It's a shame that building GtkRadiant on linux is virtually impossible these days. Code rot - the project is like, dead. I've once managed to get it running on some another machine, but it broke since then.
Tried DarkRadiant? Granted, it's only for Doom 3 engine and I haven't tried to build it from source, but at least it's actively developed.
People were excited when they said Duke Nukem Forever had been ported to HTML 5 <canvas>, but man, Doom 5 uses plain old HTML 3.2! (Though I'm fairly sure Carmack is ashamed of the fact that the highly broken Microsoft HTML generator was used.) Clearly more impressive, even when the engine may be a bit outdated by now!
The contract probably states if the publisher has the right to make certain modifications.
Ah yes, it's called "editing". The contracts usually state that the author and the publisher are allowed to make changes to the submitted manuscript, subject to specific case-by-case mutual agreements. The editing process is a long, two-way, back-and-forth dialogue. The editor usually won't make changes that the author would strongly object to.
If they're unilaterally randomly messing with the wordings and introducing new typos, that's contrary to the editor's job description. The editor's job is to make the text readable and comprehensible. Want to make the book harder to steal? Print it on sturdier and heavier paper or something - the text is off limits for that purpose. It's not befitting for the publisher to treat the author's words as their own power-fantasy playfield where they can stalk the people who didn't pay for it.
Any dialog box that has 'OK' instead of a meaningful verb as a button title is an automatic usability fail (this is one of the first things everyone learns about HCI, it's really not hard to get right...)
Linux GUIs tend to use stock buttons. The developer just plops down, say, an "OK" button and it gets translated right based on locale. The button has an icon, which is dependant on the user's theme. This does wonders to consistency between applications. Sure, in this scenario, I sure don't mind if the "OK" button has a meaningful verb as text: The icon still shows that I'm doing the "OK" thing.
The problem is that none of the other major OSes follow this convention. Windows doesn't. OSX doesn't. Affirmative and negative buttons look the same. The only thing to tell them apart is the order: OSX puts "OK" button on right and Windows on left.
I always hit the wrong button in the session restoration dialog Windows version of Firefox's Session Manager extension. It has two buttons: "load 'em up" and "just start a new bloody session". In Linux version, the "load old session" button is on right and has "OK" arrow in it. "New session" is basically "cancel" so it has cancel text. (These probably should use different GTK+ stock icons, like "new" and "load", but I'm not sure if and how XUL lets people do that.) Now, Windows version, because Microsoft wanted to not be like OSX and Linux, swaps these around. AND has no icons. Guess how many times I've hit the wrong button? I'm tired and frustrated and Firefox just made my day by crashing again, do I look like I want to read the novels that people put in the command buttons?
In summary: Verbs in buttons are nice, but they're not as helpful as people think.
Thanks, I've got to try that when I'm at that machine next. Fortunately, the machine in question sits a few hundred kilometers away from me. It gives me a chance to rest.
As I recall it, I tried poking at the usual suspects in/etc/init.d, I did something to gconf, and I found some blog post that assured me there was some way to kill pulseaudio without uninstalling it and there were instructions on how to do that. But those were lies or misinformation. All lies. All misinformation....I hope this isn't though. Thank you. Configuring stuff would be easier if it all of it really sat in/etc.
I disagree with the original article: ALSA is the way to go, I have drivers for all cards I've thrown at it, all applications imaginable that support ALSA work just fine for me, and no, as a OSS-to-ALSA changeover survivor, I don't want to change everything to another frigging API yet again (much less back to OSS), thank you very much. And while PulseAudio is less than perfect right now, I recognise it has uses.
But that's just that - it has uses. In its current state, I'm not using it for plain-ordinary music playing on my Debian system. I don't think it's ready enough as a common day-to-day audio routing thing. Still too many problems.
An example case: I was really disappointed when I upgraded Ubuntu on an older computer (600Mhz Pentium III with 256M memory and ESS Solo 1 onboard audio, plenty good enough for OpenOffice.org and web browsing, even ran Compiz at very good performance on GeForce 2 MX =) and sound playback started to just plain suck, when it previously worked just fine with straight-up app-to-ALSA playback. The machine just wasn't fast enough to route stuff through an application, plain and simple. And now Ubuntu foisted PulseAudio in. Uninstall PulseAudio = uninstall entire frigging GNOME desktop. I kept trying to tell it "no, I just want ALSA playback" in sound settings. No dice, pulseaudio kept respawning and hogging audio device all to itself. I kept disabling shit from all places imaginable. No dice, pulseaudio kept respawning. Now, I'm going insane (an unrelated story). I'll be armed with GCC and some dummy binaries. Mheheh. Muahaha. MUAHAHAHAHA....any better ideas?
Here's one thing I've noticed: When I started playing video games in 1980s, the experience was pretty disappointing. Why? The games could have been so much better but the technology just wasn't that good. In the latter half of 1990s, things changed: we got 3D, we got the Internet, we got the processing power and storage capacity. Nowadays, I have zero technological complaints. I can fire up, say, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and say "goddamn it, this is what I wanted as a kid - and so much more - and now I have it".
I'd argue that the same thing is happening with social interaction. Playing is a form of social activity. Duh. We've always wanted social games. Even in my Commodore 64 days, games were always much more fun when I had friends playing games with me - coop just wasn't always that fun because if you were lucky there were some good 2P games. That got slightly better in NES era, but not much. Later Nintendo thought "well, let's put in four controller ports. Everyone wants that." And social games have just got a whole lot better with the Internet. So, once again, it's technology growing to meet the demands of the game designers.
Here in Finland, a computer magazine published an April Fools story about an advanced multiplayer Elite clone in 1989 (I think), and the writers were surprised because no one noticed it was an April Fools story. People really thought it would have been incredibly amazing gameplay-wise and technologically plausible if your computer could make a dial-up connection to your friend's computer when you're flying in the same sector of space. And nowadays we have EVE Online. See? Technology catching up with peoples' dreams and expectations.
Why not? Doom is an excellent and influential piece of popular art: perhaps not the most remarkable game of all time, but definitely one that entertained many people and inspired latter works.
If you want to look at more artful games from that era, try Ultima VII. Epic, sprawling story! Memorable social commentary! Immersive gameworld! Detailed visual and aural work! (Etc, and so forth.)
Ah, back in the Soviet Union days, the social networking at least made sense and didn't leave any incriminating evidence. Back then, after all, "social networking" was just notes on the kitchen table:
"I've gone to the women's activism group at the collective meeting hall. The supper is in the oven. Long live the Party! -Mother."
"I've gone to the Young Pioneer Palace to meet my friends. Long live the Party! -Son."
"I've gone to the political rally in the city. Long live the Party! -Dad."
"I've stolen everything of value in this house. Long live the Party! -Thief."
It's already afternoon and I've not had coffee, so apologies for not posting this to my blog. I've got to Ramble.
Someone needs to get rid of the term "fair use". It implies there's a conflict between two content creators, and one of them will be given a begrudging "fair" chance of using the other's content. Here in Finland, we have a more appropriate term for the same legal concept: "the right to quote".
It is, however, a slight problem that even our legislators have been pretty vague in the law itself: "A published work may be quoted according to good manners and up to the extent that is appropriate to the use". (And it's not limited to text; other works can be "quoted" too) What exactly qualifies as "good manners" and "appropriate extent" is up to the courts. Or is it? We have a specific Copyright Council that has issued tons of legally sound (but not legally binding, as they operate on what has been unilaterally told to them and they won't investigate the claims further than that) opinions and recommendations of what, on those specific cases, is appropriate amount of quotation and what is not. For free. Anyone can send them questions, in free-form letter or email, and they give out statements. The statements are all there on the Web for people to browse. A great resource for everyone wondering whether or not something is okay.
I'd fully support setting up bodies like that in other jurisdictions too. The right to quote should be something that should be applicable and understandable without lengthy, costly legal fights. Even before you go and actually create anything at all.
I thought I had some hazy recollection that reCAPTCHA was being used for some open projects, like helping to OCR out-of-copyright works...
...so now it is being used to fuel Google's massive, still-very-much-copyrighted, proprietary book scanning effort?
So how's this going to benefit people? I'm, of course, assuming the details are spotty at the moment and I'm terribly interested to hear more details from Google's official "do no evil" department on how they intend to contribute to the world.
Game press being bribed? As in they are not being bribed enough already?
If certain high-quality traditional game publications and certain bloggers striving for high journalistic standards are to be believed (and I don't entirely buy this, but I say it's highly plausible and probably true to some noticeable extent), game journalism is already getting plenty enough of real bribes, thank you very much, and game publications that just print slightly tweaked press releases and are easily impressed by generous treatment in expos etc. should not need any additional fuel to the fire.
Is it actually possible that this plan is going to backfire and the journalists don't even pause to think why they've been bribed? Would the irony be that they'd just cash it in, write a "buy the game now, yawn" story, and not think about it in the slightest? Would they see this as business as usual, and not as a marketing effort?
But most importantly, will the aforementioned high-standard journalists ask these same questions? Will we ever see truly reformed game journalism all around?
Why do they build nuclear reactors, when you can get electricity from the wall socket these days?
Seriously, though: Correct, systematic and well-defined metadata makes searching more effective. Lack of metadata means you're going to comb through the results yourself looking for the stuff that matches the criteria that the search engine doesn't let you enter.
Did you configure the Xbox to run at higher resolution?... the picture will look worlds better, especially in terms of things like on-screen text.
Yep, I me it run on the highest resolution it could find. And the text definitely looked very clear on HDMI.
Like I said on the other post, HDMI was definitely better choice if I had to sit closer to the screen (and, yes, sitting in Halo 3 lobby reading people's records while waiting to be kill by zombie). It was just that if I sat on the couch, minor blur and wavines didn't matter that much.
Seriously, though, I could see the difference between Composite and HDMI - crystal clear on HDMI, slightly waving in analog - but 5 meters away on the couch, it didn't matter that much. (I can't even see the composite waving on my older CRT TV that much. Or the Commodore 1802 monitor, for that matter. Just goes to prove that everything is relative and newer TVs are an ewil kapitalist ploy to sell newer cabling. =)
Still, if I had to play sitting close to the screen, I'd pick HDMI any day.
Why is it, that all the GUI desktops abandoned Unix's philosophies completely and instead went the Windows way (which of course actually is the MacOS/Xerox/$otherProductItGotTakenFrom way)?
I mean, imagine how great it would be, if we had all the tools of Gimp, Openoffice, Firefox Add-ons, etc, as separate entities, only bound to a document / data trough its mime type. You could mash up and reconnect everything at will. Pipe stuff trough that wizard, and then trough that.
Or connect a OOo tool and a Gimp tool trough pipes, and then draw with them, etc.
The only problem with using Unix-like IPC philosophy in GUIs is that in Unix pipelines, each program does something, and it does something in a clear and specified manner. They take input in clear and specified manner, they produce output in clear and specified manner. Most importantly, they're always applied in a specific manner.
"Graphical super-piped toolbox" idea would be cool. But first you'd have to understand what you want to accomplish with it. You still need a clear and defined logic to drive all those tools - you wouldn't be able to eliminate coding entirely. Most importantly you wouldn't necessarily be able to use any of the stuff we have in existence right now. Most importantly, once you have build this graphical pipe thingy, you'd need to understand what it's supposed to process and produce.
I think the closest thing we can humanly produce would be to improve the scriptability of GUI applications, and improve the file formats as well as inter-process messaging. GUI apps are often black boxes and require human intervention all too often - not every app is like GIMP or Blender when they really should people to easily script monotonous things. Inter-process messaging is being remedied with the growing support for things like D-Bus - application can expose their inner workings and give other applications information about their state and accept commands from other programs. And you can theoretically and practically also use tons of external tools on a lot of file formats right now.
The Xbox360 comes with component. Works great for, at least, 720p (as that's the kind of TV I use it with).
I have a a-few-years-old TV in my home, everything connected with Composite+SCART. Pretty good picture at PAL 60hz. This summer I finally got a chance to try out what Xbox 360 looks like on (someone else's) HDTV - and damn, the HD picture via HDMI connector looks just marginally bit better than Composite. You can actually tell the difference if you're sitting right next to the screen. (Barely so from the couch.)
(The TV also had the curious habit of having worse analog picture on 60hz than 50hz. Flat TV are weird. And in this experiment, I also found it infinitely weird that Xbox 360, a product from that famous proprietery software corporation, had a standards-compliant HDMI port that accepts not-fancy no-brand HDMI cables... and Wii still needs an adapter of some sort. Ghh.)
In short, right now, I don't think HD is all that relevant or remarkable. Maybe in 5 years.
Haven't even bothered to install the browser so far, my wife's netbook runs circles around a Wii for couch surfing.
Actually I'm genuinely curious: Who uses the Wii browser and for what?
YouTube works wonderfully, though YouTube seems to serve pretty low-res videos at the moment (I don't think Wii has the processor power to decode HD videos anyway). So it works, but doesn't look exactly glorious - but still pretty watchable if you squint just right. And in this version, based on cursory testing, the YouTube XL fullscreen mode finally seems to work at tolerable framerate - it used to work nicely in non-fullscreen, but went sluggish in fullscreen. (Incidentally, Flash 7 for Linux suffered from the same problem but they fixed it in newer versions...)
And I've mostly been using the Internet Channel for watching streaming video and HomestarRunner stuff, quickly checking game guides, and occasionally posting to identi.ca. It's not the fastest browser around and goes sluggish on JavaScript-heavy pages like Slashdot (then again, so does my Athlon XP 3000+ desktop.) And there's no AdBlock to alleviate these things. And of course, I haven't figured out how to set up the USB keyboard layout to non-US layouts, but that's a minor problem. All in all, it does most of the stuff I'd expect from a set-top box browser just fine.
This is such a bad example. On both Debian and Ubuntu if you apt-get remove mono you'll be presented with a list of affected packages. This is the whole idea behind dependencies. You think Debian or Canonical have tested every possible combination of installed packages? Well, they haven't and they don't need to. I'm willing to bet that at least one of my systems' installed packages lists are unique in the world and it didn't need tested by Debian first.
But that was not what I was chasing with that example. I was saying that blindly removing a program from Windows pre-install images is similar to blindly removing a.deb from the Ubuntu install CD or repository. When you start doing fancy-pants stuff like checking the dependencies, you're conducting quality control work - something the original poster implied wouldn't be necessary if Windows was "ready for desktop" and highly modular.
My point was that removing an application from Windows pre-install images requires all the due care. Just like removing applications from Debian/Ubuntu distros. This doesn't make either operating system any less ready for desktop. And yes, like I said, this sort of snafus are much easier to prevent in most Linux dists because we have the notion of meticulously tracked and specified dependencies.
And I'm not speaking of problems caused by combinations of installed packages. I'm speaking of problems caused by blind removal of packages that everyone up until yesterday assumed had to be there.
In conclusion, software distribution sucks no matter what OS you have.
If Windows is so fragile that removing one application required a large amount of tests, then it is not ready for deployment.
My question, when will windows be ready for the desktop.
It's not like it's any better elsewhere.
I'm not part of Debian or Ubuntu teams, but I bet if they had a mysterious legal showstopper, they didn't just casually pull the offending.deb out of the repository and regenerate disk images. You'd get irate people saying "My install blows up because it can't find package X and now I have red all over my package list." Oops.
Think of (for a provocative example) Mono. You couldn't just remove all Mono package because that'd break some parts of GNOME default install.
Instead, you'd see people testing that all the necessary dependencies are met even when the offending package is gone. In the previous example, you'd have to adjust the dependencies - "GNOME default install no longer depends on Tomboy etc."
(Though as far as I've understood it, Debian folks have a large number of automated tests to deal with situations like this. Microsoft probably doesn't, because Windows still doesn't have as sophisticated dependency management.)
This summer, I went though some of my old floppies in a daring search for the shitty pen-and-paper RPG system I made when I was in the school, back around 1992-1993 (so here's your 17-year window). And surprise surprise, I found it! The files were in rather weird formats, though - but almost all file types I could open in current crop of software. (The vector graphics files had fared worst: I suppose the Arts & Letters Composer install disks are somewhere in the pile, but I doubt a Win16 application will work that well in recent Windows versions...) The new software doesn't preserve the formatting, though.
Yet, the best-preserved version of this shitty pen-and-paper RPG system is... (drum roll)... the one I printed on the dot-matrix printer. Surprise, surprise. Easily readable, perfect formatting, and even the made-in-two-minutes vector art is there right among my incomprehensible combat rules.
So go for printed format. These days, printing high-quality documents is easier and cheaper than back in 1992. As for computer-readable stuff, stick to standard formats. Every software package, codec or file format that is even slightly obscure these days and completely proprietary is going to cause problems. Speaking of the same bunch of floppies I went through to find this RPG, I honestly thought Microsoft Works and Windows 3.x Write files would be readable in future. "But it's made by Microsoft!"...took until OpenOffice.org 3 to get support for Works files and Write is still unsupported. I suppose MS products still read them in one form or other. *sigh*
Try finding video editing software which can edit (not commandline like ffmpeg, I'm talking gui After Effects style) a Theora file.
Cinelerra.
Though I have to say that occasionally, Cinelerra-CV has problems reading all formats with different quirks in each format. I can't remember offhand what weird quirks it had with Theora. Probably some funny inability to find keyframes at times and thus messing things up if you cut at a wrong place. Rendering to Theora works fine, last I checked.
2. With a bit of sensible design, the sites can manage this functionality themselves.
Yep, and this is the sensible solution. People at least have some idea to what site they'll be redirected to when they see the short URL.
deviantART already does this with their "fav.me" URL shortening service. If I see a fav.me URL, I know it goes to something that was posted on dA. And we can somewhat assume that dA will keep automagically maintaining it.
It hardly compares with a game where you could bake your own bread, weave your own cloth, or forge your own sword.
True, though the Oblivion engine does allow people to build things like this, so I don't really count it against this.
Oblivion's interface consists of computer-like menus, with everything stored in lists of words; Ultima's interface looks like the real world, where you flick through a book to find the spell you want to cast, or rummage through your backpack looking for a particular item.
This is not necessarily a bad thing from usability point of view, and doesn't necessarily break the suspension of disbelief. U7's gumps are more "realistic", but not more user-friendly.
Why does every single U7Pt2 guide remind people to immediately put the serpent teeth to the jawbone? Could it be because they're like 10 pixels in size, and if you put them in a bag, you'll spend 10 minutes looking for them? Right.
And how on earth were Oblivion's NPCs better than Ultima's? Oblivion's NPCs were rubbish. They only had a handful of lines each, and most of those were the same for every character in a given town. Oblivion's shallow, undetailed conversations were a step backwards even from Morrowind, which was already rather guilty of genericity! Contrast Ultima VII, where every single NPC has a unique and often deep branching conversation tree.
I'll grant that U7's NPCs have more to say, and there's more of them. But less text is not necessarily a bad thing either. A lot of older RPGs have text, text, text, and forget that it must be a) conceivably spoken by a person and b) read by the player. If I want to read a novel, I'll read a novel. If I want to listen to people chatter for hours and maybe play a little bit of game in the middle somewhere, I go play Metal Gear Solid. So I don't think Oblivion's more sparse dialogue is necessarily a bad thing - if you only have as much speech as the people can conceivably say in that situation, it's more plausible in my book. Saying more text is good almost as silly as saying "Oblivion isn't as good as Super Mario Bros, because you jump less on enemies' heads." No excuse in continuing already silly premises.
And at the risk of sounding like unimaginative bore, I'll say that voice acting - even rather limited one - really adds something to the game and helps bring out the personalities of the characters. Off hand, I can't remember too many NPCs that I can really remember in U7 as having distinct personalities and really speaking with their own voice.
Also: Which character in U7 had facial expressions? That's right, Spark. (Maybe others, I can't remember right now.) Which characters in Oblivion have facial expressions? All of them. Do I see some good untapped potential in having 3D character models, something that's quite hard to do in static character portraits?
Furthermore: Dispositions. Ultima series, of course, had disposition system in place - it invented the damn thing - but in my opinion it was underutilised. Just be a good guy, and pretty much everything is possible for you - nothing ever changes. Oblivion makes more use of uncooperativeness.
Speaking of bad guys - why is there no Thieves Guild in Britannia? Oh, right, the goody-shoes Avatar thinks Stealing Is Wrong nowadays, so player has no need to join such unvirtuous organisations. Silly me. Can't cater to different character types. =)
Don't get me wrong. I love Oblivion. I've probably spent more time playing it than any single Ultima game. But it's a very different product.
I like both series a lot - and I'm not saying Oblivion is necessarily a better or deeper game overall. It's just that as time goes on, it's harder and harder to say which of the two games is a clear winner. U7 doesn't change, and new games appear all the time, with their new technological breakthroughs. For years, I could definitely say "nothi
Holy shit? That is something shouldn't be done since the first day of ARPANet. Besides ethical reasons, one should never assume reverse DNS of some machine really belongs to an employee or student of that company/.edu.
No, but it was done on a computer that was in an IP block allocated to that company/.edu. It's a subtle distinction, of course, because people aren't IPs. Nevertheless, unregistered WP are identified by their IP address, and the registration information of IP blocks are in public, so where's the ethical angle in saying "User from IP address X, which belongs in an IP block owned by Y, made edit Z which was identified as vandalism"?
Should administrators assume good faith and say it was a granny next door, using that company's unsecured WLAN? As unlikely as it sounds like, it happens all the time, yes, but still, assuming that was the case all the time would probably not be entirely accurate.
You know what happens if some company takes that jerk (and wiki) serious enough to state legal consequences right?
Okay, a defamation case could be possible... assuming, of course, wiki vandalism was illegal, and they were falsely accused of illegal deeds.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a shame that building GtkRadiant on linux is virtually impossible these days. Code rot - the project is like, dead. I've once managed to get it running on some another machine, but it broke since then.
Tried DarkRadiant? Granted, it's only for Doom 3 engine and I haven't tried to build it from source, but at least it's actively developed.
I found a screenshot of Doom 5.
People were excited when they said Duke Nukem Forever had been ported to HTML 5 <canvas>, but man, Doom 5 uses plain old HTML 3.2! (Though I'm fairly sure Carmack is ashamed of the fact that the highly broken Microsoft HTML generator was used.) Clearly more impressive, even when the engine may be a bit outdated by now!
The contract probably states if the publisher has the right to make certain modifications.
Ah yes, it's called "editing". The contracts usually state that the author and the publisher are allowed to make changes to the submitted manuscript, subject to specific case-by-case mutual agreements. The editing process is a long, two-way, back-and-forth dialogue. The editor usually won't make changes that the author would strongly object to.
If they're unilaterally randomly messing with the wordings and introducing new typos, that's contrary to the editor's job description. The editor's job is to make the text readable and comprehensible. Want to make the book harder to steal? Print it on sturdier and heavier paper or something - the text is off limits for that purpose. It's not befitting for the publisher to treat the author's words as their own power-fantasy playfield where they can stalk the people who didn't pay for it.
Any dialog box that has 'OK' instead of a meaningful verb as a button title is an automatic usability fail (this is one of the first things everyone learns about HCI, it's really not hard to get right...)
Linux GUIs tend to use stock buttons. The developer just plops down, say, an "OK" button and it gets translated right based on locale. The button has an icon, which is dependant on the user's theme. This does wonders to consistency between applications. Sure, in this scenario, I sure don't mind if the "OK" button has a meaningful verb as text: The icon still shows that I'm doing the "OK" thing.
The problem is that none of the other major OSes follow this convention. Windows doesn't. OSX doesn't. Affirmative and negative buttons look the same. The only thing to tell them apart is the order: OSX puts "OK" button on right and Windows on left.
I always hit the wrong button in the session restoration dialog Windows version of Firefox's Session Manager extension. It has two buttons: "load 'em up" and "just start a new bloody session". In Linux version, the "load old session" button is on right and has "OK" arrow in it. "New session" is basically "cancel" so it has cancel text. (These probably should use different GTK+ stock icons, like "new" and "load", but I'm not sure if and how XUL lets people do that.) Now, Windows version, because Microsoft wanted to not be like OSX and Linux, swaps these around. AND has no icons. Guess how many times I've hit the wrong button? I'm tired and frustrated and Firefox just made my day by crashing again, do I look like I want to read the novels that people put in the command buttons?
In summary: Verbs in buttons are nice, but they're not as helpful as people think.
Thanks, I've got to try that when I'm at that machine next. Fortunately, the machine in question sits a few hundred kilometers away from me. It gives me a chance to rest.
As I recall it, I tried poking at the usual suspects in /etc/init.d, I did something to gconf, and I found some blog post that assured me there was some way to kill pulseaudio without uninstalling it and there were instructions on how to do that. But those were lies or misinformation. All lies. All misinformation. ...I hope this isn't though. Thank you. Configuring stuff would be easier if it all of it really sat in /etc.
I disagree with the original article: ALSA is the way to go, I have drivers for all cards I've thrown at it, all applications imaginable that support ALSA work just fine for me, and no, as a OSS-to-ALSA changeover survivor, I don't want to change everything to another frigging API yet again (much less back to OSS), thank you very much. And while PulseAudio is less than perfect right now, I recognise it has uses.
But that's just that - it has uses. In its current state, I'm not using it for plain-ordinary music playing on my Debian system. I don't think it's ready enough as a common day-to-day audio routing thing. Still too many problems.
An example case: I was really disappointed when I upgraded Ubuntu on an older computer (600Mhz Pentium III with 256M memory and ESS Solo 1 onboard audio, plenty good enough for OpenOffice.org and web browsing, even ran Compiz at very good performance on GeForce 2 MX =) and sound playback started to just plain suck, when it previously worked just fine with straight-up app-to-ALSA playback. The machine just wasn't fast enough to route stuff through an application, plain and simple. And now Ubuntu foisted PulseAudio in. Uninstall PulseAudio = uninstall entire frigging GNOME desktop. I kept trying to tell it "no, I just want ALSA playback" in sound settings. No dice, pulseaudio kept respawning and hogging audio device all to itself. I kept disabling shit from all places imaginable. No dice, pulseaudio kept respawning. Now, I'm going insane (an unrelated story). I'll be armed with GCC and some dummy binaries. Mheheh. Muahaha. MUAHAHAHAHA. ...any better ideas?
Here's one thing I've noticed: When I started playing video games in 1980s, the experience was pretty disappointing. Why? The games could have been so much better but the technology just wasn't that good. In the latter half of 1990s, things changed: we got 3D, we got the Internet, we got the processing power and storage capacity. Nowadays, I have zero technological complaints. I can fire up, say, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and say "goddamn it, this is what I wanted as a kid - and so much more - and now I have it".
I'd argue that the same thing is happening with social interaction. Playing is a form of social activity. Duh. We've always wanted social games. Even in my Commodore 64 days, games were always much more fun when I had friends playing games with me - coop just wasn't always that fun because if you were lucky there were some good 2P games. That got slightly better in NES era, but not much. Later Nintendo thought "well, let's put in four controller ports. Everyone wants that." And social games have just got a whole lot better with the Internet. So, once again, it's technology growing to meet the demands of the game designers.
Here in Finland, a computer magazine published an April Fools story about an advanced multiplayer Elite clone in 1989 (I think), and the writers were surprised because no one noticed it was an April Fools story. People really thought it would have been incredibly amazing gameplay-wise and technologically plausible if your computer could make a dial-up connection to your friend's computer when you're flying in the same sector of space. And nowadays we have EVE Online. See? Technology catching up with peoples' dreams and expectations.
Given the demographics of /. readers, as seen here http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/www.slashdot.org#demographics, I wouldn't be surprised if many here considers the original Doom series great art! :)
Why not? Doom is an excellent and influential piece of popular art: perhaps not the most remarkable game of all time, but definitely one that entertained many people and inspired latter works.
If you want to look at more artful games from that era, try Ultima VII. Epic, sprawling story! Memorable social commentary! Immersive gameworld! Detailed visual and aural work! (Etc, and so forth.)
Ah, back in the Soviet Union days, the social networking at least made sense and didn't leave any incriminating evidence. Back then, after all, "social networking" was just notes on the kitchen table:
"I've gone to the women's activism group at the collective meeting hall. The supper is in the oven. Long live the Party! -Mother."
"I've gone to the Young Pioneer Palace to meet my friends. Long live the Party! -Son."
"I've gone to the political rally in the city. Long live the Party! -Dad."
"I've stolen everything of value in this house. Long live the Party! -Thief."
See? New technology isn't always better.
It's already afternoon and I've not had coffee, so apologies for not posting this to my blog. I've got to Ramble.
Someone needs to get rid of the term "fair use". It implies there's a conflict between two content creators, and one of them will be given a begrudging "fair" chance of using the other's content. Here in Finland, we have a more appropriate term for the same legal concept: "the right to quote".
It is, however, a slight problem that even our legislators have been pretty vague in the law itself: "A published work may be quoted according to good manners and up to the extent that is appropriate to the use". (And it's not limited to text; other works can be "quoted" too) What exactly qualifies as "good manners" and "appropriate extent" is up to the courts. Or is it? We have a specific Copyright Council that has issued tons of legally sound (but not legally binding, as they operate on what has been unilaterally told to them and they won't investigate the claims further than that) opinions and recommendations of what, on those specific cases, is appropriate amount of quotation and what is not. For free. Anyone can send them questions, in free-form letter or email, and they give out statements. The statements are all there on the Web for people to browse. A great resource for everyone wondering whether or not something is okay.
I'd fully support setting up bodies like that in other jurisdictions too. The right to quote should be something that should be applicable and understandable without lengthy, costly legal fights. Even before you go and actually create anything at all.
I thought I had some hazy recollection that reCAPTCHA was being used for some open projects, like helping to OCR out-of-copyright works...
...so now it is being used to fuel Google's massive, still-very-much-copyrighted, proprietary book scanning effort?
So how's this going to benefit people? I'm, of course, assuming the details are spotty at the moment and I'm terribly interested to hear more details from Google's official "do no evil" department on how they intend to contribute to the world.
Game press being bribed? As in they are not being bribed enough already?
If certain high-quality traditional game publications and certain bloggers striving for high journalistic standards are to be believed (and I don't entirely buy this, but I say it's highly plausible and probably true to some noticeable extent), game journalism is already getting plenty enough of real bribes, thank you very much, and game publications that just print slightly tweaked press releases and are easily impressed by generous treatment in expos etc. should not need any additional fuel to the fire.
Is it actually possible that this plan is going to backfire and the journalists don't even pause to think why they've been bribed? Would the irony be that they'd just cash it in, write a "buy the game now, yawn" story, and not think about it in the slightest? Would they see this as business as usual, and not as a marketing effort?
But most importantly, will the aforementioned high-standard journalists ask these same questions? Will we ever see truly reformed game journalism all around?
...when you have Search? Pick your own keywords.
Why do they build nuclear reactors, when you can get electricity from the wall socket these days?
Seriously, though: Correct, systematic and well-defined metadata makes searching more effective. Lack of metadata means you're going to comb through the results yourself looking for the stuff that matches the criteria that the search engine doesn't let you enter.
Did you configure the Xbox to run at higher resolution? ... the picture will look worlds better, especially in terms of things like on-screen text.
Yep, I me it run on the highest resolution it could find. And the text definitely looked very clear on HDMI.
Like I said on the other post, HDMI was definitely better choice if I had to sit closer to the screen (and, yes, sitting in Halo 3 lobby reading people's records while waiting to be kill by zombie). It was just that if I sat on the couch, minor blur and wavines didn't matter that much.
Been to the opticians lately?
Lately? Oh yes, around 1998. Why?
Seriously, though, I could see the difference between Composite and HDMI - crystal clear on HDMI, slightly waving in analog - but 5 meters away on the couch, it didn't matter that much. (I can't even see the composite waving on my older CRT TV that much. Or the Commodore 1802 monitor, for that matter. Just goes to prove that everything is relative and newer TVs are an ewil kapitalist ploy to sell newer cabling. =)
Still, if I had to play sitting close to the screen, I'd pick HDMI any day.
Why is it, that all the GUI desktops abandoned Unix's philosophies completely and instead went the Windows way (which of course actually is the MacOS/Xerox/$otherProductItGotTakenFrom way)?
I mean, imagine how great it would be, if we had all the tools of Gimp, Openoffice, Firefox Add-ons, etc, as separate entities, only bound to a document / data trough its mime type. You could mash up and reconnect everything at will. Pipe stuff trough that wizard, and then trough that. Or connect a OOo tool and a Gimp tool trough pipes, and then draw with them, etc.
The only problem with using Unix-like IPC philosophy in GUIs is that in Unix pipelines, each program does something, and it does something in a clear and specified manner. They take input in clear and specified manner, they produce output in clear and specified manner. Most importantly, they're always applied in a specific manner.
"Graphical super-piped toolbox" idea would be cool. But first you'd have to understand what you want to accomplish with it. You still need a clear and defined logic to drive all those tools - you wouldn't be able to eliminate coding entirely. Most importantly you wouldn't necessarily be able to use any of the stuff we have in existence right now. Most importantly, once you have build this graphical pipe thingy, you'd need to understand what it's supposed to process and produce.
I think the closest thing we can humanly produce would be to improve the scriptability of GUI applications, and improve the file formats as well as inter-process messaging. GUI apps are often black boxes and require human intervention all too often - not every app is like GIMP or Blender when they really should people to easily script monotonous things. Inter-process messaging is being remedied with the growing support for things like D-Bus - application can expose their inner workings and give other applications information about their state and accept commands from other programs. And you can theoretically and practically also use tons of external tools on a lot of file formats right now.
The Xbox360 comes with component. Works great for, at least, 720p (as that's the kind of TV I use it with).
I have a a-few-years-old TV in my home, everything connected with Composite+SCART. Pretty good picture at PAL 60hz. This summer I finally got a chance to try out what Xbox 360 looks like on (someone else's) HDTV - and damn, the HD picture via HDMI connector looks just marginally bit better than Composite. You can actually tell the difference if you're sitting right next to the screen. (Barely so from the couch.)
(The TV also had the curious habit of having worse analog picture on 60hz than 50hz. Flat TV are weird. And in this experiment, I also found it infinitely weird that Xbox 360, a product from that famous proprietery software corporation, had a standards-compliant HDMI port that accepts not-fancy no-brand HDMI cables... and Wii still needs an adapter of some sort. Ghh.)
In short, right now, I don't think HD is all that relevant or remarkable. Maybe in 5 years.
...for watching videos on YouTube?
Haven't even bothered to install the browser so far, my wife's netbook runs circles around a Wii for couch surfing.
Actually I'm genuinely curious: Who uses the Wii browser and for what?
YouTube works wonderfully, though YouTube seems to serve pretty low-res videos at the moment (I don't think Wii has the processor power to decode HD videos anyway). So it works, but doesn't look exactly glorious - but still pretty watchable if you squint just right. And in this version, based on cursory testing, the YouTube XL fullscreen mode finally seems to work at tolerable framerate - it used to work nicely in non-fullscreen, but went sluggish in fullscreen. (Incidentally, Flash 7 for Linux suffered from the same problem but they fixed it in newer versions...)
And I've mostly been using the Internet Channel for watching streaming video and HomestarRunner stuff, quickly checking game guides, and occasionally posting to identi.ca. It's not the fastest browser around and goes sluggish on JavaScript-heavy pages like Slashdot (then again, so does my Athlon XP 3000+ desktop.) And there's no AdBlock to alleviate these things. And of course, I haven't figured out how to set up the USB keyboard layout to non-US layouts, but that's a minor problem. All in all, it does most of the stuff I'd expect from a set-top box browser just fine.
This is such a bad example. On both Debian and Ubuntu if you apt-get remove mono you'll be presented with a list of affected packages. This is the whole idea behind dependencies. You think Debian or Canonical have tested every possible combination of installed packages? Well, they haven't and they don't need to. I'm willing to bet that at least one of my systems' installed packages lists are unique in the world and it didn't need tested by Debian first.
But that was not what I was chasing with that example. I was saying that blindly removing a program from Windows pre-install images is similar to blindly removing a .deb from the Ubuntu install CD or repository. When you start doing fancy-pants stuff like checking the dependencies, you're conducting quality control work - something the original poster implied wouldn't be necessary if Windows was "ready for desktop" and highly modular.
My point was that removing an application from Windows pre-install images requires all the due care. Just like removing applications from Debian/Ubuntu distros. This doesn't make either operating system any less ready for desktop. And yes, like I said, this sort of snafus are much easier to prevent in most Linux dists because we have the notion of meticulously tracked and specified dependencies.
And I'm not speaking of problems caused by combinations of installed packages. I'm speaking of problems caused by blind removal of packages that everyone up until yesterday assumed had to be there.
In conclusion, software distribution sucks no matter what OS you have.
If Windows is so fragile that removing one application required a large amount of tests, then it is not ready for deployment.
My question, when will windows be ready for the desktop.
It's not like it's any better elsewhere.
I'm not part of Debian or Ubuntu teams, but I bet if they had a mysterious legal showstopper, they didn't just casually pull the offending .deb out of the repository and regenerate disk images. You'd get irate people saying "My install blows up because it can't find package X and now I have red all over my package list." Oops.
Think of (for a provocative example) Mono. You couldn't just remove all Mono package because that'd break some parts of GNOME default install.
Instead, you'd see people testing that all the necessary dependencies are met even when the offending package is gone. In the previous example, you'd have to adjust the dependencies - "GNOME default install no longer depends on Tomboy etc."
(Though as far as I've understood it, Debian folks have a large number of automated tests to deal with situations like this. Microsoft probably doesn't, because Windows still doesn't have as sophisticated dependency management.)
This summer, I went though some of my old floppies in a daring search for the shitty pen-and-paper RPG system I made when I was in the school, back around 1992-1993 (so here's your 17-year window). And surprise surprise, I found it! The files were in rather weird formats, though - but almost all file types I could open in current crop of software. (The vector graphics files had fared worst: I suppose the Arts & Letters Composer install disks are somewhere in the pile, but I doubt a Win16 application will work that well in recent Windows versions...) The new software doesn't preserve the formatting, though.
Yet, the best-preserved version of this shitty pen-and-paper RPG system is... (drum roll)... the one I printed on the dot-matrix printer. Surprise, surprise. Easily readable, perfect formatting, and even the made-in-two-minutes vector art is there right among my incomprehensible combat rules.
So go for printed format. These days, printing high-quality documents is easier and cheaper than back in 1992. As for computer-readable stuff, stick to standard formats. Every software package, codec or file format that is even slightly obscure these days and completely proprietary is going to cause problems. Speaking of the same bunch of floppies I went through to find this RPG, I honestly thought Microsoft Works and Windows 3.x Write files would be readable in future. "But it's made by Microsoft!" ...took until OpenOffice.org 3 to get support for Works files and Write is still unsupported. I suppose MS products still read them in one form or other. *sigh*
Try finding video editing software which can edit (not commandline like ffmpeg, I'm talking gui After Effects style) a Theora file.
Cinelerra.
Though I have to say that occasionally, Cinelerra-CV has problems reading all formats with different quirks in each format. I can't remember offhand what weird quirks it had with Theora. Probably some funny inability to find keyframes at times and thus messing things up if you cut at a wrong place. Rendering to Theora works fine, last I checked.
2. With a bit of sensible design, the sites can manage this functionality themselves.
Yep, and this is the sensible solution. People at least have some idea to what site they'll be redirected to when they see the short URL.
deviantART already does this with their "fav.me" URL shortening service. If I see a fav.me URL, I know it goes to something that was posted on dA. And we can somewhat assume that dA will keep automagically maintaining it.
It hardly compares with a game where you could bake your own bread, weave your own cloth, or forge your own sword.
True, though the Oblivion engine does allow people to build things like this, so I don't really count it against this.
Oblivion's interface consists of computer-like menus, with everything stored in lists of words; Ultima's interface looks like the real world, where you flick through a book to find the spell you want to cast, or rummage through your backpack looking for a particular item.
This is not necessarily a bad thing from usability point of view, and doesn't necessarily break the suspension of disbelief. U7's gumps are more "realistic", but not more user-friendly.
Why does every single U7Pt2 guide remind people to immediately put the serpent teeth to the jawbone? Could it be because they're like 10 pixels in size, and if you put them in a bag, you'll spend 10 minutes looking for them? Right.
And how on earth were Oblivion's NPCs better than Ultima's? Oblivion's NPCs were rubbish. They only had a handful of lines each, and most of those were the same for every character in a given town. Oblivion's shallow, undetailed conversations were a step backwards even from Morrowind, which was already rather guilty of genericity! Contrast Ultima VII, where every single NPC has a unique and often deep branching conversation tree.
I'll grant that U7's NPCs have more to say, and there's more of them. But less text is not necessarily a bad thing either. A lot of older RPGs have text, text, text, and forget that it must be a) conceivably spoken by a person and b) read by the player. If I want to read a novel, I'll read a novel. If I want to listen to people chatter for hours and maybe play a little bit of game in the middle somewhere, I go play Metal Gear Solid. So I don't think Oblivion's more sparse dialogue is necessarily a bad thing - if you only have as much speech as the people can conceivably say in that situation, it's more plausible in my book. Saying more text is good almost as silly as saying "Oblivion isn't as good as Super Mario Bros, because you jump less on enemies' heads." No excuse in continuing already silly premises.
And at the risk of sounding like unimaginative bore, I'll say that voice acting - even rather limited one - really adds something to the game and helps bring out the personalities of the characters. Off hand, I can't remember too many NPCs that I can really remember in U7 as having distinct personalities and really speaking with their own voice.
Also: Which character in U7 had facial expressions? That's right, Spark. (Maybe others, I can't remember right now.) Which characters in Oblivion have facial expressions? All of them. Do I see some good untapped potential in having 3D character models, something that's quite hard to do in static character portraits?
Furthermore: Dispositions. Ultima series, of course, had disposition system in place - it invented the damn thing - but in my opinion it was underutilised. Just be a good guy, and pretty much everything is possible for you - nothing ever changes. Oblivion makes more use of uncooperativeness.
Speaking of bad guys - why is there no Thieves Guild in Britannia? Oh, right, the goody-shoes Avatar thinks Stealing Is Wrong nowadays, so player has no need to join such unvirtuous organisations. Silly me. Can't cater to different character types. =)
Don't get me wrong. I love Oblivion. I've probably spent more time playing it than any single Ultima game. But it's a very different product.
I like both series a lot - and I'm not saying Oblivion is necessarily a better or deeper game overall. It's just that as time goes on, it's harder and harder to say which of the two games is a clear winner. U7 doesn't change, and new games appear all the time, with their new technological breakthroughs. For years, I could definitely say "nothi
Holy shit? That is something shouldn't be done since the first day of ARPANet. Besides ethical reasons, one should never assume reverse DNS of some machine really belongs to an employee or student of that company/.edu .
No, but it was done on a computer that was in an IP block allocated to that company/.edu. It's a subtle distinction, of course, because people aren't IPs. Nevertheless, unregistered WP are identified by their IP address, and the registration information of IP blocks are in public, so where's the ethical angle in saying "User from IP address X, which belongs in an IP block owned by Y, made edit Z which was identified as vandalism"?
Should administrators assume good faith and say it was a granny next door, using that company's unsecured WLAN? As unlikely as it sounds like, it happens all the time, yes, but still, assuming that was the case all the time would probably not be entirely accurate.
You know what happens if some company takes that jerk (and wiki) serious enough to state legal consequences right?
Okay, a defamation case could be possible... assuming, of course, wiki vandalism was illegal, and they were falsely accused of illegal deeds.