (90% identical is still a problem).
But if you buy 5 (hundred/thousand/million?) of the thing on which you saved $10 and it only cost you an hour to save that $10, did you still lose more than you gained?
What's your definition of "out"? From the Cairo download page, "Cairo is still under active development. The API is rapidly approaching stability, but is not quite there yet, so there is not yet any official "release" of cairo." So, Cairo is not a 1.0 release, or even a .01 release. Dev snapshots are available, in an unstable form (the API is "approaching" stability). How does this differ from the available technology preview of Avalon (aside from the openness of the source, of course)?
Both are still in pre-release stages. Both are available in a publicly-consumable form even though they've not reached API stability yet. Declaring one or the other the "winner" is still premature.
Oh, yeah, and Avalon will be available on XP and 2k3, not just Longhorn.
Since when is Mercenaries a sequel? The article calls it Pandemic Studios' follow up to "its innovative strategy game Full Spectrum Warrior." Since when is a "follow-up" game a sequel? And what makes this a "follow-up", other than being developed by the same studio? Is Full Spectrum Warrior a follow-up to Pandemic's earlier games like Clone Wars or Triple Play Does that mean Full Spectrum Warrior is a sequel to a baseball title? By that rationale, id's Doom 3 is a sequel to their previous title Quake 3 Arena. Does this seem silly to anybody else?
If the submitter (or the editors, if the submitter didn't) would only properly attribute his summary as a quote of the article, there wouldn't be any problem with doing this. However, once again, Slashdot gets it wrong, attributing the first paragraph of the article to someone named "codermarc" when it was really written by Larry Greenemeier. One of these days this is going to bite Slashdot in the ass when they get dragged into court for copyright infringement.
Fair use allows you to quote selected portions of a work, so long as you properly attribute the passages to their proper author. Slashdot doesn't. It's easy to blame this on the submitter, since he's the one submitting the first paragraph as a "summary", but it's the editors' problem as soon as they post the story. (btw, "editor, n, 1. One who edits, especially as an occupation," from dictionary.com, which pretty much sums up what Slashdot editors don't do)
It's simple, guys! If the summary is the first paragraph of the submitted article, change "codermarc writes ..." to "codermarc quotes from the article (link here) ...". Simple, effective, and correct. The editors do read the linked articles before posting them, right? Right? ... sigh
I'm going to assume you mean "Outlook Express" when you say "Outlook", otherwise your argument has no merit. Even then, Outlook Express isn't as bad as you make it out to be. For example, both Outlook and OE support SMTP-AUTH, via SSL or not (as well as both POP3 and IMAP-v4 over SSL). That addresses your first problem, which at this point is an ISP issue rather than an MTA issue. Your second point is really only valid for OE, and then only if you've never bothered to use Windows Update (in which case you're asking for other problems anyway). Outlook has blocked bad attachments since a service pack for Outlook 2000 (there have been two versions of Outlook since then, XP/2002 and 2003). Outlook 2003 (which is the only version I have installed right now, so I can only speak to other versions on memory) will also block malicious content in the body of the message itself (scripts, images linked to external sites, etc). If you're still getting infected by email viruses while using Outlook, you're either running a ridiculously old version, or you're explicitly overriding Outlook's protection mechanisms.
Moving everybody back to pine (or better, mutt, but that's my own personal preference) via ssh is not an acceptable solution. Forcing everybody through a webmail interface is only slightly better, but even that is not very desirable (see the new Outlook Live service from Microsoft that lets you read your hotmail email via Outlook rather than the web page, or RPC over HTTP in Exchange 2003 that lets you access corporate email without a VPN rather than using OWA).
Yes, and it looks like ass. However, notice that I held up GTA:SA as an example of expanded environments compared to previous iterations in this console generation, and not as a paragon of graphical goodness.
Nope, but then I'm not really interested in RE4, which is beside the point.
My TV is about a year too old to have a DVI input, and it only supports 480p and 1080i (no 720p), but for all that it's well-calibrated and looks good. I've not hooked a PC up to it, but my XBox (and to a lesser extent, GameCube) looks good running on the TV in 480p or 1080i.
The PS2 renders with "very low quality" textures because it doesn't have the VRAM for better. The XBox, assuming you're playing a game built for the XBox and not a PS2 port (ie, skip anything from EA), can do much higher texture resolutions than either the PS2 or Gamecube, and while it's not on par with the current bleeding edge of PC hardware, it's pretty damned good for four year old hardware.
It seems you've misunderstood my "stability" argument. I was not talking about lack of crashes, but instead the stability of the platform itself. The point here is that games designed for a console have a single, stable hardware target (as in the target doesn't change, not that the hardware doesn't crash), be it a PS2, Gamecube, or XBox. A GPU upgrade would destabilize this situation by adding another component that not everyone may have. If you're a PC game developer, you don't have the luxury of a single target. You have to build a test matrix of different CPUs, video cards, memory configurations, operating systems, etc. That's also a major reason why console games typically have much better QA than PC gamess (no, it's not because PC games are more easily patched), because the test requirements are increased exponentially.
From a development perspective, more time spent with the same hardware breeds familiarity. Because the hardware will not change from underneath you, you can learn the tricks of the hardware, and write to it directly without having to deal with an abstraction layer because you have to support both nVidia and ATI video cards, or Intel and AMD CPUs, or Pentium 3s and Pentium 4s. While there is less raw power in the hardware than with a PC, there is far more power to finesse a solution, because you don't have to worry about oddball hardware in 239047293879877892 different configurations.
On the other hand, due to the hardware staying static for 5-6 years, developers become more and more proficient with the platform and are able to eek out more than you would expect (see Gran Turismo 4, for example, which will do 60fps 1080i on an aging PS2, or compare FFIX on the PSOne to FFVII in terms of graphics, or compare GTA:SA with GTA3 on the PS2 in terms of huge levels with barely noticeable load times). Compare almost any launch title on any console to games shipping near that same console's end of life and you'll find vastly increased graphics, AI, larger levels, etc (of course within reason -- load times that are tied to the speed of the optical drive won't increase, but by becoming more familiar with the platform developers are better able to stream content or compress files so that load times effectively increase).
In that same time period, while PCs may make huge jumps in GPU or CPU power, games still have to be written to a common-denominator set of hardware that is typically 2-3 years old. A good developer can scale their technology well enough that you can have something like HL2 that runs acceptably well on DX7-level hardware (ie, ~3-5 years old) while still blowing you away on DX9-level hardware (current). How long did it take to build something like Half-Life 2 or Doom 3? 4-5 years (id started working on Doom 3 in 2000, and Valve supposedly was working on HL2 even before that). It only took 3 years to develop Halo 2 (assuming that Bungie started on it immediately after the 2001 launch of Halo, which is doubtful -- I'm sure the guys needed a nice long vacation, and got it), including a full multi-player and single-player experience (Doom 3 and HL2 are very much single-player-only, and no CS:S doesn't count since it's the same damn game as 7 years ago with prettier graphics), a full story (regardless of what people think about the ending, I felt it was a good second chapter, setting up a third Halo), and even a brand new engine (yes, the Halo 2 engine is all-new). Bungie had the benefit of targetting a single, stable hardware platform, while id and Valve had to run their games through huge test matrices of various different CPU configurations, memory configurations, OS configurations, video card configurations, hard drive configurations, sound card configurations, you name it.
Consoles developers will always have stability on their side, and if you ask any console game developer they'll tell you they would gladly sacrifice the ability to target the current bleeding edge hardware (that fewer than 1% of the target market will have anyway, so you can't write to it exclusively) in exchange for the stability provided by a console platform (bitching about the PS2's awkwardness to develop against aside, anyway).
Hell, even id built Doom 3 with the XBox in mind, making sure that the technology they were developing would be possible on the XBox even as they scaled it up to hardware two or three times as powerful as the lowly 'Box.
You think that's expensive? Bah. Buy a German car that uses laser-cut keys (Porsche, VW, BMW, etc). If I need to replace a key for my car, it'll cost > $200 just to get a new key cut and shipped from Germany (because dealers don't have the equipment or the necessary information to cut the blanks), and that's before the dealer charges labor to associate the new key with the car.
But what did Visa or MasterCard tell your wife? Unless the police officers were actually FBI, or members of an elite fraud-fighting team (doubtful), I wouldn't trust them. I wouldn't trust retail stores either (from the lowiest cashier on up to the general manager of the store, most retail establishments are pretty damned clueless). Finally, I wouldn't trust the bank unless you spoke to the local fraud expert. A teller at a window or a loan agent just isn't qualified to give this kind of fraud-prevention advice.
Think about the advice your wife was given. If she doesn't sign the cards, any thief will simply sign them for her, completely cancelling the benefit of making a cashier ask for ID. Of course, if she signs them with "See ID", the card is no longer valid, so that's out as well. No, the proper approach is to sign the card with your authorized signature, and immediately call the card issuer in the event of a theft. The quicker you call, the quicker they can cancel the card and send you a new one with a new number. If you don't realize your card has been stolen for a few hours, you're not totally out of luck. Still call and cancel the card. All card issuers have a limit on the amount of charges you can be held accountable for in the case of theft, assuming you can't prove you didn't make the purchases (your card was used in a town halfway across the state from where you live, for example).
Common sense makes it very obvious how to handle a credit card.
You're a minority, then. Every card I've ever seen (I worked retail through high school and college) with "ASK FOR ID", "See ID", "CID", or similar on it has done so in lieu of a proper authorized signature. In that case, the card is invalid and the Post Office is completely within their rights to reject it as payment.
Out of curiosity, how often are you asked for your ID when using your card? 1 in 5? 1 in 10? 1 in 100? Less? Never?
The problem is that most credit cards are not valid without the cardholder's signature (actually, I'm pretty sure all credit cards are invalid unless signed, but not all credit cards say, "Authorized Signature. Not valid unless signed," on the back). Unless your full name happens to be "ASK FOR ID", your card with that signature is no longer valid. Any place accepting credit cards as a form of payment can legally decline your card as payment if you have not properly signed it. That most places accept your card anyway is due to a number of reasons:
- Low-paid cashiers just don't care
- Poor employee education on the proper acceptance of legal tender
- Many places don't even look at the back of the card, so they don't know if it's signed or not
Even when you have "ASK FOR ID" on your card, 99% of the time you'll never be asked for your ID. That 1% of the time, you can just say, "Sorry, I don't have my ID on me," and I don't know of any cashier that would then turn down your sale.A long time ago, I worked in a store that did refuse unsigned and "ASK FOR ID"-signed credit cards (it was a Best Buy store, and they had that policy for a few years -- I'm sure they've dropped it by now, but I thought it was a good policy). When I got an unsigned credit card, I asked the customer to sign it (and verified against a driver's license), or I would refuse them sale. When I got an "ASK FOR ID"-signed card, I flat-out refused it. In every single case, my supervisor backed me up. Unless the customer had another form of payment, they weren't leaving the store with the merch they wanted to buy. Now, I know Best Buy is not known for having the best customer service, but in this one instance I think they were right and the customer truly was wrong.
Really? I wonder why they tried to charge me $260/mo for 1.5/384 ADSL, then? This was a few years back, around the time Concentric/XO was going under. I had been on XO, and figured it was time to switch before the company disappeared out from under me. So, I switched to Speakeasy for whatever the price for 1.5/384 ADSL was back then ($79 or $99, something like that). Everything went smoothly, and in fact they didn't even bother charging me for the first three months (their fault for not putting me in their billing system, but just because it was there fault doesn't mean I didn't owe them money). When I finally called them on it (who wants to get a $1000 bill at the end of the year when they realize they hadn't been billing me?), not only did they want to charge me for the months they screwed, but they wanted to charge at a rate of $260/mo. Apparently the loop XO was using for their $99/mo 1.5/384 ADSL was a $260/mo loop for Speakeasy to reuse. Good of them to tell me that when I switched!
Speakeasy's not much in the service department, either. After the whole ADSL fiasco, I ended up switching to an SDSL line instead. It worked well, except for weekly outages of a few hours or so. Every time that happened, I'd call up Speakeasy, sit on hold for 2-5 hours, and just when I finally got a live person on the phone my DSL line would come back up. Great. They wouldn't troubleshoot the line unless it was down when they talked to me, so I was never able to get anything done about it. That went on for a year and a month (hey, that's exactly the same amount of time it took for the warranty on the modem to run out!). Finally, some bright tech suggested it was the SDSL modem (never mind that I had suggested that before and they blew me off, and unlike cable modems you can't exactly go out to the store and buy your own SDSL modem). And because the modem was out of warranty, I would have to pay to replace it (something like $200). Well, fuck that. We fought for about a week, with me pointing out all of the many different times I called on this issue, showing that the problem existed while the warranty was in effect, and they eventually relented.
I was forced to move to cable when I bought a house, as it was outside of DSL area (17,000ft from the CO). I had other issues with the cable connection (for future reference: If your cable connection is up during the day and goes down at night, following a heat/cold cycle, have the cable tech check the outside lines for water damage), but I'm so happy I'm off of DSL. The SDSL upload was awesome, and I still miss my block of static IPs, but Comcast's service has been excellent aside from the water damage incident (can't really blame them for that, can I?).
Yes! Best. Space TV show. Evar. (okay, I'll submit to Babylon 5 beating out S:AaB, but just barely and only because it was allowed to run longer.) Too bad it got screwed by Fox's typical "Let's move good shows around and pre-empt them for sports" policies. Thankfully they didn't do that with 24, and because of that it's now into a richly deserved and very good (IMHO) fourth season.
See, Fox? See what happens when you give a show a chance? You screwed with Space: Above and Beyond, Firefly, Family Guy, and so many others. Perhaps you've finally found your way now, giving 24 a chance and bringing back Family Guy (however limited). Let's see more! Drop the "Who Wants to Marry your Millionaire Midget Daddy 911" bullshit and get back to making excellent dramas and comedies. Your F/X subsidiary has it right with The Shield, Nip/Tuck, and Rescue Me.
From the Slashdot summary:
And from the actual page: So, unless angkor is the author of the page over at elonka.com, he's plagiarised the article for his summary. Now, I understand that this can be a difficult call to make, since the article is clearly cited. However, the language of the summary ("angkor writesSadly, this is not the first time this has ever happened on Slashdot (in fact, it happens in nearly every posted article). Come on, people. If you're going to submit a story, either summarize the article in your own words or attribute your summary text to the article. And editors, pull your thumbs out of your asses and actually edit your site once in a while. In a case like this, it's pretty damned obvious that the article summary is just part of the first paragraph of TFA, and so rather than attributing the summary to the article submitter ("angkor writes ..."), use other language that makes clear the quoting ("angkor quotes from the article ...").
I think what you just described is traditionally known as a "console video game system", where games are shipped on their own, "bootable" CDs or DVDs and nothing else is running on the system at the same time as the game. Unlike a console, however, your solution doesn't reduce the hardware test matrix at all. Sure, you're removing a dimension or two from the test matrix by removing OS and installed or running apps from the equation, but you still have a huge hardware matrix (video card x CPU x amount of RAM x type of RAM x hard drive speed x type of hard drive x ...). At the same time adding complexities to the finished product that you've already noted -- difficulty in patching (and like it or not, consumers expect patches, even if you think your game is perfect right out of the box), driver updates, future-proof-ness (ie, you can't anticipate the drivers necessary for video cards even three years from now, so you'll either have to reissue the game again for free to all owners, allow the user to recreate his own bootable media, or abandon the game; none of those are really appealing options), etc.
I don't see the self-contained, bootable game industry coming to PC any time soon. It works for consoles, because that's how consoles were designed to do just one thing from the very start. A PC is a multi-purpose tool, and as such I shouldn't have to save my work, close all my apps, and reboot just to play a game (yes, games recommend you do that, but I typically don't and suffer no problems).
Games can be written for linux, just as games can be written for pretty any computer ever made. Hell, Spacewar was written on a PDP-11, and there are numerous games for handheld calculators and the like. The question here is can commercial games be profitable on linux. At the moment, the answer would appear to be, "No." Why? Well, big developers like id and Epic have ported their games to linux, and even though those two developers provide the engines for probably 90% of the non-sport, non-RPG games out there, you rarely hear of licensees porting to linux. Where's Splinter Cell or Rainbow Six 3 for linux? Both of those (actually, most of Ubi's current lineup) are based on Epic's Unreal engine, which has been ported to linux several times over if you consider the engine "new" for different games like Unreal Tournament, UT2003, and UT2004. You won't see them, because the money's not there. It doesn't matter if it's possible or even easy to port. The fact of the matter is that it takes some amount of time to target another platform (even if the engine itself is written in a platform-neutral way, which really is the case with many commercial games these days since many target multiple consoles as well as PC). More time means a later ship date and more money spent on development (and potentially lost money in sales, if they have to slip significantly to accomodate the port), all to support a platform with a very small marketshare. It's all numbers. For PC gaming, you're talking ~95% of the market on Windows, ~1-2% on lnux, and ~3-4% on Mac (and that's probably generous). Is it any wonder that both linux and Mac get shafted on games?
Loki tried to make a business out of porting games for developers that didn't have the time or expertise to do it themselves. They failed. Granted, it's been a few years since Loki imploded, and we did get some good technology out of the endeavor like SDL, but I think it's a pretty safe bet that a similar effort today would die just as Loki did before. Games have a very short half-life (pardon the pun), and if the ports don't ship at the same time, nobody will really care. (Yes, I know there will be the few platform zealots that will wait and wait for a port to their OS, but by and large if you can't buy the game within six months of release, you're probably never going to buy it.)
I'm not even going to mention the difficulties surrounding multiple distros of linux (how should commercial games be packaged? RPM? deb? tarballs? some proprietary installer that doesn't play nice with any distro?) or multiple platforms (it's nice that your game works on linux, but is that for x86, PPC, sparc, alpha, or what?). I'll leave that for a different post, except to say that even if the linux market was large enough to matter, the test matrix for such a game would be hell.
Drop the apostrophe in "it's", unless you meant "slower than it is already glacial performance". That doesn't make any sense to me, but perhaps it does to you.
As horrible as the idea may be, there are a number of CS departments that made the Java switch during the big Java boom of the late 90s. My alma mater did the switch, though luckily I was always at least a semester ahead of Java changes.
Just as soon as Java gets a good, cross-platform widget set, this can start happening. AWT and Swing aren't it. SWT is the right way to go, IMHO, but since it's not built into Java, it'll never have as much acceptance as AWT or Swing, and Java on the client will continue to be judged by those crappier toolkits.
Java has the same problem. The Java base librraries are good, but there will always be something you want or need to do that the default set of libraries doesn't supply. What do you do? Well, just like a C programmer, you find a library that has already done what you need, and you use that. As for portability across platforms, you still have to worry about differences in the JRE for each environment and if you make any assumptions about a particular platform (paths, for instance). Java gives you the possibility of being portable, but it doesn't guarantee it.
The problem is not writing your own custom hacked windowing system (which XUL isn't -- it's a custom hacked widget set; the difference being that a widget set is the stuff inside the window, while a windowing system handles the windows themselves and doesn't much care what's inside), but writing your own custom hacked system stupidly. Mozilla's XUL is written stupidly, because it doesn't use native widgets (hey, sounds like Swing!). If the Mozilla developers would lose the ego, they would find that there are a number of good cross-platform widget sets (Qt, wxWindows (or wxWidgets, I guess they're calling it now), or even GTK+, though that would be my very last choice for a cross-platform widget set). Instead, the Mozilla team created Firefox when people complained about the weight of the Mozilla suite, yet they left XUL in place. At least there's Galeon, K-Meleon, and even Konqueror (since it can use Gecko as a rendering engine) available as native-widget web browsers.