Although getting any new game ported to Linux like this (e.g. a free-of-charge Linux 'player' for a product you can buy off the shelf) is a Good Thing, this isn't going to be everybody's cup of tea. At least these are my impressions after a few hours playing with the demo.
3D it might be, but the game seems to have no room for mistakes the way most 3D runabouts do. e.g. you wander into a new location, there's a bloke with a shotgun who blasts you once, you die. Realistic maybe, but not much fun to keep reloading + trying to do it right the next time. The same realism is irritatingly selective: you might eventually knock down the bloke with the shotgun, but you can't pick up the feckin' shotgun afterwards, despite the fact that he's lying on the ground still clutching it!
It does have moments of great atmosphere, a decent story, but it's just way too hard IMVHO. It'll sell, I'm sure, and I think it's good to push the 3D runabout genre in whatever direction. But if you like the part about forming a gang, Requiem has that too (and way more pyrotechnics, but still manages a weak central character without ruining it), or if you just like the idea of a stealthier game, Thief does that very well (even if the guards are a bit dim).
But that's just me. Most people will disagree with my taste in games but hurrah generally for more well-marketed Linux games:-)
I'm a Classics student and find my Series 5 really helpful for writing essays in libraries where I can work far more easily than in my room (which has far too many distractions in it:-) ). You also don't irritate everyone else with a whirring hard drive. Other than that, it gets used as an overblown address book and something on which to type little things that occur to me on long train journeys. Okay, so I certainly don't/need/ one but they are truly beautiful little things.
I'm deeply suspicious of a writer's cluefulness when they describe an open standard like MP3 'dying'. As it stands, MP3 is being used by hoardes of geeks worldwide to wire up their own jukeboxes, and they don't really care whether anyone is making any money out of it. The technology is there, doing a job and doing it well. Just because a particular entrepreneur decides he can't do such-and-such with it because of its file size / compression time / whatever else doesn't mean that it's DEAD. It just means that one particular person can't find a way of making money from it! As hard drive space + fast processors get cheaper, the same technology is going to be more feasible for more applications, commercial or otherwise; but until a better audio compression standard comes along, MP3 is still blaring out of my hi-fi...
(and much the same argument goes for using Linux really; it might not be any use to a particular person right now, but the same person coming back in a year might find the situation a little different...)
mp3.com has had a list of this sort of technology up for ages. I'm building one myself (who isn't?:) ), but I'm buggered if I'm spending that much on an LCD display. There must be a cheaper way of doing it that involves too much hardware spannering.
Oh please...can slashdot get any more retarded
on
"Hackers" are Dumb
·
· Score: 1
Hurrah for that... I wrote to Eric Raymond a few days ago about the definition of 'Hacker' in the his Jargon guide, in particular about the way he called the 'cracker' meaning of the word 'deprecated'. I wrote to tell him that a good lexicon writes its definitions on the basis of examples of a word's usage, and so calling a word 'deprecated' amounted to deliberate blindness and linguistic facism. It's funny how advocates of 'free' software can be so completely facistic about everything else:-)
I think there was some (admittedly hazy) licensing of the CDDB protocol which says you agree that any data you submit becomes property of the CDDB people / person. Surely somebody must have smelt a rat at this stage if they did make their commercial intentions clear earlier?
Still, I think whatever their intentions they've screwed up their PR something chronic, and I hope they get rewarded with a better, faster, free protocol and network of enthusiast-run CDDB-alike servers:-)
Well iD have always done this, haven't they? You get the player + demo levels for free (for whatever platform) and pay for all the commercial options and levels. I don't think this is going to be as huge an experiment as everyone thinks; the only difference is that we'll see a Linux binary in a pretty box on the shelves of HMV. Good on them, really:)
Here in the UK, all our NatWest cash machines (the bank I'm with) use NT and I've seen a couple of blue screens. I'm pretty sure the cash register at Oddbin's (grog shop) was using NT too .
Slashdot Mirror
Although getting any new game ported to Linux like this (e.g. a free-of-charge Linux 'player' for a product you can buy off the shelf) is a Good Thing, this isn't going to be everybody's cup of tea. At least these are my impressions after a few hours playing with the demo.
:-)
3D it might be, but the game seems to have no room for mistakes the way most 3D runabouts do. e.g. you wander into a new location, there's a bloke with a shotgun who blasts you once, you die. Realistic maybe, but not much fun to keep reloading + trying to do it right the next time. The same realism is irritatingly selective: you might eventually knock down the bloke with the shotgun, but you can't pick up the feckin' shotgun afterwards, despite the fact that he's lying on the ground still clutching it!
It does have moments of great atmosphere, a decent story, but it's just way too hard IMVHO. It'll sell, I'm sure, and I think it's good to push the 3D runabout genre in whatever direction. But if you like the part about forming a gang, Requiem has that too (and way more pyrotechnics, but still manages a weak central character without ruining it), or if you just like the idea of a stealthier game, Thief does that very well (even if the guards are a bit dim).
But that's just me. Most people will disagree with my taste in games but hurrah generally for more well-marketed Linux games
Don't you have to be a bit of a sicko to have gotten attached to x86 machine code? :-) Maybe I've just been programming ARMs for too long...
--
Matthew
Fuck off!! We're the People's Front of Judea; that's the Judean People's Front, sitting over there. Splitter!
etc.
etc.
etc.
I'm a Classics student and find my Series 5 really helpful for writing essays in libraries where I can work far more easily than in my room (which has far too many distractions in it :-) ). You also don't irritate everyone else with a whirring hard drive. Other than that, it gets used as an overblown address book and something on which to type little things that occur to me on long train journeys. Okay, so I certainly don't /need/ one but they are truly beautiful little things.
I'm deeply suspicious of a writer's cluefulness when they describe an open standard like MP3 'dying'. As it stands, MP3 is being used by hoardes of geeks worldwide to wire up their own jukeboxes, and they don't really care whether anyone is making any money out of it. The technology is there, doing a job and doing it well. Just because a particular entrepreneur decides he can't do such-and-such with it because of its file size / compression time / whatever else doesn't mean that it's DEAD. It just means that one particular person can't find a way of making money from it! As hard drive space + fast processors get cheaper, the same technology is going to be more feasible for more applications, commercial or otherwise; but until a better audio compression standard comes along, MP3 is still blaring out of my hi-fi...
(and much the same argument goes for using Linux really; it might not be any use to a particular person right now, but the same person coming back in a year might find the situation a little different...)
mp3.com has had a list of this sort of technology up for ages. I'm building one myself (who isn't? :) ), but I'm buggered if I'm spending that much on an LCD display. There must be a cheaper way of doing it that involves too much hardware spannering.
Hurrah for that... I wrote to Eric Raymond a few days ago about the definition of 'Hacker' in the his Jargon guide, in particular about the way he called the 'cracker' meaning of the word 'deprecated'. I wrote to tell him that a good lexicon writes its definitions on the basis of examples of a word's usage, and so calling a word 'deprecated' amounted to deliberate blindness and linguistic facism. It's funny how advocates of 'free' software can be so completely facistic about everything else :-)
I think there was some (admittedly hazy) licensing of the CDDB protocol which says you agree that any data you submit becomes property of the CDDB people / person. Surely somebody must have smelt a rat at this stage if they did make their commercial intentions clear earlier?
:-)
Still, I think whatever their intentions they've screwed up their PR something chronic, and I hope they get rewarded with a better, faster, free protocol and network of enthusiast-run CDDB-alike servers
Well iD have always done this, haven't they? You get the player + demo levels for free (for whatever platform) and pay for all the commercial options and levels. I don't think this is going to be as huge an experiment as everyone thinks; the only difference is that we'll see a Linux binary in a pretty box on the shelves of HMV. Good on them, really :)
Here in the UK, all our NatWest cash machines (the bank I'm with) use NT
and I've seen a couple of blue screens. I'm pretty sure the cash
register at Oddbin's (grog shop) was using NT too .