I use GNU VCD imager (http://www.vcdimager.org/) under linux (I believe it also works in Windows with Cygwin). It's as easy as 'vcdimager -t svcd input.mpg', then you burn the resulting bin/cue. Of course, the inputs have to be in the correct mpeg formats, so I tend to spend more time reencoding AVIs than actually watching them.
Pretty much all DVD players will play s/VCDs, as long as they're built to spec.
While we're on the subject, what's the deal with these dinks cropping the top and bottom of 4:3 vids and calling them 'widescreen hdtv' encodes? Pisses me off no end, since my DVD is not smart enough to recenter the picture, and it only uses the top half of my TV.
Consider: how many manufacturers and models of cars do we have? Consumer electronics? Colours and styles of paint?
When you go to the grocery, do you ask for 'meat', or do you specify species and cut?
You can feel free to live in your one size fits all soylent world. Go to your car dealership, and say like a simpleton, "I WANT A CAR". I'm sure they'll be happy to oblige you, and fill you out with a nice payment plan that suits your needs without you even having to read the fine print.
Speaking of it being slashdot... where are the dinks complaining about her grammatical skills? C'mon, I want a free lesson in professional writing from an AC!
Think of it... considering how fragile (pop them in the microwave for 3s ?) and easily detectable (with the correct scanning equipment, that is) RFIDs are rumoured to be, what would be the impact of walking down the aisles of your local WalMart, frying chips as you go?
Usage of technology in the comission of theft (counter measures of current anti-theft devices... the ol' tin-foil envelope in your pocket trick) is supposedly a felony (IANAL but IR/.AL)... what would be the impact of re-anonymizing several tons of consumer goods?
This kind of behaviour is illegal, at least in my metro area. Technically, you're not allowed to charge fees for services based on customer choices (opting for credit vs. cash, full-serve vs. self-serve, or pay your bills by cheque vs. automatic debit deduction), but you ARE allowed to raise your prices, then levy discounts for specific customers.
Same deal with manufacturer coupons... if you buy all name brand products with your coupons, you're still paying more than if you bought the generic equivalant with no coupons. Thusly, i never buy name brand foodstuffs anymore. Except chocolate sauce. I learned my lesson with that one.
I check my receipts all the time, basically because I'm a tin-foil enthusiast. Last trip I got 6% savings, coincidentally just enough to cover sales tax in my state.
Please tell me where you get >50% saving on your groceries. I will move there and be your new best friend.
Do this test. Put a cd in a jewel case. Try to break it with your hands. Now do the same for a floppy. See the difference? If you're involved in an accident that will break the cd in your pocket or purse, you should be worrying more about your spine than your lost data.
As for floppies... unless you EM insulate them, your data will be more vulnerable. On my college campus, there were so many underground wires and EM pollution, floppies were constantly getting erased or corrupted. Not to mention the schmutz factor.
I agree that simply estimating an 18m figure is without question inaccurate. As much as I hate to admit it, greater market research is needed (shudder).
An answer to your first three points is irrelevant until you start generating stats to estimate marketing success, which would undoubtedly be important to management to decide the big IF ; I contend that out of 18 million people, there are at least 0.27% who meet the criteria of desktop user + gamer. It is not required for them to be an exclusive linux user. These people are out there.... just how many remains to be seen.
As for replacing win32 sales... that is the goal, after all. If as a matter of course you develop your game using open tools that are runnable independent of hardware (as long as they meet perfermance requirements), and porting becomes largely painless, who cares where the sales come from? The ultimate number, the one that matters to the prez and investors, is total revenue.
Specifically, the question titled "What might the linux community do in order to change the thinking of the games industry?"
Some salient points: most game publishers want a minimum 50,000 unit commitment. http://counter.li.org/ estimates current linux deployment at 18 million. The 50 thousand target clocks in at 0.27% user saturation. That is anything but impossible.
The speaker goes on to say that smaller, independent game houses are 'thrilled' to see even 1,000 sales, and this should be financial motivation enough to go to a platform.
I'm not so sure about that second point, but another speaker goes on to second the 50,000 number as a target.
I am supplying rote definitions because the parent (Frizzle Fry, who responded to me, hey that's you!) did the same. The original poster to whom i replied (and sadly never responded) started talking about anarchocapitalists, libertarians and anti-democracy. (read upwards to get the context).
I chose to use the 'old' terminology (that it's old is news to me), or rather, the original 'literal' definitions because that is what best describes the situation. That is the terminology that the founding fathers used. That's what everyone used until all of this revisionist history crap started. (was america a democracy when only wealthly, land-owning white men could vote?)
To redefine your words to change the context of discussion to prove yourself correct is a very old trick.
Democracy: rule by the people (literally). When protestors are jailed, when corporations are the first mouths that the politicians hear, when you have to lobby your government to maintain rights that were handed down to you 200 years ago and supposedly set in stone and inviolate... that is not democracy.
And finally, now that we're completely off topic, i think we should all stand and say the pledge of allegiance.
mmmm... literal interpretation of sarcasm. 2nd grade rhetoric at it's finest.
On the flip side, the perfect disconnect of a developer from a user is sometimes what allows a program to get the job done correctly. Sometimes, it's the blending of the two that gets people into trouble (site: clippy, html e-mail, default passwords and security turned off out of the box just so something will 'just work')
At any rate, good on Apple and Microsoft for being profitable. Since when did we start to believe that linux is embroiled in a war that we must win at all costs? Isn't there enough room for consumer choice?
". . . And now at last it comes. You will give me the Ring freely! In place of the Dark Lord you will set up a Queen. And I shall not be dark, but beautiful and terrible as the Morning and the Night. Fair as the Sea and the Sun and the Snow upon the Mountain! Dreadful as the Storm and the Lightning! Stronger than the foundations of the earth. All shall love me and despair!"
The original topic of discussion was a linux gaming distro. As many others have already said, they use consoles for their games. That will give you your exclusive lock on resources, while providing you with a tightly integrated and optimized experience as well as a large body of software already ported and 'just working' 'out of the box'....
If you're going to all the trouble of setting up a linux box, including your servers (sshd, apache, mysqld, smb, what have you), to have that functionality intermittently disappear renders them pointless. If some group of devs is going to all the trouble of creating a new distro, why would they even bother trying to duplicate the work that sony, nintendo and microsoft have already done? We want games on our terms ; games in linux. Good games in linux. Lots of them. But to sacrifice everything else that makes linux great just to satisfy your gaming hardon? A pyrrhic victory.
Context switches do incur penalties. Not in dispute. But try working a game without them (mmmm... single-threaded goodness)...
Finally, as for single-user-mode, or playing games as root... all it takes is one error to corrupt a file system. Your crash may only lock the computer up, or it may eradicate the entire system. No way to know until you reboot and see what prompts come up. (incidentally, i can't count how many times being able to ssh into a system that some errant suid program borked up royally saved my bacon.)
Main Entry: republic Pronunciation: ri-'p&-blik Function: noun Etymology: French republique, from Middle French republique, from Latin respublica, from res thing, wealth + publica, feminine of publicus public -- more at REAL, PUBLIC 1 a (1) : a government having a chief of state who is not a monarch and who in modern times is usually a president (2) : a political unit (as a nation) having such a form of government b (1) : a government in which supreme power resides in a body of citizens entitled to vote and is exercised by elected officers and representatives responsible to them and governing according to law (2) : a political unit (as a nation) having such a form of government c : a usually specified republican government of a political unit
www.m-w.com
There is another definition of democracy, particularly in constitutional theory and in historical usages and especially when considering the works of Aristotle or the American "Founding Fathers." According to this definition, the word "democracy" refers solely to direct democracy, whilst a representative democracy is referred to as a "republic". This older terminology also has some popularity in U.S. Conservative and Libertarian debate.
Thank goodness i don't have to be around those yutzes, anymore. I can spend my time with people who actually know what they're doing!
Let me ask you this... can you replace the GUI with a different visual shell? Can you replace the web browser? Can you use a different video player? Yes? Then those are applications, and it is still windows, or linux, or what have you.
Remember, average users don't know what a kernel is. They don't know the definition of an OS. Is there a demarkation? You bet there is, and it becomes important when you have to consider the nitty-gritty legality, functionality, and performance issues.
Ability to "lock" the scheduler, so that the game gets 100% CPU until it unlocks (effectively making it a single process OS like DOS while in this mode).
You've obviously never played with 'renice' very much. You can reprioritize your tasks very easily ; try setting an application's priority to -20, that will lock out pretty much everything else while that program is busy. Then watch how absolutely abysmally your game works.
Your PC is not a toaster; it does more than one thing at once. It is absolutely imperative that it does more than one thing at once.
Remember, the whole point of this discussion is how to draw people to linux, not how to break linux so it's not even linux anymore. That includes keeping kernelspace and userland completely separate, unless you have a DAMN good reason not to.
Also, context switches are actually really fast. It's the memory swap on the hard drive that kills you. (anyone remember creating a RAM disk to play doom in?)
Yes, the 10th amendment is great and all, however, it hasn't been literally interpreted for over a hundred years. Too bad there's several mountains of caselaw and defacto evidence that says that that's not the law anymore. (and one or two ammendments to the constitution, too... some of those high-numbered ones that noone bothers to read anymore)
Also, we (the US) were NEVER a democracy. There has never been a stable democracy on the face of the earth that was able to sustain growth and self-regulate (at least of any meaningful size (country-sized, that is)). We are a Republic.
And now we are completely offtopic.
And, if you were being tongue-in-cheek, i apologize for being literal. (i think that's all the caveats...)
It is the place of the operating system to provide the functionality that provides the functionality to provide video playback. (that's not a typo) Video playback is an application, not a fundamental part of the OS. Just like web browsing is not a fundamental part of the OS. Nor the GUI.
it has helped the new users a great deal even if it is bug ridden and crappy.
To make an almost completely inaccurate parallel... the old lemon cars were great for new users. They were affordable, and functional. And they were also death traps. Then along came a man named Ralph Nader (yes, I'm a fan of his as a consumer activist. no, I'm not a fan of his as a politician. don't start) who fixed that.
Slashdot Mirror
I use GNU VCD imager (http://www.vcdimager.org/) under linux (I believe it also works in Windows with Cygwin). It's as easy as 'vcdimager -t svcd input.mpg', then you burn the resulting bin/cue. Of course, the inputs have to be in the correct mpeg formats, so I tend to spend more time reencoding AVIs than actually watching them.
Pretty much all DVD players will play s/VCDs, as long as they're built to spec.
While we're on the subject, what's the deal with these dinks cropping the top and bottom of 4:3 vids and calling them 'widescreen hdtv' encodes? Pisses me off no end, since my DVD is not smart enough to recenter the picture, and it only uses the top half of my TV.
That sounds like fascism, to me.
Consider: how many manufacturers and models of cars do we have? Consumer electronics? Colours and styles of paint?
When you go to the grocery, do you ask for 'meat', or do you specify species and cut?
You can feel free to live in your one size fits all soylent world. Go to your car dealership, and say like a simpleton, "I WANT A CAR". I'm sure they'll be happy to oblige you, and fill you out with a nice payment plan that suits your needs without you even having to read the fine print.
Speaking of it being slashdot ... where are the dinks complaining about her grammatical skills? C'mon, I want a free lesson in professional writing from an AC!
Or portable directional microwave rayguns.
... considering how fragile (pop them in the microwave for 3s ?) and easily detectable (with the correct scanning equipment, that is) RFIDs are rumoured to be, what would be the impact of walking down the aisles of your local WalMart, frying chips as you go?
... the ol' tin-foil envelope in your pocket trick) is supposedly a felony (IANAL but IR/.AL) ... what would be the impact of re-anonymizing several tons of consumer goods?
Think of it
Usage of technology in the comission of theft (counter measures of current anti-theft devices
This kind of behaviour is illegal, at least in my metro area. Technically, you're not allowed to charge fees for services based on customer choices (opting for credit vs. cash, full-serve vs. self-serve, or pay your bills by cheque vs. automatic debit deduction), but you ARE allowed to raise your prices, then levy discounts for specific customers.
... if you buy all name brand products with your coupons, you're still paying more than if you bought the generic equivalant with no coupons. Thusly, i never buy name brand foodstuffs anymore. Except chocolate sauce. I learned my lesson with that one.
Same deal with manufacturer coupons
I check my receipts all the time, basically because I'm a tin-foil enthusiast. Last trip I got 6% savings, coincidentally just enough to cover sales tax in my state.
Please tell me where you get >50% saving on your groceries. I will move there and be your new best friend.
If you only pay in cash, that is.
Perhaps record a hash of the file you're sharing?
funny
Do this test. Put a cd in a jewel case. Try to break it with your hands. Now do the same for a floppy. See the difference? If you're involved in an accident that will break the cd in your pocket or purse, you should be worrying more about your spine than your lost data.
... unless you EM insulate them, your data will be more vulnerable. On my college campus, there were so many underground wires and EM pollution, floppies were constantly getting erased or corrupted. Not to mention the schmutz factor.
As for floppies
Ahh
On a side note, check out the bestiary. Six whole monsters! I guess three generations were worth the wait.
What is the definition of the generations?
I agree that simply estimating an 18m figure is without question inaccurate. As much as I hate to admit it, greater market research is needed (shudder).
.... just how many remains to be seen.
... that is the goal, after all. If as a matter of course you develop your game using open tools that are runnable independent of hardware (as long as they meet perfermance requirements), and porting becomes largely painless, who cares where the sales come from? The ultimate number, the one that matters to the prez and investors, is total revenue.
An answer to your first three points is irrelevant until you start generating stats to estimate marketing success, which would undoubtedly be important to management to decide the big IF ; I contend that out of 18 million people, there are at least 0.27% who meet the criteria of desktop user + gamer. It is not required for them to be an exclusive linux user. These people are out there
As for replacing win32 sales
*cough*rtfa*cough*
Specifically, the question titled "What might the linux community do in order to change the thinking of the games industry?"
Some salient points: most game publishers want a minimum 50,000 unit commitment. http://counter.li.org/ estimates current linux deployment at 18 million. The 50 thousand target clocks in at 0.27% user saturation. That is anything but impossible.
The speaker goes on to say that smaller, independent game houses are 'thrilled' to see even 1,000 sales, and this should be financial motivation enough to go to a platform.
I'm not so sure about that second point, but another speaker goes on to second the 50,000 number as a target.
I am supplying rote definitions because the parent (Frizzle Fry, who responded to me, hey that's you!) did the same. The original poster to whom i replied (and sadly never responded) started talking about anarchocapitalists, libertarians and anti-democracy. (read upwards to get the context).
... that is not democracy.
I chose to use the 'old' terminology (that it's old is news to me), or rather, the original 'literal' definitions because that is what best describes the situation. That is the terminology that the founding fathers used. That's what everyone used until all of this revisionist history crap started. (was america a democracy when only wealthly, land-owning white men could vote?)
To redefine your words to change the context of discussion to prove yourself correct is a very old trick.
Democracy: rule by the people (literally). When protestors are jailed, when corporations are the first mouths that the politicians hear, when you have to lobby your government to maintain rights that were handed down to you 200 years ago and supposedly set in stone and inviolate
And finally, now that we're completely off topic, i think we should all stand and say the pledge of allegiance.
mmmm ... literal interpretation of sarcasm. 2nd grade rhetoric at it's finest.
On the flip side, the perfect disconnect of a developer from a user is sometimes what allows a program to get the job done correctly. Sometimes, it's the blending of the two that gets people into trouble (site: clippy, html e-mail, default passwords and security turned off out of the box just so something will 'just work')
At any rate, good on Apple and Microsoft for being profitable. Since when did we start to believe that linux is embroiled in a war that we must win at all costs? Isn't there enough room for consumer choice?
". . . And now at last it comes. You will give me the Ring freely! In place of the Dark Lord you will set up a Queen. And I shall not be dark, but beautiful and terrible as the Morning and the Night. Fair as the Sea and the Sun and the Snow upon the Mountain! Dreadful as the Storm and the Lightning! Stronger than the foundations of the earth. All shall love me and despair!"
The original topic of discussion was a linux gaming distro. As many others have already said, they use consoles for their games. That will give you your exclusive lock on resources, while providing you with a tightly integrated and optimized experience as well as a large body of software already ported and 'just working' 'out of the box' ....
... single-threaded goodness) ...
... all it takes is one error to corrupt a file system. Your crash may only lock the computer up, or it may eradicate the entire system. No way to know until you reboot and see what prompts come up. (incidentally, i can't count how many times being able to ssh into a system that some errant suid program borked up royally saved my bacon.)
If you're going to all the trouble of setting up a linux box, including your servers (sshd, apache, mysqld, smb, what have you), to have that functionality intermittently disappear renders them pointless. If some group of devs is going to all the trouble of creating a new distro, why would they even bother trying to duplicate the work that sony, nintendo and microsoft have already done? We want games on our terms ; games in linux. Good games in linux. Lots of them. But to sacrifice everything else that makes linux great just to satisfy your gaming hardon? A pyrrhic victory.
Context switches do incur penalties. Not in dispute. But try working a game without them (mmmm
Finally, as for single-user-mode, or playing games as root
Main Entry: republic
y _v ersus_Republic
Pronunciation: ri-'p&-blik
Function: noun
Etymology: French republique, from Middle French republique, from Latin respublica, from res thing, wealth + publica, feminine of publicus public -- more at REAL, PUBLIC
1 a (1) : a government having a chief of state who is not a monarch and who in modern times is usually a president (2) : a political unit (as a nation) having such a form of government b (1) : a government in which supreme power resides in a body of citizens entitled to vote and is exercised by elected officers and representatives responsible to them and governing according to law (2) : a political unit (as a nation) having such a form of government c : a usually specified republican government of a political unit
www.m-w.com
There is another definition of democracy, particularly in constitutional theory and in historical usages and especially when considering the works of Aristotle or the American "Founding Fathers." According to this definition, the word "democracy" refers solely to direct democracy, whilst a representative democracy is referred to as a "republic". This older terminology also has some popularity in U.S. Conservative and Libertarian debate.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy#Democrac
Thank goodness i don't have to be around those yutzes, anymore. I can spend my time with people who actually know what they're doing!
... can you replace the GUI with a different visual shell? Can you replace the web browser? Can you use a different video player? Yes? Then those are applications, and it is still windows, or linux, or what have you.
Let me ask you this
Remember, average users don't know what a kernel is. They don't know the definition of an OS. Is there a demarkation? You bet there is, and it becomes important when you have to consider the nitty-gritty legality, functionality, and performance issues.
Ability to "lock" the scheduler, so that the game gets 100% CPU until it unlocks (effectively
making it a single process OS like DOS while in this mode).
You've obviously never played with 'renice' very much. You can reprioritize your tasks very easily ; try setting an application's priority to -20, that will lock out pretty much everything else while that program is busy. Then watch how absolutely abysmally your game works.
Your PC is not a toaster; it does more than one thing at once. It is absolutely imperative that it does more than one thing at once.
Remember, the whole point of this discussion is how to draw people to linux, not how to break linux so it's not even linux anymore. That includes keeping kernelspace and userland completely separate, unless you have a DAMN good reason not to.
Also, context switches are actually really fast. It's the memory swap on the hard drive that kills you. (anyone remember creating a RAM disk to play doom in?)
howsabouts ... PS? LaTeX?
.... ascii .... (drool)
mmmmm
Yes, the 10th amendment is great and all, however, it hasn't been literally interpreted for over a hundred years. Too bad there's several mountains of caselaw and defacto evidence that says that that's not the law anymore. (and one or two ammendments to the constitution, too ... some of those high-numbered ones that noone bothers to read anymore)
...)
Also, we (the US) were NEVER a democracy. There has never been a stable democracy on the face of the earth that was able to sustain growth and self-regulate (at least of any meaningful size (country-sized, that is)). We are a Republic.
And now we are completely offtopic.
And, if you were being tongue-in-cheek, i apologize for being literal. (i think that's all the caveats
Good to know. What's the cost per foot? (assuming i'd by a minimum of ... 200 ft)
It is the place of the operating system to provide the functionality that provides the functionality to provide video playback. (that's not a typo) Video playback is an application, not a fundamental part of the OS. Just like web browsing is not a fundamental part of the OS. Nor the GUI.
... the old lemon cars were great for new users. They were affordable, and functional. And they were also death traps. Then along came a man named Ralph Nader (yes, I'm a fan of his as a consumer activist. no, I'm not a fan of his as a politician. don't start) who fixed that.
it has helped the new users a great deal even if it is bug ridden and crappy.
To make an almost completely inaccurate parallel
However, in a true democracy, if free speech is the will of the people, it will be so.