Loki must have some deal going with Activision, most every title they've ported is an Activision one. Which is good, I like what they put out.
Of course, it's a little less cool that we're getting games way way past their release. They may still be fun now, but if a better game of the same genre has come out, buying an older one just isn't worthwhile. Unless it's the sort of timeless game that plays well a year or 3 later, like Civ:CTP:-)
But as my subject says, we have to start somewhere. As more and more people realize Linux is gaming friendly (I have a neighbour in residence who asked to borrow my Civ:CTP.. his reaction to hearing it was the Linux version was 'They make it for Linux?!?!?') then the demand will be for games to be developed on both platforms for release.
Which is good, it promotes portable code and lets developers know that locking yourself into a proprietary API (DirectX) is not profitable if you can write, say, the graphics engine in OpenGL and have it port (and sell) to many many platforms.
RPM's depend based on libraries and pretty much libraries alone. Thinking about it, it's not that bad an idea. With a little luck you should get proper versioning through good source code. That luck rarely exists though, a lot of webpages that provide RPM's for download say 'if all else fails, install with --nodeps'.
Debian's packages (.deb) is quite amazing though. You can either blatantly depend on one package or depend on a metapackage. Metapackages work better for things that aren't libraries. Say you have someprogram and someprogram needs run time data to go. But someprogram has a few different types of run time data, only some can be installed. So instead of having someprogram depend on run-time-a or run-time-b or run-time-c just have it depend on someprogram-runtime and have each run time package provide this metapackage. An example of this lies in the vim package where there are a lot of different vim executables (plain vim, vim w/ python bindings, vim w/ perl bindings, etc) that all provide 'vim'. Any other program requiring any version of vim can rest easily:-)
In the end, debs with their excellent dependencies and apt (a program that installs packages in a Wise Way in relation to these dependencies) make keeping a Debian system updated very easy. Disclaimer: I love Debian. I have made.deb's. It was all good.
I'd love to see them mine that.. Maybe we'd figure out just how fucking useless trading gold around is. Yeah, a gold standard made sense at one point. Now, all that precious metals acomplishes is being an unstable market.
On the other hand, if there's a lot of titanium, that's a metal with some use.
Ones that fly in the face of what we've been told.
A while ago, Unix==Big Iron hardware. Today, Unix can equal a 486/33. The only 'Big Iron' I'm gonna need is the hardware it'll take to make W2K fly.
I also smiled when he said 'Unix will have more software, enjoy it while it lasts.' All in response to the incompatibilities between MS'es own new OS and their own software.
On the flip side, Linux wasn't without growing pains. The lurch from libc5 to glibc wasn't too pretty a while back, but nothing was really stopping you from installing compatibility libraries. Even going 2.0 -> 2.2 was amazingly compatible. In Debian slink, I think there was about a half a dozen packages, out of thousands, that needed upgrading with the kernel.
It's amazing just how badly MS is handling the growth of Unix. You think they'd borrow a page from the Book of Good OS'es.. But instead they go on doing their thing. Scalability? Portability? Unheard of. POSIX seems to be the future of OS'es.. Who'da thunk it?
Someone mod the parent to this down. I'm usually the last to get into Moderation babble, but this one is just godawful. I mean, yes, some OSS code is pretty damn bad. Looking at RandomFreshmeatApp version 0.0.1 that just had its first public release, it's pretty bad.
And even some more important apps out there aren't coded too well (Imlib comes to mind). But part of what makes Open Source what it is, is the improvement of important things. If some software is really that important to everyone, it gets worked on. And it gets prettier. Want an example, look at pixbuf-engine in the Gnome CVS tree. The biggest effort of the current maintainer was to clean everything up from the old pixmap GTK engine. And it became better.
But in the end, the fact that a commercial company, making gobs of money, shouldn't be putting out amature code like you get from the RandomFreshmeat app. And also in the end, a comment that has no real substance and just trolls on deserves a *4*.
Well, when coding for WinCE, what API do you use? It's not just Win32, is it? Because if it isn't, it means that they still bring in money from their real cash cow, Win32.
Now, if Win32 was opened and every major OS out there could have a Win32 implementation that ran any Windows App imaginable, Windows would be dead.
But letting people peek at CE won't help us move toward that goal.
OK, personal experience follows. Expect long windedness.
What the person who started this thread failed to realize is that there are a few distinct types of people who are in computer classes in HS. And some more types who will just be using the computers in the library.
First, background. At my HS, they had some bass ackwards deal worked out with Compaq. The school had one technicial who dealt with network issues on the Fancy New computers. That was 2 labs, the new Programming lab and the Library. There were 4 other labs in the school. Drafting, Business and the 2 Applications labs. These other labs were FILLED with old stuff. Note I avoid using the term 'junk.' Why? Easy. The drafting computers were 286's running CADKey. It did the job smashingly. A row of Compaqs was also in this lab. You could literally watch them crash sequentially down the row, every 20 minutes.
Of course, who was maintaining these old labs? Myself and some friends of mine. We overhauled donated computers, replaced whole labs, maintained them. This kind of group is the first group in my list. Good users. The kind of people who respect computers and have fun with them. We would eat our lunch as we wanderd the labs, checking out system problems, making printers work.. Basically the things a tech should do but never did. The teachers couldn't do it. They were business teachers, not computer teachers.
One of the other groups that stood out in the labs was the Kiddies. People with a little knowhow. They would be the ones doing the viriing, pr0ning, etc. They were steaming headon through adolescence and just had to be destructive. I got so damn sick of these ****s. They would whine to the teachers because we were allowed to eat in the labs while we fixed stuff. They'd try to install shit on the old machines that we could only *BARELY* scrape enough harddrive space onto for Windows and Word. On the fast machines a few of them even played Warez Kiddies, chatting from telnet connections to their Shellz. People like these make teachers assholes. My little revenge came from BO'ing every computer I had authority over and smoking them from a distance. It was petty but it was all I had. After all, I wasn't getting paid.
Last was the Clueless. They would be the people who knew how to run IE, Word, etc. They weren't taking classes but rather they were the library users. And of course, with the filters there, everyone just *HAD* to try and see what would happen if they put in a naughty URL. Scary how many people actually FOUND porn, the filters were damn near useless.
Now, out of everyone, there were maybe 10-20 Good Users in the school. Of them, only 8 (me & friends) thought it worth their while to help the labs out. There were a lot more Kiddies. And they were active. And a lot of people who would just try to get porn and virii because the filters were supposed to stop them.
So you tell me, what groups stand out? Screw the good users. Sure, you can trust some of them, but everyone else? You have to be a Computer Lab Nazi.
Did I suggest that Linux was any better? Lord no. I was comparing the X Box to other consoles, not to Linux.
I run Debian Unstable. I *LIVE* on updates. Hell, every few weeks something breaks in the updating system because everything is changing. Hence, the name Unstable.
Then look at the PSX. Yes it has a few issues. But the system hasn't changed since it's release. If it was changing, who's to say original games would keep working? And by not changing at all, the programmers have to make do with what they have. They learn to push the envelope an insane amount.
If MS is changing the X Box, who's to say they won't change it to break certain products? They don't like ABC Gaming comapny that has released product XYZ.. Well next update time, have XYZ stop working. This is an extreme example though. XYZ would probably stop working without malicious reason.
The static nature of consoles is what makes them successful. You buy a console, plug it in, and play. It works. And 2 years later the software gets better but it's the same damn console.
Why do I ask? Simple. It has a hard drive. And supports high speed online connections. Does this mean that we'll see patches and software upgrades from MS? They live on these updates in the desktop world.. Releasing second rate products and promising fixes, leaving people begging for more. With a moving target, will we see DLL Hell?
A Static Target is a Good Thing on consoles. Early on in the consoles lifespan, people code on the API's. Then they start coding on the low-level. As they get better, programs get better. Just look at how far the PSX has been pushed with FF8 or Chrono Cross.
We'll wait and see I suppose. Incoherent post brought to you by lack of sleep and lots of Coke/Code.
Six months? My God man, I'd be *happy* if Diablo II was only six months late. I'd be playing it already! In fact, I'd probably be DONE with it!
Blizzard may have a reputation for releasing well polished final products, but they also have a reputation for releasing them late-as-all-fscking-hell. Starcraft was years late. (and the original release was the most non-playbalanced thing I ever played) Diablo II seems to be just as late.
Diablo was a fun, easy to get into dungeon hack. But since then, everyone and their dog has jumped into the quick dungeon hack market, with titles like Darkstone and Nox. Diablo II should be able to compete, given how pretty it is, but that logic only follows through if they RELEASE IT! =)
Is that these chips aren't as good as they ought to be. Many moons ago, before the Athlon, Intel was slow to put out new chips. They always had to attack the problem of getting Really Fast Cache(tm) to go with the Really Fast MHz(tm). The chips would only increment about 50-66 MHz in speed, but would actually show a decent performance increase.
Today? It's a blatant race for pure MHz. Your average/.'er can tell you that there's more to speed then just MHz, or we'd all just be using cache-less Celerons clocked at 2 GHz. AMD and Intel are just showing off who has the bigger [censored].
Who said competition helped everyone? It certainly doesn't mean jack-all in a world where only one number means anything.
Actually, what's worse is that this is total hipocrisy on Apple's part. A while ago, before Quicktime 4, before Apple's site redesign, back when Jobs was just taking the helm again, there was more then one porn site in Apple's Quicktime Showcase. Why? Simple, Quicktime is the best quality:P
The interview ended up as a defense for the one-click patent. And I'll admit that One-Click was a Good Idea (tm). It was said well, the Web let you just point, click, and have. But what on the Associate Program? I may agree with the idea of Defensive Patents, but I'd prefer they be made by organizations like the EFF.
Amazon now has a patent on something that is the furthest thing from original that I can put to words. They can claim it to be a defensive patent, but after seeing them take agressive litigation against B&N.. I don't trust them. They can look noble, they can have nice stories on/. and news sites.. But hey, Unisys was all nice over LZW for many many years of it's existance:P
The only 'frightening' trend I'm noticing on/. are posts like the above. 3 or 4 times a week, someone comes into a thread that's a little warmer then the rest. YRO's or Katz's come to mind quickly. These people do like the above, they rant about/., they whine about how they're gonna get moderated down, and what not other shit.
It's not irony that gets these posts modded up, it's idiocy. Simply tack on 'I know I'll be modded down for this but such and such..' and 'We really should do something about all those Trolls like this and that..' and watch your post hit an easy 3. Even as an AC.
Look, this is NOT where to complain. Try the sid=moderation thread or SOMETHING. All you add is noise, not signal with a post like that. I'm not helping myself, but at least I'll put my name to it and not post AC.
Incidently, on the topic of browsing, it goes like this: -1: Trolls. 0: Blather and Trolls about to be modded down. 1: The 'average' poster. 2: Karma whores with a +1. 3+: Generally good posts. Of which there will be about a 1/30 ratio on.
And any moderator who mods this BLATANTLY offtopic post up is a moron. Just how the above was modded up too.
(posted without Score+1 for the protection of those surfing at 2 for content)
1) Like the old saying goes: "Liquor then beer, never fear; beer then liquor, never sicker."
Of course, college students interepret this to say 'Have a beer at last call and you'll do fine':-)
My 2.something cents CDN
on
MacOS X DP3
·
· Score: 4
I'm still mixed on OS X. Now, first things first, I'm seriously glad that someone commercial has released a desktop OS that's built on something stable like BSD. Apple isn't doing this stupid crap like MS, seperating 'workstation' from 'home user.' And I hope this OS succeeds. Apple deserves a good shot at the market, despite my own opinions on the cost of buying into the Apple name (Apple is a hardware company, you buy their hardware and then get to run their OS).
But on the other hand, how amazing is OS X really? AFAICT, it's just NeXT with real pretty graphics. A NeXT that can run old MacOS stuff and has an extra-pretty accelerated GUI. Honestly, things like slightly transparent windows/menus, animated buttons, neato entrance effects for status windows.. In the end, it's mostly glitz. It does actually add to the UI, however. Feedback to the user as to what button is highlited, what window a status popup came from, those all mean something.
So how hard *IS* it to do most of that stuff? In March we'll have an XFree that incorporates hardware acceleration standard. GNOME already has libraries in it that do transparency/animated buttons (gdk-pixbuf).. Who's to bet we couldn't do all this, at a minimun cost to CPU?
After all, imitation is the most sincere form of flattery:-)
Point 1 needs to be qualified. Home recorders aren't capable of bit-bit copies. They've already stopped home DVD piracy IMHO. There are no home burners that will make a *whole* DVD that any DVD reader can play. They will never need to worry about that.
But why the hell should they CARE about the home user making a copy or three? The real people they ought to care about are those commercial outfits that actually have writers capable of making a whole DVD, making and selling true bootlegs by the thousand.
Oh gawd, EVERY time an XFree discussion starts, someone says the development is too closed. You know what? Shut up. I have one word for you and it is NDA. It's not *HARD* to become a developer, and anyone who complains about it being 'too closed' has obviously not even looked INTO the subject.
XFree is not a 'closed' development, it's a controlled one. And it has to be controlled, as NDAs exist, like them or not.
-Posting at Score:2 just because it needs to be heard.
I resolve to become a better person; sociable, kind, nice-smelling, considerate, polite, and above all, gain programming skills that can assist those in need!
I also resolve to be SO drunk tonight that I won't remember these resolutions in the morning. (:
Closed source need not be the solution. Take almost any form of encryption. I have some trust in the server, but of course there's some form of authentication involved. That authentication is perfectly open source and it still can't be faked.
What I think needs to happen is JC to put out an open source authentication module so that the Quake players have some faith in the module and so that everyone is happy.
The GPL isn't about "infecting" it's about maintaining freedom. And by wanting freedom, you have to take the chance of choosing a license that maintains freedom. The whole point is that when using GPL code, you have to maintain the GPL. Otherwise, what the hell is the point?
I write some GPL code, someone uses it, changes it to BSD, and suddenly my code is available for commercial use, without my consent. Well if I wanted to give my code away for commercial use, I would have chosen the BSD license in the first place. That's the whole reason for choosing the GPL, is if you want to guarantee perpetual freedom.
Now, as per the definition of 'freedom', the BSD could almost be called more 'free' then the GPL because BSD code can be used anywhere for anything. But as far as 'freedom' in the sense that I want my code to be free, but I don't want some commercial entity using my code without even acknowleging my existance.. Then I choose the GPL because it gives me more freedom.
Now, your trolling on the GPL license is just dumb. The 'infectous' nature of the GPL is one of it's strongest points, that it is guaranteed to stay free.
Actually, as far as simple editors go, don't give the newbies vi. I use vim religiously, but I don't think that vi or vim or emacs are appropriate for just starting. For one thing, when you open a file in vi, you don't start in editing mode. How bad would THAT fsck with the head of a newbie? I mean, if you're lucky they've used DOS 'edit', so at least they expect to be able to manipulate text right away.
The solution? Give them pico! Or if you don't like the license on pico, try ae (Anthony's Editor). Straight text mangling when you start the program, and the vital commands are printed on screen for reference.
On the side, why can't people use lynx to view the html docs?
Slashdot Mirror
Loki must have some deal going with Activision, most every title they've ported is an Activision one. Which is good, I like what they put out.
:-)
Of course, it's a little less cool that we're getting games way way past their release. They may still be fun now, but if a better game of the same genre has come out, buying an older one just isn't worthwhile. Unless it's the sort of timeless game that plays well a year or 3 later, like Civ:CTP
But as my subject says, we have to start somewhere. As more and more people realize Linux is gaming friendly (I have a neighbour in residence who asked to borrow my Civ:CTP.. his reaction to hearing it was the Linux version was 'They make it for Linux?!?!?') then the demand will be for games to be developed on both platforms for release.
Which is good, it promotes portable code and lets developers know that locking yourself into a proprietary API (DirectX) is not profitable if you can write, say, the graphics engine in OpenGL and have it port (and sell) to many many platforms.
Sorry, I have to bite here.
:-)
.deb's. It was all good.
RPM's depend based on libraries and pretty much libraries alone. Thinking about it, it's not that bad an idea. With a little luck you should get proper versioning through good source code. That luck rarely exists though, a lot of webpages that provide RPM's for download say 'if all else fails, install with --nodeps'.
Debian's packages (.deb) is quite amazing though. You can either blatantly depend on one package or depend on a metapackage. Metapackages work better for things that aren't libraries. Say you have someprogram and someprogram needs run time data to go. But someprogram has a few different types of run time data, only some can be installed. So instead of having someprogram depend on run-time-a or run-time-b or run-time-c just have it depend on someprogram-runtime and have each run time package provide this metapackage. An example of this lies in the vim package where there are a lot of different vim executables (plain vim, vim w/ python bindings, vim w/ perl bindings, etc) that all provide 'vim'. Any other program requiring any version of vim can rest easily
In the end, debs with their excellent dependencies and apt (a program that installs packages in a Wise Way in relation to these dependencies) make keeping a Debian system updated very easy. Disclaimer: I love Debian. I have made
I'd love to see them mine that.. Maybe we'd figure out just how fucking useless trading gold around is. Yeah, a gold standard made sense at one point. Now, all that precious metals acomplishes is being an unstable market.
On the other hand, if there's a lot of titanium, that's a metal with some use.
Ones that fly in the face of what we've been told.
A while ago, Unix==Big Iron hardware. Today, Unix can equal a 486/33. The only 'Big Iron' I'm gonna need is the hardware it'll take to make W2K fly.
I also smiled when he said 'Unix will have more software, enjoy it while it lasts.' All in response to the incompatibilities between MS'es own new OS and their own software.
On the flip side, Linux wasn't without growing pains. The lurch from libc5 to glibc wasn't too pretty a while back, but nothing was really stopping you from installing compatibility libraries. Even going 2.0 -> 2.2 was amazingly compatible. In Debian slink, I think there was about a half a dozen packages, out of thousands, that needed upgrading with the kernel.
It's amazing just how badly MS is handling the growth of Unix. You think they'd borrow a page from the Book of Good OS'es.. But instead they go on doing their thing. Scalability? Portability? Unheard of. POSIX seems to be the future of OS'es.. Who'da thunk it?
Someone mod the parent to this down. I'm usually the last to get into Moderation babble, but this one is just godawful. I mean, yes, some OSS code is pretty damn bad. Looking at RandomFreshmeatApp version 0.0.1 that just had its first public release, it's pretty bad.
And even some more important apps out there aren't coded too well (Imlib comes to mind). But part of what makes Open Source what it is, is the improvement of important things. If some software is really that important to everyone, it gets worked on. And it gets prettier. Want an example, look at pixbuf-engine in the Gnome CVS tree. The biggest effort of the current maintainer was to clean everything up from the old pixmap GTK engine. And it became better.
But in the end, the fact that a commercial company, making gobs of money, shouldn't be putting out amature code like you get from the RandomFreshmeat app. And also in the end, a comment that has no real substance and just trolls on deserves a *4*.
..Who's gonna be selling the debris on ebay? :-)
Well, when coding for WinCE, what API do you use? It's not just Win32, is it? Because if it isn't, it means that they still bring in money from their real cash cow, Win32.
Now, if Win32 was opened and every major OS out there could have a Win32 implementation that ran any Windows App imaginable, Windows would be dead.
But letting people peek at CE won't help us move toward that goal.
OK, personal experience follows. Expect long windedness.
What the person who started this thread failed to realize is that there are a few distinct types of people who are in computer classes in HS. And some more types who will just be using the computers in the library.
First, background. At my HS, they had some bass ackwards deal worked out with Compaq. The school had one technicial who dealt with network issues on the Fancy New computers. That was 2 labs, the new Programming lab and the Library. There were 4 other labs in the school. Drafting, Business and the 2 Applications labs. These other labs were FILLED with old stuff. Note I avoid using the term 'junk.' Why? Easy. The drafting computers were 286's running CADKey. It did the job smashingly. A row of Compaqs was also in this lab. You could literally watch them crash sequentially down the row, every 20 minutes.
Of course, who was maintaining these old labs? Myself and some friends of mine. We overhauled donated computers, replaced whole labs, maintained them. This kind of group is the first group in my list. Good users. The kind of people who respect computers and have fun with them. We would eat our lunch as we wanderd the labs, checking out system problems, making printers work.. Basically the things a tech should do but never did. The teachers couldn't do it. They were business teachers, not computer teachers.
One of the other groups that stood out in the labs was the Kiddies. People with a little knowhow. They would be the ones doing the viriing, pr0ning, etc. They were steaming headon through adolescence and just had to be destructive. I got so damn sick of these ****s. They would whine to the teachers because we were allowed to eat in the labs while we fixed stuff. They'd try to install shit on the old machines that we could only *BARELY* scrape enough harddrive space onto for Windows and Word. On the fast machines a few of them even played Warez Kiddies, chatting from telnet connections to their Shellz. People like these make teachers assholes. My little revenge came from BO'ing every computer I had authority over and smoking them from a distance. It was petty but it was all I had. After all, I wasn't getting paid.
Last was the Clueless. They would be the people who knew how to run IE, Word, etc. They weren't taking classes but rather they were the library users. And of course, with the filters there, everyone just *HAD* to try and see what would happen if they put in a naughty URL. Scary how many people actually FOUND porn, the filters were damn near useless.
Now, out of everyone, there were maybe 10-20 Good Users in the school. Of them, only 8 (me & friends) thought it worth their while to help the labs out. There were a lot more Kiddies. And they were active. And a lot of people who would just try to get porn and virii because the filters were supposed to stop them.
So you tell me, what groups stand out? Screw the good users. Sure, you can trust some of them, but everyone else? You have to be a Computer Lab Nazi.
Did I suggest that Linux was any better? Lord no. I was comparing the X Box to other consoles, not to Linux.
I run Debian Unstable. I *LIVE* on updates. Hell, every few weeks something breaks in the updating system because everything is changing. Hence, the name Unstable.
Then look at the PSX. Yes it has a few issues. But the system hasn't changed since it's release. If it was changing, who's to say original games would keep working? And by not changing at all, the programmers have to make do with what they have. They learn to push the envelope an insane amount.
If MS is changing the X Box, who's to say they won't change it to break certain products? They don't like ABC Gaming comapny that has released product XYZ.. Well next update time, have XYZ stop working. This is an extreme example though. XYZ would probably stop working without malicious reason.
The static nature of consoles is what makes them successful. You buy a console, plug it in, and play. It works. And 2 years later the software gets better but it's the same damn console.
Will the X Box be another moving target?
Why do I ask? Simple. It has a hard drive. And supports high speed online connections. Does this mean that we'll see patches and software upgrades from MS? They live on these updates in the desktop world.. Releasing second rate products and promising fixes, leaving people begging for more. With a moving target, will we see DLL Hell?
A Static Target is a Good Thing on consoles. Early on in the consoles lifespan, people code on the API's. Then they start coding on the low-level. As they get better, programs get better. Just look at how far the PSX has been pushed with FF8 or Chrono Cross.
We'll wait and see I suppose. Incoherent post brought to you by lack of sleep and lots of Coke/Code.
Six months? My God man, I'd be *happy* if Diablo II was only six months late. I'd be playing it already! In fact, I'd probably be DONE with it!
Blizzard may have a reputation for releasing well polished final products, but they also have a reputation for releasing them late-as-all-fscking-hell. Starcraft was years late. (and the original release was the most non-playbalanced thing I ever played) Diablo II seems to be just as late.
Diablo was a fun, easy to get into dungeon hack. But since then, everyone and their dog has jumped into the quick dungeon hack market, with titles like Darkstone and Nox. Diablo II should be able to compete, given how pretty it is, but that logic only follows through if they RELEASE IT! =)
The openssh.org website isn't some Evil page that forwards you to a dozen porn sites.
It's squatting, but not malicious squatting.
Is that these chips aren't as good as they ought to be. Many moons ago, before the Athlon, Intel was slow to put out new chips. They always had to attack the problem of getting Really Fast Cache(tm) to go with the Really Fast MHz(tm). The chips would only increment about 50-66 MHz in speed, but would actually show a decent performance increase.
/.'er can tell you that there's more to speed then just MHz, or we'd all just be using cache-less Celerons clocked at 2 GHz. AMD and Intel are just showing off who has the bigger [censored].
Today? It's a blatant race for pure MHz. Your average
Who said competition helped everyone? It certainly doesn't mean jack-all in a world where only one number means anything.
Actually, what's worse is that this is total hipocrisy on Apple's part. A while ago, before Quicktime 4, before Apple's site redesign, back when Jobs was just taking the helm again, there was more then one porn site in Apple's Quicktime Showcase. Why? Simple, Quicktime is the best quality :P
The interview ended up as a defense for the one-click patent. And I'll admit that One-Click was a Good Idea (tm). It was said well, the Web let you just point, click, and have. But what on the Associate Program? I may agree with the idea of Defensive Patents, but I'd prefer they be made by organizations like the EFF.
/. and news sites.. But hey, Unisys was all nice over LZW for many many years of it's existance :P
Amazon now has a patent on something that is the furthest thing from original that I can put to words. They can claim it to be a defensive patent, but after seeing them take agressive litigation against B&N.. I don't trust them. They can look noble, they can have nice stories on
The only 'frightening' trend I'm noticing on /. are posts like the above. 3 or 4 times a week, someone comes into a thread that's a little warmer then the rest. YRO's or Katz's come to mind quickly. These people do like the above, they rant about /., they whine about how they're gonna get moderated down, and what not other shit.
It's not irony that gets these posts modded up, it's idiocy. Simply tack on 'I know I'll be modded down for this but such and such..' and 'We really should do something about all those Trolls like this and that..' and watch your post hit an easy 3. Even as an AC.
Look, this is NOT where to complain. Try the sid=moderation thread or SOMETHING. All you add is noise, not signal with a post like that. I'm not helping myself, but at least I'll put my name to it and not post AC.
Incidently, on the topic of browsing, it goes like this: -1: Trolls. 0: Blather and Trolls about to be modded down. 1: The 'average' poster. 2: Karma whores with a +1. 3+: Generally good posts. Of which there will be about a 1/30 ratio on.
And any moderator who mods this BLATANTLY offtopic post up is a moron. Just how the above was modded up too.
(posted without Score+1 for the protection of those surfing at 2 for content)
1) Like the old saying goes: "Liquor then beer, never fear; beer then liquor, never sicker."
:-)
Of course, college students interepret this to say 'Have a beer at last call and you'll do fine'
I'm still mixed on OS X. Now, first things first, I'm seriously glad that someone commercial has released a desktop OS that's built on something stable like BSD. Apple isn't doing this stupid crap like MS, seperating 'workstation' from 'home user.' And I hope this OS succeeds. Apple deserves a good shot at the market, despite my own opinions on the cost of buying into the Apple name (Apple is a hardware company, you buy their hardware and then get to run their OS).
:-)
But on the other hand, how amazing is OS X really? AFAICT, it's just NeXT with real pretty graphics. A NeXT that can run old MacOS stuff and has an extra-pretty accelerated GUI. Honestly, things like slightly transparent windows/menus, animated buttons, neato entrance effects for status windows.. In the end, it's mostly glitz. It does actually add to the UI, however. Feedback to the user as to what button is highlited, what window a status popup came from, those all mean something.
So how hard *IS* it to do most of that stuff? In March we'll have an XFree that incorporates hardware acceleration standard. GNOME already has libraries in it that do transparency/animated buttons (gdk-pixbuf).. Who's to bet we couldn't do all this, at a minimun cost to CPU?
After all, imitation is the most sincere form of flattery
On the Novell page, comparing reliability..
The scale is between 80 and 100 percent. The low 90 that MS scores just PALES in comparision to that full-height 100.
Of course, ~10% downtime is an extremely significant number if you're talking mission critital.. But still, it's not the 50% that it looks like.
Point 1 needs to be qualified. Home recorders aren't capable of bit-bit copies. They've already stopped home DVD piracy IMHO. There are no home burners that will make a *whole* DVD that any DVD reader can play. They will never need to worry about that.
But why the hell should they CARE about the home user making a copy or three? The real people they ought to care about are those commercial outfits that actually have writers capable of making a whole DVD, making and selling true bootlegs by the thousand.
They need to get their priorities straight.
Oh gawd, EVERY time an XFree discussion starts, someone says the development is too closed. You know what? Shut up. I have one word for you and it is NDA. It's not *HARD* to become a developer, and anyone who complains about it being 'too closed' has obviously not even looked INTO the subject.
XFree is not a 'closed' development, it's a controlled one. And it has to be controlled, as NDAs exist, like them or not.
-Posting at Score:2 just because it needs to be heard.
I resolve to become a better person; sociable, kind, nice-smelling, considerate, polite, and above all, gain programming skills that can assist those in need!
I also resolve to be SO drunk tonight that I won't remember these resolutions in the morning. (:
Closed source need not be the solution. Take almost any form of encryption. I have some trust in the server, but of course there's some form of authentication involved. That authentication is perfectly open source and it still can't be faked.
What I think needs to happen is JC to put out an open source authentication module so that the Quake players have some faith in the module and so that everyone is happy.
The GPL isn't about "infecting" it's about maintaining freedom. And by wanting freedom, you have to take the chance of choosing a license that maintains freedom. The whole point is that when using GPL code, you have to maintain the GPL. Otherwise, what the hell is the point?
I write some GPL code, someone uses it, changes it to BSD, and suddenly my code is available for commercial use, without my consent. Well if I wanted to give my code away for commercial use, I would have chosen the BSD license in the first place. That's the whole reason for choosing the GPL, is if you want to guarantee perpetual freedom.
Now, as per the definition of 'freedom', the BSD could almost be called more 'free' then the GPL because BSD code can be used anywhere for anything. But as far as 'freedom' in the sense that I want my code to be free, but I don't want some commercial entity using my code without even acknowleging my existance.. Then I choose the GPL because it gives me more freedom.
Now, your trolling on the GPL license is just dumb. The 'infectous' nature of the GPL is one of it's strongest points, that it is guaranteed to stay free.
Actually, as far as simple editors go, don't give the newbies vi. I use vim religiously, but I don't think that vi or vim or emacs are appropriate for just starting. For one thing, when you open a file in vi, you don't start in editing mode. How bad would THAT fsck with the head of a newbie? I mean, if you're lucky they've used DOS 'edit', so at least they expect to be able to manipulate text right away.
The solution? Give them pico! Or if you don't like the license on pico, try ae (Anthony's Editor). Straight text mangling when you start the program, and the vital commands are printed on screen for reference.
On the side, why can't people use lynx to view the html docs?