Now *that's* a great game. The huge variety of config options at the beginning of the game make it almost infinitely replayable. It's not just puny stuff like +10% research -- the wizard customization really makes a difference in how the game plays. It's a shame the AI is so stupid, that diplomacy is pointless, and that there's no multiplayer support.
Actually, the new game has features meant to deal with this specifically. From the faq:
What are imperial focus points and how do they work?
Imperial focus points ( or IFP ) is a new and interesting addition to the Master of Orion series. It signify your most important resource, your time and focus. As a real emperor of an empire, you can only do so much to govern an empire in the 2 years a single turn represent. You will have a small amount of IFP, where every order you give will cost you one IFP.
Don't forget the Linux-based vaporware, in the form of the Indrema console. I don't know how well they'll do at getting actual games made for their platform, but the promise of tivo-like features has me intrigued.
AFS isn't trivial to set up and maintain. It's very cool, though. For those interested, check out OpenAFS, based on an open source fork of the IBM/Transarc codebase, and Arla, a completely from scratch open source implementation.
The Arla client works very well, but I don't think the server is considered stable. I'm not sure about the server side of OpenAFS either.
Not in the same sense. Slashdot is *based* on the idea of providing links to stories from outside sources. In contrast, the "walled garden" sites in question try to provide everything internally, with as few external links as possible.
Hotbot = Lycos. Which includes Wired News and a bunch of other medium-big name sites. And a market cap of eight and a half billion. So probably not them.
What you say is true for most releases within a version of a kernel (2.2.16 -> 2.2.17, for example), but isn't necessarly completely accurate when moving from 2.2 to 2.4. For example, the mod-utils and util-linux packages (and probably several others) that come with Red Hat 6.2 aren't quite up to the revision level wanted by the kernel. This is what Red Hat means when they say that RH 7 is their first 2.4-ready distro -- it's not all marketing hype.
I have to agree -- Linux really is too gigantic. Why, I've had to start formatting my router floppy disks as 1.7MB just to fit everyhing I want on there. I've even been considering getting a 4MB compact flash card or maybe even an old IDE hard drive.
If you use their "secret" language, I bet it would be somewhere between assembler and C programmer.
Not even. Writing functions for a basic universal turing machine, which is what they seem to imply, would be extremely tedious -- way more so than writing in ASM (or even x86 machine code).
Oh my. To answer myself a bit about the "magic" part: I just read the white paper on "Turing machines". It seems that the people there read a (non-technical) biography of Turing and thought it was really cool. They seem to totally miss the concept that modern computer hardware essentially implements a universal Turing machine, and have instead decided that the ideal thing to do is re-implement an emulated universal Turing machine in software. I don't think I need to go on any more about how silly that is....
Okay maybe a little bit: have you ever designed a Turing machine from scratch to do something as simple as multiply two numbers? It's incredibly tedious. There's a reason we invented more complicated instruction sets, and then higher-level languages.
Although they claim "full Java capabilities", it's unclear exactly what exactly they've implemented. What of the standard Java class libraries have they implemented? (The white paper on their web site dismisses graphics, for example.)
The press release also makes some extremely dubious claims about "a novel architectural approach that allows the creation of extremely compact software, often many times smaller than that built using traditional coding techniques." Uh-huh. It's magic!
The 180sw web site says that this is the first 8-bit Java VM. That's definitely not true -- TinyVM for Lego Mindstorms has been around for quite a long time, and I doubt that's even the first. This "GENEVA" thing may be more complete, but that's a different issue.
Actually, it's the other way around. The old probes were made back when NASA had a lot of money and popular backing. They put a lot of work into getting them exactly right, no matter the cost.
The new-era NASA doesn't have that luxury. The new plan is to make a lot of (relatively-speaking) cheap stuff and send it up with fingers crossed. Even if half of it fails, it's *still* a bargain.
As long as phones get DNS, that's a great idea. Otherwise, I don't really relish the idea of remebering 128-bit addresses. (10-digit is only what, 34 bits?)
Like I said, you're welcome to disagree with me. I find it ugly and cluttered. And while I'm able to cope with MDI, I sure wouldn't want to try and explain the concept to my grandma. (In fact, I have tried, with very limited success. It's just not intuitive. You can disagree with that too, if you want -- that's my point.)
This will work for a while, but it gets messy after several years. Knowledgeable, professional admins are harder to come by than they should be, but even if you manage to only get that sort, after four or five different admins, things still get crufty. Using tools to help keep things straight isn't a sign of weakness.
Hmmm. This sure sounds like a troll, but I'll bite.
Some of us just want software that doesn't suck. Open source is overall a superior method of getting there, but often closed methods produce pretty good stuff too. If a closed-source program sucks less than the alternatives, I don't have a moral problem with using it. I'll support the development of better open-source choices, but I won't feel bad about using something else until they're ready -- forever, if that's the way it turns out. And I certainly won't bash someone else for their choice.
Games are a good example of something that seems to work very well with a closed-source develpment process. I've purchased several games from Loki, and I'm really happy with them. Loki does a great job of supporting good and useful open-source game-infrastructure projects, and that makes me happy. I don't see a reason to go demanding the source to Sim City.
On the browser front, for whatever its worth, I still think Opera sucks -- fast and light is nice, but there's no attention to good interface design. So, for whatever its flaws, I'm posting this from a copy of Mozilla I built from CVS. I'm glad I have this option, but if you like Opera better, fine with me.
tarballs are simple for one machine with one admin. However, when you've got a bunch of machine s that've been maintained by multiple people for years, you start to appreciate package managers really quickly.
Did you read the article at all? This doesn't have anything to do with getting rid of RPM. It's a tool that exists on top of the package mananger and deals with things (dependency resolution, finding mirrors) that the package manger itself doesn't.
Furthermore, RPM is a *good* packaging format. If you want to bash it, give some examples of problems rather than just FUD.
Slashdot Mirror
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that the status of a Linux version is "unknown at this time". Send them e-mail; let 'em know.
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Actually, the new game has features meant to deal with this specifically. From the faq:
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The Arla client works very well, but I don't think the server is considered stable. I'm not sure about the server side of OpenAFS either.
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Not even. Writing functions for a basic universal turing machine, which is what they seem to imply, would be extremely tedious -- way more so than writing in ASM (or even x86 machine code).
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Okay maybe a little bit: have you ever designed a Turing machine from scratch to do something as simple as multiply two numbers? It's incredibly tedious. There's a reason we invented more complicated instruction sets, and then higher-level languages.
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The press release also makes some extremely dubious claims about "a novel architectural approach that allows the creation of extremely compact software, often many times smaller than that built using traditional coding techniques." Uh-huh. It's magic!
The 180sw web site says that this is the first 8-bit Java VM. That's definitely not true -- TinyVM for Lego Mindstorms has been around for quite a long time, and I doubt that's even the first. This "GENEVA" thing may be more complete, but that's a different issue.
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The new-era NASA doesn't have that luxury. The new plan is to make a lot of (relatively-speaking) cheap stuff and send it up with fingers crossed. Even if half of it fails, it's *still* a bargain.
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Some of us just want software that doesn't suck. Open source is overall a superior method of getting there, but often closed methods produce pretty good stuff too. If a closed-source program sucks less than the alternatives, I don't have a moral problem with using it. I'll support the development of better open-source choices, but I won't feel bad about using something else until they're ready -- forever, if that's the way it turns out. And I certainly won't bash someone else for their choice.
Games are a good example of something that seems to work very well with a closed-source develpment process. I've purchased several games from Loki, and I'm really happy with them. Loki does a great job of supporting good and useful open-source game-infrastructure projects, and that makes me happy. I don't see a reason to go demanding the source to Sim City.
On the browser front, for whatever its worth, I still think Opera sucks -- fast and light is nice, but there's no attention to good interface design. So, for whatever its flaws, I'm posting this from a copy of Mozilla I built from CVS. I'm glad I have this option, but if you like Opera better, fine with me.
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In your ~/.Xdefaults:
Netscape*toolBar.search.isEnabled: false
Netscape*toolBar.destinations.isEnabled: false
Netscape*toolBar.myshopping.isEnabled: false
Netscape*toolBar.viewSecurity.isEnabled: false
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Furthermore, RPM is a *good* packaging format. If you want to bash it, give some examples of problems rather than just FUD.
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