One of the things I'd like to see is better (than Windows) old game support in Linux.
.
Let me give you an example. Recently, I got a new PC running Vista. One of the first things I tried to do was install my favorite game, Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines. Now, officially, V:tM:B isn't supported on 64 bit Windows OSs. This is due to an easily corrected programming mistake by Troika as it was going out the door (they were under a lot of pressure, I don't blame them). A kindly hacker has fixed it for us: Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines 64 bit patch
So, the next game I tried to Install was my second favorite System Shock 2. I also had a problem with that due to my Dual Core CPU. So, I had to find another kindly hacker to help me... Game Issues With Multiprocessor/Hyperthreading Systems...
I'm expecting to keep installing old games, because I happen to like them. (Sacrifice is probably up next... well after my Steam games and Dawn of War.)
Now with Wine, you have people dedicated to adding a Windows compatibility layer to Linux. Each individual game you might think of will have an entry in the database, with different levels of success. Wine itself runs in multiple modes, so if one mode doesn't work you can try others. Unfortunately at the moment, it isn't a panacea. Some games work, and some don't. What I'm hoping for in the future is that older games will work better in Wine than the latest Windows, especially games that have a small but loyal fanbase. Because with old games, officialdom doesn't care, we could lose generations of gaming art and they'd just shrug. It's sort of like throwing out all the old books, or trashing all the old movies... (there was a time when that was a problem, a lot of old Ernie Kovacs was recycled for it's silver content... )
Alternatives for a lot of games are also in the works, basically creating Linux native engines to run Windows content. I remember looking for one for Dark Engine games, with no luck, but that was a while back. Of course, maybe I should be following ReactOS's Progress instead, but right now it isn't nearly as desktop ready as Linux and I like Linux better than WinXP, given the choice. Of course, really old games from Infocom and LucasArts tend to have top notch native Linux support, so I have hope.
Plan? There wasn't a Plan! What there was was a seething hatred, the hatred of Sega's Japanese branch for the American branch, a hatred that was paid back by the Americans with the self-same coin!
.
In other words, instead of working together as one big happy company, the two branches worked on backstabbing each other in a scary display of self destructive internal corporate politics.
All one needs to do is read of the train wreck that was the Neptune project or find out about the depressing story of the 3dFX lawsuit that came out of Sega of America designing "Black Belt" while Sega of Japan designed "Katana" (Dreamcast) which used a totally different graphics chip. Did you know that the money Sega lost from that lawsuit could have put DVD players in Dreamcasts!!!
It was a story written in Hell by Lucifer himself!
I also was one of the enlightened ones, err, I mean suckers who bought the CD and 32X units.
That reminds me, when is the next meeting of the Enlightened Ones, we're supposed to be working on that plan to use those enormous Sega monoliths (SegaCD Original, Sega Genesis, topped by 32X) to summon Lord Hastur.
I thought it was even funnier that his doctor shopping got a slap on the wrist, thus illustrating the way the law operates differently for the Haves and Have Mores than for the rest of us.
Well, no, that wasn't funny... that was more stomach turning than funny.
Limbaugh's success is almost entirely due to his sense of humor. He was basically a Colbert/Stewart of the Right, before Comedy Central was a political humor channel. Now, humor is somewhat subjective, and Limbaugh has a mean streak that comes out at odd times and spoils the party. His mask only slips occasionally though, and he can usually convince his loyal listeners that he was joking or that the monster they saw was just misunderstood. (for example, when he made fun of Michael J. Fox's Parkinsons Disease, or expressed glee at the suicide of Kurt Cobain.)
Even so, Limbaugh has a great sense of the absurd, and his selective reporting of the news has been great at finding things that are both idiotic and obviously "left-inspired." Now, he's dishonest to a degree, so he'll lie, exagerate or misreport when it suits him. Still, it's actually fairly easy if you go to the right places to find some absurdity related to environmentalism or feminism. Shooting fish in a barrel, it is. Frankly, he doesn't outright lie that often, because he doesn't have to. Clowns attach themselves to any political movement that has any power.
The new young Turks of Right Wing talk haven't been humor oriented, they've been revenge oriented. So people like O'Reilly and Hannity come across as hate-filled trolls without anything resembling a sense of humor. This is all to the good, because people with no sense of humor make perfect straight men victims for satirists.
From reading previous (modded up) posts I am getting the impression that most Americans are all to eager to step back into the cold war and blame Russia.
The avalanche has already started, it is too late for the pebbles to vote.
When I first started getting Email addresses, unless they were assigned by school, I would just use whatever random cartoon character name from whatever comic book or cartoon I happened to be reading at the time. As time passed, things happened:
.
1. Other people besides me started using the Internet, and no matter how obscure a cartoon character was, somebody already took it. Also, Japanese cartoons and comic books became more popular, so formerly obscure characters I'd use suddenly became well know.
2. People would get annoyed at my weird Email addresses, "So, you're JustyUekiTylor@xyz.com . How do you spell that?"
3. It was too much information about me to be giving out, and of course, I'd end up giving these Email addresses to employers and potential employers (fortunately it was the dot.com boom, so I got hired anyway).
Nowadays, my Email address are (first intial)_(middle initial)_(last name)_(random number)@xyz.com , I can give them out to anyone, business or personal, and they don't tell anything about me except a little bit about my ethnic ancestry. I also have a few old cartoon character Email addresses hanging around, which I use for dubious Websites that I want to be (semi)anonymous on.
The Irish and Italians were not legal immigrants. We just didn't have our internal passport system perfected yet, so once they jumped the border they were able to disappear into the local population... as they are indeed still doing, but with less success because of our new fangled, and disgusting to anyone who loves liberty, internal passport system.
So your appeals to liberal wimpism won't work on me, I'm not a Nancy Pelosi fan.
The reason why Bush's appeals to terrorism work is because terrorism is a real problem. His solutions to it are garbage, but the threat is real. So is racism.
I know racism been defined as an unword by the PC-right, but that's not going to stop me from identifying it when I see it. If you don't see the obvious racism in the GP post, then you are also a racist, and I don't expect to have a meaningful conversation with you.
It's not an argument, just an observation. Besides, he wasn't talking about "illegals" if you read carefully. Not in the part that was relevant to the discussion at hand, anyway, which was referring to Indians who were working in India for American corporations. Not to Indian border jumpers who came here to steal American IT jobs. I haven't heard of any of those. I have heard of H1-B Visa's which are lobbied for by scary Mexicans like Bill Gates, of course every single person who has one of those is a legal immigrant.
Of course, the majority of his post was an attempt at a thread hijack to get people frothing at Mexicans, so you have that part right. Of course, I could go into a long off topic discussion about mal-investment in the housing industry and how greediness by rich, white developers causes them to hire unlicensed contractors rather than those who have the proper licenses and do quality work.... but that wouldn't really have much to do with IT, now would it.
Meh, reading his rant it seems the entire purpose was racism, and relevance to the issue at hand was secondary.
Racism is just a Divide and Rule tactic anyway, keep the working class abitrarily divided and they won't see the guys who are really twisting the knife (who tend to be white and rich).
Anyone who falls for it is a fool who thinks he's could be part of the ruling class if not for those damn (insert-non-favored-race-here). Look, I hate to tell you this but you can't. You might be the right color, but you aren't from the right family, and that club is very exclusive.
However, go on being a puppet playing out the script your masters have written for you, don't try to assault their wealth and privilege (the first flows from the second).
Actually, a smart libertarian shouldn't believe that "all success is personally earned." That would be ridiculous. What a libertarian believes is normally that the government is out to harm ordinary people, and himself/herself in particular. A libertarian, should, for example be opposed to all forms of corporate welfare, including such things as existing businesses having their property given to Walmart as an eminent domain thing because Walmart bought enough votes on the city council.
.
The truth is actual libertarians are an incredibly small number of people. Most of the people I've met working in IT would never think of voting for someone like Harry Browne... they're Republicans almost to a man/woman. (Which, to my mind, means they want the government to sell their childrens organs to zoos, for meat.)
If you aren't going to have a union, and you are working class (which means you live off of your labor and not your investments) you have to be your own union. Which means driving a beater or taking the bus, renting instead of owning, going without the latest XBox or iPhone. (Oh, and if you have a family, enforcing this austerity on them as well.) In other words, you need to have a savings account for the day your company gets aquired and your new boss tells you about pay cuts and mandatory unpaid overtime.
You need to be able to walk away... because corporate america is not a meritocracy and never will be. Anyone who believes otherwise has just drunk Reaganite Kool Aid. It's really dominated by cronyism, nepotism and all kinds of corruption. High level executives who fail miserably will often leave with golden parachutes to their next high level job. It's easy to find examples, Carly Fiorina and Bernie Stolar come to mind off the top of my head. Oh, and George W. Bush, possibly the best example in recent times.
Now, I don't practice what I preach... I used to but indulging my family did me in. However, I still think it's good advice.
Well, you're a sucker then. (Either that or you are making so much money you expect to retire early.) Frankly I'm all for this suit, but actually I don't think anyone has to work that kind of job... but maybe people want to in order to work for a "sexy" company like Apple.
.
Don't misunderstand, I think it is very macho of you to give your labor away for free. Being taken advantage of by your bosses is the best way to prove that you are an IT god, after all. I'm sure that since you've taken care of your company in this way, they'll take care of you. Even if shipping your job someplace else or just eliminating it makes financial sense, I'm sure you'll be fine. After all, after all the loyalty and dedication you've shown, they'd never do that to you, would they?
Incidentally, iPods/iPhones? Worthless consumer junk, give me the cash not the overpriced trinket.
Working Designs did some things that irritated me (putting their own spin on stories rather than directly translating), but the below quote from the article sums up the fun of being "independent" and working for a console company:
When the Sony PlayStation and Sega Saturn arrived on the scene, Victor Ireland met with then-President of SCEA Bernie Stolar to discuss translating and publishing Sony's Japanese launch SRPG Arc the Lad. Stolar outright refused Victor, saying that RPGs were not the future, and said that WD's games didn't help the Sega CD and TGCD. This sparked a feud between Vic and Stolar, and Vic resigned his company to making Sega Saturn games, as the Nintendo 64 was considered to be too expensive to consider publishing on. When Sony eventually let go of Stolar, and Sega hired him, Stolar's first act was to kill off the Sega Saturn. Victor finished up his Saturn projects and moved the company to the PlayStation, where they achieved some of the more notable successes in their history. And as a personal triumph, they finally managed to get the rights to Arc the Lad and its sequels, which Sony's new management insisted that they bundle together as one game. Vic's feud with Stolar led them to ignore Sega's Dreamcast console in favor of the PlayStation 2, but friction with Sony's approval process was starting to cost Working Designs money, and concerned fans wondered why Working Designs didn't move to the Nintendo GameCube or Microsoft Xbox. In fact, Victor had been pursuing the rights to titles on both consoles, but in a vicious cycle, kept finding himself outbid on the few titles that matched his company's skills. When asked why he passed on Lunar Legend for the GameBoy Advance, a title he already owned the right of first-refusal on, he said it was because the game was mediocre, and because he still disliked the expense of publishing cartridges. He initially dismissed the Nintendo DS, saying that although production costs had come down significantly, the high wait times were still costly, and endorsed Sony's PlayStation Portable, and may have been pursuing titles for that handheld. Upon his company's demise, he quietly withdrew his support of Sony's PSP, and voiced his support for the Xbox 360.
Of course, the DRM that makes piracy much more difficult and that console makers enforce as one of their primary revenue streams, also makes it a requirement that developers have to pay protection money... er... "license fees" to the big three to develop for their crippled computers.
Can't afford to pay the protection money? Hmm... guess you can't afford effective DRM.
In other words, for indie developers, DRM is part of the problem. Oh, and since anything like effective DRM that actually prevents piracy (and on a PC platform, good luck!) will cost an arm and a leg, it makes it unlikely that your indie developer can afford it. Instead they'll try to do it on the cheap, and their game will shortly show up on bittorrent, to be downloaded mainly by pirates but also by people who actually bought the game but can't get it to work because of something stupid about the DRM.
Now, consoles are more profitable because the hurdles to console piracy are higher than for PC piracy. It can be done, but you might have to by specialized equiment and have a certain amount of technical savvy (or know someone who does) to bypass the security. With a computer, it'll just be a matter of running some program that the DRM developer didn't think of how to block and voila, your game can be easily pirated.
Of course, consoles are currently a strong studio system, expect interference with your game's content from all three of the big companies. And it will be alm
Conservatism hasn't been about reducing government in my lifetime. What it is about is crony capitalism privatising the profits to be had at the public till while socializing the risks. This is why bankers get bailouts, but homeowners don't. The bankers were just as irresponsible in making bad loans as the homeowners were in accepting them. In fact, since the home owner can be any poorly educated individual but the people who run banks and approve loans are supposed to be qualified, they are actually more culpable. Want to get rich in America? Make sure you've got political pull.
Conservatives use the language of minarchism to justify slashing the programs they want to slash and lowering the taxes they want to lower. If, on the other hand, they want to justify some military boondoggle or increased police-statism, they fall back on playing on people's irrational fears. Money flows from our taxes into government coffers and flows out again to favored defense contractors and members of the finance industry. Government grows, it doesn't shrink.
Basically, conservatism is a complicated confidence scam. Government grows differently under conservatism than under socialism, but it still grows. The goal of conservatism is simply to make sure that the average person gets nothing useful for his or her tax dollar, but he or she will still pay through the nose, one way or the other.
Slashdot Mirror
.
Let me give you an example. Recently, I got a new PC running Vista. One of the first things I tried to do was install my favorite game, Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines. Now, officially, V:tM:B isn't supported on 64 bit Windows OSs. This is due to an easily corrected programming mistake by Troika as it was going out the door (they were under a lot of pressure, I don't blame them). A kindly hacker has fixed it for us: Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines 64 bit patch
So, the next game I tried to Install was my second favorite System Shock 2. I also had a problem with that due to my Dual Core CPU. So, I had to find another kindly hacker to help me... Game Issues With Multiprocessor/Hyperthreading Systems...
I'm expecting to keep installing old games, because I happen to like them. (Sacrifice is probably up next... well after my Steam games and Dawn of War.)
Now with Wine, you have people dedicated to adding a Windows compatibility layer to Linux. Each individual game you might think of will have an entry in the database, with different levels of success. Wine itself runs in multiple modes, so if one mode doesn't work you can try others. Unfortunately at the moment, it isn't a panacea. Some games work, and some don't. What I'm hoping for in the future is that older games will work better in Wine than the latest Windows, especially games that have a small but loyal fanbase. Because with old games, officialdom doesn't care, we could lose generations of gaming art and they'd just shrug. It's sort of like throwing out all the old books, or trashing all the old movies... (there was a time when that was a problem, a lot of old Ernie Kovacs was recycled for it's silver content... )
Alternatives for a lot of games are also in the works, basically creating Linux native engines to run Windows content. I remember looking for one for Dark Engine games, with no luck, but that was a while back. Of course, maybe I should be following ReactOS's Progress instead, but right now it isn't nearly as desktop ready as Linux and I like Linux better than WinXP, given the choice. Of course, really old games from Infocom and LucasArts tend to have top notch native Linux support, so I have hope.
.
In other words, instead of working together as one big happy company, the two branches worked on backstabbing each other in a scary display of self destructive internal corporate politics.
All one needs to do is read of the train wreck that was the Neptune project or find out about the depressing story of the 3dFX lawsuit that came out of Sega of America designing "Black Belt" while Sega of Japan designed "Katana" (Dreamcast) which used a totally different graphics chip. Did you know that the money Sega lost from that lawsuit could have put DVD players in Dreamcasts!!!
It was a story written in Hell by Lucifer himself!
That reminds me, when is the next meeting of the Enlightened Ones, we're supposed to be working on that plan to use those enormous Sega monoliths (SegaCD Original, Sega Genesis, topped by 32X) to summon Lord Hastur.
Ia, Ia, Hasuturu phtagn!!!
That's because Sega had blast-processing , which everyone knows was superior.
Indeed, to a lady with a bit of a sleazy reputation for hanging out in pachinko parlors...
A Console Too Soon
I thought it was even funnier that his doctor shopping got a slap on the wrist, thus illustrating the way the law operates differently for the Haves and Have Mores than for the rest of us.
Well, no, that wasn't funny... that was more stomach turning than funny.
Limbaugh's success is almost entirely due to his sense of humor. He was basically a Colbert/Stewart of the Right, before Comedy Central was a political humor channel. Now, humor is somewhat subjective, and Limbaugh has a mean streak that comes out at odd times and spoils the party. His mask only slips occasionally though, and he can usually convince his loyal listeners that he was joking or that the monster they saw was just misunderstood. (for example, when he made fun of Michael J. Fox's Parkinsons Disease, or expressed glee at the suicide of Kurt Cobain.)
Even so, Limbaugh has a great sense of the absurd, and his selective reporting of the news has been great at finding things that are both idiotic and obviously "left-inspired." Now, he's dishonest to a degree, so he'll lie, exagerate or misreport when it suits him. Still, it's actually fairly easy if you go to the right places to find some absurdity related to environmentalism or feminism. Shooting fish in a barrel, it is. Frankly, he doesn't outright lie that often, because he doesn't have to. Clowns attach themselves to any political movement that has any power.
The new young Turks of Right Wing talk haven't been humor oriented, they've been revenge oriented. So people like O'Reilly and Hannity come across as hate-filled trolls without anything resembling a sense of humor. This is all to the good, because people with no sense of humor make perfect straight men victims for satirists.
Good things the Georgians are such soft, fluffy people. Why they're as innocent as babes...
Yeah, I saw some of those... things at work, it was (shudder) take your daughter to work day!
The avalanche has already started, it is too late for the pebbles to vote.
.
1. Other people besides me started using the Internet, and no matter how obscure a cartoon character was, somebody already took it. Also, Japanese cartoons and comic books became more popular, so formerly obscure characters I'd use suddenly became well know.
2. People would get annoyed at my weird Email addresses, "So, you're JustyUekiTylor@xyz.com . How do you spell that?"
3. It was too much information about me to be giving out, and of course, I'd end up giving these Email addresses to employers and potential employers (fortunately it was the dot.com boom, so I got hired anyway).
Nowadays, my Email address are (first intial)_(middle initial)_(last name)_(random number)@xyz.com , I can give them out to anyone, business or personal, and they don't tell anything about me except a little bit about my ethnic ancestry. I also have a few old cartoon character Email addresses hanging around, which I use for dubious Websites that I want to be (semi)anonymous on.
But not as weird as if he was developed by Homsar.
The Irish and Italians were not legal immigrants. We just didn't have our internal passport system perfected yet, so once they jumped the border they were able to disappear into the local population... as they are indeed still doing, but with less success because of our new fangled, and disgusting to anyone who loves liberty, internal passport system.
I'm not a liberal, I'm some form of radical.
So your appeals to liberal wimpism won't work on me, I'm not a Nancy Pelosi fan.
The reason why Bush's appeals to terrorism work is because terrorism is a real problem. His solutions to it are garbage, but the threat is real. So is racism.
I know racism been defined as an unword by the PC-right, but that's not going to stop me from identifying it when I see it. If you don't see the obvious racism in the GP post, then you are also a racist, and I don't expect to have a meaningful conversation with you.
Certainly, especially if the family is named Bush or Gates....
It's not an argument, just an observation. Besides, he wasn't talking about "illegals" if you read carefully. Not in the part that was relevant to the discussion at hand, anyway, which was referring to Indians who were working in India for American corporations. Not to Indian border jumpers who came here to steal American IT jobs. I haven't heard of any of those. I have heard of H1-B Visa's which are lobbied for by scary Mexicans like Bill Gates, of course every single person who has one of those is a legal immigrant.
Of course, the majority of his post was an attempt at a thread hijack to get people frothing at Mexicans, so you have that part right. Of course, I could go into a long off topic discussion about mal-investment in the housing industry and how greediness by rich, white developers causes them to hire unlicensed contractors rather than those who have the proper licenses and do quality work.... but that wouldn't really have much to do with IT, now would it.
Maybe it's El Guapo, in which case the GP is lucky, "El Guapo only kills men. He does not kill crying women!"
Meh, reading his rant it seems the entire purpose was racism, and relevance to the issue at hand was secondary.
Racism is just a Divide and Rule tactic anyway, keep the working class abitrarily divided and they won't see the guys who are really twisting the knife (who tend to be white and rich).
Anyone who falls for it is a fool who thinks he's could be part of the ruling class if not for those damn (insert-non-favored-race-here). Look, I hate to tell you this but you can't. You might be the right color, but you aren't from the right family, and that club is very exclusive.
However, go on being a puppet playing out the script your masters have written for you, don't try to assault their wealth and privilege (the first flows from the second).
American Civil Liberties Union
.
The truth is actual libertarians are an incredibly small number of people. Most of the people I've met working in IT would never think of voting for someone like Harry Browne... they're Republicans almost to a man/woman. (Which, to my mind, means they want the government to sell their childrens organs to zoos, for meat.)
If you aren't going to have a union, and you are working class (which means you live off of your labor and not your investments) you have to be your own union. Which means driving a beater or taking the bus, renting instead of owning, going without the latest XBox or iPhone. (Oh, and if you have a family, enforcing this austerity on them as well.) In other words, you need to have a savings account for the day your company gets aquired and your new boss tells you about pay cuts and mandatory unpaid overtime.
You need to be able to walk away... because corporate america is not a meritocracy and never will be. Anyone who believes otherwise has just drunk Reaganite Kool Aid. It's really dominated by cronyism, nepotism and all kinds of corruption. High level executives who fail miserably will often leave with golden parachutes to their next high level job. It's easy to find examples, Carly Fiorina and Bernie Stolar come to mind off the top of my head. Oh, and George W. Bush, possibly the best example in recent times.
Now, I don't practice what I preach... I used to but indulging my family did me in. However, I still think it's good advice.
.
Don't misunderstand, I think it is very macho of you to give your labor away for free. Being taken advantage of by your bosses is the best way to prove that you are an IT god, after all. I'm sure that since you've taken care of your company in this way, they'll take care of you. Even if shipping your job someplace else or just eliminating it makes financial sense, I'm sure you'll be fine. After all, after all the loyalty and dedication you've shown, they'd never do that to you, would they?
Incidentally, iPods/iPhones? Worthless consumer junk, give me the cash not the overpriced trinket.
For the story of one small, at least semi-indie console publisher, see below:
Working Designs
Working Designs did some things that irritated me (putting their own spin on stories rather than directly translating), but the below quote from the article sums up the fun of being "independent" and working for a console company:
Of course, the DRM that makes piracy much more difficult and that console makers enforce as one of their primary revenue streams, also makes it a requirement that developers have to pay protection money... er... "license fees" to the big three to develop for their crippled computers.
Can't afford to pay the protection money? Hmm... guess you can't afford effective DRM.
In other words, for indie developers, DRM is part of the problem. Oh, and since anything like effective DRM that actually prevents piracy (and on a PC platform, good luck!) will cost an arm and a leg, it makes it unlikely that your indie developer can afford it. Instead they'll try to do it on the cheap, and their game will shortly show up on bittorrent, to be downloaded mainly by pirates but also by people who actually bought the game but can't get it to work because of something stupid about the DRM.
Now, consoles are more profitable because the hurdles to console piracy are higher than for PC piracy. It can be done, but you might have to by specialized equiment and have a certain amount of technical savvy (or know someone who does) to bypass the security. With a computer, it'll just be a matter of running some program that the DRM developer didn't think of how to block and voila, your game can be easily pirated.
Of course, consoles are currently a strong studio system, expect interference with your game's content from all three of the big companies. And it will be alm
But in the US we have the Hydra: Hydra Game Station
Conservatism hasn't been about reducing government in my lifetime. What it is about is crony capitalism privatising the profits to be had at the public till while socializing the risks. This is why bankers get bailouts, but homeowners don't. The bankers were just as irresponsible in making bad loans as the homeowners were in accepting them. In fact, since the home owner can be any poorly educated individual but the people who run banks and approve loans are supposed to be qualified, they are actually more culpable. Want to get rich in America? Make sure you've got political pull.
Conservatives use the language of minarchism to justify slashing the programs they want to slash and lowering the taxes they want to lower. If, on the other hand, they want to justify some military boondoggle or increased police-statism, they fall back on playing on people's irrational fears. Money flows from our taxes into government coffers and flows out again to favored defense contractors and members of the finance industry. Government grows, it doesn't shrink.
Basically, conservatism is a complicated confidence scam. Government grows differently under conservatism than under socialism, but it still grows. The goal of conservatism is simply to make sure that the average person gets nothing useful for his or her tax dollar, but he or she will still pay through the nose, one way or the other.