Re:Free the Digital Distribution Revolution! No St
on
The Age of Steam
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· Score: 1
Throwing karma to the wind here, but the last thing we need is an open source distribution method for games people pay for with real money. I mean, even high-profile projects like compiz get crapped out because developers come and go and lose interest in "teh shiny." That's fine when we are talking about notepad application number 2,387,691 on an OS I didn't have to pay for, but that is not going to cut it when money is on the line and I want to play that game four years from now.
Frankly, the track record for open source for longevity and remaining agnostic about the issue-of-the-moment is not exactly stellar. All it would take is some pissing-contest between developers over "the vision" or whatever, and the rifts would last in perpetuity. XFree/Xorg is a great example here.
Betting on the long-term success of any open source project is about as reliable as betting on sub-prime mortgages in your investment portfolio. I wouldn't put my money into it. Valve has a far better track record and long-term viability despite the DRM inclusion and phone-home nuisances in their products.
Let's see how all you pro free-trade computer people make out now. Boy, after decades of saying that auto-workers should make the same as their chinese counterparts, how will it feel to hear corporations saying the same about computer people?
I guess you have been hiding under a rock for the last 6+ years or so and entirely missed the whole offshoring-to-India movement? Thousands of jobs forever lost to the WalMarts of India IT.
Frankly, if those jobs went to China from India, I'd probably laugh at this point. It would only be a change in accent from the people I have to deal with every day already. The level of service couldn't possibly go lower.
I think I speak for all of slashdot when I say this.
No, you really don't. You just speak for judgmental, obnoxious pricks that believe the world should operate only according to their narrow-minded rules. People like you are the reason linux only enjoys a 1.2% marketshare.
A lot of us actually would like to see better market penetration and a system that is universally accessible and enjoyed by users of all proficiency levels. This is a requirement for the big software houses to want to port their products to *nix.
The 's' and 'z' are interchangeable depending on whether you are using American English or a more International English. This is no different than adding a 'u' in certain words.
I'd consider them blessed that they don't know how it feels afterward, or have the sleepless nights that come with it, or the hot ball of sour sickness that tightens in your gut every time you come under fire.
They may be ignorant, but it is not a failing, just the naivete of youth and living a privileged existence even if it is in very bad taste. In a better world, no one would have to know what it is like.
My point is that in the "real world" we salaried professionals are expected to not just present information, but to do so in a clean, precise, and aesthetically-pleasing format. This is how the corporate world works. It is not enough to have some half-assed document when you make a formal presentation. Management likes drawings, charts, and visual aids to supplement the information they are being presented with. It helps to bridge the gap between the technical people like myself to those that are in management that have little to no knowledge of how or what we do.
Effective communication means tailoring your presentation to your target audience. Once you leave the world of academia, this becomes more important than ever.
I can't address your lamentation about hypothetical students because: 1) I have been out of school since the early nineties and don't really care nor worry about what is going on there. 2) The real-world needs of others have little to nothing to do with what the college crowd has deemed "the way it should be".
Another lying Micro$hill who avoids the obvious. OOo can read and save in.doc format.
Ignoring the mean-spirited zealotness of this post, I will point out that saving OOo documents in MS Office format does not properly conserve all document formatting. I have found this to be true time and time again for word processing documents that have real formatting and inserted tables and graphics.
My wife is taking an online teacher certification course right now. She uses a Mac as her primary computer. The online coursework is completely unaccessible without Internet Explorer. We've tried Safari, Chrome, and of course Firefox to no avail. You have to have IE. All coursework must be submitted as Excel or Word. This is non-negotiable. We know this because we tried since she uses OpenOffice normally.
No, saving as an MS Office document does NOT preserve OOo's document formatting like it should.
Consequently, she has to use my gaming Windows machine for her school work. The reality of it all is that for some things you truly do need Windows because that is what the company you are working with expect. Calling and whining to the company that runs the online certification program does absolutely nothing, and all students are expected to comply with this because that is how the program works.
We can blame the woman in this story for not pulling out the man pages, searching google extensively, working things on command-line, etc... or we can accept that normal, average people should not have to do these things for a mature operating system. They expect things to work. She is not wrong for this.
My Perl isn't particularly strong, but this looks like it works. That doesn't mean you have the job just yet because I have other questions to ask, but it looks like an answer that works. All I'm really looking for is evidence that you actually can write a computer program. There's more to the job, though
I assumed so. I asked mostly to see if someone answering with something that can quickly be executed on a command-line was acceptable, or if you would specifically want something deeper or demand a specific language or if you were using the question to leverage a deeper insight into the candidate's style or personality. Language choice and style of answer to that would speak volumes.
Since I work on the network side, it is always interesting to see what those guys on the other side of the house have to do. I do something similar in my interviews where I start the real Q&A with a fairly basic question like "When you are working with chassis switches, do you prefer CatOS, Native, or Hybrid setups and why?"
There is no right answer. Any of the three is totally acceptable (and reveals a little about the personality, in my opinion) but it is the 'why' that I want to hear. People that have been doing networking for a while have very definite opinions on this and feel quite strongly about their particular convictions. Someone who is new or doesn't know will give an answer that is the equivalent of a shoulder shrug. It also helps that I like working with people that are not afraid to voice their opinions, so this question does have relevance even though it is simple.
Having spent the entirety of my childhood in Houston, I always had an interest in astronomy and had a decently mounted catadioptric refractor that I used quite a bit to see/sketch the moon but the city glow makes the entire night sky bright orange. Stars and planets were pretty much off the menu except right after cold fronts in the winter, when I would sit outside for hours with a chart and try to track down all the stars I could find. It was never very many though, but it was exciting.
I went on an extended hiking and camping trip to the White Mountains in Colorado when I was 14 and on a whim decided to lug my scope with me strapped to the bottom of my pack. It was heavy and more of a burden than I thought it would be, but the very first evening we set camp at ~9,000 feet. After a trout dinner and some relaxing, the sun went down and slowly but surely the night sky began to appear. It was as close to a religious experience as I have ever had. I didn't sleep that night even though I had hiked for hours the previous day and was still trying to come to terms with "non-sea-level" atmospheric pressure.
Since then, I have seen the sky from many other vantage points with equally impressive vistas, but I still look back on that trip fondly. It was the first time I felt truly humbled and how insignificant we all are in the universe.
Nazism was killed as a mainstream idea, but fanatics are rarely mainstream and the ideas they have persevere. Even so, an Idea can never be completely killed.
Either side in any armed conflict are ultimately fighting for an idea. That idea could be patriotism, religion, perceived justice, revenge, or any other of a myriad of goals. Some seem more noble or understandable to Westerners like myself, but that does not detract from the subjective value they hold to the combatant. Even if you kill off all the adherents of a specific idea, time has a way of bringing them back.
You can kill people by the millions, but you can never kill an idea. If what they stood for still means something and actively interests even one person, then the idea is not dead and can propagate. This is why true peace can not and will not ever be achieved through war over an idea.
This is true for both sides in any armed conflict.
I was a butcher in college to pay for my tuition and room/board. You are absolutely incorrect that pointed knives are not necessary or useful. While they are not required for most roasts or large cuts like sirloin or shoulders, they are absolutely essential for separating meat from bone especially around joints or ribs. Working on poultry without a pointed thin knife would be a nightmarish task. Effective separation of the parts requires it. That is why they make "Boning Knives" that are very pointy, very thin, and very sharp.
Banning effective kitchen implements because some young wankers are carrying them as weapons solves absolutely nothing. They'll just carry screwdrivers next. Machetes. Bats. Whatever. People wanting to hurt or kill each other has little to nothing to do with the particular tool they use at this moment in time. It started with rocks and sticks, and has progressed nicely to nuclear and biological weapons. Keep taking things away and watch it regress backward through bows and swords all the way to rocks again. I point to any protest in a small third world country as proof. What is the weapon of choice for those crowds? Rocks.
Taking a stand against kitchen implements is rather silly. It's the culture of the youth and their environment that is the issue. Solve the problem not the symptom.
On a side note, is it just me or is Slackware one of the most source friendly distros out there? I've been using Linux for a pretty good while now, and I've had the least trouble building stuff under Slackware.
It's not you. It really is easier. The file layout is cleaner and the libraries are in the correct place. I started using slack in the late 90s and still have a laptop at the house running it. I have never found a better system for development or custom source builds. Gentoo was close (before I gave up on it), but never quite as clean and streamlined as slack.
The only real addition that I have to go out of my for on any slack install is Dropline. I just can't get past how butt-ugly KDE was/is. I never could stand it.
Unless I'm mistaken, none of the quests in the early stages of those quests are group quests - they can all be completed solo.
As a human holy priest on a PVP server that is almost 2:1 horde to alliance, quests are soloable only for as long as you can keep from getting ganked. Questing in groups is mandatory. Phasing has made that a bit more difficult, since you have to find people that will go from start to finish with you.
I wouldn't remove the phasing though.. it's just too cool and opens up so many possibilities for future story lines, but there are real issues with it.
The starter quests were designed that way to really make you uncomfortable so that you would understand why your character would choose to walk away from all of that power and join the weaker alliance/horde. If they didn't do this, people would lament that there was no backstory to explain why their Death Knight was suddenly running amok and hanging out with the very people they used to kill with great relish just because it was Monday night and Heros was a rerun.
My chief lamentation is that Blizzard should have implemented a heroic healing class to complement. Not only would it have made the 60-70 grind in Outland a little more pleasant for instancing and grouping, but it would have given a boost to the dwindling ranks of available healers in the game. We didn't need another tank class. We needed a healing class that has enough offensive capability and PVP survival that they would be damned fun to play without changing specs away from raid healing.
If XP is not bad enough out of the box, it will be after six months of net use.
The XP Pro install on my primary desktop at my house is 5 years old and still going. It has seen SP1, SP2, and SP3 with no issues. It has never had a virus, worm, or trojan. It serves daily as my MMO gaming computer, multimedia machine, and general internet surfing machine for my family.
The point is that the long-term stability and reliability of the OS has far more to do with the person using it than any other factor. Garbage-In, Garbage-Out.
I was citing one office as an example, not as the definitive sole issue holding back linux. Be realistic. No one piece of software will make or break an OS, but my use of Solidworks, Pro-E, and Lightwave are, in this case, definite examples that keep this particular office from looking at linux. Denying the existence of the elephant in the room does not make its actual presence a fact.
You can extrapolate from that to include Photoshop (no, GIMP is not good enough for serious work), accounting software, 3DS max, and much more.
The point was that by presenting a real moving target, that the lack of software is rather self-inflicted.
Windows presents much less of a moving target that linux ever has. Games that ran on my 2000 desktop over 8 years ago work just fine on my Vista desktop. Old Photoshop works fine too.
I'd love to see real graphics packages ported to linux. Having Photoshop and a real 3D package (3DS or Lightwave) available would go a LONG way to making it my primary desktop and not just my development box.
Slashdot Mirror
Throwing karma to the wind here, but the last thing we need is an open source distribution method for games people pay for with real money. I mean, even high-profile projects like compiz get crapped out because developers come and go and lose interest in "teh shiny." That's fine when we are talking about notepad application number 2,387,691 on an OS I didn't have to pay for, but that is not going to cut it when money is on the line and I want to play that game four years from now.
Frankly, the track record for open source for longevity and remaining agnostic about the issue-of-the-moment is not exactly stellar. All it would take is some pissing-contest between developers over "the vision" or whatever, and the rifts would last in perpetuity. XFree/Xorg is a great example here.
Betting on the long-term success of any open source project is about as reliable as betting on sub-prime mortgages in your investment portfolio. I wouldn't put my money into it. Valve has a far better track record and long-term viability despite the DRM inclusion and phone-home nuisances in their products.
Strawman? False Dichotomy? Slippery Slope?
Man... where do I even begin to explain how bizarre this leap of logic is? Not even Evel Knievel could make this jump.
Let's see how all you pro free-trade computer people make out now. Boy, after decades of saying that auto-workers should make the same as their chinese counterparts, how will it feel to hear corporations saying the same about computer people?
I guess you have been hiding under a rock for the last 6+ years or so and entirely missed the whole offshoring-to-India movement? Thousands of jobs forever lost to the WalMarts of India IT.
Frankly, if those jobs went to China from India, I'd probably laugh at this point. It would only be a change in accent from the people I have to deal with every day already. The level of service couldn't possibly go lower.
I think I speak for all of slashdot when I say this.
No, you really don't. You just speak for judgmental, obnoxious pricks that believe the world should operate only according to their narrow-minded rules. People like you are the reason linux only enjoys a 1.2% marketshare.
A lot of us actually would like to see better market penetration and a system that is universally accessible and enjoyed by users of all proficiency levels. This is a requirement for the big software houses to want to port their products to *nix.
The 's' and 'z' are interchangeable depending on whether you are using American English or a more International English. This is no different than adding a 'u' in certain words.
e.g.
realize vs realise
honor vs honour
WoW actually dates from November of 2004 for active release.
Your point still stands though.
this is beyond old...
Old and inexplicable. I keep seeing these random posts in any *nix discussion. Is there some background for this odd troll?
I suspect things would be much more civil and less annoying around here if the Anonymous Coward posting was entirely removed.
I'd consider them blessed that they don't know how it feels afterward, or have the sleepless nights that come with it, or the hot ball of sour sickness that tightens in your gut every time you come under fire.
They may be ignorant, but it is not a failing, just the naivete of youth and living a privileged existence even if it is in very bad taste. In a better world, no one would have to know what it is like.
My point is that in the "real world" we salaried professionals are expected to not just present information, but to do so in a clean, precise, and aesthetically-pleasing format. This is how the corporate world works. It is not enough to have some half-assed document when you make a formal presentation. Management likes drawings, charts, and visual aids to supplement the information they are being presented with. It helps to bridge the gap between the technical people like myself to those that are in management that have little to no knowledge of how or what we do.
Effective communication means tailoring your presentation to your target audience. Once you leave the world of academia, this becomes more important than ever.
I can't address your lamentation about hypothetical students because:
1) I have been out of school since the early nineties and don't really care nor worry about what is going on there.
2) The real-world needs of others have little to nothing to do with what the college crowd has deemed "the way it should be".
Another lying Micro$hill who avoids the obvious. OOo can read and save in .doc format.
Ignoring the mean-spirited zealotness of this post, I will point out that saving OOo documents in MS Office format does not properly conserve all document formatting. I have found this to be true time and time again for word processing documents that have real formatting and inserted tables and graphics.
My wife is taking an online teacher certification course right now. She uses a Mac as her primary computer. The online coursework is completely unaccessible without Internet Explorer. We've tried Safari, Chrome, and of course Firefox to no avail. You have to have IE. All coursework must be submitted as Excel or Word. This is non-negotiable. We know this because we tried since she uses OpenOffice normally.
No, saving as an MS Office document does NOT preserve OOo's document formatting like it should.
Consequently, she has to use my gaming Windows machine for her school work.
The reality of it all is that for some things you truly do need Windows because that is what the company you are working with expect. Calling and whining to the company that runs the online certification program does absolutely nothing, and all students are expected to comply with this because that is how the program works.
We can blame the woman in this story for not pulling out the man pages, searching google extensively, working things on command-line, etc... or we can accept that normal, average people should not have to do these things for a mature operating system. They expect things to work. She is not wrong for this.
My Perl isn't particularly strong, but this looks like it works. That doesn't mean you have the job just yet because I have other questions to ask, but it looks like an answer that works. All I'm really looking for is evidence that you actually can write a computer program. There's more to the job, though
I assumed so. I asked mostly to see if someone answering with something that can quickly be executed on a command-line was acceptable, or if you would specifically want something deeper or demand a specific language or if you were using the question to leverage a deeper insight into the candidate's style or personality. Language choice and style of answer to that would speak volumes.
Since I work on the network side, it is always interesting to see what those guys on the other side of the house have to do. I do something similar in my interviews where I start the real Q&A with a fairly basic question like "When you are working with chassis switches, do you prefer CatOS, Native, or Hybrid setups and why?"
There is no right answer. Any of the three is totally acceptable (and reveals a little about the personality, in my opinion) but it is the 'why' that I want to hear. People that have been doing networking for a while have very definite opinions on this and feel quite strongly about their particular convictions. Someone who is new or doesn't know will give an answer that is the equivalent of a shoulder shrug. It also helps that I like working with people that are not afraid to voice their opinions, so this question does have relevance even though it is simple.
Just out of curiosity, would you have accepted this?:
perl -e '$c=0; for (0..100) {$c+=$_;}; print $c;'
I mean.. how simplistic would you want it?
Having spent the entirety of my childhood in Houston, I always had an interest in astronomy and had a decently mounted catadioptric refractor that I used quite a bit to see/sketch the moon but the city glow makes the entire night sky bright orange. Stars and planets were pretty much off the menu except right after cold fronts in the winter, when I would sit outside for hours with a chart and try to track down all the stars I could find. It was never very many though, but it was exciting.
I went on an extended hiking and camping trip to the White Mountains in Colorado when I was 14 and on a whim decided to lug my scope with me strapped to the bottom of my pack. It was heavy and more of a burden than I thought it would be, but the very first evening we set camp at ~9,000 feet. After a trout dinner and some relaxing, the sun went down and slowly but surely the night sky began to appear. It was as close to a religious experience as I have ever had. I didn't sleep that night even though I had hiked for hours the previous day and was still trying to come to terms with "non-sea-level" atmospheric pressure.
Since then, I have seen the sky from many other vantage points with equally impressive vistas, but I still look back on that trip fondly. It was the first time I felt truly humbled and how insignificant we all are in the universe.
Nazism was killed as a mainstream idea, but fanatics are rarely mainstream and the ideas they have persevere. Even so, an Idea can never be completely killed.
Either side in any armed conflict are ultimately fighting for an idea. That idea could be patriotism, religion, perceived justice, revenge, or any other of a myriad of goals. Some seem more noble or understandable to Westerners like myself, but that does not detract from the subjective value they hold to the combatant. Even if you kill off all the adherents of a specific idea, time has a way of bringing them back.
Not if Hamas is gone.
You can kill people by the millions, but you can never kill an idea. If what they stood for still means something and actively interests even one person, then the idea is not dead and can propagate. This is why true peace can not and will not ever be achieved through war over an idea.
This is true for both sides in any armed conflict.
Then those doctors have never prepared a meal more complicated than a microwave dinner.
To be fair.. have you had British food? Most people just get a curry from the local Indian place for a reason.
Out of curiosity, do these same doctors want to ban scalpels? They can easily be acquired and are vastly sharper than the average kitchen knife.
What would that do to the health care industry?
Banning things is a slippery slope that never, ever ends. Solve the problem, not the manifestation of it.
I was a butcher in college to pay for my tuition and room/board. You are absolutely incorrect that pointed knives are not necessary or useful. While they are not required for most roasts or large cuts like sirloin or shoulders, they are absolutely essential for separating meat from bone especially around joints or ribs. Working on poultry without a pointed thin knife would be a nightmarish task. Effective separation of the parts requires it. That is why they make "Boning Knives" that are very pointy, very thin, and very sharp.
Banning effective kitchen implements because some young wankers are carrying them as weapons solves absolutely nothing. They'll just carry screwdrivers next. Machetes. Bats. Whatever. People wanting to hurt or kill each other has little to nothing to do with the particular tool they use at this moment in time. It started with rocks and sticks, and has progressed nicely to nuclear and biological weapons. Keep taking things away and watch it regress backward through bows and swords all the way to rocks again. I point to any protest in a small third world country as proof. What is the weapon of choice for those crowds? Rocks.
Taking a stand against kitchen implements is rather silly. It's the culture of the youth and their environment that is the issue. Solve the problem not the symptom.
The whole reason we like Gentoo around here is that it's a huge time saver as opposed to RedHat.
Please give a description of what you found to be so time consuming with your Gentoo servers so that we can attempt to help you.
emerge world
On a side note, is it just me or is Slackware one of the most source friendly distros out there? I've been using Linux for a pretty good while now, and I've had the least trouble building stuff under Slackware.
It's not you. It really is easier. The file layout is cleaner and the libraries are in the correct place. I started using slack in the late 90s and still have a laptop at the house running it. I have never found a better system for development or custom source builds. Gentoo was close (before I gave up on it), but never quite as clean and streamlined as slack.
The only real addition that I have to go out of my for on any slack install is Dropline. I just can't get past how butt-ugly KDE was/is. I never could stand it.
Unless I'm mistaken, none of the quests in the early stages of those quests are group quests - they can all be completed solo.
As a human holy priest on a PVP server that is almost 2:1 horde to alliance, quests are soloable only for as long as you can keep from getting ganked. Questing in groups is mandatory. Phasing has made that a bit more difficult, since you have to find people that will go from start to finish with you.
I wouldn't remove the phasing though.. it's just too cool and opens up so many possibilities for future story lines, but there are real issues with it.
The starter quests were designed that way to really make you uncomfortable so that you would understand why your character would choose to walk away from all of that power and join the weaker alliance/horde. If they didn't do this, people would lament that there was no backstory to explain why their Death Knight was suddenly running amok and hanging out with the very people they used to kill with great relish just because it was Monday night and Heros was a rerun.
My chief lamentation is that Blizzard should have implemented a heroic healing class to complement. Not only would it have made the 60-70 grind in Outland a little more pleasant for instancing and grouping, but it would have given a boost to the dwindling ranks of available healers in the game. We didn't need another tank class. We needed a healing class that has enough offensive capability and PVP survival that they would be damned fun to play without changing specs away from raid healing.
If XP is not bad enough out of the box, it will be after six months of net use.
The XP Pro install on my primary desktop at my house is 5 years old and still going. It has seen SP1, SP2, and SP3 with no issues. It has never had a virus, worm, or trojan. It serves daily as my MMO gaming computer, multimedia machine, and general internet surfing machine for my family.
The point is that the long-term stability and reliability of the OS has far more to do with the person using it than any other factor. Garbage-In, Garbage-Out.
I was citing one office as an example, not as the definitive sole issue holding back linux. Be realistic. No one piece of software will make or break an OS, but my use of Solidworks, Pro-E, and Lightwave are, in this case, definite examples that keep this particular office from looking at linux. Denying the existence of the elephant in the room does not make its actual presence a fact.
You can extrapolate from that to include Photoshop (no, GIMP is not good enough for serious work), accounting software, 3DS max, and much more.
The point was that by presenting a real moving target, that the lack of software is rather self-inflicted.
Windows presents much less of a moving target that linux ever has. Games that ran on my 2000 desktop over 8 years ago work just fine on my Vista desktop. Old Photoshop works fine too.
I'd love to see real graphics packages ported to linux. Having Photoshop and a real 3D package (3DS or Lightwave) available would go a LONG way to making it my primary desktop and not just my development box.