I've been a big fan of the Madden series for as long as it's been on the current gen systems. Madden 2002 was the first game I bought for Gamecube, even before I had the console. I only started getting the game every year because my roommate bought 2003 (mainly for updated rosters) and I found that they had introduced the best feature every: the ability to design custom formations and plays. I even started a website based around this specific feature. Say what you want about geeks and sports, custom playbooks offer more hacakbility than just about any RPG video game you'll find.
Sadly, this iteration blows hard. Tomorrow I'll be taking my copy back for a refund after experiencing lockups with the both the original disc I bought and a replacement. The lockups have only occurred for me when using custom playbooks, but without these the game is worthless to me.
I also think that EA has basically given up on improving core gameplay on current gen, and have gone into a see saw mode where they twiddle settings each year but don't really improve anything. In 2002 and 2003 passing was easy and big were made to the outside. In 2004 (thought by many to be the best version produced on current gen, and in my opinion the most balanced version overall) inside running was improved. 2005 and 2006 strengthened defense to the point that running became difficult and defensive backs super human at times. Now in 2007 it's back to big outside runs and deep passes, and a more arcade-like feel than the series has had since 2003.
Ironically, the visibility of my website led to me writing part of a Madden 2007 strategy guide for 1up.com that will be posted in a few days (I agreed to do this well before playing the game and experiencing the bugs, especially on Gamecube as I used a preview of the PC version for research). I think what I wrote is good, and applies pretty well to almost any version of Madden, but I in good conscience I would not have written it if I had known that the game would turn out like this.
I second this, I've had a relatively inexpensive ($2300 at purchase time) 40" Toshiba rear projection set for 5 years. No burn in, I've left games/movies paused for several minutes without adverse effect (though obviously I'm not going to try to test the limits of this on purpose).
If you think that graphics power is the limiting factor in VR, think again. VR has never required more than double the power (typically using two video cards) of a desktop machine to achieve equally good graphics. The major costs are in:
1) Head mounted displays: Two small, high-res displays attached to your head requiring full video bandwidth. 2) Tracking systems. VR isn't much fun unless the HMD and some sort of glove or stylus is accurately tracked in real time.
Besides these systems being expensive, they're cumbersome. HMDs all use cables AFAIK because the bandwidth needed for high-res video is too much for most wireless systems to support. I don't know of any systems that try to use on the fly compression; you might be able to get away with it with video encoding hardware but if adds even 1/10th of a second to the time that it takes the video to be presented to the user this lag will negatively impact the immersive experience. The tracking sensors add significant expense to the setup.
Accurate tracking systems which allow users to walk around require tracking devices to be deployed all around a room, or even a room built with customized hardware wired into it. Looking at the Wii gives some promise for low cost tracking in the future, but it's still quite limited compared to what a true VR system will provide.
Are you kidding? $500k is so far below budget for a modern game that it's almost laughable. You simply won't be able to produce a viable product (i.e., one that people will want to buy) for that amount.
Actually, I work for a small game studio that is just wrapping up a game for both PC and XBox with a budget of under $500K. The software is written by three developers, there are two artists which created all for the art content, and music and voice work were contracted out. Testing and distribution is handled by the publisher and so are not counted in the development budget, but testing at least would surely account for less than the development budget.
Let's look at your numbers. 8-10 people to develop an engine? Try zero, at least for small budget games. Most studios don't code engines from scratch, they use existing game engines (look at ID software, the Quake/Doom engines are their real products). The engine handles model loading, texturing and animation, sound, networking, basic physics, etc. Game engines can be licensed for a wide range of prices, decent engines go something like $20K-$100K+. And without the need for engine coding you really don't need a team of PhD's. I have a Masters in CS myself, but no one else on the team does, and that hasn't been a serious detriment.
Now, the game in question is a fishing game, not an adventure game, so we don't need story writers, just someone to write voice overs. Artwork is a significant part of the art budget, but if you're creative you get a fair amount of mileage out of a single level (e.g., make mini-games that reuse main levels). Lakes for fishing admittedly require less development and testing than a Super Mario Bros style platformer level where every jump and step must be measured just right.
This game isn't a big AAA title, it's being sold as a value game. However, I don't see why some AAA quality games can't be created for a few million dollars if our small studio can produce something decent for less than $1 million.
As far as the rest of the costs you list, from my understanding of the actual publishing process many of those costs wouldn't even be included in the development budget anyways. A studio develops the game, but the publisher handles marketing, distribution, possible tech support. These would likely be included in a larger overall publishing budget, but aren't development costs per se.
Maybe you should look into Pyrex, with is essentially Python with static, C primitive data types. I've never used it myself, and it's mainly intended for writing Python modules, but I see no reason why you couldn't write essentially an entire app as a Python module and call that from a very short Python script.
I'm curious, have you ruled out a rear projection set? These aren't quite as sleek and stylish as the newer flat-panel formats, but they're based on reliable technology.
I've had a Toshiba 40H80 for about 6 years now. You've probably seen them, they were used in a lot of Best Buys as early HD demo models. At the time I got it mainly because it was the most affordable true HDTV I could find, and despite reading a few mixed reviews online mine has been great. I've been watching actual HD broadcasts since about 2002 or 2003 and they look great, whether the signal is native 720p or downconverted 1080i.
The gotchas with rear projection sets are that the individual guns can become misaligned after moving the set around, but I've never had too much trouble realigning them. Game consoles have long warned about playing video games on projection sets, but with modern games it's very rare for any part of the screen to be continuously be showing the exact same image. I've seen no burn in over 6 years of light-to-moderate N64 and Gamecube play.
Just to add a few more points about the quality of human vision, birds of prey certainly have greater visual acuity, but I wouldn't say humans are laughably bad in comparison. Humans can resolve about 60 cycles per degree (cycles in a sine wave grating, typical measure of acuity) while eagles can resolve about 150 cycles/degree. In other words, an average eagle has vision of about 20/8.
Also, while humans have fairly mediocre night vision, eagles (and I presume other related birds of prey) have even worse, and rarely leave their roosts at night.
I'd be happy if Slashdot simply avoided using black as the color for followed links. It's ridiculous that I have to scan the intro paragraph of a story with my mouse if I ever want to follow the same link twice.
And in case you're wondering, no I don't set my browser to underline links by default, as colored links work just fine for me and I find lots of colored and underlined links more distracting than lots of simply colored links. I think Slashdot is the only site I've ever visited where this approach has actually caused me problems.
The problem is that, while oft quoted, this is really a bad argument when you get down to it (at least without situational context). There are an infinite number of things out there, and we need to prioritize according to what is most meaningful to us.
I run Linux, I'm a computer guy, so why haven't I tried *BSD? Because there are other things out there that mean more to me, like going back and learning Lisp, learning Ruby, checking out open source game and graphics engines, etc. I've installed a few Linux distros, honestly the process isn't all that educational after the first few. I'm guessing that a BSD would be pretty similar, so in my case I need a better reason that "it's there". I probably wouldn't have felt like I conquered anything by installing it, and any operating system that feels like a triumph just to install probably wouldn't interest me anyways. There are far more interesting things (to me) to work on.
You know, I've had Panda3D bookmarked for a while now but never really looked into what it offered in detail, and I gotta say wow, this looks great. In just a half hour looking over their docs I'm seeing that they've implemented functionality that I've struggled to get working or have had to implement myself in my part time job as a game developer for a small game studio using a professional game engine. Some of these issues are related to the terrible documentation this engine (which I won't mention by name) has, but in other cases I'm pretty sure that the engine just doesn't work quite as well as it should.
Has anyone here actually used Panda in depth? I'd love to hear if it works as good as it looks from the documentation.
I agree that it's a bit unfair to directly compare Testing to other distros, but the fact is that for desktop users Testing is probably the most widely used Debian distro. That may be contrary to the intentions of the Debian developers, but it is the reality of the situation. Breakage isn't really even the biggest issue, for me the requirement to upgrade dependencies of newly installed packages was the biggest kicker (e.g. I installed foo-1.0 at one point, later I want to install bar-1.1 which depends on foo-1.1 which is the current version, so installing bar-1.1 requires upgrading foo-1.0 and most likely several packages which depend on foo-*).
In any case, if I could only choose a Debian distro it would probably be Testing because as a desktop user I'd have greater misgivings with the old packages in Stable.
I disagree that Debian Testing's packages work better than Ubuntu (or at least Kubuntu, in my case). I used Debian Testing for nearly two years, but late last year I decided to give Kubuntu a shot and haven't looked back. The final straw was a large set of KDE updates. I had a version of Amarok that I believe was either broken or had some key bug that was fixed in more current versions, but due to some kind of broken dependency chain in Debian Testing there was no way to upgrade anything KDE related. It was like this for a couple of months when I finally left.
There's also the issue that once Debian Testing updates a core package, updating dependencies of that package all require the new core package. Again, this was an issue with many KDE apps. I might want to update Kate, but if the KDE core went under some minor bug fix version change then I have to upgrade EVERYTHING in KDE just to upgrade or install one app. Even the small chance of serious breakage made this a serious risk.
With Kubuntu I know that my software might be as much as 6 months out of date, but I've never had a problem installing or upgrading software, including from the Universe and Multiverse repositories. I can wait 6 months for most things.
It's all about tradeoffs. For me K/Ubuntu strikes the right balance between freshness and stability. Neither Debian Stable nor Testing are as good a fit. YMMV.
I really like the All-in-one-gestures extension, but not for the reasons you might guess. At first I tried out using gestures for normal actions but found it generally more tedious than normal keyboard shortcuts. However, gestures includes one feature that cannot be done with the keyboard: removing specific portions of a webpage.
I use Flashblock to eliminate most annoying flash advertisements, but so many webpages are just filled with so much crap that it's best to get rid of the clutter altogether. Even block flash ads take up space in the middle of text, and even not animated images can be distracting. By remapping "Hide Object" to the simple left gesture and "Undo Hide Object" to the right gesture I can quickly trim down most webpages. This is also useful for a few webpages which use small text but have poorly coded layout which gets screwed up when the text size is increased, as sometimes eliminating unimportant layout blocks can put things back in order.
The Google toolbar is also a great extension. Sure, Firefox already has Google search built into its toolbars, but I love having a spellchecker that works in any webform. Search history also proves handy every once in a while.
Just wanted to point out that your sequence fails the conditions you've specified. Where you spell out all eight three-digit binary numbers above you include leading zeros which are not present in the whole sequence. Because every number but the first starts with 1, there are more ones than zeros. I didn't check, but there are likely more 10's than 01's, etc., for the same reason.
Ah, I see. You don't run a Debian based distro do you? Synaptic is a graphical front end to apt-get, the Debian packaging system. Debian (and most of its offshoots) have HUGE repositories of software available. Kubuntu currently lists over 17,000 packages. Now a lot of these are system utilities, shared libraries and development versions, but there are literally thousands of user applications in the mix. Installation is a snap, I simply can browse the available categories (internet, multimedia, games, etc.) or do searches based on package (application) names or descriptions. Packages which depend on other packages (e.g., KOffice depending on kde-libs) will automatically select these dependencies. Once you hit install all necessary packages are downloaded, configured and installed, automatically in almost all cases. Unistalls and upgrades are just as easy. Even the kernel can be upgraded like this.
Other distros have some similar capabilities, though I'm not personally familiar with them. Fedora has Yum I believe, Mandrake/Mandriva has urpmi, etc. I can't speak directly for these distros, but personally I almost never need to do the./configure; make; make install dance anymore unless I specifically want something that is not very popular or a very recent version.
Apt-get with Synaptic is miles ahead of any windows installer that I've ever seen. The only drawback I can see is that the sheer number of packages might be overwhelming to some people. I have no doubts that this will continue to improve at it has over the past several years. Likely by minor changes to Synaptic or other front ends being created that hide things like library dependencies and development packages from users who don't specifically enable them, and by incorporating information about the most popular installed packages in each category.
Also, why would you intentionally limit yourself? Are you saying that every single application for Linux is better than the windows counterpart? Why not have the option of using the best app for the job?
I'm going to turn this around on you. Why limit yourself with Windows? Why limit yourself to an operating system that makes it so messy to locate and install new software? And of course why put up with viruses and spyware?
You say that a lot of software on Linux is available on Windows. This is true, but a lot of it isn't. Many of the best Linux desktop apps are part of KDE, and KDE apps won't run on Windows (maybe with a lot of work with Cygwin, X-servers, etc.) On my distribution (Kubuntu) I have thousands of applications ready to be painlessly installed just a few clicks away. If I have a pretty good idea of what I want I fire up Synaptic directly, maybe do a quick keyword search to identify the exact package to install, click "Install", and moments later I have new software. On Windows I'd have to go to freshmeat.net, find the developer website, download the packages, and hope that everything works with my system. For me Windows feels constraining, and Linux feels liberating, because I know I can find software for almost any task I want to complete, for free and with no strings attached.
Obviously Linux doesn't completely fit your needs, which are based largely around a few high-quality commercial packages. 99% of computer users don't need these applications (I'm not counting people that use pirated versions but wouldn't buy them if pirating wasn't an option), and 90% of computer users really don't need any functionality that isn't covered by a modern Linux distribution. Most people don't do print publishing. Most people don't use CAD software. The people that do are stuck with Windows for the time being. For the rest Windows is not clearly better, it merely has different strengths than Linux. For my purposes, Linux is the superior choice, bar none.
This is a decent argument for buying CAD engineers, developers, and graphic artists new computers. It's not a very good argument for anyone using their computer for Word processing and email.
Also, you have to consider that those individual "lost" seconds will in many cases be spent thinking about the problem at hand, some of which might have been done with the computer idle if the computer had been faster.
Finally, there's the overhead of upgrading the systems, installing the software, and configuring the work environment. This is probably a net loss of a few days productivity for each full upgrade.
You really think so? I'd say that most of the "losers" in this world probably started life out under mediocre to bad circumstances and never took any significant initiative to improve their lot in life.
Sure, some people take risks and end up losing a lot, but I'll bet there's fewer of these people than of the former.
Additionally, if you read some of Graham's other essays you'll see that risk is one reason he recommends starting startups early in life, while in school or right out of school, before a person has accumulated much that could be lost.
A little off-topic, but I'd appreciate insight from any Debian devs reading this discussion. I've been trying to upgrade to KDE 3.4 in testing for a while now, but I can't make the upgrade without a whole lot of stuff being uninstalled. From what I've read this has to do with the switch to GCC 4.0 and getting all the apps and their dependencies compiled against it, just wondering if there's any timeline (including guesstimated ones) for when things should be settled down.
I'm not a music aficionado, and I've never used iTunes so I can't make a direct comparison, but I think amarok blows away the basic music players I've seen (like XMMS):
1) Smart playlists. Playlists for artists, genre's, etc. automatically updated when new music is added. 2) Automatic download of lyrics. Some people won't care, but I love this feature. 3) Integration with Audioscrobbler (informs you of music you might like based on analysis of what you listen to).
I've never had the crash issues you've had, I'd be interested if you were using a bleeding edge version, poor package, etc. That kind of thing can have a big effect on perception of quality of particular apps.
As far as Konqueror, I've mainly used it for a file manager. I love the tabs and the ability to use fish:// to transfer files between any computer I can SSH into, as well as FTP between my home machine and website using a couple tabs.
As far as stability, I usually have to restart Firefox every few days but Konqueror stays up indefinitely (admittedly with far less use). I don't see Konqueror as bloated, but rather excellent use of modular design. I do agree it seems a bit sluggish at times.
Spending makes the economy go round sure. But those that spend without saving are the ones who find themselves without money to spend after the loss of a job, severe illness, natural disaster, etc. They can't afford what they need, which causes the people they normally pay for goods and services to not getting paid. In short, spending without saving causes uncertainty. Careful spending while saving enough to smooth over the rough times creates a more consistent, predictable economy.
The argument against saving is even more wrong in the context of money saved on cheaper open source software. It's like the broken window fallacy in reverse. Money saved on software will not just be put away, it will often be invested in this like expanding a business, hiring more employees or upgrading equipment. This is good for the overall economy.
At first when I saw the listed resolution I thought that it was total overkill, that no one wold even be able to see anything near that detail. I own an HDTV (720p resolution, or 1280x720), and at a normal viewing distance you aren't missing a lot of detail.
Coincidentally though, I'm taking a class in visual perception and we've just been discussing optimal human visual acuity, specifically as measured with sine wave patterns. Maximum human acuity is about 60 cycles per degree of visual angle. One cycle in a sine wave can be roughly represented with two rows or columns of pixels, so you really can't do any better than 120 pixels per degree (which is also the approximate density of photoreceptors in the fovea, the highest resolution spot in the retina).
So what's a reasonable viewing angle? When developing 3D graphics applications I find than a perspective projection angle less than about 60 degrees requires getting pretty close to the screen for realistic perspective. This seems reasonable for a closest comfortable viewing distance. I know I usually sit farther away from my TV than this, probably less than a 30 degree viewing angle.
At 60 degrees this monitor has just about 120 pixels per degree (128 to be exact). At a farther distance the pixel density will be even higher.
In a practical sense this monitor still seems like massive overkill to me. HDTV is great for TV, and even computer screens will see considerably diminishing returns by this point. In a theoretical sense though, it might be the perfect resolution.
Yeah, their strategy to make a profit is to do good work. That's why it's important to support companies like Google. MS has shown they are perfectly willing to cripple a product in order to enforce lock in and future sales. That's why it's important to support companies other than MS.
You're the naive one if you think that a quest for profits makes every company use equally moral strategies. They don't, and the marketplace is best served by supporting companies that take the high road. Google has been such a company so far, an that's why I support them in their endeavors. Once they start pushing people around the way MS does, then it's time for a change.
I think you have the right idea, but this is not exactly correct. GNOME strictly speaking is a desktop environment and collection of software developed for that environment, written using GTK as the main toolkit. GNOME is not a GUI itself, it can't be because individual apps have GUIs and GNOME is not a single app.
There are plenty of GTK GUI apps that have nothing to do with GNOME, but any app which uses GTK likely has a GTK GUI. Likewise any app built using Qt (including the KDE apps) likely have a GUI built primarily using Qt, though KDE extends Qt in many ways.
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I've been a big fan of the Madden series for as long as it's been on the current gen systems. Madden 2002 was the first game I bought for Gamecube, even before I had the console. I only started getting the game every year because my roommate bought 2003 (mainly for updated rosters) and I found that they had introduced the best feature every: the ability to design custom formations and plays. I even started a website based around this specific feature. Say what you want about geeks and sports, custom playbooks offer more hacakbility than just about any RPG video game you'll find.
Sadly, this iteration blows hard. Tomorrow I'll be taking my copy back for a refund after experiencing lockups with the both the original disc I bought and a replacement. The lockups have only occurred for me when using custom playbooks, but without these the game is worthless to me.
I also think that EA has basically given up on improving core gameplay on current gen, and have gone into a see saw mode where they twiddle settings each year but don't really improve anything. In 2002 and 2003 passing was easy and big were made to the outside. In 2004 (thought by many to be the best version produced on current gen, and in my opinion the most balanced version overall) inside running was improved. 2005 and 2006 strengthened defense to the point that running became difficult and defensive backs super human at times. Now in 2007 it's back to big outside runs and deep passes, and a more arcade-like feel than the series has had since 2003.
Ironically, the visibility of my website led to me writing part of a Madden 2007 strategy guide for 1up.com that will be posted in a few days (I agreed to do this well before playing the game and experiencing the bugs, especially on Gamecube as I used a preview of the PC version for research). I think what I wrote is good, and applies pretty well to almost any version of Madden, but I in good conscience I would not have written it if I had known that the game would turn out like this.
I second this, I've had a relatively inexpensive ($2300 at purchase time) 40" Toshiba rear projection set for 5 years. No burn in, I've left games/movies paused for several minutes without adverse effect (though obviously I'm not going to try to test the limits of this on purpose).
If you think that graphics power is the limiting factor in VR, think again. VR has never required more than double the power (typically using two video cards) of a desktop machine to achieve equally good graphics. The major costs are in:
1) Head mounted displays: Two small, high-res displays attached to your head requiring full video bandwidth.
2) Tracking systems. VR isn't much fun unless the HMD and some sort of glove or stylus is accurately tracked in real time.
Besides these systems being expensive, they're cumbersome. HMDs all use cables AFAIK because the bandwidth needed for high-res video is too much for most wireless systems to support. I don't know of any systems that try to use on the fly compression; you might be able to get away with it with video encoding hardware but if adds even 1/10th of a second to the time that it takes the video to be presented to the user this lag will negatively impact the immersive experience. The tracking sensors add significant expense to the setup.
Accurate tracking systems which allow users to walk around require tracking devices to be deployed all around a room, or even a room built with customized hardware wired into it. Looking at the Wii gives some promise for low cost tracking in the future, but it's still quite limited compared to what a true VR system will provide.
Actually, I work for a small game studio that is just wrapping up a game for both PC and XBox with a budget of under $500K. The software is written by three developers, there are two artists which created all for the art content, and music and voice work were contracted out. Testing and distribution is handled by the publisher and so are not counted in the development budget, but testing at least would surely account for less than the development budget.
Let's look at your numbers. 8-10 people to develop an engine? Try zero, at least for small budget games. Most studios don't code engines from scratch, they use existing game engines (look at ID software, the Quake/Doom engines are their real products). The engine handles model loading, texturing and animation, sound, networking, basic physics, etc. Game engines can be licensed for a wide range of prices, decent engines go something like $20K-$100K+. And without the need for engine coding you really don't need a team of PhD's. I have a Masters in CS myself, but no one else on the team does, and that hasn't been a serious detriment.
Now, the game in question is a fishing game, not an adventure game, so we don't need story writers, just someone to write voice overs. Artwork is a significant part of the art budget, but if you're creative you get a fair amount of mileage out of a single level (e.g., make mini-games that reuse main levels). Lakes for fishing admittedly require less development and testing than a Super Mario Bros style platformer level where every jump and step must be measured just right.
This game isn't a big AAA title, it's being sold as a value game. However, I don't see why some AAA quality games can't be created for a few million dollars if our small studio can produce something decent for less than $1 million.
As far as the rest of the costs you list, from my understanding of the actual publishing process many of those costs wouldn't even be included in the
development budget anyways. A studio develops the game, but the publisher handles marketing, distribution, possible tech support. These would likely be included in a larger overall publishing budget, but aren't development costs per se.
Maybe you should look into Pyrex, with is essentially Python with static, C primitive data types. I've never used it myself, and it's mainly intended for writing Python modules, but I see no reason why you couldn't write essentially an entire app as a Python module and call that from a very short Python script.
I'm curious, have you ruled out a rear projection set? These aren't quite as sleek and stylish as the newer flat-panel formats, but they're based on reliable technology.
I've had a Toshiba 40H80 for about 6 years now. You've probably seen them, they were used in a lot of Best Buys as early HD demo models. At the time I got it mainly because it was the most affordable true HDTV I could find, and despite reading a few mixed reviews online mine has been great. I've been watching actual HD broadcasts since about 2002 or 2003 and they look great, whether the signal is native 720p or downconverted 1080i.
The gotchas with rear projection sets are that the individual guns can become misaligned after moving the set around, but I've never had too much trouble realigning them. Game consoles have long warned about playing video games on projection sets, but with modern games it's very rare for any part of the screen to be continuously be showing the exact same image. I've seen no burn in over 6 years of light-to-moderate N64 and Gamecube play.
Just to add a few more points about the quality of human vision, birds of prey certainly have greater visual acuity, but I wouldn't say humans are laughably bad in comparison. Humans can resolve about 60 cycles per degree (cycles in a sine wave grating, typical measure of acuity) while eagles can resolve about 150 cycles/degree. In other words, an average eagle has vision of about 20/8.
Also, while humans have fairly mediocre night vision, eagles (and I presume other related birds of prey) have even worse, and rarely leave their roosts at night.
I'd be happy if Slashdot simply avoided using black as the color for followed links. It's ridiculous that I have to scan the intro paragraph of a story with my mouse if I ever want to follow the same link twice.
And in case you're wondering, no I don't set my browser to underline links by default, as colored links work just fine for me and I find lots of colored and underlined links more distracting than lots of simply colored links. I think Slashdot is the only site I've ever visited where this approach has actually caused me problems.
The problem is that, while oft quoted, this is really a bad argument when you get down to it (at least without situational context). There are an infinite number of things out there, and we need to prioritize according to what is most meaningful to us.
I run Linux, I'm a computer guy, so why haven't I tried *BSD? Because there are other things out there that mean more to me, like going back and learning Lisp, learning Ruby, checking out open source game and graphics engines, etc. I've installed a few Linux distros, honestly the process isn't all that educational after the first few. I'm guessing that a BSD would be pretty similar, so in my case I need a better reason that "it's there". I probably wouldn't have felt like I conquered anything by installing it, and any operating system that feels like a triumph just to install probably wouldn't interest me anyways. There are far more interesting things (to me) to work on.
You know, I've had Panda3D bookmarked for a while now but never really looked into what it offered in detail, and I gotta say wow, this looks great. In just a half hour looking over their docs I'm seeing that they've implemented functionality that I've struggled to get working or have had to implement myself in my part time job as a game developer for a small game studio using a professional game engine. Some of these issues are related to the terrible documentation this engine (which I won't mention by name) has, but in other cases I'm pretty sure that the engine just doesn't work quite as well as it should.
Has anyone here actually used Panda in depth? I'd love to hear if it works as good as it looks from the documentation.
I agree that it's a bit unfair to directly compare Testing to other distros, but the fact is that for desktop users Testing is probably the most widely used Debian distro. That may be contrary to the intentions of the Debian developers, but it is the reality of the situation. Breakage isn't really even the biggest issue, for me the requirement to upgrade dependencies of newly installed packages was the biggest kicker (e.g. I installed foo-1.0 at one point, later I want to install bar-1.1 which depends on foo-1.1 which is the current version, so installing bar-1.1 requires upgrading foo-1.0 and most likely several packages which depend on foo-*).
In any case, if I could only choose a Debian distro it would probably be Testing because as a desktop user I'd have greater misgivings with the old packages in Stable.
I disagree that Debian Testing's packages work better than Ubuntu (or at least Kubuntu, in my case). I used Debian Testing for nearly two years, but late last year I decided to give Kubuntu a shot and haven't looked back. The final straw was a large set of KDE updates. I had a version of Amarok that I believe was either broken or had some key bug that was fixed in more current versions, but due to some kind of broken dependency chain in Debian Testing there was no way to upgrade anything KDE related. It was like this for a couple of months when I finally left.
There's also the issue that once Debian Testing updates a core package, updating dependencies of that package all require the new core package. Again, this was an issue with many KDE apps. I might want to update Kate, but if the KDE core went under some minor bug fix version change then I have to upgrade EVERYTHING in KDE just to upgrade or install one app. Even the small chance of serious breakage made this a serious risk.
With Kubuntu I know that my software might be as much as 6 months out of date, but I've never had a problem installing or upgrading software, including from the Universe and Multiverse repositories. I can wait 6 months for most things.
It's all about tradeoffs. For me K/Ubuntu strikes the right balance between freshness and stability. Neither Debian Stable nor Testing are as good a fit. YMMV.
I really like the All-in-one-gestures extension, but not for the reasons you might guess. At first I tried out using gestures for normal actions but found it generally more tedious than normal keyboard shortcuts. However, gestures includes one feature that cannot be done with the keyboard: removing specific portions of a webpage.
I use Flashblock to eliminate most annoying flash advertisements, but so many webpages are just filled with so much crap that it's best to get rid of the clutter altogether. Even block flash ads take up space in the middle of text, and even not animated images can be distracting. By remapping "Hide Object" to the simple left gesture and "Undo Hide Object" to the right gesture I can quickly trim down most webpages. This is also useful for a few webpages which use small text but have poorly coded layout which gets screwed up when the text size is increased, as sometimes eliminating unimportant layout blocks can put things back in order.
The Google toolbar is also a great extension. Sure, Firefox already has Google search built into its toolbars, but I love having a spellchecker that works in any webform. Search history also proves handy every once in a while.
Just wanted to point out that your sequence fails the conditions you've specified. Where you spell out all eight three-digit binary numbers above you include leading zeros which are not present in the whole sequence. Because every number but the first starts with 1, there are more ones than zeros. I didn't check, but there are likely more 10's than 01's, etc., for the same reason.
Ah, I see. You don't run a Debian based distro do you? Synaptic is a graphical front end to apt-get, the Debian packaging system. Debian (and most of its offshoots) have HUGE repositories of software available. Kubuntu currently lists over 17,000 packages. Now a lot of these are system utilities, shared libraries and development versions, but there are literally thousands of user applications in the mix. Installation is a snap, I simply can browse the available categories (internet, multimedia, games, etc.) or do searches based on package (application) names or descriptions. Packages which depend on other packages (e.g., KOffice depending on kde-libs) will automatically select these dependencies. Once you hit install all necessary packages are downloaded, configured and installed, automatically in almost all cases. Unistalls and upgrades are just as easy. Even the kernel can be upgraded like this.
./configure; make; make install dance anymore unless I specifically want something that is not very popular or a very recent version.
Other distros have some similar capabilities, though I'm not personally familiar with them. Fedora has Yum I believe, Mandrake/Mandriva has urpmi, etc. I can't speak directly for these distros, but personally I almost never need to do the
Apt-get with Synaptic is miles ahead of any windows installer that I've ever seen. The only drawback I can see is that the sheer number of packages might be overwhelming to some people. I have no doubts that this will continue to improve at it has over the past several years. Likely by minor changes to Synaptic or other front ends being created that hide things like library dependencies and development packages from users who don't specifically enable them, and by incorporating information about the most popular installed packages in each category.
Also, why would you intentionally limit yourself? Are you saying that every single application for Linux is better than the windows counterpart? Why not have the option of using the best app for the job?
I'm going to turn this around on you. Why limit yourself with Windows? Why limit yourself to an operating system that makes it so messy to locate and install new software? And of course why put up with viruses and spyware?
You say that a lot of software on Linux is available on Windows. This is true, but a lot of it isn't. Many of the best Linux desktop apps are part of KDE, and KDE apps won't run on Windows (maybe with a lot of work with Cygwin, X-servers, etc.) On my distribution (Kubuntu) I have thousands of applications ready to be painlessly installed just a few clicks away. If I have a pretty good idea of what I want I fire up Synaptic directly, maybe do a quick keyword search to identify the exact package to install, click "Install", and moments later I have new software. On Windows I'd have to go to freshmeat.net, find the developer website, download the packages, and hope that everything works with my system. For me Windows feels constraining, and Linux feels liberating, because I know I can find software for almost any task I want to complete, for free and with no strings attached.
Obviously Linux doesn't completely fit your needs, which are based largely around a few high-quality commercial packages. 99% of computer users don't need these applications (I'm not counting people that use pirated versions but wouldn't buy them if pirating wasn't an option), and 90% of computer users really don't need any functionality that isn't covered by a modern Linux distribution. Most people don't do print publishing. Most people don't use CAD software. The people that do are stuck with Windows for the time being. For the rest Windows is not clearly better, it merely has different strengths than Linux. For my purposes, Linux is the superior choice, bar none.
This is a decent argument for buying CAD engineers, developers, and graphic artists new computers. It's not a very good argument for anyone using their computer for Word processing and email.
Also, you have to consider that those individual "lost" seconds will in many cases be spent thinking about the problem at hand, some of which might have been done with the computer idle if the computer had been faster.
Finally, there's the overhead of upgrading the systems, installing the software, and configuring the work environment. This is probably a net loss of a few days productivity for each full upgrade.
You really think so? I'd say that most of the "losers" in this world probably started life out under mediocre to bad circumstances and never took any significant initiative to improve their lot in life.
Sure, some people take risks and end up losing a lot, but I'll bet there's fewer of these people than of the former.
Additionally, if you read some of Graham's other essays you'll see that risk is one reason he recommends starting startups early in life, while in school or right out of school, before a person has accumulated much that could be lost.
A little off-topic, but I'd appreciate insight from any Debian devs reading this discussion. I've been trying to upgrade to KDE 3.4 in testing for a while now, but I can't make the upgrade without a whole lot of stuff being uninstalled. From what I've read this has to do with the switch to GCC 4.0 and getting all the apps and their dependencies compiled against it, just wondering if there's any timeline (including guesstimated ones) for when things should be settled down.
I'm not a music aficionado, and I've never used iTunes so I can't make a direct comparison, but I think amarok blows away the basic music players I've seen (like XMMS):
1) Smart playlists. Playlists for artists, genre's, etc. automatically updated when new music is added.
2) Automatic download of lyrics. Some people won't care, but I love this feature.
3) Integration with Audioscrobbler (informs you of music you might like based on analysis of what you listen to).
I've never had the crash issues you've had, I'd be interested if you were using a bleeding edge version, poor package, etc. That kind of thing can have a big effect on perception of quality of particular apps.
As far as Konqueror, I've mainly used it for a file manager. I love the tabs and the ability to use fish:// to transfer files between any computer I can SSH into, as well as FTP between my home machine and website using a couple tabs.
As far as stability, I usually have to restart Firefox every few days but Konqueror stays up indefinitely (admittedly with far less use). I don't see Konqueror as bloated, but rather excellent use of modular design. I do agree it seems a bit sluggish at times.
Just my observations.
Not trying to prolong an argument here, just explaining my criticism.
This is stupid, extreme oversimplification.
Spending makes the economy go round sure. But those that spend without saving are the ones who find themselves without money to spend after the loss of a job, severe illness, natural disaster, etc. They can't afford what they need, which causes the people they normally pay for goods and services to not getting paid. In short, spending without saving causes uncertainty. Careful spending while saving enough to smooth over the rough times creates a more consistent, predictable economy.
The argument against saving is even more wrong in the context of money saved on cheaper open source software. It's like the broken window fallacy in reverse. Money saved on software will not just be put away, it will often be invested in this like expanding a business, hiring more employees or upgrading equipment. This is good for the overall economy.
At first when I saw the listed resolution I thought that it was total overkill, that no one wold even be able to see anything near that detail. I own an HDTV (720p resolution, or 1280x720), and at a normal viewing distance you aren't missing a lot of detail.
Coincidentally though, I'm taking a class in visual perception and we've just been discussing optimal human visual acuity, specifically as measured with sine wave patterns. Maximum human acuity is about 60 cycles per degree of visual angle. One cycle in a sine wave can be roughly represented with two rows or columns of pixels, so you really can't do any better than 120 pixels per degree (which is also the approximate density of photoreceptors in the fovea, the highest resolution spot in the retina).
So what's a reasonable viewing angle? When developing 3D graphics applications I find than a perspective projection angle less than about 60 degrees requires getting pretty close to the screen for realistic perspective. This seems reasonable for a closest comfortable viewing distance. I know I usually sit farther away from my TV than this, probably less than a 30 degree viewing angle.
At 60 degrees this monitor has just about 120 pixels per degree (128 to be exact). At a farther distance the pixel density will be even higher.
In a practical sense this monitor still seems like massive overkill to me. HDTV is great for TV, and even computer screens will see considerably diminishing returns by this point. In a theoretical sense though, it might be the perfect resolution.
Yeah, their strategy to make a profit is to do good work. That's why it's important to support companies like Google. MS has shown they are perfectly willing to cripple a product in order to enforce lock in and future sales. That's why it's important to support companies other than MS.
You're the naive one if you think that a quest for profits makes every company use equally moral strategies. They don't, and the marketplace is best served by supporting companies that take the high road. Google has been such a company so far, an that's why I support them in their endeavors. Once they start pushing people around the way MS does, then it's time for a change.
I think you have the right idea, but this is not exactly correct. GNOME strictly speaking is a desktop environment and collection of software developed for that environment, written using GTK as the main toolkit. GNOME is not a GUI itself, it can't be because individual apps have GUIs and GNOME is not a single app.
There are plenty of GTK GUI apps that have nothing to do with GNOME, but any app which uses GTK likely has a GTK GUI. Likewise any app built using Qt (including the KDE apps) likely have a GUI built primarily using Qt, though KDE extends Qt in many ways.