I don't see free software as sucking. I think it's excellent, personally. You'll notice that I made no judgements along this line in my original post, because they're just opinions. Opinions about quality are rarely defensible.
"She gave numerous problems she had which prevented her from adopting the operating system for her day to day usage [...]
To make another quality judgement, the article in question was offensive. That's what irked me. I'd be willing to look past it if it was something novel or useful -- "hey, here's a bunch of insights no one's had before, perhaps this will help you guys who are doing a massive amount of work for free, for my benefit as a user?" Unfortunately for the author, that's not the case. Whining about how free software isn't easy enough/full featured enough for you is kind of like masturbating. You might feel good doing it, but ultimately you haven't accomplished anything, and you've made a mess.
You can either use free software, where you can both contact developers and ask them to implement something you want, and if they're unresponsive, implement what you'd like to see yourself, or you can use closed-source software, and be at the relative whim of the companies who make up that world. Those of us in the free software world made our choice -- we said, "Ok, forget about overpaying for things we don't like or want, we'll do it ourselves!"
What boggles the mind is that there are people unwilling to do much more than bitch at us for writing code they're free to do anything they like with, but they feel compelled to make as much noise as they can about how horrible it is that their experience with the alternative to closed-code isn't exactly what they want it to be.
The most frustrating part about these articles is that they aren't productive, in any way -- a person who has been given a free set of tools and all the resources they'd conceivably need to help maintain and improve them bitches that said tools don't do exactly what they want.
Perhaps we as a community are somewhat at fault for trying to shoehorn Linux into a desktop role (although consider the alternatives, which are often insecure, buggy, and expensive), but regardless, singing and dancing about how bad Linux is without offering to be helpful -- or worse, stereotyping those of us who run it and then adding injury to insult by calling us "shrieking geeks" is no better than any other troll.
Sigh. It's a user's world, and that just sucks -- the user mentality is as digusting as it is pervasive, whether you're talking about computers, politics, economics, or any other major aspect of modern life.
If you can't overclock a chip, then that CPU that *might* run -- hell, even if Intel -knew- it would run - at a 40% speed increase, you're stuck with its original speed. Want a faster processor? Go overspend on another one.
Why do all the anti-US people feel the need to replace the letter 'c' with 'k'? Is 'c' somehow evil? "Amerika", "korporate", etc. When did writing as though one never graduated from 3rd grade became synonymous with being militantly leftist?
I retract my earlier statement. If you can indeed buy a system for 50% of the cost that nets you 75% performance, you have a better general rule of thumb. I have a better exceptional-case rule. I'm taking your word for it -- I haven't bought a brand new system in quite a few years.
Your argument has merit if you're going to be upgrading your system regularly. Let's say it costs $1500 for a top of the line system. Let's also make two assumptions here: computer prices aren't changing, so any $750 system is 75% as fast as a $1500 cost system, and also that computer speed doubles in a year. You buy a system at some point in time for $750. So, you wait 9 months, and buy a second system at the same price, wanting to stay at 75% of current "top" speed. You repeat this cycle for 36 months -- 3 years. At the end of 3 years you've spent $3000.
Now, imagine that I buy a top of the line system at the same time that you bought your 75% system. I wait a full year -- 12 months -- and spend $1500 again, wanting to stay at 100% of the current "top" speed. In another year, I spend yet another $1500. In three years, I've spent $4500, or 150% more than you.
However, let's now imagine that each of us waits about 3 years to upgrade, as seems to be the case for this guy, who's running a 450mHz system. Computer speed has now tripled: you're 375% behind the current top speed, and I'm 300% behind. That's only 75% of difference, sure, but if I'm only upgrading every 3 years, I'd sure as heck want that extra 25% of leeway per year.
"Buy the most expensive system you can, and hold off for as long as you can" costs more in the end, but if you're only able to upgrade once in a great while, you'll make that system last longer. So what you propose makes more sense, if you can drop the $750 every 9 months. If you can't, though, and need to depend on a windfall of some sort coming in (which could reasonably occur every few years), buy the best possible when you do.
If you want to buy a computer that can run D3, wait for it to come out. About a month after its release, shop around for a new system -- you'll both be able to build a system that will be assured to work well for playing Doom, and reap the benefits of the latest hardware at the time.
The general rule of thumb for upgrading it to put it off for as long as you can, and then buy as close to the top of the line as you can afford.
Subscribers are better posters only at the beginning of subscription-existance, it seems. Back when k5 was just getting started, most of us were trying hard to keep the discussion above the waterline. k5 got popular, the signal:noise ratio went to hell. When Rusty revealed k5's dire straits, a lot of us poured out our support, and things swelled -- and for about a week, it was like the old days.
What would be neat would be a subscriber-only web community; it would be horribly elitist, but at least it would keep some of the trolls out.
It is a telephone. Telephones are for talking to people -- they do not make you cool, sexy, suave, professional, or anything else.
That polyphonic ring? It's fucking annoying. The color screen, camera, GPS, etc.? Shiny baubles to suck the money out of your hands. Sure, sure -- you can never get lost, you can show people things at the touch of a button, etc. Personally, I rather *like* getting lost once in a while. It's an experience that breaks from the norm. It sort of goes along with preferring to be out of contact -- no voicemail, no email, just my ears. You want me, you can find me; otherwise, it is just not that important.
You folks with your chirping, buzzing pieces of plastic can operate at maximum efficiency and synergistic quality all the time. Maybe next year they'll release a phone that whispers how important and unique you are into your ear for you./P>
MOO3 removes most of the micromanagent. It's also complex, and takes more than an hour to full appreciate and understand. Why did you buy a complex galatic conquest game if you expected whizz-bang-gee excitement in 60 minutes?
Well, seeing as this is a proven company (Linux Game Publishing) that has released a number of games to the community, and also given that Michael Simms is known for being responsive and patient when assailed with questions, I'd say that LGP has a pretty solid reputation going. The likelihood that they would screw that over to make a few bucks is incredibly slim.
I'd also be highly surprised if LGP *didn't* have a handful of paperwork for the eight people that they choose.
Just because the consumer is already being fucked in the ass does not mean he needs to roll over and pretend to enjoy it, too. The fact that a good number of privacy invasions are already taking place is entirely unrelated to this one, aside (perhaps) from the fact that this is yet one more reason to be outraged.
You don't necessarily need a window manager. If you'd like to run _just_ a game, then edit your ~/.xinitrc so that the only line in it is game's executable. For example, to run only quake3, I'd edit ~/.xinitrc to look like:
quake3
No wm, nothing else. Then, when X starts, assuming it's using ~/.xinitrc, it will only run what's listed there -- in this case, just quake3.
Savefile scumming is pretty much frowned upon by the hard-core players.
But then, hard-core players of a console-based roleplaying game frown quite a bit.
Nethack is a game very much in the tradition of Rogue, so much so that it (and its bretheren like Crawl, Angband, and Omega, to name a few) are called "roguelikes".
A roguelike generally has the following features:
Randomly generated dungeon levels.
Monsters with substantial abilities, often the same sort as the player might get.
An "identification" item system, where the more you play, the more your character knows. (For example: a "purple potion" at the game's beginning, after you learn what it does, might become a "Purple potion of Invisibility."
Multipurpose items: throw that purple potion at an Orc, and it vanishes. Poof.
Substantial character death. No saving, except to stop playing for the night and to come back in the morning. When you die, you _die_.
HARD. You'll die. A lot. ("YASD" == Yet Another Stupid Death.) And you know? You'll keep coming back.
There are 5 comments up as I post this, and the site is already being slashdotted -- it's horridly slow. Last night I noticed on the Guerilla News Network story that the poster had gone out and asked the site admins if he/she could link to them prior to submitting it to the editors.
It is relatively well-understood that/. cannot mirror sites, for a large number of reasons. Moreover, the admins here are taxed (well, maybe...) as is, and aren't willing to fire off emails asking permission to post a link to someone's site every time they get a story that ends up on the frontpage. Nor should they have to.
Perhaps, though, we as posters could be mature and responsible? Asking for permission before DOS'ing someone's site via a link here would at the least be polite.
That's a pretty serious allegation. Can you back it up? How did *you* get access to the code? Can you provide evidence? Moreoever, how does the code detect that the game is running? It can't be simply executable name, given that the Quack3 fiasco took place when ATI tried this stunt.
No disrespect intended, but a claim like that does not stand on its own.
Although I have no need for (and thus don't know about) "DVD design and writing software", I do a considerable amount of work with Cinelerra, which in my mind is an excellent non-linear movie editor (and suite of associated tools).
You obviously failed to understand the majority. Most of the comments posted have pointed out the massive number of problems with this technology, as well as the fact that gun ownership is a guaranteed right in the United States, and shouldn't be tampered with.
My family and I are entering the second year where we don't swap gifts, but instead just get together and enjoy each others' company. It's wonderful.
When I was seven or eight, the excitement of the holiday was "getting stuff", and if there were kids in the picture I imagine we'd all still do the gift thing. What's the point of a bunch of adults spending money they don't have on shit they don't need, though?
The most enjoyable part of the non-loot-oriented approach is how relaxed we all are. There's no rush to the stores, no fretting over our wallets, no concern that someone's been left out. Our only obligation is to drive home and see each other, share a meal, and talk.
I suppose it's a minority view, especially among the/. crowd, but I'm still really surprised by how many comments mention the stress and dread of this time of year.
The most higly supported 3d card under linux is the 3dfx Voodoo 3.
Huh?
Care to define "most highly supported"? NVIDIA has been putting out drivers for a good while now, and their cards are rock solid. The drivers are binary-only, granted, but the fact that they're actively updated certainly surpasses the state of the tdfx code, I think.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't see free software as sucking. I think it's excellent, personally. You'll notice that I made no judgements along this line in my original post, because they're just opinions. Opinions about quality are rarely defensible.
"She gave numerous problems she had which prevented her from adopting the operating system for her day to day usage [...]
To make another quality judgement, the article in question was offensive. That's what irked me. I'd be willing to look past it if it was something novel or useful -- "hey, here's a bunch of insights no one's had before, perhaps this will help you guys who are doing a massive amount of work for free, for my benefit as a user?" Unfortunately for the author, that's not the case. Whining about how free software isn't easy enough/full featured enough for you is kind of like masturbating. You might feel good doing it, but ultimately you haven't accomplished anything, and you've made a mess.
You can either use free software, where you can both contact developers and ask them to implement something you want, and if they're unresponsive, implement what you'd like to see yourself, or you can use closed-source software, and be at the relative whim of the companies who make up that world. Those of us in the free software world made our choice -- we said, "Ok, forget about overpaying for things we don't like or want, we'll do it ourselves!"
What boggles the mind is that there are people unwilling to do much more than bitch at us for writing code they're free to do anything they like with, but they feel compelled to make as much noise as they can about how horrible it is that their experience with the alternative to closed-code isn't exactly what they want it to be.
"Shrieking geeks", indeed.
The most frustrating part about these articles is that they aren't productive, in any way -- a person who has been given a free set of tools and all the resources they'd conceivably need to help maintain and improve them bitches that said tools don't do exactly what they want.
Perhaps we as a community are somewhat at fault for trying to shoehorn Linux into a desktop role (although consider the alternatives, which are often insecure, buggy, and expensive), but regardless, singing and dancing about how bad Linux is without offering to be helpful -- or worse, stereotyping those of us who run it and then adding injury to insult by calling us "shrieking geeks" is no better than any other troll.
Sigh. It's a user's world, and that just sucks -- the user mentality is as digusting as it is pervasive, whether you're talking about computers, politics, economics, or any other major aspect of modern life.
Actually, that should teach you not to not preview a post. :0
...And in an unsurprising countermove, the United States henceforth will be refered to as the Fourth Reich. Heil Bush!
If you can't overclock a chip, then that CPU that *might* run -- hell, even if Intel -knew- it would run - at a 40% speed increase, you're stuck with its original speed. Want a faster processor? Go overspend on another one.
Why do all the anti-US people feel the need to replace the letter 'c' with 'k'? Is 'c' somehow evil? "Amerika", "korporate", etc. When did writing as though one never graduated from 3rd grade became synonymous with being militantly leftist?
Your argument has merit if you're going to be upgrading your system regularly. Let's say it costs $1500 for a top of the line system. Let's also make two assumptions here: computer prices aren't changing, so any $750 system is 75% as fast as a $1500 cost system, and also that computer speed doubles in a year. You buy a system at some point in time for $750. So, you wait 9 months, and buy a second system at the same price, wanting to stay at 75% of current "top" speed. You repeat this cycle for 36 months -- 3 years. At the end of 3 years you've spent $3000.
Now, imagine that I buy a top of the line system at the same time that you bought your 75% system. I wait a full year -- 12 months -- and spend $1500 again, wanting to stay at 100% of the current "top" speed. In another year, I spend yet another $1500. In three years, I've spent $4500, or 150% more than you.
However, let's now imagine that each of us waits about 3 years to upgrade, as seems to be the case for this guy, who's running a 450mHz system. Computer speed has now tripled: you're 375% behind the current top speed, and I'm 300% behind. That's only 75% of difference, sure, but if I'm only upgrading every 3 years, I'd sure as heck want that extra 25% of leeway per year.
"Buy the most expensive system you can, and hold off for as long as you can" costs more in the end, but if you're only able to upgrade once in a great while, you'll make that system last longer. So what you propose makes more sense, if you can drop the $750 every 9 months. If you can't, though, and need to depend on a windfall of some sort coming in (which could reasonably occur every few years), buy the best possible when you do.
The general rule of thumb for upgrading it to put it off for as long as you can, and then buy as close to the top of the line as you can afford.
Since when do you crapflood, levi? :)
Subscribers are better posters only at the beginning of subscription-existance, it seems. Back when k5 was just getting started, most of us were trying hard to keep the discussion above the waterline. k5 got popular, the signal:noise ratio went to hell. When Rusty revealed k5's dire straits, a lot of us poured out our support, and things swelled -- and for about a week, it was like the old days.
What would be neat would be a subscriber-only web community; it would be horribly elitist, but at least it would keep some of the trolls out.
Taco, man, you're confused. Rusty handles news from the trenches -- you're supposed to be giving us stuff that matters! ;)
Hardly a troll, Anonymous Coward. Go look through my history of comments.
It is a telephone. Telephones are for talking to people -- they do not make you cool, sexy, suave, professional, or anything else.
That polyphonic ring? It's fucking annoying. The color screen, camera, GPS, etc.? Shiny baubles to suck the money out of your hands. Sure, sure -- you can never get lost, you can show people things at the touch of a button, etc. Personally, I rather *like* getting lost once in a while. It's an experience that breaks from the norm. It sort of goes along with preferring to be out of contact -- no voicemail, no email, just my ears. You want me, you can find me; otherwise, it is just not that important.
You folks with your chirping, buzzing pieces of plastic can operate at maximum efficiency and synergistic quality all the time. Maybe next year they'll release a phone that whispers how important and unique you are into your ear for you. /P>
MOO3 removes most of the micromanagent. It's also complex, and takes more than an hour to full appreciate and understand. Why did you buy a complex galatic conquest game if you expected whizz-bang-gee excitement in 60 minutes?
Well, seeing as this is a proven company (Linux Game Publishing) that has released a number of games to the community, and also given that Michael Simms is known for being responsive and patient when assailed with questions, I'd say that LGP has a pretty solid reputation going. The likelihood that they would screw that over to make a few bucks is incredibly slim.
I'd also be highly surprised if LGP *didn't* have a handful of paperwork for the eight people that they choose.
Just because the consumer is already being fucked in the ass does not mean he needs to roll over and pretend to enjoy it, too. The fact that a good number of privacy invasions are already taking place is entirely unrelated to this one, aside (perhaps) from the fact that this is yet one more reason to be outraged.
You don't necessarily need a window manager. If you'd like to run _just_ a game, then edit your ~/.xinitrc so that the only line in it is game's executable. For example, to run only quake3, I'd edit ~/.xinitrc to look like:
quake3
No wm, nothing else. Then, when X starts, assuming it's using ~/.xinitrc, it will only run what's listed there -- in this case, just quake3.
Savefile scumming is pretty much frowned upon by the hard-core players. But then, hard-core players of a console-based roleplaying game frown quite a bit.
Nethack is a game very much in the tradition of Rogue, so much so that it (and its bretheren like Crawl, Angband, and Omega, to name a few) are called "roguelikes".
A roguelike generally has the following features:
There are 5 comments up as I post this, and the site is already being slashdotted -- it's horridly slow. Last night I noticed on the Guerilla News Network story that the poster had gone out and asked the site admins if he/she could link to them prior to submitting it to the editors.
It is relatively well-understood that /. cannot mirror sites, for a large number of reasons. Moreover, the admins here are taxed (well, maybe...) as is, and aren't willing to fire off emails asking permission to post a link to someone's site every time they get a story that ends up on the frontpage. Nor should they have to.
Perhaps, though, we as posters could be mature and responsible? Asking for permission before DOS'ing someone's site via a link here would at the least be polite.
That's a pretty serious allegation. Can you back it up? How did *you* get access to the code? Can you provide evidence? Moreoever, how does the code detect that the game is running? It can't be simply executable name, given that the Quack3 fiasco took place when ATI tried this stunt.
No disrespect intended, but a claim like that does not stand on its own.
Although I have no need for (and thus don't know about) "DVD design and writing software", I do a considerable amount of work with Cinelerra, which in my mind is an excellent non-linear movie editor (and suite of associated tools).
You obviously failed to understand the majority. Most of the comments posted have pointed out the massive number of problems with this technology, as well as the fact that gun ownership is a guaranteed right in the United States, and shouldn't be tampered with.
Flamebait, much?
I played the game, was never a big fan. You can find information on it here.
My family and I are entering the second year where we don't swap gifts, but instead just get together and enjoy each others' company. It's wonderful.
When I was seven or eight, the excitement of the holiday was "getting stuff", and if there were kids in the picture I imagine we'd all still do the gift thing. What's the point of a bunch of adults spending money they don't have on shit they don't need, though?
The most enjoyable part of the non-loot-oriented approach is how relaxed we all are. There's no rush to the stores, no fretting over our wallets, no concern that someone's been left out. Our only obligation is to drive home and see each other, share a meal, and talk.
I suppose it's a minority view, especially among the /. crowd, but I'm still really surprised by how many comments mention the stress and dread of this time of year.
The most higly supported 3d card under linux is the 3dfx Voodoo 3.
Huh?
Care to define "most highly supported"? NVIDIA has been putting out drivers for a good while now, and their cards are rock solid. The drivers are binary-only, granted, but the fact that they're actively updated certainly surpasses the state of the tdfx code, I think.