If you don't use Linux for 3D stuff, it feels damn-near native on a modern machine. No more rebooting. Bonus: you don't have to install duplicate apps in both environments (like OpenOffice).
In my experience, the only decent PHP framework is Wordpress. Seriously, you can do a hell of a lot with very little work just by creating a theme and using three or four plugins. You can crank out an awesome, somewhat customized (feature-wise, I mean), client-editable site in a day, counting the graphics work, and 99% of the maintenance is just updating Wordpress when a bugfix or new version comes out. It's hard to beat that for smaller sites.
I've found that if I can't do it without any framework or with Wordpress, I'm better off using Python and Django rather than trying to wrestle with PHP's various mediocre-at-best frameworks, several of which I've tried and none of which have impressed me like Django or RoR (not even the similar CakePHP)
Raw PHP (optionally with a standalone ORM), Wordpress, or pick another language entirely. That's my take on it after seven or eight years working in the language. The other frameworks will just make you wish you were using something better.
1. You can't take advantage of the Wii's special input (IR pointer, motion sensor) in anything but a totally gimmicky and unnecessary way if you want to port it to another system, unless you're willing to re-write that entire part of the game.
2. The art and graphics are a huge part of making the game. Having to do that twice means nearly double the effort, vs. only doing it once for PS3/360/PC support.
3. I doubt there are many (any?) decent 3D and/or physics engines that work on the Wii and on the other systems, while there are several that work across the 360, PS3, and PC.
In other words you wouldn't be porting the game, you'd be making a second one from scratch (or you'd be writing a custom and even-more-complicated-than-usual game engine, which is worse). Then there's marketing to consider--if just 5% of the people who own only a Wii would play your game, while 40% of the people who game on a PS3, 360, or PC would, which is your better bet? While those numbers are pulled out of my ass, I doubt the proportion is far off for some game types--how many people who only own a Wii give a shit about violent FPS games, for instance?
At least with the Sony machine you can play ordinary Blu-ray disks.
Not to mention playing streamed video & music over a network. It's freakin' great at that. The chapter-like feature (hit square when a video's playing, you'll see it; up and down increase or decrease length between snapshots) alone makes it better than any other video player I can think of.
I use it more to watch videos and play music than I do to play games, though it still gets 5-10hrs of game time a week--mostly Modern Warfare 2 split-screen multiplayer.
Yeah, should have used the full CoD:MW2. Used to read it that way, too, before I started playing Modern Warfare 2 (god help me; it's not even a good multiplayer game but it gets its hooks in you and keeps you playing anyway with the promise of another unlock or another killstreak)
So true. The amount of crying would fill an ocean if MW2 forced players of similar level to play together rather than providing a steady stream of n00bs to the elite players so they can use the Tactical Nuke 3 minutes in on every map.
I think games that are only the mechanics (Tetris and similar, many platformers and schmups, etc.) are art as much as beer pong, horseshoes, or carnival games are art. They might be pretty, and they might be excellent games, but they're not designed to elicit emotion (other than maybe "goddamn it, I swear I hit A you piece of shit game!") and generally don't.
OTOH, many games are designed to elicit emotion, and the game mechanics of those games are as much a part of their success at that as anything else.
Is Alien vs. Predator as scary if you give the marine the ability to see through the dark and kill anything with one hit? Is STALKER as bleak and lonely if it's a Doom-style shooter instead of a semi-realistic one? What about The Witcher? Let's make it a JRPG complete with the main character calling down giant meteors to hit human enemies (who proceed to take only half damage). Let's go to the super-artsy games: is the effect of The Path ruined if its subtle visual hints are turned in to a traditional HUD? How about if we give the player a map and let them warp around using it? Does that change the tone of other parts of the game and story? I think it does, and if it can drastically change the effect of the graphics, sound, and atmosphere, then it's part of the art.
Fuck up the game mechanics--not even making them bad, necessarily, but making them not match up with your goals for the emotional effect of the game--and you've ruined the art. Remove the game mechanics, and there's no way to experience the art properly. Nail them, and the art is dramatically improved.
Yes, and I'm sure you could cut veteran's benefits to fund a Mars mission too... or neighborhood watch programs.
Meh. Neighborhood Watch is no substitute for having a proper number of police stations. I mean sure, once your city's huge and you've got more money coming in than you can use (but before you start covering the map in arcologies) you might as well check that one and City Beautification and all the other barely-useful options, but until then you're better off saving for more police stations.
Besides, all your money's probably going to seaport and airport zoning anyway.
As for the space program--well, the arcologies are your space program, but you can't build those until late-game anyway.
Do what I do--run Windows, put Linux in a VM. Virtual Box is free, robust, and easy to use, or there's always VMWare.
Run the VM full screen and you can forget you're not running it natively, so long as you don't need to do anything in 3D or very processor intensive (video encoding, for example). Drop to Windows if you need a Windows app (say, a recent version of Photoshop or real MSOffice) or to play games. Plus, if your chosen distro decides to make horrible decisions that cause massive audio breakage (Ubuntu.... *glower*) you can still listen to music or watch Youtube videos in Windows without rebooting.
Another plus is that your Linux installation is all in a single file that you can back up or transfer very easily.
I find that this works far better than dual booting. Saves disk space, saves time. I felt kind of crappy at first for making Linux a second-class citizen on my machine, but this works so much better that I wish I'd done it years ago--though I supposed high clocked multi-core processors and multi-gigabyte RAM sticks weren't commonplace back then, so the experience might not have been so nice.
Both were very good at it. Only operating systems you could run on an original Pentium and expect to be able to play back an MP3 while doing other stuff without it skipping and without the slightest hint of UI slowdown (Linux and Windows certainly couldn't pull it off)
QNX and BeOS were my choices when I wanted a low-end machine to play MP3s without skipping, back when processing power was low enough that both Windows and Linux couldn't be relied upon to do so even when that's all they were doing.
BeOS had a lot of other useful desktop apps, too. QNX had some, but not as many. Either would remain responsive while multi-tasking and still keep the audio playing back smoothly in the background (sounds dumb now, but that was pretty cool on an early Pentium or 486DX with 32 to 64 MB RAM)
I wish they'd build more operating systems like those. Hell, even modern advanced features wouldn't seem out of place in BeOS and I can easily imagine some modern version of it taking up 1/10th the disk space and resources of (say) Windows 7 while offering the same or better features; that's essentially what it did back then when compared with Win98, after all.
QNX could do some crazy shit on machines weaker than my cell phone. It'd be awesome to see it adapted for modern low power consumer devices.
I did the same thing about 8 months ago. Ubuntu's shitty changes to their audio system finally drove me to try installing it in Virtual Box (free). Result? I don't need a dedicated partition, the VM "drive" is a fraction of the size of my old Linux partition in part due to not needing multiple copies of everything (don't need The GIMP and OpenOffice in Linux, for example), and I can play games, use Photoshop and Flash, etc. without rebooting.
As for Linux, there's not a single thing I did in it that really taxed the CPU that I can't do better in Windows. If I make it fullscreen and don't have any cycle-hungry Windows apps in the background it feels just like it's native. I use it for coding and a few power tools, and Windows for everything else.
Virtual Box is free and works as well as VMWare. It's every bit as easy to use, too. You can copy/paste between the operating systems, and even file transfer is simple. Far fewer problems. I should have done this years ago.
As much as I initially hated their methods, I can't say I'm completely against it now, having used it a bit.
It's a small glimpse of what a sane copyright policy might allow. Yes, it's a fucked up walled garden, but even the equivalent of a Disney park ride take on what reasonable copyright policy might look like is exciting. It's possible it's the only time I'll see something like that in my lifetime, if it gets shut down and the idea doesn't spread.
The first gen fats have an entire PS2 in them, essentially.
The second gen with backward compatibility had only one component from the PS2 (the one they say they can't emulate in software for whatever reason) and did the rest in software. Later fats (IIRC) and slims don't have any. So, they already have a software emulator for everything but that bit. I want to know why a bunch of volunteers can overcome that hurdle without access to design specs and such, but Sony can't, even though they'll make a mountain of money if they do.
at some points it's hard to believe it's a documentary
Another documentary that had a similar effect for me was Murderball. It started out as an interesting but typical look in to a sport that few people are familiar with, but by the end it had become the best sports movie I'd ever seen, period.
Try not to read too much about it if you plan to watch it, as spoilers could really ruin the experience.
Speaking of Playstations and emulators, why the hell isn't there a software PS2 emulator on all PS3s yet?
There's clearly not a valid technical reason. I know Sony has said they're having trouble emulating one specific bit of the machine, but there are at least two or three noncommercial (so, people donating spare time and with no access to inside info on the machine) PS2 emulators that seem to manage OK. There's no way Sony can't do it, with better access and resources. With access to the bare metal on the PS3, there shouldn't be any problems with insufficient horsepower. The PS3's no slouch in the processing department.
There's also not a business reason, as far as I can tell. I find it hard to believe they're making much money selling PS2s--hell, you could probably buy 100 or more of them here in one day without traveling more than 15 miles and without buying a single one new. About half would be slims, too. The used market is saturated with them. Decent software PS2 emulation on the PS3 would give holdouts a big reason to buy the new console, and it would let Sony start selling PS2 games over the network, which is practically free money for them.
Debian's always been my personal fallback solution, though it's far more obtuse to install than Ubuntu and has fewer things installed and working by default afterward. Don't like RPM-based distros much, personally. Gentoo was my distro of choice before Ubuntu, but it's pretty hardcore, definitely not a good choice for usability. Still has my favorite package manager ever, though I could do without the constant compiling.
I'm not really sure these days. Ubuntu was so good for so long that I'm not up on many other distros. The last 2-3 versions have really sucked, though. Some good features were added (wireless has gotten far better with every release, for instance) but others were so bad that they offset any gains.
As for media players specifically, I've yet to find one that I liked and that wasn't an unstable piece of crap or a massive resource hog. My advice is aim lower; learn to accept a player one tier of features under Amarok (warning: it will probably be a GTK app). Then again, your trouble may have been Ubuntu's recent and inexplicable sound system shakeup, in which case it might sort itself out in the upcoming release.
Sorry that I'm not much help. Between the fact that I only run Linux in a VM these days and that Ubuntu hadn't given me a good reason to leave for so long, I'm out of the loop. If the next version sucks as much as the last couple, though, I'll be right with you digging through distrowatch.
Gstreamer used to be the first thing I'd (painfully) strip out of Ubuntu, because it never fucking worked and every program wanted to use it by default.
About the time it got good enough to leave in they broke audio far, far worse with the premature inclusion of PulseAudio. I hear it's gotten better, but Ubuntu's inability to get its shit together on audio (which was weird, since audio'd been Just Working (TM) for me in Linux since '04 or so) drove me to delete its partition and banish it to a Virtual Box VM, only "booting" it up to write code.
Any Windows program that advertised the porting and inclusion of either of these things would cause me to run way the hell away and find some other solution.
I'm kind of surprised to see someone bringing up Aquinas' arguments as relevant to a modern discussion about the existence of god. Usually someone smart enough to be aware of them also knows that anyone with even the slightest exposure to philosophy or formal reasoning has probably, at least once, shredded one or more of those arguments as an exercise. Tearing them apart is about one step up the difficulty ladder from identifying elementary errors in false syllogisms.
Further explanation on 4 & 5:
4 is basically "see that tree with green leaves? Now imagine the greenest thing. That thing is god". You may replace green and greenest with any quality.
OK, that's not quite fair; it's more like "now imagine the tree-est thing". He's essentially saying that Plato's forms are god.
5 is just a very old form of the entropy argument. Drop a cup, it breaks; drop pieces of a cup, they don't form a whole cup. This might not be so silly an argument except for all the things we've learned about how molecules can self-arrange in high energy environments (Earth, that is).
Kind of like the space station module naming contest.
"Suggest a name for the module! Or, just vote on one of the ones we've selected for you! Oops, the one that won isn't one we listed and it's silly, guess we won't do that. Also, we're not picking the one that got the most votes of the ones we ourselves suggested. Apparently we only put that one on there to fuck with you."
Slashdot Mirror
Or run Linux in VirtualBox.
If you don't use Linux for 3D stuff, it feels damn-near native on a modern machine. No more rebooting. Bonus: you don't have to install duplicate apps in both environments (like OpenOffice).
In my experience, the only decent PHP framework is Wordpress. Seriously, you can do a hell of a lot with very little work just by creating a theme and using three or four plugins. You can crank out an awesome, somewhat customized (feature-wise, I mean), client-editable site in a day, counting the graphics work, and 99% of the maintenance is just updating Wordpress when a bugfix or new version comes out. It's hard to beat that for smaller sites.
I've found that if I can't do it without any framework or with Wordpress, I'm better off using Python and Django rather than trying to wrestle with PHP's various mediocre-at-best frameworks, several of which I've tried and none of which have impressed me like Django or RoR (not even the similar CakePHP)
Raw PHP (optionally with a standalone ORM), Wordpress, or pick another language entirely. That's my take on it after seven or eight years working in the language. The other frameworks will just make you wish you were using something better.
1. You can't take advantage of the Wii's special input (IR pointer, motion sensor) in anything but a totally gimmicky and unnecessary way if you want to port it to another system, unless you're willing to re-write that entire part of the game.
2. The art and graphics are a huge part of making the game. Having to do that twice means nearly double the effort, vs. only doing it once for PS3/360/PC support.
3. I doubt there are many (any?) decent 3D and/or physics engines that work on the Wii and on the other systems, while there are several that work across the 360, PS3, and PC.
In other words you wouldn't be porting the game, you'd be making a second one from scratch (or you'd be writing a custom and even-more-complicated-than-usual game engine, which is worse). Then there's marketing to consider--if just 5% of the people who own only a Wii would play your game, while 40% of the people who game on a PS3, 360, or PC would, which is your better bet? While those numbers are pulled out of my ass, I doubt the proportion is far off for some game types--how many people who only own a Wii give a shit about violent FPS games, for instance?
Not to mention playing streamed video & music over a network. It's freakin' great at that. The chapter-like feature (hit square when a video's playing, you'll see it; up and down increase or decrease length between snapshots) alone makes it better than any other video player I can think of.
I use it more to watch videos and play music than I do to play games, though it still gets 5-10hrs of game time a week--mostly Modern Warfare 2 split-screen multiplayer.
Yeah, should have used the full CoD:MW2. Used to read it that way, too, before I started playing Modern Warfare 2 (god help me; it's not even a good multiplayer game but it gets its hooks in you and keeps you playing anyway with the promise of another unlock or another killstreak)
So true. The amount of crying would fill an ocean if MW2 forced players of similar level to play together rather than providing a steady stream of n00bs to the elite players so they can use the Tactical Nuke 3 minutes in on every map.
I think games that are only the mechanics (Tetris and similar, many platformers and schmups, etc.) are art as much as beer pong, horseshoes, or carnival games are art. They might be pretty, and they might be excellent games, but they're not designed to elicit emotion (other than maybe "goddamn it, I swear I hit A you piece of shit game!") and generally don't.
OTOH, many games are designed to elicit emotion, and the game mechanics of those games are as much a part of their success at that as anything else.
Is Alien vs. Predator as scary if you give the marine the ability to see through the dark and kill anything with one hit? Is STALKER as bleak and lonely if it's a Doom-style shooter instead of a semi-realistic one? What about The Witcher? Let's make it a JRPG complete with the main character calling down giant meteors to hit human enemies (who proceed to take only half damage). Let's go to the super-artsy games: is the effect of The Path ruined if its subtle visual hints are turned in to a traditional HUD? How about if we give the player a map and let them warp around using it? Does that change the tone of other parts of the game and story? I think it does, and if it can drastically change the effect of the graphics, sound, and atmosphere, then it's part of the art.
Fuck up the game mechanics--not even making them bad, necessarily, but making them not match up with your goals for the emotional effect of the game--and you've ruined the art. Remove the game mechanics, and there's no way to experience the art properly. Nail them, and the art is dramatically improved.
Meh. Neighborhood Watch is no substitute for having a proper number of police stations. I mean sure, once your city's huge and you've got more money coming in than you can use (but before you start covering the map in arcologies) you might as well check that one and City Beautification and all the other barely-useful options, but until then you're better off saving for more police stations.
Besides, all your money's probably going to seaport and airport zoning anyway.
As for the space program--well, the arcologies are your space program, but you can't build those until late-game anyway.
Do what I do--run Windows, put Linux in a VM. Virtual Box is free, robust, and easy to use, or there's always VMWare.
Run the VM full screen and you can forget you're not running it natively, so long as you don't need to do anything in 3D or very processor intensive (video encoding, for example). Drop to Windows if you need a Windows app (say, a recent version of Photoshop or real MSOffice) or to play games. Plus, if your chosen distro decides to make horrible decisions that cause massive audio breakage (Ubuntu.... *glower*) you can still listen to music or watch Youtube videos in Windows without rebooting.
Another plus is that your Linux installation is all in a single file that you can back up or transfer very easily.
I find that this works far better than dual booting. Saves disk space, saves time. I felt kind of crappy at first for making Linux a second-class citizen on my machine, but this works so much better that I wish I'd done it years ago--though I supposed high clocked multi-core processors and multi-gigabyte RAM sticks weren't commonplace back then, so the experience might not have been so nice.
Both were very good at it. Only operating systems you could run on an original Pentium and expect to be able to play back an MP3 while doing other stuff without it skipping and without the slightest hint of UI slowdown (Linux and Windows certainly couldn't pull it off)
Well, open-sourcing it would qualify as "something" :)
I'm sure that'd help the folks working on Haiku.
AFAIK, Palm still owns BeOS.
Hopefully whoever buys them does something with it, or sells it to someone who will.
QNX and BeOS were my choices when I wanted a low-end machine to play MP3s without skipping, back when processing power was low enough that both Windows and Linux couldn't be relied upon to do so even when that's all they were doing.
BeOS had a lot of other useful desktop apps, too. QNX had some, but not as many. Either would remain responsive while multi-tasking and still keep the audio playing back smoothly in the background (sounds dumb now, but that was pretty cool on an early Pentium or 486DX with 32 to 64 MB RAM)
I wish they'd build more operating systems like those. Hell, even modern advanced features wouldn't seem out of place in BeOS and I can easily imagine some modern version of it taking up 1/10th the disk space and resources of (say) Windows 7 while offering the same or better features; that's essentially what it did back then when compared with Win98, after all.
QNX could do some crazy shit on machines weaker than my cell phone. It'd be awesome to see it adapted for modern low power consumer devices.
In the version of Minesweeper that comes with Windows, I don't think the first click can be a mine.
I did the same thing about 8 months ago. Ubuntu's shitty changes to their audio system finally drove me to try installing it in Virtual Box (free). Result? I don't need a dedicated partition, the VM "drive" is a fraction of the size of my old Linux partition in part due to not needing multiple copies of everything (don't need The GIMP and OpenOffice in Linux, for example), and I can play games, use Photoshop and Flash, etc. without rebooting.
As for Linux, there's not a single thing I did in it that really taxed the CPU that I can't do better in Windows. If I make it fullscreen and don't have any cycle-hungry Windows apps in the background it feels just like it's native. I use it for coding and a few power tools, and Windows for everything else.
Virtual Box is free and works as well as VMWare. It's every bit as easy to use, too. You can copy/paste between the operating systems, and even file transfer is simple. Far fewer problems. I should have done this years ago.
As much as I initially hated their methods, I can't say I'm completely against it now, having used it a bit.
It's a small glimpse of what a sane copyright policy might allow. Yes, it's a fucked up walled garden, but even the equivalent of a Disney park ride take on what reasonable copyright policy might look like is exciting. It's possible it's the only time I'll see something like that in my lifetime, if it gets shut down and the idea doesn't spread.
The first gen fats have an entire PS2 in them, essentially.
The second gen with backward compatibility had only one component from the PS2 (the one they say they can't emulate in software for whatever reason) and did the rest in software. Later fats (IIRC) and slims don't have any. So, they already have a software emulator for everything but that bit. I want to know why a bunch of volunteers can overcome that hurdle without access to design specs and such, but Sony can't, even though they'll make a mountain of money if they do.
Another documentary that had a similar effect for me was Murderball. It started out as an interesting but typical look in to a sport that few people are familiar with, but by the end it had become the best sports movie I'd ever seen, period.
Try not to read too much about it if you plan to watch it, as spoilers could really ruin the experience.
Speaking of Playstations and emulators, why the hell isn't there a software PS2 emulator on all PS3s yet?
There's clearly not a valid technical reason. I know Sony has said they're having trouble emulating one specific bit of the machine, but there are at least two or three noncommercial (so, people donating spare time and with no access to inside info on the machine) PS2 emulators that seem to manage OK. There's no way Sony can't do it, with better access and resources. With access to the bare metal on the PS3, there shouldn't be any problems with insufficient horsepower. The PS3's no slouch in the processing department.
There's also not a business reason, as far as I can tell. I find it hard to believe they're making much money selling PS2s--hell, you could probably buy 100 or more of them here in one day without traveling more than 15 miles and without buying a single one new. About half would be slims, too. The used market is saturated with them. Decent software PS2 emulation on the PS3 would give holdouts a big reason to buy the new console, and it would let Sony start selling PS2 games over the network, which is practically free money for them.
WTF, Sony?
Debian's always been my personal fallback solution, though it's far more obtuse to install than Ubuntu and has fewer things installed and working by default afterward. Don't like RPM-based distros much, personally. Gentoo was my distro of choice before Ubuntu, but it's pretty hardcore, definitely not a good choice for usability. Still has my favorite package manager ever, though I could do without the constant compiling.
I'm not really sure these days. Ubuntu was so good for so long that I'm not up on many other distros. The last 2-3 versions have really sucked, though. Some good features were added (wireless has gotten far better with every release, for instance) but others were so bad that they offset any gains.
As for media players specifically, I've yet to find one that I liked and that wasn't an unstable piece of crap or a massive resource hog. My advice is aim lower; learn to accept a player one tier of features under Amarok (warning: it will probably be a GTK app). Then again, your trouble may have been Ubuntu's recent and inexplicable sound system shakeup, in which case it might sort itself out in the upcoming release.
Sorry that I'm not much help. Between the fact that I only run Linux in a VM these days and that Ubuntu hadn't given me a good reason to leave for so long, I'm out of the loop. If the next version sucks as much as the last couple, though, I'll be right with you digging through distrowatch.
Gstreamer used to be the first thing I'd (painfully) strip out of Ubuntu, because it never fucking worked and every program wanted to use it by default.
About the time it got good enough to leave in they broke audio far, far worse with the premature inclusion of PulseAudio. I hear it's gotten better, but Ubuntu's inability to get its shit together on audio (which was weird, since audio'd been Just Working (TM) for me in Linux since '04 or so) drove me to delete its partition and banish it to a Virtual Box VM, only "booting" it up to write code.
Any Windows program that advertised the porting and inclusion of either of these things would cause me to run way the hell away and find some other solution.
SLLT
(Strategic Lightning Limitation Treaty)
I'm kind of surprised to see someone bringing up Aquinas' arguments as relevant to a modern discussion about the existence of god. Usually someone smart enough to be aware of them also knows that anyone with even the slightest exposure to philosophy or formal reasoning has probably, at least once, shredded one or more of those arguments as an exercise. Tearing them apart is about one step up the difficulty ladder from identifying elementary errors in false syllogisms.
Further explanation on 4 & 5:
4 is basically "see that tree with green leaves? Now imagine the greenest thing. That thing is god". You may replace green and greenest with any quality.
OK, that's not quite fair; it's more like "now imagine the tree-est thing". He's essentially saying that Plato's forms are god.
5 is just a very old form of the entropy argument. Drop a cup, it breaks; drop pieces of a cup, they don't form a whole cup. This might not be so silly an argument except for all the things we've learned about how molecules can self-arrange in high energy environments (Earth, that is).
Kind of like the space station module naming contest.
"Suggest a name for the module! Or, just vote on one of the ones we've selected for you! Oops, the one that won isn't one we listed and it's silly, guess we won't do that. Also, we're not picking the one that got the most votes of the ones we ourselves suggested. Apparently we only put that one on there to fuck with you."
Or LinkedIn, if it's gotta be a social network.