It's all built on top of an engine that runs their own language, so *everything* is customizable. The world, the interface, the creatures themselves... people even managed to do things that weren't originally planned like creatures that could fly or live under water.
The only closed part was the music, which had some cool format that allowed smooth transitions from one theme to another, but that seems to have been reverse-engineered.
Myself, I reverse-engineered a good part of the game's networking protocol:-)
These days it's probably possible to turn it into something completely different, like a space shooter. Actually, the game had an easter egg where they had a space invaders game somewhere.
It seems to help a bit actually. Probably due to the idle times caused by disk I/O. While one job is reading/writing from the disk the other one can compile, for example.
I won't repeat what everybody else said, but here's an extra point: Since Gentoo builds everything from source already, it naturally makes building from source very easy!
The good thing about that is that if you happen to need a program that's not in Gentoo, it should be trivial to make an ebuild for it, if it's not made in some horribly unstandard way. And most likely all the development files and tools will be already installed.
Gentoo's got a great system that makes making packages that can be installed with./configure && make && make install really trivial, and contains some helper scripts for making the installation of things like Perl modules much easier as well (automatic downloading from CPAN for instance)
The problem's not so much Windows as the lack of customization.
If those machines were locked down embedded Windows or something similar, then I wouldn't be so worried. But these things appear to be more like a normal Windows installation with an ATM program on top. That *is* scary.
Think of it, if so much care was taken on the design of the ATM, how do you know that your credit card number and PIN aren't in a text file that can be read directly if you manage to get to the Windows interface?
And what will happen when the virus of the week hits it because nobody bothered closing unneeded ports?
Well, that Unix interface to a bank is about as bad as the ATM being mentioned in this article. I certainly hope that whoever makes a program like that takes care of making it ask for a password, like the 'passwd' command does, instead of requiring it as an argument and letting everybody see it.
If 500 people copy a game off a friend's CD, doesn't that cost the producer 500 sales?
No. I might have decided that the game is crap so why bother paying for it? Or my computer wasn't powerful enough. Or I didn't have enough money.
Here's a serious example of not enough money. One russian user on a game company's website admitted that she pirated the $30 or so game. The developer flamed her for that of course.
Now, from the US this is all clear. But think of this: In Russia, at that time, my aunt's wage was $100 a month. This is the wage of an university teacher. Nobody there is going to spend $30 on a game, don't even think of it. You may say all you want about that the game shouldn't have been pirated, but the end result is this: The developer wouldn't have got any money in any case.
Nobody in their right mind would spend 30% of their wage on a game ($1000 maybe?). So the end result comes to this, you get no money, but the end user either gets one or doesn't. If the user gets a copy you can at least have some benefit from the extra advertising. If the user doesn't, you get nothing at all.
Alternatively, you could sell the game for $1 in russia. Of course then I'd ask my aunt to buy the game in Russia, and send her $3.
If 500 people read a book through the library, doesn't that cost the author 500 sales?
No. I have bought books that I've read in the library. Sometimes I like the book and want to have it permanently as a reference. The library then served to find a book I like.
What's the difference?
The difference is that when somebody steals a book, somebody loses their book, while when somebody makes a copy of some software nobody loses their copy of it.
The other difference is that you think of books and games as if they should disappear instantly after being used. They fortunately don't. Authors already know that most books will be read by more than one person. And there's nothing wrong with that.
Well, I'm not from a very new generation, but I play some old games on my P200 laptop. Not long ago I installed One Must Fall 2097, Descent and Descent 2 on it.
There's something nice about simplicity. Some of the new games aren't as fun as the old ones. For example the old UFO was great, while UFO Aftermath is not bad, but way too simplified, and had some annoying mistakes.
For example, the idea of accepting the aliens' offer was great. Give up on defending the Earth and the aliens will save everybody they can. However, for this all you get is the Earth being completely covered by this biomass stuff.
What happened with the whole intelligent organism thing? They could have made it do something interesting. I'm sure that part could have been more developed.
No, it was more like compression in Win2K (on NTFS only)
Drive/DoubleSpace is a driver that gets loaded at boot. Your data is actually inside one big.CVF file. The driver emulates a disk drive with this big compressed file. So your C: would actually be inside H:\whatever.cvf.
This was very good except for a few things:
1. Most people had no idea of how compression actually worked. They went into the config program and set the estimated compression ratio to 20x so that they could brag about having 20GB on a 1GB disk drive. Then they were surprised about how they had 15MB less after copying a 1MB file.
2. The system was naturally complex, and if something went wrong (crashes, bad sectors), it was very likely that you'd lose more data than if it was uncompressed.
3. I think in DOS 6.0 there were some bugs that caused serious data corruption. This is partly why 6.2 came out.
Overall, I like the idea a lot though. I wish more Linux filesystems implemented this. For example, documentation could be always kept compressed, and still immediately readable. Most distributions seem to keep most of the docs gzipped, but it's less convenient.
A distribution is a compilation of software. It appeared because somebody thought that they had a good idea about how to put some software together. People who create them don't go and email software authors "Could you package your program in this format I just came up with, and with this directory layout?". On the contrary, a distribution is what results when somebody takes a lot of software written by other people, and organizes it in some way.
I don't see why would it be the KDE project's responsibility to seek every distribution that could include it, and make packages for them.
I'm sure the KDE people simply consider that their time is better spent on writing the code. The distributions already have lots of people who do packages, and could take care of that just fine.
Well, there are lots of companies that started running their systems on 2.2 and have no reason at all to upgrade. It works for them. What would be a colossal waste of time is forcing tens of thousands of computers to be upgraded and tested with the latest Linux version for no good reason.
I won't discuss that Ada might not have been the first programmer, but there are some points I want to make.
First, I don't see your point about human-looking languages. I think that a programmer is a programmer whether s/he writes code in C, assembler or machine code. Certainly there is much more to programming than learning a human readable description.
The real thing in programming, IMHO, is knowing how computers deal with data. In any programming language you have to understand some basic concepts, like what's an array, what's a linked list, recursion, how to make a tree, how a program receives its arguments. These things are far harder to learn and understand than studying a human readable language. Just look at how people easily learn the C syntax but struggle to understand that checking the value of argv[2] is wrong if argc is less than 3.
Second, although this may be rather weak I think that it's perfectly possible to write a program for a computer that doesn't exist yet. For example, I'm pretty sure that people write test programs for CPUs that don't exist in hardware yet before making the real thing.
Of course, there's going to be some overhead, but I don't think it's very big. Also, most things in Gentoo can compile using both CPUs at once, with a few annoying exceptions like OpenOffice. KDE and almost everything else will nicely use all available processors though.
Besides, my system's a bit old now. Currently you could easily get a dual 2600+, my board supports up to 2800+, I think. This should give you far better performance than this 3GHz CPU, especially if it's going to be used for Gentoo.
Easy, get two of them. I've got a dual Athlon MP 2000+. If you add the MHz together (1667), you get a big more than those 3 GHz. For games it's not much use, except that I get a second CPU that can be used to run stuff on the background. But for compiling it's great.
It's not too expensive either. Not dirt cheap, but it's not very far from what you'd pay for a decent board and the fastest Intel CPU currently available, and probably will perform better than that as well. As an additional advantage, you get decent hardware that doesn't crash every week.
I use KDE on a dual Athlon MP, but that doesn't stop me from appreciating the usability of the command line. In fact, while coding I will mostly do it using vim, screen, and less/links to read the documentation.
If it wasn't for the difficulty with reading most websites in a text based web browser (Slashdot!), I would spend most of the time on the command line.
Just the fact that GUIs exist doesn't make text mode programs completely obsolete. They're still better for some environments, especially those with limited bandwidth and memory. And they've been working just fine for years. Tend to have less bugs as well.
It had a really nice system. You could change the difficulty setting while in the game. It changed the amount of damage done by monsters, but low settings reduced the amount of experience you gained.
This was really nice for those annoying times you got stuck in a place. For example in my first game I made the alarm ring in the room near the dryads. Then I got damaged by the traps in the room, and overwrote my old game. Then came the golems, which quickly killed me.
In other games this would have meant downloading a cheat, restarting the game, or perhaps loading a saved game from an hour ago. In BG2 I could just temporarily set the difficulty level to easy, kill them, and set it back to normal.
For me in most games it doesn't happen that it's too hard in general. It's usually too hard in a specific place, because I screwed up, went to the wrong place, or especially in RPGs, had a party that couldn't deal with the enemy. It can be bad luck too, like in Morrowind, where you can be really screwed if you *have* to sleep, do it, and have a zombie wake you up and attack before you're healed.
I can confirm that from experience. I maintain a 50000 line VB program. It's VERY annoying.
Just a few issues you find when programming in VB: On computer A the compiler crashes at random, but after a few tries works.
On computer B the compiler works fine, but the resulting executable doesn't run.
The IDE has some stupid bug where a "component" gets a "reference" line in then project file, with the result of having to open it and fix by hand.
Either ADO or VB have a really annoying quirk, where an error ocurring inside a stored procedure will not be noticed inside the application if it was called with Connection.Execute. It will work if I build a Command object.
And this is without even beginning to discuss the problems that are there by design, like a lack of decent inheritance, and the ability to build static libraries.
There's so much crap to deal with that I think it'd be a big improvement to throw it all out, put Linux on the terminals, and code the interface with PerlQt.
It's a lie. Any image stored on a computer is just a collection of bits. And all a computer does is manipulating bits.
Probably, using a tool changes the image in such a way that an analysis might determine that there might be something there. However, think of this:
If you set up a digital camera in such a way that it's perfectly fixed, and then take 100 photos of the same static scene, the resulting images will almost certainly be different, due to things like imperceptible illumination changes, and noise in the sensors.
Every one of those images will have a "message" embedded in it, even if it makes no sense. It can't be impossible to modify the image in such a way that at least a few bits of information can be stored.
Besides, steganography doesn't necessarily have to have long messages. Suppose we have the following protocol: To arrange a meeting at a specified time and place I will transfer you the coordinates and time in the length of MP3 files. I will simply search P2P networks for files with a length that comes as close as possible to the intended time and place. 20 files, perhaps 100MB in total could be used to transfer a message just a few bytes long. Are you sure you can find the relevant few bits in a 5MB file?
Slashdot Mirror
Definitely one of the best games for modding.
:-)
It's all built on top of an engine that runs their own language, so *everything* is customizable. The world, the interface, the creatures themselves... people even managed to do things that weren't originally planned like creatures that could fly or live under water.
The only closed part was the music, which had some cool format that allowed smooth transitions from one theme to another, but that seems to have been reverse-engineered.
Myself, I reverse-engineered a good part of the game's networking protocol
These days it's probably possible to turn it into something completely different, like a space shooter. Actually, the game had an easter egg where they had a space invaders game somewhere.
It seems to help a bit actually. Probably due to the idle times caused by disk I/O. While one job is reading/writing from the disk the other one can compile, for example.
I won't repeat what everybody else said, but here's an extra point: Since Gentoo builds everything from source already, it naturally makes building from source very easy!
./configure && make && make install really trivial, and contains some helper scripts for making the installation of things like Perl modules much easier as well (automatic downloading from CPAN for instance)
The good thing about that is that if you happen to need a program that's not in Gentoo, it should be trivial to make an ebuild for it, if it's not made in some horribly unstandard way. And most likely all the development files and tools will be already installed.
Gentoo's got a great system that makes making packages that can be installed with
Two things:
Film has motion blur. Games don't, because calculating it would be slower than outputting more frames per second to make its absence unnoticeable.
Second, 30fps when looking at a wall will often become 10fps when looking at a big area with lots of things going on.
The problem's not so much Windows as the lack of customization.
If those machines were locked down embedded Windows or something similar, then I wouldn't be so worried. But these things appear to be more like a normal Windows installation with an ATM program on top. That *is* scary.
Think of it, if so much care was taken on the design of the ATM, how do you know that your credit card number and PIN aren't in a text file that can be read directly if you manage to get to the Windows interface?
And what will happen when the virus of the week hits it because nobody bothered closing unneeded ports?
Well, that Unix interface to a bank is about as bad as the ATM being mentioned in this article. I certainly hope that whoever makes a program like that takes care of making it ask for a password, like the 'passwd' command does, instead of requiring it as an argument and letting everybody see it.
And why 'cd ~/pinnumber'?
If 500 people copy a game off a friend's CD, doesn't that cost the producer 500 sales?
No. I might have decided that the game is crap so why bother paying for it? Or my computer wasn't powerful enough. Or I didn't have enough money.
Here's a serious example of not enough money. One russian user on a game company's website admitted that she pirated the $30 or so game. The developer flamed her for that of course.
Now, from the US this is all clear. But think of this: In Russia, at that time, my aunt's wage was $100 a month. This is the wage of an university teacher. Nobody there is going to spend $30 on a game, don't even think of it. You may say all you want about that the game shouldn't have been pirated, but the end result is this: The developer wouldn't have got any money in any case.
Nobody in their right mind would spend 30% of their wage on a game ($1000 maybe?). So the end result comes to this, you get no money, but the end user either gets one or doesn't. If the user gets a copy you can at least have some benefit from the extra advertising. If the user doesn't, you get nothing at all.
Alternatively, you could sell the game for $1 in russia. Of course then I'd ask my aunt to buy the game in Russia, and send her $3.
If 500 people read a book through the library, doesn't that cost the author 500 sales?
No. I have bought books that I've read in the library. Sometimes I like the book and want to have it permanently as a reference. The library then served to find a book I like.
What's the difference?
The difference is that when somebody steals a book, somebody loses their book, while when somebody makes a copy of some software nobody loses their copy of it.
The other difference is that you think of books and games as if they should disappear instantly after being used. They fortunately don't. Authors already know that most books will be read by more than one person. And there's nothing wrong with that.
No need to pay for it anymore, now that they released OMF Battlegrounds, the full DOS game is completely legal to download for free.
Well, I'm not from a very new generation, but I play some old games on my P200 laptop. Not long ago I installed One Must Fall 2097, Descent and Descent 2 on it.
There's something nice about simplicity. Some of the new games aren't as fun as the old ones. For example the old UFO was great, while UFO Aftermath is not bad, but way too simplified, and had some annoying mistakes.
For example, the idea of accepting the aliens' offer was great. Give up on defending the Earth and the aliens will save everybody they can. However, for this all you get is the Earth being completely covered by this biomass stuff.
What happened with the whole intelligent organism thing? They could have made it do something interesting. I'm sure that part could have been more developed.
If you want to exclude words you can do this:
grep -r "shit" * | grep -Eiv "(matsushita|cushite)"
For looking for only some things you could do this:
grep -rEi " (shit|shitty) " *
No, it was more like compression in Win2K (on NTFS only)
.CVF file. The driver emulates a disk drive with this big compressed file. So your C: would actually be inside H:\whatever.cvf.
Drive/DoubleSpace is a driver that gets loaded at boot. Your data is actually inside one big
This was very good except for a few things:
1. Most people had no idea of how compression actually worked. They went into the config program and set the estimated compression ratio to 20x so that they could brag about having 20GB on a 1GB disk drive. Then they were surprised about how they had 15MB less after copying a 1MB file.
2. The system was naturally complex, and if something went wrong (crashes, bad sectors), it was very likely that you'd lose more data than if it was uncompressed.
3. I think in DOS 6.0 there were some bugs that caused serious data corruption. This is partly why 6.2 came out.
Overall, I like the idea a lot though. I wish more Linux filesystems implemented this. For example, documentation could be always kept compressed, and still immediately readable. Most distributions seem to keep most of the docs gzipped, but it's less convenient.
Well, just in case they're really watching, I tried to leave them a message, wonder if they noticed.
Why?
A distribution is a compilation of software. It appeared because somebody thought that they had a good idea about how to put some software together. People who create them don't go and email software authors "Could you package your program in this format I just came up with, and with this directory layout?". On the contrary, a distribution is what results when somebody takes a lot of software written by other people, and organizes it in some way.
I don't see why would it be the KDE project's responsibility to seek every distribution that could include it, and make packages for them.
I'm sure the KDE people simply consider that their time is better spent on writing the code. The distributions already have lots of people who do packages, and could take care of that just fine.
Well, there are lots of companies that started running their systems on 2.2 and have no reason at all to upgrade. It works for them. What would be a colossal waste of time is forcing tens of thousands of computers to be upgraded and tested with the latest Linux version for no good reason.
Gecko/20040219 Firefox/0.8
Maybe there's something screwed up in the gentoo package.
I checked the about screen.
Why does a program called FireFox have a logo that's a (nice looking) FireBird? I was expecting to see the fox from here instead.
I won't discuss that Ada might not have been the first programmer, but there are some points I want to make.
First, I don't see your point about human-looking languages. I think that a programmer is a programmer whether s/he writes code in C, assembler or machine code. Certainly there is much more to programming than learning a human readable description.
The real thing in programming, IMHO, is knowing how computers deal with data. In any programming language you have to understand some basic concepts, like what's an array, what's a linked list, recursion, how to make a tree, how a program receives its arguments. These things are far harder to learn and understand than studying a human readable language. Just look at how people easily learn the C syntax but struggle to understand that checking the value of argv[2] is wrong if argc is less than 3.
Second, although this may be rather weak I think that it's perfectly possible to write a program for a computer that doesn't exist yet. For example, I'm pretty sure that people write test programs for CPUs that don't exist in hardware yet before making the real thing.
Of course, there's going to be some overhead, but I don't think it's very big. Also, most things in Gentoo can compile using both CPUs at once, with a few annoying exceptions like OpenOffice. KDE and almost everything else will nicely use all available processors though.
Besides, my system's a bit old now. Currently you could easily get a dual 2600+, my board supports up to 2800+, I think. This should give you far better performance than this 3GHz CPU, especially if it's going to be used for Gentoo.
Easy, get two of them. I've got a dual Athlon MP 2000+. If you add the MHz together (1667), you get a big more than those 3 GHz. For games it's not much use, except that I get a second CPU that can be used to run stuff on the background. But for compiling it's great.
It's not too expensive either. Not dirt cheap, but it's not very far from what you'd pay for a decent board and the fastest Intel CPU currently available, and probably will perform better than that as well. As an additional advantage, you get decent hardware that doesn't crash every week.
Yikes. Talk about intolerant.
I use KDE on a dual Athlon MP, but that doesn't stop me from appreciating the usability of the command line. In fact, while coding I will mostly do it using vim, screen, and less/links to read the documentation.
If it wasn't for the difficulty with reading most websites in a text based web browser (Slashdot!), I would spend most of the time on the command line.
Just the fact that GUIs exist doesn't make text mode programs completely obsolete. They're still better for some environments, especially those with limited bandwidth and memory. And they've been working just fine for years. Tend to have less bugs as well.
It had a really nice system. You could change the difficulty setting while in the game. It changed the amount of damage done by monsters, but low settings reduced the amount of experience you gained.
This was really nice for those annoying times you got stuck in a place. For example in my first game I made the alarm ring in the room near the dryads. Then I got damaged by the traps in the room, and overwrote my old game. Then came the golems, which quickly killed me.
In other games this would have meant downloading a cheat, restarting the game, or perhaps loading a saved game from an hour ago. In BG2 I could just temporarily set the difficulty level to easy, kill them, and set it back to normal.
For me in most games it doesn't happen that it's too hard in general. It's usually too hard in a specific place, because I screwed up, went to the wrong place, or especially in RPGs, had a party that couldn't deal with the enemy. It can be bad luck too, like in Morrowind, where you can be really screwed if you *have* to sleep, do it, and have a zombie wake you up and attack before you're healed.
I can confirm that from experience. I maintain a 50000 line VB program. It's VERY annoying.
Just a few issues you find when programming in VB:
On computer A the compiler crashes at random, but after a few tries works.
On computer B the compiler works fine, but the resulting executable doesn't run.
The IDE has some stupid bug where a "component" gets a "reference" line in then project file, with the result of having to open it and fix by hand.
Either ADO or VB have a really annoying quirk, where an error ocurring inside a stored procedure will not be noticed inside the application if it was called with Connection.Execute. It will work if I build a Command object.
And this is without even beginning to discuss the problems that are there by design, like a lack of decent inheritance, and the ability to build static libraries.
There's so much crap to deal with that I think it'd be a big improvement to throw it all out, put Linux on the terminals, and code the interface with PerlQt.
It's a lie. Any image stored on a computer is just a collection of bits. And all a computer does is manipulating bits.
Probably, using a tool changes the image in such a way that an analysis might determine that there might be something there. However, think of this:
If you set up a digital camera in such a way that it's perfectly fixed, and then take 100 photos of the same static scene, the resulting images will almost certainly be different, due to things like imperceptible illumination changes, and noise in the sensors.
Every one of those images will have a "message" embedded in it, even if it makes no sense. It can't be impossible to modify the image in such a way that at least a few bits of information can be stored.
Besides, steganography doesn't necessarily have to have long messages. Suppose we have the following protocol: To arrange a meeting at a specified time and place I will transfer you the coordinates and time in the length of MP3 files. I will simply search P2P networks for files with a length that comes as close as possible to the intended time and place. 20 files, perhaps 100MB in total could be used to transfer a message just a few bytes long. Are you sure you can find the relevant few bits in a 5MB file?
Actually, turns out my monitor delivers a tiny bit more than it promises.
I measured the diagonal at 48.5 cm, 19.09 inches. Then, it's a LCD.