* Print Screen / Scroll Lock / Pause are relics of the 1980s.
Scroll Lock and Pause maybe, but Print Screen? The only reason it's called that is that the keyboard manufacturers think "Scrn Sht" might be, ahem, misinterpreted, while "Prt Scr" generally won't be. =) Makes a heck of a good screenshot key in most operating systems, though. As for SysRq, it's frequently used in Linux, for example.
The C64 "breadbox" case was a bit worrisome, yes, and the keys were a bit stiff compared to modern keyboards, but the layout wasn't that bad. The only major thing that I missed back then was the fact that only rich kids in far-away big cities got Nordic letters, and even if you did got those, you lost other characters, so what's the point?
Aside of that, the keyboard was pretty good. And there's nothing nonstandard about "Run/Stop" - people just call it "Esc" in PC-land. =)
Also, remember back when the President was on TV and was asked what was on his iPod... Beatles. The only way it got there was if he (by the RIAA definition) pirated it.
Aaaaaaaaa! Prepare for an imminent, tangled multi-way collision of Apple Corps, Apple Computer, RIAA and the President!!! This will hurt, and by that, I mean it will hurt everyone who hears of this particular court case in any way... truly hurt, truly cause pain, in emotional, physical and legal sense. (Of course, now you have heard of this hypothetical case. I may have unwittingly created the very first Slashdot post that may kill you if you read it...)
Wikipedia says that Finland switched off analogue TV on 1 September 2007. I guess everyone there is aware of it.
Were we ever. The switchover to digital was very much promoted over the preceding few years. We certainly didn't have anyone asking "what, we went digital and no one told me?"... =)
Instead we got quite a few irate but informed people who quit paying for the TV licence because the DVB-T reception sucked where they were living. (The remote areas are always a pain to deal with...) The Finnish national broadcasting company, YLE, gets its funding through the licence fees and was stung pretty badly by the whole affair.
A *NIX package can typically run pre- and post-install scripts (as root) and so it would be easy for the developer to accidentally do 'rm -rf boot' and have it delete the contents of the boot partition rather than the initialisation files for the package, since they forgot that the installer ran in the root directory rather than/opt/{package} (or wherever).
Yes, but at least in Debian, for most update tasks you don't have to manually add and remove files and directories; the package manager clears them up. If, when uninstalling package massive-timewaster, the package manager automatically removes the package's files from/usr/share/games/massive-timewaster and, if no files in that directory exist, the directory itself gets removed - BUT if there are files the user created, the directory is retained. It also won't overwrite another package's files, and will ask if it has to replace a config file that you have edited by hand (and a backup of the old version is retained if you choose to use the new version).
I'm betting most *nix package managers would have easily caught a simple "messing with a file that belongs to another package" situation, which is what this boot.ini situation really boiled down to.
However, for the sake of fair assessment, I have to say that at least in this GRUB package version I have at hand, dpkg doesn't seem to manage/boot/grub/menu.lst so theoretically another package could overwrite it. Well, at least GRUB will give you a prompt if it can't make heads or tails of the menu.lst. (I think. I could be wrong. =)
Quake 3, and I assume for 2 and 1, contained a file called "autoexec.cfg."
Yup, Quake 1 and 2 have that file too (though it doesn't seem to be always present, unless created by the user - at least for me, it seems that the only game where it gets automatically created if it doesn't exist is Quake 1). It also seems to appear in Doom 3 and Quake 4, and I assume every game other game based on id engines.
Knol claims to be open to all knowledge of entertainment so it's possible it could be seen as a safe haven for these fans & anyone who's been struck by the notability hammer.
Except that people who have been hit with Notability Hammer in Wikipedia generally tend to just shrug and go build their own topical wikis. People know that the wiki system as a collaboration technology doesn't suck; the only problem is that Wikipedia specifically isn't all-inclusive, but that problem doesn't exist in a topical wiki.
Okay, I may be a bit biased in favour of wiki model, but in short, I'm a bit sceptical on the whole point of having collaborative writing system that tries to specifically limit the collaboration and information sharing. Basically, here Google rolls out yet another dog-old web hosting thingy, woohoo, where "Web 3.0" apparently means return of the Web 1.0 model: If you spot an error in the page, you send the author an email and hope they fix it by the end of the decade. If ever.
I now have to pay my publisher back the advance due to lack of sales.
Then your publisher screwed you. Generally, no matter how badly the book bombs, you never have to pay the advance back. If I ever saw a publishing contract term that states otherwise, I'd not sign it. (I think this is the common book publishing industry thing. I've not yet gotten a publishing contract myself, but I've read enough material on that and most contracts I've seen specifically speak of "guaranteed advance payments".)
Except that FlashGet isn't strictly a Firefox add-on - it supports multiple browsers, though only on Windows. But yeah, time to toss that away and switch to DownThemAll. I'll take occasional 100% processor hits during downloading over spywareering any day =)
I'm not saying Firefox will be immune of spyware though - there have been a few spyware thingies that affect Firefox too, at least on Windows. Be careful what you install.
As an international evil mastermind I have numerous plans which require advanced mathematical calculations and simulations to be performed (wiping out the human race, transmogrifying all kittens into war machines, etc - the usual kind of stuff).
I was wondering if the license of this software will allow me to achieve my goals without giving up my principles and secrets?
Regrettably in this release, SAGE is somewhat limited and would not meet your goals. Due to some unforeseen limitations, it can only run in Baby Mulching Machines at the moment. However, I believe the next release has worked out these little kinks.
I see Arden is just yet another module for Neverwinter Nights. And so long as I need to have THAT installed to play Arden, why don't I just, like, put on my robe and wizard hat and play the main campaign?
Maybe because the NWN single-player campaign was pretty weak, and in its heigh NWN had bazillion really amazing online game worlds (don't know if they're still around, I haven't touched them for a while)? For most part, NWN was all about user-created mods; they only mastered their own tools afterwards with SoU, HotU and the premium modules =)
That said, the big problem with Arden seems to be that they're not open and public. The most successful servers showed up in game browser. Servers with passwords or those that don't appear in GameSpy list at all just didn't get the same amount of attention...
Thank you - sometimes I really need to be told when I'm stepping out of line. I don't pretend to be anything but a random idiot. Never mind me, I'm just thinking aloud and rambling to no one in particular (this is Slashdot, after all =)... My semi-incomprehensible ravings were definitely not aimed at you in particular.
And why wasnt MPlayer on that list? Oh yeah, cause it is "illegal" here in the USA. But aside that, one can convert to/from anything that is viewable. Nawww.. thats not good at all.
Well, VLC was on the list, and can also convert video. (No comment on legality or anything.)
Too bad they didnt mention tools in my favorites:... GParted, GRUB... NMap, RDesktop, VNC...
Yeah, because people get extremely excited when they start... um... partitioning drives! And booting the operating system! And they can, like... find out that no ports are open on their system, whatever that means!... and it's good to know that you can use the computer from some other place - if only they had another computer.
Let's face it, there's a TON of good open source software, but a lot of it isn't exactly "marketable". You can't sell open source to people by telling how much butt GRUB kicks. ("Yeah, it displays a menu and starts up the operating system. So?") A lot of open source is just neat tools for marginal purposes: people pick them because they fit their needs. They're not out there to make everyone happy. You can really only "sell" programs that have a big audience. Also, there's the element of "fun". Using productivity software is fun; you get results. On the other hand, not a lot of people are so enthusiastic when they have to boot the computer; selling GRUB is harder. A lot of people don't care about their bootloader as long as it kicks the kernel running.
Some tools are easy to market even when they have specialist target group, because everyone understands the basics of the field - say, in case of GNU Lilypond, everyone knows a little bit about music and notation, so everyone understands that the program they're "selling" here is useful to the musicians, composers and music typesetters (and are intrigued by the information found here), and the musicians, composers and music typesetters will be even further intrigued when they see how well the software fits their needs. It's also nice because making music is nice and makes people happy (or at least emotional). Now, try selling gparted. Everyone, even the specialists, think partitioning drives is dull... yes, you can make the sales speech interesting, but you can't make drive partitioning fun or frequent enough.
True audiophiles do not use FLAC encoding! A FLAC-encoded sound will have to be processed using a complex computational process, which will mean it will travel through very, very many transistors in the CPU before it hits the DAC on sound card, thus causing noticeable and very jarring latency in the sound. Even uncompressed files have headers which might affect seek performance. No, true audiophiles use raw sound data - indeed, raw sound files also save disk space, because they don't have headers.
during the early days of X-Ray's they were often used as a method for hair removal
And my dad's "fun experiments for kids" kind of book had tons of fun experiments kids could do with X-ray tubes. Such experiments were strangely missing from the children's science books for my generation. =)
Radiation was used really, really often recklessly back in the days. X-ray machines here, nuclear elements there... I recently saw one documentary that mentioned an X-ray-based shoe fitting machine (complete with eyepieces for the salesman, the customer, and the customer's kids!). There was a segment about a rather famous invention called Revigator; zaps the drinking water with a good healthy dose of alpha particles with truly magical effects all around...
I don't use the search box myself because it's, frankly, pretty clumsy. I use keyword searches because it's much more powerful: Just right click on a search box on any web page, select "Add keyword for this search", and now you can search whatever you want by typing the keyword and search terms to the address bar. ("g firefox keywords", bam. "wp Mozilla Firefox", bam.)
So, basically, he let out this Media Kit, hoping to imprint his manifesto in our souls in fiery letters. However, his tactic is doomed - due to technological considerations, his data is being eaten. Over the preceding hours, I've watched this thing getting mirrored in various locations... but this particular file's name keeps changing, because it has non-ASCII characters. (It's supposed to be named "Hyökkäyksen Tiedot.doc", in case you were wondering. I hope it gets posted right when I hit submit. It looks okay in preview, but hey, this is Slashdot, Eater of High-Bit Characters. =)
Is this truly the state of computing in 2007? Data rot hits in mere hours of releasing any kind of information? This is pathetic! Utterly pathetic!
I, for one, am quite saddened by the case (of course), but I can't fail to see the humorous sides of the case. (Please don't blame me. It's just one of my ways to cope with the tragedies.)
Actually, I'd say it'd be better to just throttle the hardware arms-race in general - I've been saying that for a long time. The PC game system requirements are getting more and more ridiculous even when I've not seen that many groundbreaking new things that improve playability. If we need tons of new iron just to up the game experience... well, yawn.
I believe that Nintendo can stay viable for a long time, even if they aren't keeping up latest-and-greatest. I'm still playing GBA games (okay, on a DS =) and absolutely don't feel a tiny little bit silly - the platform certainly worked for its purpose... I'm sure Wii will enjoy similar longevity with a little bit of luck.
There's nothing "magical" in the encoding systems that hampers or helps the identification of files, and in this respect, it's not different from other P2P file distribution systems. It's kind of like saying "the music file can't be identified once it's decoded and played by the media player" - well, no, representation format does change, but the content is the same.
It's possible to automatically decode binary Usenet posts, including multi-part ones, and perform ordinary content analysis on them (as in "this appears to be an MP3 file, and the ID3 tags somewhat allege that this song is 'Enter Sandman' by 'Metallica'.") However, RIAA still faces the same problem as with the other P2P networks: For correct procedure, the stuff has to be downloaded, identified, and takedown'd - they can't trust on people tagging files correctly or naming them correctly in the posts.
Writers, as in story, dialog, etc.? Since if so, I really would like to have a few of them...
I'm just trying to expand on what I've seen: Give people who are inclined to write a toolkit to play with, and they can write great stories. Or at least let someone else do the hard work of scripting and modeling and level design and whatnot.
Just take a look at the dozens if hundreds good modules for Neverwinter Nights: All it takes to create a good enjoyable adventure is a little bit of writing skill, aesthetics and story design - programming skill helps a little bit if you're not relying on wizard/generator code. Or look at the Battle for Wesnoth: As long as they don't need to touch the engine itself, folks are happy writing their own campaigns. Some are pretty good. Or see the recent work in the field of interactive fiction: a good toolkit + some decent writing skills = gold.
As for attracting writers in your case, I don't know - the best bet would be to advertise the fact loudly and try to "sell" the engine to the people. As in "we have a kickawesome engine here, all we need is someone to write some engaging dialogue to replace this awful drawl that we wrote at 3 AM..." (a completely hypothetical example, of course - I haven't checked out your project yet so I don't know how you're really doing =)
However, can we ever get to the point that the 'best' horse that gets trotted out for OSS Gaming looks like the era of games released for Windows95? It is just not possible for a high end gaming production to be FOSS?
As others pointed out, it's the issue of not having enough 2D/3D artists and music/sound folk. OSS developers certainly have a whole bunch of good coders - and writers, in a pinch.
For example, take a look at the Irrlicht or OGRE screenie galleries - you see the technology is definitely getting there. You can get ye trimesh to ye rendering device, and by golly does it ever look shiny and, with a bit of work, not that bad. (More bloom! More! More!) But we'd definitely need folks creating those models for the display first! The tech is there, but the art lags a bit.
If you want to see a project where the art and tech goes well hand in hand, try Battle for Wesnoth - top notch graphics (albeit in 2D pixel-art), sound effects and music. We can do this.
In Halo3 you are fighting against what could easily be called a 'False Prophet'. Sounds like good justification for a Christian church.
Guhhhh. And at the same time, the reaction to Ultima VI: The False Prophet was probably along the lines of "It's got MAGIC in it, so it's an EVIL game". (Never mind that Ultima series was mostly about living virtuous, chivalric life, and straightening up both personal and social problems...)
In general, I'm a little bit worried that some Christian groups have to take so superficial looks at the games: No one pauses to study the deeper values in the games, they just see "heck of a lot of violence = BURN" or "almost exposed boobies = BURN" or "someone mentioned magic once = BURN OF HARRYPOTTERIFIC PROPORTIONS" or "that kind of looks like a demon = BURN". No one analyses the games deeper than that.
Of course, if you think any of that copying is acceptable, then that kinda means you have to also accept that Disney's business practices are in any way "acceptable".
Well, Disney copying old stories isn't bad as such. The attitude of "We, ahem, re-invented them, and now nobody can ever make a better version of it forevermore" is what is the problem.
Though, Disney folks have done good stuff too. The animated films and series are pretty much yawnsome compared to the comics, some of which are completely brilliant. I mean, the stuff that made me a geek =)...
If Bungie shakes loose of Microsoft's cruel embrace, they should immediately buy the Myth IP back from Take2, conduct a throughout investigation of Where The Heck Myth II Loki Source Code Really Went (current myth2 devs don't seem to know what happened to it), and release an updated Linux binary. I mean, that ought to tell Microsoft a hint or two. =)
(Well, the Linux binary still works, but it seems I need to use the static binary and it appears to no longer do OpenGL or support gamma correction, and latter in particular makes the game highly annoying to play... Perhaps all it needs is a recompilation against the new versions of the libraries.)
Slashdot Mirror
Scroll Lock and Pause maybe, but Print Screen? The only reason it's called that is that the keyboard manufacturers think "Scrn Sht" might be, ahem, misinterpreted, while "Prt Scr" generally won't be. =) Makes a heck of a good screenshot key in most operating systems, though. As for SysRq, it's frequently used in Linux, for example.
The C64 "breadbox" case was a bit worrisome, yes, and the keys were a bit stiff compared to modern keyboards, but the layout wasn't that bad. The only major thing that I missed back then was the fact that only rich kids in far-away big cities got Nordic letters, and even if you did got those, you lost other characters, so what's the point?
Aside of that, the keyboard was pretty good. And there's nothing nonstandard about "Run/Stop" - people just call it "Esc" in PC-land. =)
Aaaaaaaaa! Prepare for an imminent, tangled multi-way collision of Apple Corps, Apple Computer, RIAA and the President!!! This will hurt, and by that, I mean it will hurt everyone who hears of this particular court case in any way... truly hurt, truly cause pain, in emotional, physical and legal sense. (Of course, now you have heard of this hypothetical case. I may have unwittingly created the very first Slashdot post that may kill you if you read it...)
Wikipedia says that Finland switched off analogue TV on 1 September 2007. I guess everyone there is aware of it.
Were we ever. The switchover to digital was very much promoted over the preceding few years. We certainly didn't have anyone asking "what, we went digital and no one told me?"... =)
Instead we got quite a few irate but informed people who quit paying for the TV licence because the DVB-T reception sucked where they were living. (The remote areas are always a pain to deal with...) The Finnish national broadcasting company, YLE, gets its funding through the licence fees and was stung pretty badly by the whole affair.
Yes, but at least in Debian, for most update tasks you don't have to manually add and remove files and directories; the package manager clears them up. If, when uninstalling package massive-timewaster, the package manager automatically removes the package's files from /usr/share/games/massive-timewaster and, if no files in that directory exist, the directory itself gets removed - BUT if there are files the user created, the directory is retained. It also won't overwrite another package's files, and will ask if it has to replace a config file that you have edited by hand (and a backup of the old version is retained if you choose to use the new version).
I'm betting most *nix package managers would have easily caught a simple "messing with a file that belongs to another package" situation, which is what this boot.ini situation really boiled down to.
However, for the sake of fair assessment, I have to say that at least in this GRUB package version I have at hand, dpkg doesn't seem to manage /boot/grub/menu.lst so theoretically another package could overwrite it. Well, at least GRUB will give you a prompt if it can't make heads or tails of the menu.lst. (I think. I could be wrong. =)
Yup, Quake 1 and 2 have that file too (though it doesn't seem to be always present, unless created by the user - at least for me, it seems that the only game where it gets automatically created if it doesn't exist is Quake 1). It also seems to appear in Doom 3 and Quake 4, and I assume every game other game based on id engines.
Except that people who have been hit with Notability Hammer in Wikipedia generally tend to just shrug and go build their own topical wikis. People know that the wiki system as a collaboration technology doesn't suck; the only problem is that Wikipedia specifically isn't all-inclusive, but that problem doesn't exist in a topical wiki.
Okay, I may be a bit biased in favour of wiki model, but in short, I'm a bit sceptical on the whole point of having collaborative writing system that tries to specifically limit the collaboration and information sharing. Basically, here Google rolls out yet another dog-old web hosting thingy, woohoo, where "Web 3.0" apparently means return of the Web 1.0 model: If you spot an error in the page, you send the author an email and hope they fix it by the end of the decade. If ever.
Then your publisher screwed you. Generally, no matter how badly the book bombs, you never have to pay the advance back. If I ever saw a publishing contract term that states otherwise, I'd not sign it. (I think this is the common book publishing industry thing. I've not yet gotten a publishing contract myself, but I've read enough material on that and most contracts I've seen specifically speak of "guaranteed advance payments".)
Except that FlashGet isn't strictly a Firefox add-on - it supports multiple browsers, though only on Windows. But yeah, time to toss that away and switch to DownThemAll. I'll take occasional 100% processor hits during downloading over spywareering any day =)
I'm not saying Firefox will be immune of spyware though - there have been a few spyware thingies that affect Firefox too, at least on Windows. Be careful what you install.
I was wondering if the license of this software will allow me to achieve my goals without giving up my principles and secrets?
Regrettably in this release, SAGE is somewhat limited and would not meet your goals. Due to some unforeseen limitations, it can only run in Baby Mulching Machines at the moment. However, I believe the next release has worked out these little kinks.
Maybe because the NWN single-player campaign was pretty weak, and in its heigh NWN had bazillion really amazing online game worlds (don't know if they're still around, I haven't touched them for a while)? For most part, NWN was all about user-created mods; they only mastered their own tools afterwards with SoU, HotU and the premium modules =)
That said, the big problem with Arden seems to be that they're not open and public. The most successful servers showed up in game browser. Servers with passwords or those that don't appear in GameSpy list at all just didn't get the same amount of attention...
Thank you - sometimes I really need to be told when I'm stepping out of line. I don't pretend to be anything but a random idiot. Never mind me, I'm just thinking aloud and rambling to no one in particular (this is Slashdot, after all =)... My semi-incomprehensible ravings were definitely not aimed at you in particular.
And why wasnt MPlayer on that list? Oh yeah, cause it is "illegal" here in the USA. But aside that, one can convert to/from anything that is viewable. Nawww.. thats not good at all.Well, VLC was on the list, and can also convert video. (No comment on legality or anything.)
Yeah, because people get extremely excited when they start... um... partitioning drives! And booting the operating system! And they can, like... find out that no ports are open on their system, whatever that means!... and it's good to know that you can use the computer from some other place - if only they had another computer.
Let's face it, there's a TON of good open source software, but a lot of it isn't exactly "marketable". You can't sell open source to people by telling how much butt GRUB kicks. ("Yeah, it displays a menu and starts up the operating system. So?") A lot of open source is just neat tools for marginal purposes: people pick them because they fit their needs. They're not out there to make everyone happy. You can really only "sell" programs that have a big audience. Also, there's the element of "fun". Using productivity software is fun; you get results. On the other hand, not a lot of people are so enthusiastic when they have to boot the computer; selling GRUB is harder. A lot of people don't care about their bootloader as long as it kicks the kernel running.
Some tools are easy to market even when they have specialist target group, because everyone understands the basics of the field - say, in case of GNU Lilypond, everyone knows a little bit about music and notation, so everyone understands that the program they're "selling" here is useful to the musicians, composers and music typesetters (and are intrigued by the information found here), and the musicians, composers and music typesetters will be even further intrigued when they see how well the software fits their needs. It's also nice because making music is nice and makes people happy (or at least emotional). Now, try selling gparted. Everyone, even the specialists, think partitioning drives is dull... yes, you can make the sales speech interesting, but you can't make drive partitioning fun or frequent enough.
True audiophiles do not use FLAC encoding! A FLAC-encoded sound will have to be processed using a complex computational process, which will mean it will travel through very, very many transistors in the CPU before it hits the DAC on sound card, thus causing noticeable and very jarring latency in the sound. Even uncompressed files have headers which might affect seek performance. No, true audiophiles use raw sound data - indeed, raw sound files also save disk space, because they don't have headers.
And my dad's "fun experiments for kids" kind of book had tons of fun experiments kids could do with X-ray tubes. Such experiments were strangely missing from the children's science books for my generation. =)
Radiation was used really, really often recklessly back in the days. X-ray machines here, nuclear elements there... I recently saw one documentary that mentioned an X-ray-based shoe fitting machine (complete with eyepieces for the salesman, the customer, and the customer's kids!). There was a segment about a rather famous invention called Revigator; zaps the drinking water with a good healthy dose of alpha particles with truly magical effects all around...
Seriously, how difficult would it be for you to show me a list of search providers at install time and let me choose the one I prefer?
See the little Google icon in the Firefox search box? Now click it.
Last I checked, the last choice was also sticky and/or you could set the default somewhere...
Don't see the search engines you like? Head here.
I don't use the search box myself because it's, frankly, pretty clumsy. I use keyword searches because it's much more powerful: Just right click on a search box on any web page, select "Add keyword for this search", and now you can search whatever you want by typing the keyword and search terms to the address bar. ("g firefox keywords", bam. "wp Mozilla Firefox", bam.)
So, basically, he let out this Media Kit, hoping to imprint his manifesto in our souls in fiery letters. However, his tactic is doomed - due to technological considerations, his data is being eaten. Over the preceding hours, I've watched this thing getting mirrored in various locations... but this particular file's name keeps changing, because it has non-ASCII characters. (It's supposed to be named "Hyökkäyksen Tiedot.doc", in case you were wondering. I hope it gets posted right when I hit submit. It looks okay in preview, but hey, this is Slashdot, Eater of High-Bit Characters. =)
Is this truly the state of computing in 2007? Data rot hits in mere hours of releasing any kind of information? This is pathetic! Utterly pathetic!
I, for one, am quite saddened by the case (of course), but I can't fail to see the humorous sides of the case. (Please don't blame me. It's just one of my ways to cope with the tragedies.)
Actually, I'd say it'd be better to just throttle the hardware arms-race in general - I've been saying that for a long time. The PC game system requirements are getting more and more ridiculous even when I've not seen that many groundbreaking new things that improve playability. If we need tons of new iron just to up the game experience... well, yawn.
I believe that Nintendo can stay viable for a long time, even if they aren't keeping up latest-and-greatest. I'm still playing GBA games (okay, on a DS =) and absolutely don't feel a tiny little bit silly - the platform certainly worked for its purpose... I'm sure Wii will enjoy similar longevity with a little bit of luck.
There's nothing "magical" in the encoding systems that hampers or helps the identification of files, and in this respect, it's not different from other P2P file distribution systems. It's kind of like saying "the music file can't be identified once it's decoded and played by the media player" - well, no, representation format does change, but the content is the same.
It's possible to automatically decode binary Usenet posts, including multi-part ones, and perform ordinary content analysis on them (as in "this appears to be an MP3 file, and the ID3 tags somewhat allege that this song is 'Enter Sandman' by 'Metallica'.") However, RIAA still faces the same problem as with the other P2P networks: For correct procedure, the stuff has to be downloaded, identified, and takedown'd - they can't trust on people tagging files correctly or naming them correctly in the posts.
I'm just trying to expand on what I've seen: Give people who are inclined to write a toolkit to play with, and they can write great stories. Or at least let someone else do the hard work of scripting and modeling and level design and whatnot.
Just take a look at the dozens if hundreds good modules for Neverwinter Nights: All it takes to create a good enjoyable adventure is a little bit of writing skill, aesthetics and story design - programming skill helps a little bit if you're not relying on wizard/generator code. Or look at the Battle for Wesnoth: As long as they don't need to touch the engine itself, folks are happy writing their own campaigns. Some are pretty good. Or see the recent work in the field of interactive fiction: a good toolkit + some decent writing skills = gold.
As for attracting writers in your case, I don't know - the best bet would be to advertise the fact loudly and try to "sell" the engine to the people. As in "we have a kickawesome engine here, all we need is someone to write some engaging dialogue to replace this awful drawl that we wrote at 3 AM..." (a completely hypothetical example, of course - I haven't checked out your project yet so I don't know how you're really doing =)
As others pointed out, it's the issue of not having enough 2D/3D artists and music/sound folk. OSS developers certainly have a whole bunch of good coders - and writers, in a pinch.
For example, take a look at the Irrlicht or OGRE screenie galleries - you see the technology is definitely getting there. You can get ye trimesh to ye rendering device, and by golly does it ever look shiny and, with a bit of work, not that bad. (More bloom! More! More!) But we'd definitely need folks creating those models for the display first! The tech is there, but the art lags a bit.
If you want to see a project where the art and tech goes well hand in hand, try Battle for Wesnoth - top notch graphics (albeit in 2D pixel-art), sound effects and music. We can do this.
Loki games "required" a CD. Of course, there was no copy protection and .isos probably work just fine in a pinch... =)
Guhhhh. And at the same time, the reaction to Ultima VI: The False Prophet was probably along the lines of "It's got MAGIC in it, so it's an EVIL game". (Never mind that Ultima series was mostly about living virtuous, chivalric life, and straightening up both personal and social problems...)
In general, I'm a little bit worried that some Christian groups have to take so superficial looks at the games: No one pauses to study the deeper values in the games, they just see "heck of a lot of violence = BURN" or "almost exposed boobies = BURN" or "someone mentioned magic once = BURN OF HARRYPOTTERIFIC PROPORTIONS" or "that kind of looks like a demon = BURN". No one analyses the games deeper than that.
Well, Disney copying old stories isn't bad as such. The attitude of "We, ahem, re-invented them, and now nobody can ever make a better version of it forevermore" is what is the problem.
Though, Disney folks have done good stuff too. The animated films and series are pretty much yawnsome compared to the comics, some of which are completely brilliant. I mean, the stuff that made me a geek =)...
Seriously, who cares about Halo?
If Bungie shakes loose of Microsoft's cruel embrace, they should immediately buy the Myth IP back from Take2, conduct a throughout investigation of Where The Heck Myth II Loki Source Code Really Went (current myth2 devs don't seem to know what happened to it), and release an updated Linux binary. I mean, that ought to tell Microsoft a hint or two. =)
(Well, the Linux binary still works, but it seems I need to use the static binary and it appears to no longer do OpenGL or support gamma correction, and latter in particular makes the game highly annoying to play... Perhaps all it needs is a recompilation against the new versions of the libraries.)