Just wait for day when a web spider gets smart enough to correlate blog user IDs to real names. I sure hope I never get my real name correlated against Anonymous Coward - I'd never get a smart date again!
My guess is that some toadie came up with the idea as a way of ingratiating itself with the CEO. I imagine most CEOs can serve themselves in more meaningful ways!
the company actually spends money on thousands of these promotional pieces of junk, money that could have instead been spent on the bottom line, or at least on something that isn't tossed, ignored, and useless.
someone in the company gets paid to come up with the idea of the bobble-head doll, and other pieces of promotional junk that your typical employee ignores
I mean hey, a gift that shows that people in the company are thinking of you is nice, but these meaningless items reek of the "you are a number" philosophy. It seems like the bigger a company gets, the more likely that it is to generate this kind of landfill.
My WAG is that they may have been expecting Miles and BINK, the multiplatform (Win, Mac, various consoles) SDKs they mentioned, to be ported to Linux. When NWN got started, Loki was all the rage, as was Linux in general. So, if my theory's right, the company that does Miles and BINK dropped their Linux development when it became clear that it wasn't going to make them any real money anytime soon, and the NWN team got left with a Linux port but no implementation of some libraries that they're heavily invested in.
Again, this is just a WAG, based on the idea that the NWN guys clearly planned to make a simultaneous Linux, Mac, and PC release. If you start with the assumption that they had a realistic plan to get there, this could make sense.
So, in any case, I'm pleased as punch that in the face of the near-total implosion of commerical Linux gaming, these guys are still plugging away at it.
Skimming the overview on how to link in an ARM subroutine here, I didn't get the impression that it'd be very hard to do. There's no mention that the linked in function must be assembly - there's no reason that the entire ogg codec couldn't be linked via a large ARM C API.
FWIW, it looks like a tools improvement permitting pure native ARM application development ought to be forthcoming sometime next year.
Actually, I did subscribe to the lists during the entire GNOME 2 development cycle. Besides posting a couple of simple patches, I never really had time to get involved. I did, however, notice a vocal minority complaining about solid design decisions made by the GNOME developers.
It looked to me like the complainers were for the most part being unreasonable, whether the discussion was menu editing, Metacity behavior, pet "crack" features in Nautilus or Galeon, or whatever. YMMV.
Sounds to me like you're just flaming wildly. Get over it!
I'm a GNOME user, and not a developer. GNOME 2 is giving me, a member of the user community, exactly what I want - a better desktop than GNOME 1.x.
I'm not sure if this unlistened-to community that you're describing really exists. At least, it's probably nowhere near as big as you think it is. Most Linux users I know don't really care for the "configurability" of older GNOME desktops. Instead, they're looking for stuff that "just works".
IMHO, trying to maintain and support every goober preference that GNOME 1.x supported is a waste of time. I'd much rather see clean designs win over configurability, put the configuration issues to bed, and see more effort go into unifying the GNOME desktop. I think that's just what's happening, and I for one like it.
Wow, that article sure was light on detail. It read like someone trying to sell the casual reader on how cool BREW is going to be, casually ignoring the fact that every handset vendor on the face of the earth is shooting for the same market with their own technologies. The article mentioned that Motorola was competing with BREW on Java support, as if no other vendors have Java-enabled hansets (not even remotely true). Check out this link, found at the top of a Google search on "Java-enabled phone", for a list of a bunch of Java-enabled phones. The downloads page there lists a whole bunch of Java-based games for handsets.
Last time I looked at the public info on BREW (from the downloadable API documentation), it didn't look like it had any world-beating features to enable gaming. From the article, you'd think that BREW had the inside track on becoming the game development platform of choice for mobile phones.
IMHO, BREW looks like an awfully lightweight, low-feature application-development toolkit, appropriate to use in a low-memory handset. There's nothing here that Nokia isn't offering with their Series 60 platform, or that any of the other big players aren't doing with their own proprietary toolkits, I would expect.
The trick is that BREW has had a Java virtual machine ported to it, and game developers will develop to THAT, not to anything that is really BREW-specific, or even really enabled by BREW. But every handset vendor is doing the same thing with their own toolkit.
Hey - I was just running down the list of usual suspects that warrant an increment in the major version number. A shift to a new kernel series would fill that role, but obviously, there's no new stable kernel.
I've found it to be awfully alpha in quality. I last used it several releases ago, so I may be out of date. I hope it improves in the future, but to be honest, a linux-based application without a MS-Windows client wouldn't be very helpful in many heterogenous computing environments.
You might have luck looking at one of the web-based project management servers. One of the projects at my company picked one that seems to work well with your typical browsers on all types of operating systems.
I've noticed a serious improvment in kernel interactivity. GUI applications on the 2.4.9-ish kernels that Red Hat was shipping for 7.2 ran like a dog whenever I tried to run a build or two of a large software project in the background.
I had been applying the preemptive kernel patches, which improved things a little, but still left GUI response jerky (completely subjective on my part). The 2.4.18-ish kernels in the 7.3 beta didn't have this responsiveness problem at all.
So, if you aren't into rolling your own kernels, and you frequently find your CPU load higher than 1, the upgrade may be worth it for you for that alone.
The story (as I've heard it, mostly just speculation) is that 8.0 will come when there are enough changes to justify some major breakage in compatibility. I guess the new version of gcc isn't where it needs to be for Red Hat to switch to it, nor is GNOME 2 ready. No kernel 2.6.x, no new glibc, etc... Everything else (even KDE3 I guess) is considered to be more evolutionary, rather than revolutionary.
To each his own - but my take is the complete opposite. Loved the movie, as did the theater. I remember hearing about plans for a trilogy, and was mildly disappointed when I heard about the TV series instead. I gave a few early episodes a shot, but could never really get into it.
Sure, the movie had some flaws, but I thought that the scenery and camerawork was great. Watching the TV series, I get claustrophobic. No scope. No grand vision. And the "revolving bad guy of the week" never did it for me.
Forget security,what about stability/traceability?
on
Read the Fine Print
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· Score: 1
Forget the question of security and rights for a second - those are bad enough, and I'm not going to add anything new there.
What about stability of the platform? At any point in time, your software platform can change underfoot. Word starts crashing in new ways that you can't control by choosing to NOT install the new service pack.
Or worse, as a developer, you're in the middle of developing some application, and a bug that you were seeing due to some Windows problem goes away because Microsoft patched it. Great - except for the subset of your users who want to run unconnected to the net, and without that update. You can probably work around that - but do you want to have to?
Even worse, what happens when the update flat out breaks something? It's happened before - what can you? Reinstall and disconnect yourself from the net? Rely on quick service? Nope - start coding up that workaround...
Finaly - what about traceability? The legalese left me with the impression that not only would updates be installed automatically, but that Microsoft wasn't under any obligation to inform the user of it one way or the other. If Microsoft makes an update that I don't know about, and the box begins behaving differently, I know for sure that I want a guarantee that I can figure out what happened to it, and when.
For what it's worth, getting the NWN toolset working under WineX is something that has been showing up in Transgaming's polls. It hasn't reached the top of their to-do list - if you want to help to change that, you can buy some votes at Transgaming and spend them on NWN toolset porting.
Civ3 is one of the top 5 or so items on Transgaming's current list of things to work on, behind improved DX8 support, DX6 support, investigation of kernel-related acceleration, and some 2D-optimization.
It'll cost you a minimum of $5 (one month's subscription fee to vote in the current polls). Then, it'll cost you $5 during the month that Civ3 support gets rolled into Transgaming's binary release (which you'll want to get the copy-protection support, I think).
Assuming Wine actually meets the goal of becoming a true Windows compatibility layer, at some point there won't be a reason to buy a Windows license to run Microsoft API games. That's the point where it makes financial sense for game developers to support to native Linux APIs (or Hurd, or *BSD, depending on which OS is in vogue when Wine gets rock solid).
Until you reach the point where Wine gets good enough to "just work", then I think there will be a market for native *NIX games. I'll certainly pay for a Loki game that is supported and known to work well.
It would behoove Loki to monitor add Wine and Winelib to their game porting toolkit. If Loki embraces Winelib, there's no reason it can't garner Winelib porting contracts until such time that game developers have a more urgent need for direct Linux porting (i.e., real consumer demand).
What's most interesting, I think, is that Loki's current business model actually appears to NEED the mass gaming market to flourish on SOME OTHER PLATFORM. If the mass gaming market were for Linux, Loki would lose its contracts, and have to get involved in game creation, not porting.
But that's just my uninformed opinion. YMMV!
Re:Sweet! Mail is MUCH faster
on
Mozilla 0.9.5
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· Score: 1
Regarding personalties:
An easy workaround is to define one mail account for each address that you use. Then the from line in the compose window becomes a menu that you can select addresses from.
It's not perfect, though. Mozilla needs an unique incoming mail server for each account. I've just pointed it at dummy IP adresses for each extra account where I don't have access to the real server (i.e., at work, behind the corporate firewall).
Taco mentioned that you won't get fan noise from this hardware. If I'm actually going to listen to MP3's, I'm going to want to get rid of all of the ambient noise sources that I can. Any PC is going to add too much fan noise to an already lossy format.
The toslink is a nice bonus there too, but I wonder if it has any really noticeable effect at all.
Besides that, there's no room for a PC in my stereo rack!
Re:First minute free is NOT ubiquitous in the US
on
GPS Meets PCS
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· Score: 1
Hmm. That's wacked - I had no idea. My Cingular account is free-first-incoming minute.
You're right - there won't be any. No network is going to make any money if the word gets out customers are on the hook for an open-ended bill that they can't control - all of the subscribers would cancel.
You're probably paying per-minute charges only on voice calls and data connections that you initiate. I've never heard of a network provider charging for anything that's pushed to your phone without your OK, like SMS, email, or whatever else comes down the radio pipe.
That's where the "first minute free on incoming calls" clause that seems to be ubiquitous - gives the customer a chance to opt-out of the airtime charges.
Slashdot Mirror
Just wait for day when a web spider gets smart enough to correlate blog user IDs to real names. I sure hope I never get my real name correlated against Anonymous Coward - I'd never get a smart date again!
My guess is that some toadie came up with the idea as a way of ingratiating itself with the CEO. I imagine most CEOs can serve themselves in more meaningful ways!
- the company actually spends money on thousands of these promotional pieces of junk, money that could have instead been spent on the bottom line, or at least on something that isn't tossed, ignored, and useless.
- someone in the company gets paid to come up with the idea of the bobble-head doll, and other pieces of promotional junk that your typical employee ignores
I mean hey, a gift that shows that people in the company are thinking of you is nice, but these meaningless items reek of the "you are a number" philosophy. It seems like the bigger a company gets, the more likely that it is to generate this kind of landfill.My WAG is that they may have been expecting Miles and BINK, the multiplatform (Win, Mac, various consoles) SDKs they mentioned, to be ported to Linux. When NWN got started, Loki was all the rage, as was Linux in general. So, if my theory's right, the company that does Miles and BINK dropped their Linux development when it became clear that it wasn't going to make them any real money anytime soon, and the NWN team got left with a Linux port but no implementation of some libraries that they're heavily invested in.
Again, this is just a WAG, based on the idea that the NWN guys clearly planned to make a simultaneous Linux, Mac, and PC release. If you start with the assumption that they had a realistic plan to get there, this could make sense.
So, in any case, I'm pleased as punch that in the face of the near-total implosion of commerical Linux gaming, these guys are still plugging away at it.
Skimming the overview on how to link in an ARM subroutine here, I didn't get the impression that it'd be very hard to do. There's no mention that the linked in function must be assembly - there's no reason that the entire ogg codec couldn't be linked via a large ARM C API.
FWIW, it looks like a tools improvement permitting pure native ARM application development ought to be forthcoming sometime next year.
From the article:
"AeroPlayer presently runs on Palm's Tungsten T handheld."
The Tungsten is pretty beefy. It's got both a high speed ARM925 processor and a high-speed DSP in it.
Actually, I did subscribe to the lists during the entire GNOME 2 development cycle. Besides posting a couple of simple patches, I never really had time to get involved. I did, however, notice a vocal minority complaining about solid design decisions made by the GNOME developers.
It looked to me like the complainers were for the most part being unreasonable, whether the discussion was menu editing, Metacity behavior, pet "crack" features in Nautilus or Galeon, or whatever. YMMV.
Sounds to me like you're just flaming wildly. Get over it!
I'm a GNOME user, and not a developer. GNOME 2 is giving me, a member of the user community, exactly what I want - a better desktop than GNOME 1.x.
I'm not sure if this unlistened-to community that you're describing really exists. At least, it's probably nowhere near as big as you think it is. Most Linux users I know don't really care for the "configurability" of older GNOME desktops. Instead, they're looking for stuff that "just works".
IMHO, trying to maintain and support every goober preference that GNOME 1.x supported is a waste of time. I'd much rather see clean designs win over configurability, put the configuration issues to bed, and see more effort go into unifying the GNOME desktop. I think that's just what's happening, and I for one like it.
If you haven't already run across it, Munchkin is a card game that contains a Gazebo monster. The game's pretty good for a laugh.
Wow, that article sure was light on detail. It read like someone trying to sell the casual reader on how cool BREW is going to be, casually ignoring the fact that every handset vendor on the face of the earth is shooting for the same market with their own technologies. The article mentioned that Motorola was competing with BREW on Java support, as if no other vendors have Java-enabled hansets (not even remotely true). Check out this link, found at the top of a Google search on "Java-enabled phone", for a list of a bunch of Java-enabled phones. The downloads page there lists a whole bunch of Java-based games for handsets.
Last time I looked at the public info on BREW (from the downloadable API documentation), it didn't look like it had any world-beating features to enable gaming. From the article, you'd think that BREW had the inside track on becoming the game development platform of choice for mobile phones.
IMHO, BREW looks like an awfully lightweight, low-feature application-development toolkit, appropriate to use in a low-memory handset. There's nothing here that Nokia isn't offering with their Series 60 platform, or that any of the other big players aren't doing with their own proprietary toolkits, I would expect.
The trick is that BREW has had a Java virtual machine ported to it, and game developers will develop to THAT, not to anything that is really BREW-specific, or even really enabled by BREW. But every handset vendor is doing the same thing with their own toolkit.
Hey - I was just running down the list of usual suspects that warrant an increment in the major version number. A shift to a new kernel series would fill that role, but obviously, there's no new stable kernel.
I've found it to be awfully alpha in quality. I last used it several releases ago, so I may be out of date. I hope it improves in the future, but to be honest, a linux-based application without a MS-Windows client wouldn't be very helpful in many heterogenous computing environments.
You might have luck looking at one of the web-based project management servers. One of the projects at my company picked one that seems to work well with your typical browsers on all types of operating systems.
I've noticed a serious improvment in kernel interactivity. GUI applications on the 2.4.9-ish kernels that Red Hat was shipping for 7.2 ran like a dog whenever I tried to run a build or two of a large software project in the background.
I had been applying the preemptive kernel patches, which improved things a little, but still left GUI response jerky (completely subjective on my part). The 2.4.18-ish kernels in the 7.3 beta didn't have this responsiveness problem at all.
So, if you aren't into rolling your own kernels, and you frequently find your CPU load higher than 1, the upgrade may be worth it for you for that alone.
Yeah - I noticed that too. I sent a message to the webadmin - I wonder if they'll fix it.
The story (as I've heard it, mostly just speculation) is that 8.0 will come when there are enough changes to justify some major breakage in compatibility. I guess the new version of gcc isn't where it needs to be for Red Hat to switch to it, nor is GNOME 2 ready. No kernel 2.6.x, no new glibc, etc... Everything else (even KDE3 I guess) is considered to be more evolutionary, rather than revolutionary.
To each his own - but my take is the complete opposite. Loved the movie, as did the theater. I remember hearing about plans for a trilogy, and was mildly disappointed when I heard about the TV series instead. I gave a few early episodes a shot, but could never really get into it.
Sure, the movie had some flaws, but I thought that the scenery and camerawork was great. Watching the TV series, I get claustrophobic. No scope. No grand vision. And the "revolving bad guy of the week" never did it for me.
Forget the question of security and rights for a second - those are bad enough, and I'm not going to add anything new there.
What about stability of the platform? At any point in time, your software platform can change underfoot. Word starts crashing in new ways that you can't control by choosing to NOT install the new service pack.
Or worse, as a developer, you're in the middle of developing some application, and a bug that you were seeing due to some Windows problem goes away because Microsoft patched it. Great - except for the subset of your users who want to run unconnected to the net, and without that update. You can probably work around that - but do you want to have to?
Even worse, what happens when the update flat out breaks something? It's happened before - what can you? Reinstall and disconnect yourself from the net? Rely on quick service? Nope - start coding up that workaround...
Finaly - what about traceability? The legalese left me with the impression that not only would updates be installed automatically, but that Microsoft wasn't under any obligation to inform the user of it one way or the other. If Microsoft makes an update that I don't know about, and the box begins behaving differently, I know for sure that I want a guarantee that I can figure out what happened to it, and when.
For what it's worth, getting the NWN toolset working under WineX is something that has been showing up in Transgaming's polls. It hasn't reached the top of their to-do list - if you want to help to change that, you can buy some votes at Transgaming and spend them on NWN toolset porting.
Odds are, the people doing this aren't concerned about licensing purity, and just like the technical features.
Civ3 is one of the top 5 or so items on Transgaming's current list of things to work on, behind improved DX8 support, DX6 support, investigation of kernel-related acceleration, and some 2D-optimization.
It'll cost you a minimum of $5 (one month's subscription fee to vote in the current polls). Then, it'll cost you $5 during the month that Civ3 support gets rolled into Transgaming's binary release (which you'll want to get the copy-protection support, I think).
I've already cast my vote for it.
Here's another angle on this one:
Assuming Wine actually meets the goal of becoming a true Windows compatibility layer, at some point there won't be a reason to buy a Windows license to run Microsoft API games. That's the point where it makes financial sense for game developers to support to native Linux APIs (or Hurd, or *BSD, depending on which OS is in vogue when Wine gets rock solid).
Until you reach the point where Wine gets good enough to "just work", then I think there will be a market for native *NIX games. I'll certainly pay for a Loki game that is supported and known to work well.
It would behoove Loki to monitor add Wine and Winelib to their game porting toolkit. If Loki embraces Winelib, there's no reason it can't garner Winelib porting contracts until such time that game developers have a more urgent need for direct Linux porting (i.e., real consumer demand).
What's most interesting, I think, is that Loki's current business model actually appears to NEED the mass gaming market to flourish on SOME OTHER PLATFORM. If the mass gaming market were for Linux, Loki would lose its contracts, and have to get involved in game creation, not porting.
But that's just my uninformed opinion. YMMV!
Regarding personalties:
An easy workaround is to define one mail account for each address that you use. Then the from line in the compose window becomes a menu that you can select addresses from.
It's not perfect, though. Mozilla needs an unique incoming mail server for each account. I've just pointed it at dummy IP adresses for each extra account where I don't have access to the real server (i.e., at work, behind the corporate firewall).
Taco mentioned that you won't get fan noise from this hardware. If I'm actually going to listen to MP3's, I'm going to want to get rid of all of the ambient noise sources that I can. Any PC is going to add too much fan noise to an already lossy format.
The toslink is a nice bonus there too, but I wonder if it has any really noticeable effect at all.
Besides that, there's no room for a PC in my stereo rack!
Hmm. That's wacked - I had no idea. My Cingular account is free-first-incoming minute.
You're right - there won't be any. No network is going to make any money if the word gets out customers are on the hook for an open-ended bill that they can't control - all of the subscribers would cancel.
You're probably paying per-minute charges only on voice calls and data connections that you initiate. I've never heard of a network provider charging for anything that's pushed to your phone without your OK, like SMS, email, or whatever else comes down the radio pipe.
That's where the "first minute free on incoming calls" clause that seems to be ubiquitous - gives the customer a chance to opt-out of the airtime charges.