I think by saying he is a pioneer he's referring to the fact that he's the first to make a steady living off of competitive gaming. Thresh was probably equally dominant, but there just wasn't the corporate interest in gaming that there is now.
Also, there are plenty of people who dedicate huge amounts of time to these games, and very few are anywhere near his league. You can't discount his talent by writing it off as just time spent playing. That would be like claiming that Tiger Woods is just good at golf because he practices more than anyone. There is definitely an element of talent involved in playing these games.
Oh yes, I'm a "Win fanboy", and "Bill worshipper" because I dare point out the legitimate problems that linux has. I use linux every day (for development purposes), and I have for a long time. It's a quality OS that has come a long way in a short time. If you can't step back and honestly point out the problems with it then I dare say you are the "fanboy", whatever the hell that means in real english.
It's the last refuge of the Bill-worshippers to claim that Linux doesn't have quality apps. Anyone with a clue knows this isn't true. Anyone with a clue, that is
You're right, me and my fellow windows supporters are clutching at straws to prevent the dominance of linux. We're the last defenders of the gates, in a world being swept away by penguins..
Now back to reality. The invasion of linux on the desktop has been talked about for years, and it hasn't happened. Since "my claim has been refuted" I fail to see why this is true. If linux were an honest to goodness drop in replacement for windows, at a fraction of the price, why aren't more people using it? Is it because the man is keeping the nerds down? A microsoft conspiracy? Perhaps the rest of the world, along with me, doesn't have a clue, like you suggest.
Or is it because linux _isn't_ a drop in replacement for windows yet? As it stands now Joe User can walk into compusa and chances are any app or game he picks up will work on windows. This is a huge advantage. Linux has replacements for some of these apps (some in a better working state than others), but the sheer amount of working, commercially supported software for windows isn't even close to being matched on linux.
Now that I'm done with my "breast-beating", I invite an actual intelligent response. Last time I checked name calling and quipy remarks aren't a valid form of debate.
Finally, someone who gets it, and can express it. Bravo on a post well done. The sheer amount of arrogance involved with the linux "subculture" makes me want to puke sometimes, but then I read something like this, and I'm satisfied that I'm not the only one.
Stability is a nice thing to have, but unless you're talking about servers, its value to a home user is way blown out of proportion. I use winxp on a daily basis, and I've _never_ had a stability problem with it. And I keep it on for weeks at a time, just like I do my linux box.
Linux has always been more stable than windows, and it really hasn't helped much. Which would your average home user choose? An OS thats perfectly stable (unless you mess with it of course), but is hard to configure and is lacking in quality applications (ie: not beta software written by a guy in his basement which is likely to be abandoned before 1.0), or a minorly unstable winxp which supports everything you could possibly want to do on a home pc. I use windows and linux on daily basis, and I can honestly say that linux has a LONG way to go before it has a chance of beating windows on the non-nerds desktop. Having stability and cost as your only bonuses isn't going to cut it.
What manner of sheep would you have to be to actually change your OS so the teenage linux zealots on slashdot would respect you more? Anyone who would be embarrassed by the OS they are currently using needs to reassess their priorities.
> This is no computer, NO computer would ever play a game like this.
The odd openings mean nothing, as a computer will play any moves which are in its opening book. It would be fairly easy for someone with the time to construct an opening book which uses these openings.
Whats more difficult to determine is why a sensible human would ever play moves like these, assuming they are playing to win. The self-handicapping argument doesn't seem right to me. 3 minute blitz is an area in which computers perform quite favorably as compared to humans, even grandmasters. I believe that even with this 'handicap' a fast SMP computer running fritz would probably make butter out of any human at this time control. The whole thing seems like a hoax to me.
Hi. I was the one who marked this offtopic. Call it bad moderation if you want, but I'm so sick of what I call "meta-bitching" that I had to do something. People get so wrapped up in this imaginary slashdot "community" that they feel they are owed something from it.
It's just a website. You don't like what's posted, go to the next article. Maybe change your preferences to block certain topics. Maybe GO READ ANOTHER WEB PAGE ENTIRELY. Just don't hurt the signal to noise ratio by posting crap like "I don't want to see this here." No one really cares what you want out of slashdot. I personally could give a hoot if Jon Katz ever got posted ever again, but I don't waste anyone's time complaining about it, I just don't read his articles. What's worse is that these whiny posts always get modded up. So I marked it back down. Maybe "redundant" would have been a better choice, but in the end the result is the same. You're not contributing to the discussion, and you're wasting the time of the people who are interested in the article (I've personally been waiting for 4.01, its actually a pretty significant release to a lot of us), so you're offtopic. So sorry if I affected your prescious karma.
Oh, and before you all rush to the reply button, I know I'm being a hypocrite by whining about this myself. Don't even bother.
This page has pictures of what they claim are the one time pads taken from captured foreign agents. They were hidden in hollowed out bars of soap and talcum powder containers.
This seems like a really silly attitude to take. Yes, I'm pro-linux, but my OS is not my religion. I'm not going to use only linux if linux can't do what I want it to do. This sounds like a good way to make yourself frustrated with linux.
I also don't see how this helps get more games ported over. I still prefer linux games (assuming they work as well as the windows versions), so if they are available I buy them. It's these sales figures that get games ported, not.1% of the people who buy games writing letters saying they don't own windows.
I think the major obstacle to linux games is the absence of a standard media api. Windows has directx which makes game programming extremely easy in that environment. We need a standard like this, and if we could get a dx workalike in place that would be even better. -kms1
What I've always hoped would happen would be that a class->native code compiler would be shipped with the jdk. That way vendors could ship the platform independent code, and if it wasn't fast enough for you, you could natively compile it yourself. I know the gcj extension to the gcc has something like this, but it wasn't all that far along last I checked.
I really don't understand sun's stubbornness when it comes to the native compilation issue. For applets it makes sense to have that capability, but there really aren't many applications that I choose to use cross-platform anyway. If java could be natively compiled I'd choose it over c++ probably 95% of the time. As it is the startup time is simply too great for my tastes.
against what most slashdotters believe, money rules every commerical industry. Capitalism is perfect in the software industry because of the following: if software sucks, people just won't buy it. Only the best of the best will survive ( and im talking about the consumer end-user not programmers), and it will give the programmer incentive to only release software that's higher quality. If it's free, knowledge will be gained, it can be added upon by other programmers, but programmers will have no doubt in their mind when releasing shitty software.
HAH! What world are you living in? Crappy software gets chosen over quality software everyday in this industry. Consumers buy things because a)its a standard, for better or worse, b)because they are uninformed of the alternatives, or c)because they have a bias towards a certain product that they've used for quite a while.
I'm not arguing for or against free software here, but the notion that the average software consumer buys a product based on its actual value is absurd. Your example of the BeOS is a good one. Be is clearly a superior OS to windows in everything but software and driver support. Are people flocking in droves to go buy it? Of course not.
NVIDIA is doing everything they can to get the new drivers out the door, and it will be really soon, but people have no right to DEMAND drivers from a company.
You know something you're not telling? For all we know the linux driver team has been sitting around picking their asses this whole time. Besides the extremely-crappy obfuscated early driver release we haven't gotten any feedback from nvidia at all, much less a driver. Doesn't this company have a PR team? I know every time a video card story gets posted on slashdot 1000 rabid geeks email nvidia all pissed off, and they still can't even issue a damn press release giving us the state of the drivers?
Oh, and btw, we absolutely have a right to demand drivers. We are their CUSTOMERS for christs sake. We pay them money to do what we want. That's how it works. The sad fact is that they claimed linux support early on, which caused a whole bunch of people to buy their hardware, then they promptly shafted us.
Also, don't give me this "programming is hard" bullshit. Thats why we pay them money, to do the hard stuff. Don't tell me they can fully design and produce the most cutting-edge video hardware on the market in a 6 month period, yet programming the software to run that hardware for any OS besides windows is just beyond them. 3dFX seems to be very capably handling linux support.
So basically, I have a $300 2D card in my machine right now. But I'm not complaining one bit.
An easy way to find the comments is to use the 'find' feature of your browser. In ie its ctrl-f, and in netscape its alt-f. Just do a find for '#101', etc..
Hey, don't forget reveal codes! They are the feature I miss most when moving from WP to Word. Not knowing all the extra formatting codes left in my word doc just drives me nuts. I have no idea why ms never implemented this feature, as it seems to be the major reason hardcore WP users won't switch over, even in the face of extremely buggy releases (eg, WP2K for windows).
As for the virus stuff mentioned later in this thread: WP 6-8 only have support for their own scripting language, PerfectScript. While it is possible to write a virus with ps, I never saw one in my year of doing corel tech support on the macros team. WP9 has support for VBA, but it remains to be seen whether virii written for Word will work the same in corel's VBA implementation. -kms1
Speaking as a beta-tester, this product is nowhere near ready to ship.
I used to work for corel's tech support department, and this doesn't surprise me at all. When WP2K for windows was released it had so many bugs it was basically unusable for anything but basic wordprocessing. There were features advertised on the box that weren't even in the damn program! The first 2 service packs added up to about 100 megs, and replaced a large chunk of the suite.
I used to be a big fan of corel. I still think they have the best interface and features of any of the big name wordprocessors, but I gave up on them after WP2K and started using word (when in windows of course). Say what you will about microsoft, at least they released office 2000 in a somewhat usable state.
If I were you guys I'd give the linux version of WP a couple of service packs before buying it (or just use something else entirely - waiting for koffice my self).
I'm using IE 5 right now (note that I'm not the original poster). What I really dislike (apart from the eventual 'an internal error occurred' message box that pops up after program termination) is the fact that sometimes (cannot really say why this happens) I click on the menu bar (e.g. File) and the menu won't come up! All I can do is terminate that instance and start a new one. That's really annoying...
I get that sometimes too. What works for me is to minimize the window and then restore it. This brings the menus back.
RealAudio and RealVideo work only in few cases. Most of the time, clicking on an RA / RV / RAM link will result in no action at all. ASF / ASX support is great, though;-) Not that surprising!
I wouldn't be surprised if this weren't a problem with realaudio. A more bloated, buggy piece of software is hard to find..
Personally, ie5 is quite stable for me, and I use it over netscape and opera whenever I'm forced to be booted into windows for whatever reason. Besides the fact that its stable, I also like the autocomplete feature, the fact that it brings up a dialog that lets you organize a bookmark at the time you create it, and that when I click a link off a long page, then come back to it, the browser is always in the same place where I left off. I can't explain how annoying it is to be reading the comments for an article, click to read a nested comment, press back and find myself at some random place on the page, instead of where I left off. Pet peeve I guess.
Anyway, I sincerely hope mozilla turns out as good as its hyped to be, because linux is in severe need of a browser as nice as ie5, imho. A lot of the time I spend at my computer is spent tooling around on the web, and since netscape is so painful to use, I do most of it in windows.
"Now, if you knew that trademarks are assigned to specific goods and services listed as a trademark is registered, you would know 2 things: #1, Coke has trademarks on softdrinks, T-shirts, magnets, windbreakers, ande verything else. The products are listed by name in a very very long list that Coke's trademarks cover. And they go no further. #2, The Linux trademark lists ONE ITEM under its goods and services: computer operating systems. In other words, what Linus and his lawyers are doing is extra-legal at best, downright illegal at worst. His trademark does not apply to domain names, T-Shirts, hell, not even company names if they don't sell operating systems! "
Somehow I doubt the legality of this. If I created a new operating system and called it oh say, Coca-Cola, I'm guessing the lawyers for coke would have something to say about it if my project ever took off.
Slashdot Mirror
Ahem.. Joqystiq Guide: iPod on the Xbox 360
I think by saying he is a pioneer he's referring to the fact that he's the first to make a steady living off of competitive gaming. Thresh was probably equally dominant, but there just wasn't the corporate interest in gaming that there is now.
Also, there are plenty of people who dedicate huge amounts of time to these games, and very few are anywhere near his league. You can't discount his talent by writing it off as just time spent playing. That would be like claiming that Tiger Woods is just good at golf because he practices more than anyone. There is definitely an element of talent involved in playing these games.
A guy with a uni-brow for one..
Oh yes, I'm a "Win fanboy", and "Bill worshipper" because I dare point out the legitimate problems that linux has. I use linux every day (for development purposes), and I have for a long time. It's a quality OS that has come a long way in a short time. If you can't step back and honestly point out the problems with it then I dare say you are the "fanboy", whatever the hell that means in real english.
It's the last refuge of the Bill-worshippers to claim that Linux doesn't have quality apps. Anyone with a clue knows this isn't true. Anyone with a clue, that is
You're right, me and my fellow windows supporters are clutching at straws to prevent the dominance of linux. We're the last defenders of the gates, in a world being swept away by penguins..
Now back to reality. The invasion of linux on the desktop has been talked about for years, and it hasn't happened. Since "my claim has been refuted" I fail to see why this is true. If linux were an honest to goodness drop in replacement for windows, at a fraction of the price, why aren't more people using it? Is it because the man is keeping the nerds down? A microsoft conspiracy? Perhaps the rest of the world, along with me, doesn't have a clue, like you suggest.
Or is it because linux _isn't_ a drop in replacement for windows yet? As it stands now Joe User can walk into compusa and chances are any app or game he picks up will work on windows. This is a huge advantage. Linux has replacements for some of these apps (some in a better working state than others), but the sheer amount of working, commercially supported software for windows isn't even close to being matched on linux.
Now that I'm done with my "breast-beating", I invite an actual intelligent response. Last time I checked name calling and quipy remarks aren't a valid form of debate.
*APPLAUSE*
Finally, someone who gets it, and can express it. Bravo on a post well done. The sheer amount of arrogance involved with the linux "subculture" makes me want to puke sometimes, but then I read something like this, and I'm satisfied that I'm not the only one.
Stability is a nice thing to have, but unless you're talking about servers, its value to a home user is way blown out of proportion. I use winxp on a daily basis, and I've _never_ had a stability problem with it. And I keep it on for weeks at a time, just like I do my linux box.
Linux has always been more stable than windows, and it really hasn't helped much. Which would your average home user choose? An OS thats perfectly stable (unless you mess with it of course), but is hard to configure and is lacking in quality applications (ie: not beta software written by a guy in his basement which is likely to be abandoned before 1.0), or a minorly unstable winxp which supports everything you could possibly want to do on a home pc. I use windows and linux on daily basis, and I can honestly say that linux has a LONG way to go before it has a chance of beating windows on the non-nerds desktop. Having stability and cost as your only bonuses isn't going to cut it.
What manner of sheep would you have to be to actually change your OS so the teenage linux zealots on slashdot would respect you more? Anyone who would be embarrassed by the OS they are currently using needs to reassess their priorities.
> This is no computer, NO computer would ever play a game like this.
The odd openings mean nothing, as a computer will play any moves which are in its opening book. It would be fairly easy for someone with the time to construct an opening book which uses these openings.
Whats more difficult to determine is why a sensible human would ever play moves like these, assuming they are playing to win. The self-handicapping argument doesn't seem right to me. 3 minute blitz is an area in which computers perform quite favorably as compared to humans, even grandmasters. I believe that even with this 'handicap' a fast SMP computer running fritz would probably make butter out of any human at this time control. The whole thing seems like a hoax to me.
-KMS
Hi. I was the one who marked this offtopic. Call it bad moderation if you want, but I'm so sick of what I call "meta-bitching" that I had to do something. People get so wrapped up in this imaginary slashdot "community" that they feel they are owed something from it.
It's just a website. You don't like what's posted, go to the next article. Maybe change your preferences to block certain topics. Maybe GO READ ANOTHER WEB PAGE ENTIRELY. Just don't hurt the signal to noise ratio by posting crap like "I don't want to see this here." No one really cares what you want out of slashdot. I personally could give a hoot if Jon Katz ever got posted ever again, but I don't waste anyone's time complaining about it, I just don't read his articles. What's worse is that these whiny posts always get modded up. So I marked it back down. Maybe "redundant" would have been a better choice, but in the end the result is the same. You're not contributing to the discussion, and you're wasting the time of the people who are interested in the article (I've personally been waiting for 4.01, its actually a pretty significant release to a lot of us), so you're offtopic. So sorry if I affected your prescious karma.
Oh, and before you all rush to the reply button, I know I'm being a hypocrite by whining about this myself. Don't even bother.
-kms1
This page has pictures of what they claim are the one time pads taken from captured foreign agents. They were hidden in hollowed out bars of soap and talcum powder containers.
http://www.btinternet.com/~simon .mason/page30.html
-kms1
This seems like a really silly attitude to take. Yes, I'm pro-linux, but my OS is not my religion. I'm not going to use only linux if linux can't do what I want it to do. This sounds like a good way to make yourself frustrated with linux.
.1% of the people who buy games writing letters saying they don't own windows.
I also don't see how this helps get more games ported over. I still prefer linux games (assuming they work as well as the windows versions), so if they are available I buy them. It's these sales figures that get games ported, not
I think the major obstacle to linux games is the absence of a standard media api. Windows has directx which makes game programming extremely easy in that environment. We need a standard like this, and if we could get a dx workalike in place that would be even better.
-kms1
What I've always hoped would happen would be that a class->native code compiler would be shipped with the jdk. That way vendors could ship the platform independent code, and if it wasn't fast enough for you, you could natively compile it yourself. I know the gcj extension to the gcc has something like this, but it wasn't all that far along last I checked.
I really don't understand sun's stubbornness when it comes to the native compilation issue. For applets it makes sense to have that capability, but there really aren't many applications that I choose to use cross-platform anyway. If java could be natively compiled I'd choose it over c++ probably 95% of the time. As it is the startup time is simply too great for my tastes.
-kms1
HAH! What world are you living in? Crappy software gets chosen over quality software everyday in this industry. Consumers buy things because a)its a standard, for better or worse, b)because they are uninformed of the alternatives, or c)because they have a bias towards a certain product that they've used for quite a while.
I'm not arguing for or against free software here, but the notion that the average software consumer buys a product based on its actual value is absurd. Your example of the BeOS is a good one. Be is clearly a superior OS to windows in everything but software and driver support. Are people flocking in droves to go buy it? Of course not.
-kms1
You know something you're not telling? For all we know the linux driver team has been sitting around picking their asses this whole time. Besides the extremely-crappy obfuscated early driver release we haven't gotten any feedback from nvidia at all, much less a driver. Doesn't this company have a PR team? I know every time a video card story gets posted on slashdot 1000 rabid geeks email nvidia all pissed off, and they still can't even issue a damn press release giving us the state of the drivers?
Oh, and btw, we absolutely have a right to demand drivers. We are their CUSTOMERS for christs sake. We pay them money to do what we want. That's how it works. The sad fact is that they claimed linux support early on, which caused a whole bunch of people to buy their hardware, then they promptly shafted us.
Also, don't give me this "programming is hard" bullshit. Thats why we pay them money, to do the hard stuff. Don't tell me they can fully design and produce the most cutting-edge video hardware on the market in a 6 month period, yet programming the software to run that hardware for any OS besides windows is just beyond them. 3dFX seems to be very capably handling linux support.
So basically, I have a $300 2D card in my machine right now. But I'm not complaining one bit.
Um, you're a tool then. Sorry.
-kms1
An easy way to find the comments is to use the 'find' feature of your browser. In ie its ctrl-f, and in netscape its alt-f. Just do a find for '#101', etc..
-kms
Hey, don't forget reveal codes! They are the feature I miss most when moving from WP to Word. Not knowing all the extra formatting codes left in my word doc just drives me nuts. I have no idea why ms never implemented this feature, as it seems to be the major reason hardcore WP users won't switch over, even in the face of extremely buggy releases (eg, WP2K for windows).
As for the virus stuff mentioned later in this thread: WP 6-8 only have support for their own scripting language, PerfectScript. While it is possible to write a virus with ps, I never saw one in my year of doing corel tech support on the macros team. WP9 has support for VBA, but it remains to be seen whether virii written for Word will work the same in corel's VBA implementation.
-kms1
I used to work for corel's tech support department, and this doesn't surprise me at all. When WP2K for windows was released it had so many bugs it was basically unusable for anything but basic wordprocessing. There were features advertised on the box that weren't even in the damn program! The first 2 service packs added up to about 100 megs, and replaced a large chunk of the suite.
I used to be a big fan of corel. I still think they have the best interface and features of any of the big name wordprocessors, but I gave up on them after WP2K and started using word (when in windows of course). Say what you will about microsoft, at least they released office 2000 in a somewhat usable state.
If I were you guys I'd give the linux version of WP a couple of service packs before buying it (or just use something else entirely - waiting for koffice my self).
kms1
I get that sometimes too. What works for me is to minimize the window and then restore it. This brings the menus back.
RealAudio and RealVideo work only in few cases. Most of the time, clicking on an RA / RV / RAM link will result in no action at all. ASF / ASX support is great, though ;-) Not that surprising!
I wouldn't be surprised if this weren't a problem with realaudio. A more bloated, buggy piece of software is hard to find..
Personally, ie5 is quite stable for me, and I use it over netscape and opera whenever I'm forced to be booted into windows for whatever reason. Besides the fact that its stable, I also like the autocomplete feature, the fact that it brings up a dialog that lets you organize a bookmark at the time you create it, and that when I click a link off a long page, then come back to it, the browser is always in the same place where I left off. I can't explain how annoying it is to be reading the comments for an article, click to read a nested comment, press back and find myself at some random place on the page, instead of where I left off. Pet peeve I guess.
Anyway, I sincerely hope mozilla turns out as good as its hyped to be, because linux is in severe need of a browser as nice as ie5, imho. A lot of the time I spend at my computer is spent tooling around on the web, and since netscape is so painful to use, I do most of it in windows.
-KMS
"Now, if you knew that trademarks are assigned to specific goods and services listed as a trademark is registered, you would know 2 things: #1, Coke has trademarks on softdrinks, T-shirts, magnets, windbreakers, ande verything else. The products are listed by name in a very very long list that Coke's trademarks cover. And they go no further.
#2, The Linux trademark lists ONE ITEM under its goods and services: computer operating systems. In other words, what Linus and his lawyers are doing is extra-legal at best, downright illegal at worst. His trademark does not apply to domain names, T-Shirts, hell, not even company names if they don't sell operating systems! "
Somehow I doubt the legality of this. If I created
a new operating system and called it oh say,
Coca-Cola, I'm guessing the lawyers for coke would
have something to say about it if my project ever
took off.