is not _cool_ anymore. You are a mindless FPS freak, go away.
I'm supposed to care about some AC's opinion who doesn't even know that Id Software can be spelled with either a capital or lower-case 'I'? Uh, doubt it. Clearly your gaming credentials are suspect.
It's interesting that Linux is being used, but that's not what makes it cheap. What makes it cheap is the Intel hardware. Even if they had used SCO Unix, it would have been far cheaper than that equivalent SGI platform.
And just to be controversial [:)], I'll say that you really have to give the credit to both Microsoft and Intel. They are really the ones who brought affordable computing to the masses, and through that economy of scale we have the incredibly cheap power that we have. [God knows Apple didn't bring cheap computers to the masses, despite their "computer for the rest of us" claims. Their tagline should have been "the computer for the arrogant elite"]
Right now, Linux has a killer stability proposition, but it doesn't yet have the apps the mainstream users want...
It had a killer stability proposition. Win2k Professional is comparably stable to Linux. Yes, you can find horror stories, just like you find Linux horror stories, but on the whole it works pretty damn well.
Which begs the question, why should anyone switch even if Linux did have comparable apps? Price, perhaps? Still, you have to think that Windows is always going to have a usability advantages, simply because usability is such a low priority to the hacker community compared to "neat hacks" (which are irrelevent or even confusing to the normal user).
What will make a desktop Linux? Interface, interface, interface.
Wrong! There seems to be a lot of this thinking in the Linux community -- that the only reason Windows is popular is because of a pretty interface (The "shiny things" theory).
Now, an easy-to-use interface is important, but what is far more important is APPLICATIONS. I simply don't understand why people don't get this. Work is not done with desktop shells, it's done with applications.
Why did Win 3.1 kick everyone's butt despite having a horrible interface compared to the Mac or OS/2? Because it had all the applications that everyone wanted.
There still is not one Linux end-user application that is better than the equivalent under Windows. Not one. And many are greatly inferior. [OT: I often wonder if this is the grand example of where cathedral-bazaar development has utterly failed. You would think there would be one good example of an end-user app that is clearly better, but there just isn't one.]
For Linux to have any chance of gaining a foothold in the "normal" world, it not only has to have equivalent apps, it has to have better apps by a long margin. People are just not going to switch for no reason.
It means you have to take responsibility YOURSELF for ensuring that you stay consistant with whatever setup you want.
Is that supposed to be an advantage? What you're saying is that I'm supposed to audit millions of lines of code if I want upgrade to a newer version of RedHat or pick-your-distro.
I don't think it's reasonable to blame the users when a Linux package is released with major problems, particularly major security problems (which, unfortunately, Linux is riddled with).
I've brought this up lightly at the Dept. of Ed. and people didn't care.
People probably don't care because you're totally wrong. NT out of the box is not POSIX compliant, but there are POSIX compatibility packages that make it compliant if that is a requirement.
Of course, that other quoted stuff is just nonsense.
You would be a lot better thinker if you applied some objectivity, rather than just spewing anti-Microsoft FUD*.
*Stupid disclaimer to head off foolish replies: No, Microsoft is not a perfect company, and Win* is not a perfect product. But neither is as bad as the typical emotional Slashdotter believes.
I guess this puts to rest these rumors of the "magic" Java implementation that was supposed to be multiple factors faster than anything around. It's faster than IE in some cases, but on balance, IE kicks its butt.
Now could someone explain to me why anyone would use Java as a primary development language rather than where it's useful -- an embedded controller language?
Caveat: If we had native-language compilers (NOT compilers that operate on the byte codes), we might have some reasonable Java speed. Unfortunately, no one seems to want to remove the JVM millstone around the neck of Java-the-language -- and at the same time remove the brain damage from the language (such as the lack of an unsigned type, my personal pet peeve).
I guess there aren't any dearth of people who are willing to be called Dummies.
I used to think that too, until I saw one titled "Taxes For Dummies". I came this close to picking up that bad boy.:) The only reason I didn't is that I'd already made the decision a long time ago to let my CPA handle my taxes. It's well worth the money to not have to pollute my mind with all the complexities, particularly when you mix together personal, business personal, and corporate taxes.
However, it gave me a new appreciation for books "for the rest of us" when faced with a subject that is 1) horrendously complex, and 2) a subject that I simply don't care enough about to become competent at it.
FUD is when you spread misrepresentations to cast doubt on a competing product. In general I don't think this is widely done by the Linux community.
That's a joke, right? Slashdot is the home of anti-Microsoft FUD. Not that MS is a perfect company, or Windows is a perfect product, but if you listened to many Slashdotters, you'd think that it was impossible to get ANY work done because of the constant crashes, never mind that 50-100 million people use it every day.
You get the Linux "I know what my friends and I use therefore the rest of the world follows along" blindness award for 2000!
The number of Linux desktop users is not even a micro-blip on the radar, primarily because there are no desktop apps available for Linux that are comparable to Windows apps. You have to intentionally choose to use inferior software in order to choose Linux on the desktop.
Don't fool yourself. I like Linux for servers (although, let's face it -- it's the poorest version of Unix out there), but you have to be the hardest of the hard core to live with Linux and Linux apps on the desktop full time.
And that license thing (Slashdot raving, drooling stories notwithstanding) does not affect the numbers to any significant degree.
Code run through dynamo runs faster than code natively optimized.
Well, I'll believe it when I see it. This has been claimed over and over for the past 30 years. The argument normally goes like, "compilers will inevitably create code that is better than human optimized code because whatever trick the human used we can build into the compiler!" -- which is a great theory, but we have this little obstacle called the "strong AI problem". Code optimization is a more complex version of the travelling salesman problem. Add to that the problem that compilers don't have enough contextual knowledge for really agressive optimization, and I take a very "show me" attitude toward this whole subject.
"This is one thing people don't understand, and they keep on saying, "The new Amiga provides portable binaries. Portable binaries are slow." Now, in the past they've been slow because portable binaries have always been interpreted. But what happens with Tao's Intent is that they are dynamically translated into actual native machine code. It only has to be translated from VP code to native code once.
Er, correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe this is popularly referred to as "Just In Time Compilation". Dude, it's been done, and yes, it's still slow. There is no such thing as a magic compiler. Hand-tuned assembly is faster than compiled source code, and compiled source code is faster than translated machine code. This shouldn't be that surprising. At each lower level, you have more context in which to make optimizations. Automatic translation of machine code has almost no high-level context.
See also the x86 emulators on the Mac. They use the same principles. They are slow.
These are the kind of things that make me think this is all smoke and mirrors.
Doesn't give any milk because the Milk application is "still being worked on". But they promise to have a clone of WinMilk Real Soon Now. But at least it has transparent skin and you can watch the organs do their thing.
OS/2
Gave lots of milk, but incompatible with everyone's digestion.
MacOS
Gives milk colored water, but the advocates try and convince you that it's really better that way.
BeOS
A cow that simultaneously whirls its ears, tap dances, plays Beethoven's ninth symphony when it passes gas, and fans you with its tail to distract you from the fact that it doesn't have a Milk app either.
NT
A cow that can give you options for 10 flavors of milk, but might fall over dead any minute.
Note that it was the game I was taking issue with, not the animation. Just like you can have a movie with great special effects, but still be a bad movie.
When it first came out, there must have been 20 people standing around the thing. In fact, that ws the first game I remeber to have an additional monitor on top of the box so more peeps could see it.
Oh, I remember that well. That's what convinced my friends to put money into buying one ("Look at all these people! How can we lose?"). The trouble was that the novelty wore off real fast. What did it take, like, a month for the fad to be dead as a doornail? There's no question that the animations were really well done, but judged as a game, it stunk.:)
By the time my friends actually got the machine in their hands and in an pizza place (they split with the owner 50/50 I believe), it made a ridiculously small amount of money, like $100 or something. It was a complete disaster.
By the way, does anyone know where you can find all the animations for Dragon's Lair? You would think someone would have uploaded it to the web somewhere. It would be interesting to see all the various sequences.
OK, we all know the best game of all time was Robotron 2084. (heh).
But my vote for the worst game of all time, that combines the most money spent with the worst game experience has to be Dragon's Lair. All that expensive animation, a video disk player (that wasn't cheap back then), etc. Too bad the gameplay stunk. It was total no-skill memorization.
To those who never played it, Dragon's Lair was developed by a former disney animator (I believe). You played as a midieval character who trys to rescue a maiden. It would play a certain video animation, and at a critical point you had to make a choice using the joystick. For example, you might hit a fork where you had to go over a drawbridge, or jump in the water or something. The problem was that there was little or no hint what the right answer was. You had to guess, and then remember it for next time (a bad guess used up a life, and you got three lives). After choosing, it would play a video of the outcome of your choice, either moving on or dying in some amusing way. It was novel, but got boring pretty fast.
A great lesson in how not to design a video game. Ironically, it was so new and "innovative" at the time that I had some friends who invested money in buying one. They lost big $$$ on it. I think it's still in someone's garage.
Jesus F. Christ! It's not going to go away no matter what happens! Why don't people figure out how to DEAL WITH IT instead of whining about morality and law? God, this is getting annoying.
Murder is not going to go away no matter what happens! Why don't people figure out how to DEAL WITH IT instead of whining about morality and law? God, this is getting annoying. [indeed]
But you cannot shut down all pizza parlors because they can be used for money laundering.
And Napster wouldn't be shut down if they only trafficked in legally licensed music. The point is that just because a service might engage in both legal and illegal activity, doesn't make the illegal activity OK.
Perhaps you meant to construct an argument instead of introducing a logical fallacy.
Perhaps you meant to think about what I said instead of stating a non sequitur.
Regardless of Napster's motivations for creating Napster, the service itself is not illegal. There are legitimate purposes for Napster, therefore Napster should win.
Regardless of The Mafia's motivations for creating the pizza parlor, the pizza itself is not illegal. There are legitimate purposes for pizza, therefore The Mafia should win.
Slashdot Mirror
(not Id you idiot)
If Carmack can spell it with a capital 'I', then so can I.
is not _cool_ anymore. You are a mindless FPS freak, go away.
I'm supposed to care about some AC's opinion who doesn't even know that Id Software can be spelled with either a capital or lower-case 'I'? Uh, doubt it. Clearly your gaming credentials are suspect.
--
Do you ever skip the current latest/greatest because you know what's around the corner?
For some odd reason, I find my upgrades are synchronized to the release schedule of Id Software. :)
--
It's interesting that Linux is being used, but that's not what makes it cheap. What makes it cheap is the Intel hardware. Even if they had used SCO Unix, it would have been far cheaper than that equivalent SGI platform.
And just to be controversial [:)], I'll say that you really have to give the credit to both Microsoft and Intel. They are really the ones who brought affordable computing to the masses, and through that economy of scale we have the incredibly cheap power that we have. [God knows Apple didn't bring cheap computers to the masses, despite their "computer for the rest of us" claims. Their tagline should have been "the computer for the arrogant elite"]
--
Right now, Linux has a killer stability proposition, but it doesn't yet have the apps the mainstream users want...
It had a killer stability proposition. Win2k Professional is comparably stable to Linux. Yes, you can find horror stories, just like you find Linux horror stories, but on the whole it works pretty damn well.
Which begs the question, why should anyone switch even if Linux did have comparable apps? Price, perhaps? Still, you have to think that Windows is always going to have a usability advantages, simply because usability is such a low priority to the hacker community compared to "neat hacks" (which are irrelevent or even confusing to the normal user).
--
What will make a desktop Linux? Interface, interface, interface.
Wrong! There seems to be a lot of this thinking in the Linux community -- that the only reason Windows is popular is because of a pretty interface (The "shiny things" theory).
Now, an easy-to-use interface is important, but what is far more important is APPLICATIONS. I simply don't understand why people don't get this. Work is not done with desktop shells, it's done with applications.
Why did Win 3.1 kick everyone's butt despite having a horrible interface compared to the Mac or OS/2? Because it had all the applications that everyone wanted.
There still is not one Linux end-user application that is better than the equivalent under Windows. Not one. And many are greatly inferior. [OT: I often wonder if this is the grand example of where cathedral-bazaar development has utterly failed. You would think there would be one good example of an end-user app that is clearly better, but there just isn't one.]
For Linux to have any chance of gaining a foothold in the "normal" world, it not only has to have equivalent apps, it has to have better apps by a long margin. People are just not going to switch for no reason.
--
It means you have to take responsibility YOURSELF for ensuring that you stay consistant with whatever setup you want.
Is that supposed to be an advantage? What you're saying is that I'm supposed to audit millions of lines of code if I want upgrade to a newer version of RedHat or pick-your-distro.
I don't think it's reasonable to blame the users when a Linux package is released with major problems, particularly major security problems (which, unfortunately, Linux is riddled with).
--
I've brought this up lightly at the Dept. of Ed. and people didn't care.
People probably don't care because you're totally wrong. NT out of the box is not POSIX compliant, but there are POSIX compatibility packages that make it compliant if that is a requirement.
Of course, that other quoted stuff is just nonsense.
You would be a lot better thinker if you applied some objectivity, rather than just spewing anti-Microsoft FUD*.
*Stupid disclaimer to head off foolish replies: No, Microsoft is not a perfect company, and Win* is not a perfect product. But neither is as bad as the typical emotional Slashdotter believes.
--
I guess this puts to rest these rumors of the "magic" Java implementation that was supposed to be multiple factors faster than anything around. It's faster than IE in some cases, but on balance, IE kicks its butt.
Now could someone explain to me why anyone would use Java as a primary development language rather than where it's useful -- an embedded controller language?
Caveat: If we had native-language compilers (NOT compilers that operate on the byte codes), we might have some reasonable Java speed. Unfortunately, no one seems to want to remove the JVM millstone around the neck of Java-the-language -- and at the same time remove the brain damage from the language (such as the lack of an unsigned type, my personal pet peeve).
--
I guess there aren't any dearth of people who are willing to be called Dummies.
I used to think that too, until I saw one titled "Taxes For Dummies". I came this close to picking up that bad boy. :) The only reason I didn't is that I'd already made the decision a long time ago to let my CPA handle my taxes. It's well worth the money to not have to pollute my mind with all the complexities, particularly when you mix together personal, business personal, and corporate taxes.
However, it gave me a new appreciation for books "for the rest of us" when faced with a subject that is 1) horrendously complex, and 2) a subject that I simply don't care enough about to become competent at it.
--
FUD is when you spread misrepresentations to cast doubt on a competing product. In general I don't think this is widely done by the Linux community.
That's a joke, right? Slashdot is the home of anti-Microsoft FUD. Not that MS is a perfect company, or Windows is a perfect product, but if you listened to many Slashdotters, you'd think that it was impossible to get ANY work done because of the constant crashes, never mind that 50-100 million people use it every day.
--
You get the Linux "I know what my friends and I use therefore the rest of the world follows along" blindness award for 2000!
The number of Linux desktop users is not even a micro-blip on the radar, primarily because there are no desktop apps available for Linux that are comparable to Windows apps. You have to intentionally choose to use inferior software in order to choose Linux on the desktop.
Don't fool yourself. I like Linux for servers (although, let's face it -- it's the poorest version of Unix out there), but you have to be the hardest of the hard core to live with Linux and Linux apps on the desktop full time.
And that license thing (Slashdot raving, drooling stories notwithstanding) does not affect the numbers to any significant degree.
--
Did Jackson really say that? If so, regardless of the merits of the case, it proves he was an idiot who had no clue what he was judging.
--
Code run through dynamo runs faster than code natively optimized.
Well, I'll believe it when I see it. This has been claimed over and over for the past 30 years. The argument normally goes like, "compilers will inevitably create code that is better than human optimized code because whatever trick the human used we can build into the compiler!" -- which is a great theory, but we have this little obstacle called the "strong AI problem". Code optimization is a more complex version of the travelling salesman problem. Add to that the problem that compilers don't have enough contextual knowledge for really agressive optimization, and I take a very "show me" attitude toward this whole subject.
--
"This is one thing people don't understand, and they keep on saying, "The new Amiga provides portable binaries. Portable binaries are slow." Now, in the past they've been slow because portable binaries have always been interpreted. But what happens with Tao's Intent is that they are dynamically translated into actual native machine code. It only has to be translated from VP code to native code once.
Er, correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe this is popularly referred to as "Just In Time Compilation". Dude, it's been done, and yes, it's still slow. There is no such thing as a magic compiler. Hand-tuned assembly is faster than compiled source code, and compiled source code is faster than translated machine code. This shouldn't be that surprising. At each lower level, you have more context in which to make optimizations. Automatic translation of machine code has almost no high-level context.
See also the x86 emulators on the Mac. They use the same principles. They are slow.
These are the kind of things that make me think this is all smoke and mirrors.
--
Linux
Doesn't give any milk because the Milk application is "still being worked on". But they promise to have a clone of WinMilk Real Soon Now. But at least it has transparent skin and you can watch the organs do their thing.
OS/2
Gave lots of milk, but incompatible with everyone's digestion.
MacOS
Gives milk colored water, but the advocates try and convince you that it's really better that way.
BeOS
A cow that simultaneously whirls its ears, tap dances, plays Beethoven's ninth symphony when it passes gas, and fans you with its tail to distract you from the fact that it doesn't have a Milk app either.
NT
A cow that can give you options for 10 flavors of milk, but might fall over dead any minute.
--
Note that it was the game I was taking issue with, not the animation. Just like you can have a movie with great special effects, but still be a bad movie.
--
When it first came out, there must have been 20 people standing around the thing. In fact, that ws the first game I remeber to have an additional monitor on top of the box so more peeps could see it.
Oh, I remember that well. That's what convinced my friends to put money into buying one ("Look at all these people! How can we lose?"). The trouble was that the novelty wore off real fast. What did it take, like, a month for the fad to be dead as a doornail? There's no question that the animations were really well done, but judged as a game, it stunk. :)
By the time my friends actually got the machine in their hands and in an pizza place (they split with the owner 50/50 I believe), it made a ridiculously small amount of money, like $100 or something. It was a complete disaster.
--
Apparently, they have Released Dragon's Lair as a DVD game. It would probably be worth picking it up just for the animations.
--
By the way, does anyone know where you can find all the animations for Dragon's Lair? You would think someone would have uploaded it to the web somewhere. It would be interesting to see all the various sequences.
--
OK, we all know the best game of all time was Robotron 2084. (heh).
But my vote for the worst game of all time, that combines the most money spent with the worst game experience has to be Dragon's Lair. All that expensive animation, a video disk player (that wasn't cheap back then), etc. Too bad the gameplay stunk. It was total no-skill memorization.
To those who never played it, Dragon's Lair was developed by a former disney animator (I believe). You played as a midieval character who trys to rescue a maiden. It would play a certain video animation, and at a critical point you had to make a choice using the joystick. For example, you might hit a fork where you had to go over a drawbridge, or jump in the water or something. The problem was that there was little or no hint what the right answer was. You had to guess, and then remember it for next time (a bad guess used up a life, and you got three lives). After choosing, it would play a video of the outcome of your choice, either moving on or dying in some amusing way. It was novel, but got boring pretty fast.
A great lesson in how not to design a video game. Ironically, it was so new and "innovative" at the time that I had some friends who invested money in buying one. They lost big $$$ on it. I think it's still in someone's garage.
--
Jesus F. Christ! It's not going to go away no matter what happens! Why don't people figure out how to DEAL WITH IT instead of whining about morality and law? God, this is getting annoying.
Murder is not going to go away no matter what happens! Why don't people figure out how to DEAL WITH IT instead of whining about morality and law? God, this is getting annoying. [indeed]
--
If you drive the getaway car, you're still responsible for the crime even though you didn't rob the bank.
"But Your Honor, I was just driving a car -- a perfectly legal activity! I had nothing to do with my passengers who just happened to rob a bank!
--
But you cannot shut down all pizza parlors because they can be used for money laundering.
And Napster wouldn't be shut down if they only trafficked in legally licensed music. The point is that just because a service might engage in both legal and illegal activity, doesn't make the illegal activity OK.
Perhaps you meant to construct an argument instead of introducing a logical fallacy.
Perhaps you meant to think about what I said instead of stating a non sequitur.
--
Regardless of Napster's motivations for creating Napster, the service itself is not illegal. There are legitimate purposes for Napster, therefore Napster should win.
Regardless of The Mafia's motivations for creating the pizza parlor, the pizza itself is not illegal. There are legitimate purposes for pizza, therefore The Mafia should win.
Guess what? Money laundering is still illegal.
--
In fact, I like that analogy so much, I think I'll make it my new sig. :)
--