Software can be multiplied easily by making copies of it. This means if you do software, the development costs often won't be the major pain, but getting people to buy your product. I guess you can prove me wrong in some cases, but I'd say that a lot of the expenses in salaries is really executive and creativity salary. If you start cost-cutting there, you can just as well start to chop your head off.
If you are a software company that needs to borrow capital, I guess offshoring makes sense. Smart money is just too smart for us.
You spoke a about config files; There are a few man pages for config files, but not enough, and they often don't explain the details of the config file. And how do you find out the name of the config file in the beginning ?
I can only talk about S.u.S.E. here, but the searchable documentation/FAQ they add often just discusses very few weird problems, not the basics. Of course you can google, but you need a working system for that.
I didn't find the info files more usable, and sometimes you will actually have failed to install info. And what I hate most are the short man pages which tell you to look at the info file, and you find out the info file is just a copy of the man page.
For me, ability to search is the main problem. Of course, there is find / -type f -exec grep "modules.conf" {} \; -print:-P
Reproducing a cup of coffee together with the cup in a kind of nanotechnological machine is one of the more stupid ideas of Star Trek. Surely it is easier to just do it the usual way, coffee powder + hot water.
Of course, you probably wouldn't grow coffee, but use genetic engineered organisms/biologic factories to produce it.
Actually, making the cup out of nanotechnology is an OK idea, but you still wouldn't ask for a new cup every few minutes but re-use the old cup, and you'd have to place the old cup somewhere. Somehow in S.T., no one ever has to discard a cup, Janeway only is into getting new cups. She's probably hoarding the cups. "Here see my collection of 854 cups."
The way Star Trek does it has nothing to do with actual nanotechnology, it is more related to magic.
If the music is encoded like in that transmission, that the information collapses once read, then well, the use for DRM could be buy-once use-once media. Would be pretty annoying, especially since THE LAW makes it illegal to circumvent it, however easy (plug in recorder to output) it might be.
Why 192.168.123.43 is trying to send 300 emails an hour ?
Really easy answer: he is running an email list.
Why a large number of IP addresses are trying to access port 3250 on 192.168.123.33 ?
Well, because 192.168.123.33 is not the wrongdoer but because someone is faking IP packets replies to which all go back to 192.168.123.33. Or maybe 192.168.123.33 is running filesharing on that port, which he should well be allowed to do on a decent network.
I guess you could handle all this by having white-lists of hosts that are allowed to do things that the admin considers weird, but without the automation the initial poster spoke of, I think the admin will not be able to maintain a decent service.
Compare this to the first Web servers to be run: An admin could easily have considered these evil bandwidth hogs, and stifled innovation by blocking them.
Of course there are assets of SCO that you can use! Why, just yesterday I filed my business plan that involves buying the rights to SCO Unix and System V, and suing every Linux user on the planet.
This is step one in my plans for World Domination.
This time, it will work.
Did you ever try out a game like e.g. Wesnoth ?
It scrolls very slow and doesn't even scroll smoothly. I believe this is due to limitations of X.
There is nothing out there that can work with the newest features of graphics cards as DirectX can. DirectX is one of the last unassaulted selling points of Windows.
Just yesterday I used the OpenOffice spreadsheet as a calculator because the X calculators all(I only tried three) suck. (Well maybe they are not the newest versions.) That was my nail-hammer problem.
I like to use notepad more than frontpage or dreamweaver because you actually have to know what you are doing. I guess I could use proton or context to get funky syntax highlighting, but actually can tell what is in "" from javascript without colors, so why bother.
For search and replace, xemacs regexp is pretty powerful, but you can't replace in all files in a directory.
I mostly use rpms, but you have to use the source when you want to add something to the source code, use ggc -g/gdb to debug, or do profiling.
So I'm happy that the most interesting stuff is available as source. (That is the stuff that I'm interested in. YMMV.) When you don't expect to work out anything from the source(not even pngs and config files) you are better off with rpms.
I found it funny how in the computer RPG Fallout, you could shoot robots in the motivator, which was located precisely where a humans private parts would be.
Essentially if you bring a goblin-thwacker +10 from a game where this is a mundane item into another dungeon where the same item is considered godly, then this is the same profit that can be made by trading, adding new option to do stuff in the game. The mediator program amd both dungeons will provde a mechanism which will lead to a shortage of goblin-thwackers in the dungeon where it formerly was mundane.
But you really need some kind of standard. At least one base class. But for this, as standard, you could also use a simple scripting language. Or XML, but that achieves the same ends, and XML can be very choosy about standards adherence.
On the other hand, I find the scripting taht Stratagus uses to define its units looking kind of scary. But I didn't really try hard to understand it.
So, in fact, looking not only at single objects but at maps, it would be cool if ALL games could share their data, so you could run several engines using one map.
I harbor a plan for a kind of broker server that would allow you to transfer characters and assets between different kind of servers, but you would need the servers to adopt this system, which probably only open source games would do. I also fancy a special kind of magic/object system to go with that server.
Feel like helping me program it ?
Maybe it is the subject itself that is difficult.
on
Gimp Hits 2.0
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I'm not very good with neither Photoshop or Gimp.
So my views are more the kind of a beginners views.
I found it hard to find the relevant menus in Gimp. But I also found it hard to find the relevant window to change something in Photoshop, where you have lots of opened tool windows, which most of the time don't do anything because you haven't selected anything relevant. Maybe image manipulation and drawing really requires a lot of skills to create an interface which does the easy stuff but also allows complex manipulations.
The only program I came to terms with was IRIS Showcase, but that is mostly a vector/object program. I liked the way you could group/raise/lower parts of the graphics. It sure was quicker than dragging all those layers around in Photoshop with the mouse.
Macromedia(tm) did this. Speaks volumes for a company attempting to sell an html editing tool.
I was unable to access their site using any of the four different browsers I had.
FreeC**** is not really shut down, it is named stratagus now. There is also a game named Magnant(www.insectwar.com) which isn't free though but based on stratagus. Probably means more trouble to come when someone will try to freeclone Magnant.
Wouldn't it be enough to have a switch for the program rpm which simply installs packages recursively ?
So you could do(pseudocode) rpm -R --explain --force -package penguin --rpmsource/mnt/dvd/rpm then if you like what happens rpm -R --force -package penguin --rpmsource/mnt/dvd/rpm
Where explain will explain what rpm will do and what dependencies --force will break(if any)
I guess you will all blame it on me and my old system, which is partly useless for games anyway, but with my linux system, I have two problems: The sound often doesn't play, maybe because I have something like a SB 32/2 which is neither 32 nor 16 or maybe it is the artsd, and my old graphics card(riva 128) is not really supported: Strangely, linux told me after an upgrade that I need to downgrade X, but after I copied my old XF86Config(which also was a pain to create in the first place, since SaX didn't work right) X works.
I think I could put more work into it, but so far I already spend more time than I think the average user will.
I admit though, that the scanning for new hardware and automounting of DOS harddrives has greatly simplified use of linux. That is, if you forget that now I have every drive put twice on the desktop because it maps both/dev/hda2 and/a which is where I let mount/dev/hda2.
Getting games from sourceforge is a good idea, but it often requires you to install extra packages and upgrade existing ones, and sometimes makes you wonder if you don't break anything in the process.
So this again is something that may be beyond that what average joe who has problems to beat games with invulnerability turned on will do.
It's not an important issue for open source because open source lives by the people who DO spend a lot of times figuring out things and can contribute.
Another thing is grapics. The only widespread and shared graphics is TuX the penguin. It would be cool if you had a repository of 3D models and a toolchain to take images from that to be used across a range of games. Maybe such a place does exist, but I must have missed that news.
Eh, Dr. Zoidberg, unfortunately there is only enough oxygen for the rest of us left on the spaceship.. I'm sure you won't mind helping us by staying in the freezer. *Push*
The (unix) "file" command combined with a shell script could easily do what the patent does. So even if the file command doesn't count(yet), because it does not usually recognize game platforms, isn't this patent lacking the invention depth required of a patent ?
Slashdot Mirror
Software can be multiplied easily by making copies of it. This means if you do software, the development costs often won't be the major pain, but getting people to buy your product. I guess you can prove me wrong in some cases, but I'd say that a lot of the expenses in salaries is really executive and creativity salary. If you start cost-cutting there, you can just as well start to chop your head off.
If you are a software company that needs to borrow capital, I guess offshoring makes sense. Smart money is just too smart for us.
You spoke a about config files; There are a few man pages for config files, but not enough, and they often don't explain the details of the config file. And how do you find out the name of the config file in the beginning ?
:-P
I can only talk about S.u.S.E. here, but the searchable documentation/FAQ they add often just discusses very few weird problems, not the basics.
Of course you can google, but you need a working system for that.
I didn't find the info files more usable, and sometimes you will actually have failed to install info. And what I hate most are the short man pages which tell you to look at the info file, and you find out the info file is just a copy of the man page.
For me, ability to search is the main problem.
Of course, there is find / -type f -exec grep "modules.conf" {} \; -print
Of course, you probably wouldn't grow coffee, but use genetic engineered organisms/biologic factories to produce it.
Actually, making the cup out of nanotechnology is an OK idea, but you still wouldn't ask for a new cup every few minutes but re-use the old cup, and you'd have to place the old cup somewhere. Somehow in S.T., no one ever has to discard a cup, Janeway only is into getting new cups. She's probably hoarding the cups. "Here see my collection of 854 cups."
The way Star Trek does it has nothing to do with actual nanotechnology, it is more related to magic.
If the music is encoded like in that transmission, that the information collapses once read, then well, the use for DRM could be buy-once use-once media. Would be pretty annoying, especially since THE LAW makes it illegal to circumvent it, however easy (plug in recorder to output) it might be.
Why 192.168.123.43 is trying to send 300 emails an hour ?
Really easy answer: he is running an email list.
Why a large number of IP addresses are trying to access port 3250 on 192.168.123.33 ?
Well, because 192.168.123.33 is not the wrongdoer but because someone is faking IP packets replies to which all go back to 192.168.123.33.
Or maybe 192.168.123.33 is running filesharing on that port, which he should well be allowed to do on a decent network.
I guess you could handle all this by having white-lists of hosts that are allowed to do things that the admin considers weird, but without the automation the initial poster spoke of, I think the admin will not be able to maintain a decent service.
Compare this to the first Web servers to be run: An admin could easily have considered these evil bandwidth hogs, and stifled innovation by blocking them.
This is step one in my plans for World Domination. This time, it will work.
The joke might have been almost funny if it was about installing Linux on OxDEADBEEF.
Sadly, a dead badger contains a g and an r, making it uneligible for hexadecimal, although it is dead beef in a way.
Maybe someone with more imagination than me can actually make a real joke out of "installing Linux on 0xdeadbeef".
There is nothing out there that can work with the newest features of graphics cards as DirectX can. DirectX is one of the last unassaulted selling points of Windows.
I like to use notepad more than frontpage or dreamweaver because you actually have to know what you are doing. I guess I could use proton or context to get funky syntax highlighting, but actually can tell what is in "" from javascript without colors, so why bother.
For search and replace, xemacs regexp is pretty powerful, but you can't replace in all files in a directory.
I intended to make fun of it, but unfortunately, it *might* work .. .
It doesn't look like it will make it easier to understand programs though. See:
click on "define function"
click on "arguments"
click on "green dot", "red dot"
click on "if", "green dot", "greater"
click on "red dot"
click on "swap" "green dot" [to] "red dot"
click on "while", "green dot" "greater"
click on "divide" "red dot" [by] "green dot"
click "select rest(modulo) from previous division"
click on "assign" [to] "blue dot"
click on "red dot" "assign" "green dot"
click on "green dot" "assign" "red dot"
click on "return" "red dot".
Done. Total about 28 clicks.
Click click click you probably get repetitive strain injury until they perfect the direct brain interface. But you need less clicks than letters.
Now what does it do and is it any easier to debug ?
So I'm happy that the most interesting stuff is available as source. (That is the stuff that I'm interested in. YMMV.) When you don't expect to work out anything from the source(not even pngs and config files) you are better off with rpms.
I found it funny how in the computer RPG Fallout, you could shoot robots in the motivator, which was located precisely where a humans private parts would be.
Essentially if you bring a goblin-thwacker +10 from a game where this is a mundane item into another dungeon where the same item is considered godly, then this is the same profit that can be made by trading, adding new option to do stuff in the game. The mediator program amd both dungeons will provde a mechanism which will lead to a shortage of goblin-thwackers in the dungeon where it formerly was mundane.
On the other hand, I find the scripting taht Stratagus uses to define its units looking kind of scary. But I didn't really try hard to understand it.
So, in fact, looking not only at single objects but at maps, it would be cool if ALL games could share their data, so you could run several engines using one map.
I harbor a plan for a kind of broker server that would allow you to transfer characters and assets between different kind of servers, but you would need the servers to adopt this system, which probably only open source games would do. I also fancy a special kind of magic/object system to go with that server.
Feel like helping me program it ?
I found it hard to find the relevant menus in Gimp. But I also found it hard to find the relevant window to change something in Photoshop, where you have lots of opened tool windows, which most of the time don't do anything because you haven't selected anything relevant. Maybe image manipulation and drawing really requires a lot of skills to create an interface which does the easy stuff but also allows complex manipulations.
The only program I came to terms with was IRIS Showcase, but that is mostly a vector/object program. I liked the way you could group/raise/lower parts of the graphics. It sure was quicker than dragging all those layers around in Photoshop with the mouse.
Also what happened to Paintshop ?
I thought the same thing as the poster .. .
:-)
I miss the option to vote +1, Troll on posts
Notepad or vi works great for editing html :-)
FreeC**** is not really shut down, it is named stratagus now. There is also a game named Magnant(www.insectwar.com) which isn't free though but based on stratagus. Probably means more trouble to come when someone will try to freeclone Magnant.
YaST isn't just an installer.
/mnt/dvd/rpm /mnt/dvd/rpm
Wouldn't it be enough to have a switch for the program rpm which simply installs packages recursively ?
So you could do(pseudocode)
rpm -R --explain --force -package penguin --rpmsource
then if you like what happens
rpm -R --force -package penguin --rpmsource
Where explain will explain what rpm will do and what dependencies --force will break(if any)
See : Creating Extensions
I think I could put more work into it, but so far I already spend more time than I think the average user will.
I admit though, that the scanning for new hardware and automounting of DOS harddrives has greatly simplified use of linux. That is, if you forget that now I have every drive put twice on the desktop because it maps both /dev/hda2 and /a which is where I let mount /dev/hda2.
Getting games from sourceforge is a good idea, but it often requires you to install extra packages and upgrade existing ones, and sometimes makes you wonder if you don't break anything in the process.
So this again is something that may be beyond that what average joe who has problems to beat games with invulnerability turned on will do. It's not an important issue for open source because open source lives by the people who DO spend a lot of times figuring out things and can contribute.
Another thing is grapics. The only widespread and shared graphics is TuX the penguin. It would be cool if you had a repository of 3D models and a toolchain to take images from that to be used across a range of games. Maybe such a place does exist, but I must have missed that news.
Eh, Dr. Zoidberg, unfortunately there is only enough oxygen for the rest of us left on the spaceship .. I'm sure you won't mind helping us by staying in the freezer. *Push*
I got no problem with this. My 200 Battle Tanks just find their path and approach the enemy in a second. I just need to click.
Maybe your pathfinding is either too simple or trying to be too smart or you approach it from the wrong angle.
The (unix) "file" command combined with a shell script could easily do what the patent does. So even if the file command doesn't count(yet), because it does not usually recognize game platforms, isn't this patent lacking the invention depth required of a patent ?
Earth or Mars?
Which do you want to nuke ?