Most Open Source developers know that even at a source code level, it is hard to get things to compile and work the same way everywhere. Just between distributions, kernel & glibc patches, and libc and kernel versions differ making things really strange to get to work everywhere without problems. Trying to do something similar in binary is horrible in terms of support. The only thing for a company to do (which seems reasonable, but would also get flamed on slashdot) is to list a specific distribution as supported and categorically refuse to support anything else. That distribution would likely be Redhat (at least in the states). People wanting to run the application in another distro that has problems would have to either match redhat as best it can, ask for help elsewhere.
Of course I am of the opinion that linux in gerneral does not lend itself well to binary distrbution at all. Most Open Source developers
are so reliant upon people using the Open Source development model, that ABI compatibility is not important enough to give enough attention to keep old binaries working, most people can just recompile and go on with their lives.
Well, this might be changing, gcc developers, glibc, and the other big projects seem to be getting more concerned with ABI compatibility between versions, so who knows what will happen..
It could be done, but not too easily in a screen wide sense and even then, from an efficiency viewpoint it would be a bad thing to settle for. As an example let's look at the use of OpenGL in many 2D video players. OpenGL is widely supported and does nice scaling and filtering. However, the "proper" way would be to make use of YUV overlays, as it is more the right tool for the job. The only reason this is not happening is that YUV support is rare, and in those cards, there is also GL support, so the most universal solution is to use GL.
In other words, we are relying a lot on GL where more efficient methods exist. In these cases, GL implementations should be regarded as a temporary hack rather than a complete, viable solution.
Re:SICK OF IT! Giving up moderator points to say i
on
BSD to Leapfrog Linux?
·
· Score: 1
I agree with you, and have had experience with most (not Tru64, SCO, or Irix though).
But you mispelled a few:
HP-UX should be: PHUX
AIX: Aches
Just my experience with those two makes those names much more appropriate... I'm not too much on calling Solaris "Slowlaris" as I use it on Ultras all day and I can't testify to any sluggishness compared to Linux..
Actually, there is quite a difference between
"UNIXalikes" maybe at the command line they are all similar, but even then there are significant differences by default. I'll just compare Solaris and standard GNU/Linux distros. The shell of choice in solaris is ksh, which behaves differently somewhat from bash, the linux favorite. Also, linux usually ships with GNU fileutils, while solaris does not. Just use ps on both and you'll realize that there are some fundamental differences in the way they interface.
In the GUI front, solaris still sticks by CDE, while Redhat tends to like to use GNOME, and mandrake uses kde.. Also, under solaris you basically get no VCs, which is also quite a large diff.
From the standpoint of development, the systems have really different behaving environments. Just try to use dlopen() under both and you'll see. Also, try to write a multi-threaded X app in Solaris and then port it to linux. Chances are, in linux, you'll get tons of async replies before you add mutexes, semaphores, and special X calls for threading. Solaris X environment is *much* more thread safe than XFree86.
No matter how you look at it, while "UNIXalikes" may be very similar, there are many fundamental differences that distinguish them and cause preferences one way or the other. All in all, things are probably about equal, just some prefer one style over another...
The only alternative is obviously *not* egcs, gcc 2.95.2 would be the choice. gcc 2.96 was/is broken in more ways than a compatibilty sense.
Particularly the g++/libstdc++ that they shipped would miscompile many applications resulting in application lockups and such nightmares often. Most of these problems have since been fixed in rawhide and cvs gcc, but not in any updates that I can find in errata. Sure the rawhide packages work fine, but corporations want it to be an update, not installing something "unsupported" glibc is hosed too, but that is not exactly a virtue...
W3M sucks, use links!:) Just adding to the flamwar:) But seriously links does frames a lot better than w3m, but aside from that there are really similar:)
In an interesting twist, 2000 is ok, only locked up once while I was using it, pretty stable, but
it just does not support my IDE chipset correctly
nor my gamepad of choice, while linux supports
both. Who would have thought that linux would ever have better hardware support than a microsoft offering:) I like the way linux works better anyway (as far as user interaction and flexibilty). But I am feeling like criticism of 2000 flakiness is not as called for as it used to be.. In any case I'll continue on with my Unix of choice but will say that for once Micro$oft has done a good job of producing a decent product, though 2000's price tag was (and still is) unreasonable and I would never had bothered if my company did not pay for it.
The test code is available to everyone to test and find bugs. It is just extra precautions to use commercial testlabs since they can. No harm done, and many many eyes still examine all the bugs, just some testing is more well documented and assured than the rest. Dumping the kernel as 2.4.0 because it looks right to the more experimental users and having many more unknown bugs to fix may have been passable 3 or four years ago, but now Linux is sufficiently mainstream that such practices would be viewed as bad form, leave new users with a bad taste in their mouths, and forever be held up by m$ people as a shining example of the "weakness of linux"
There is a *huge* difference from having a desktop environment starting an application and a media player opening whatever file you can throw at it. A standard is needed, but right now it appears that it is more of a race of what is most popular and what gets most complete most quickly. Current, comprehensive Quicktime4 support is a lost cause for now, because of Sorenson, xanim is rather outdated now, SMPEG does a good job with MPG1, xmovie is nice, except for being a standalone player and not have its functionality through a lib. avifile is a really slick idea and can work quite well alongside smpeg to cover a great deal of file formats. I do not know much about livid, but I do know that real will probably stay in its current state for a long long time. Also promising to me is mpeglib (http://mpeglib.sourceforge.net/) Supporting, apparently, mpg-1, mpg2, and divx...
Some programs are attempting to bring together the functionality of whatever libraries are available for playback. Xtheater, xmps, LAMP are examples of projects in relatively similar states of development.. I suspect one of these may become a much bigger factor in the Linux community sometime soon.
does this upset people so much? If you *really* cannot wait for 2.4.0, run the 2.4.0test series. If they did release, it would be exactly this code anyway.. Makes no difference to me if it is termed "official" or not. Maybe for businesses, but for those applications it doesn't matter *too* much.. 2.2 seriesis good enough for most users, especially corporations that would be afraid of running test software. No one can claim vaporware because anyone can use it:)
Ahh memories.
I think I was most impressed by my first upgrade.. 286/12 to Pentium 60.. Now that amazed me..:)
Then Pentium 200, not as amazing, but decent..
Then AMD K6/2 400, that was also impressive.
Nothing really compares to that first jump (understandably). One thing about the impressiveness is that in rememberence, the last time will always seem better. Also, you're not running the latest bloatware to slow sane computers down:) I wouldn't mind a faster machine for game playing and fast compiling. If you really want to make a jump like that seem impressive, run enlightenment and efm, then you'll be complaining about how slow the latest 1.2 GHz is for UI:)
As far as motherboard tech being old, that doesn't really hold for anything but PCI anymore. Memory bandwidth has been progressing at a pretty good rate, (especially with the upcoming DDR SDRAM), AGP has greatly improved possibilities with graphics. And of course the processor interface and chipsets overall have been improved significantly. The only area of motherboard tech to me that is still current, yet outdated is PCI. 33Mhz. bus just isn't what it used to be, especially if you want to put high speed disk controllers and such on it.
under the releases, there is a guiness directory,
that is where I have been downloading it from, since before the slashdot announcement. Not surprisingly, the transfer rate has dropped about 20 k/s since then.. I haven't found a single mirror with it yet though.. I guess they will make a redhat-7.0 directory soon enough.
If you don't use core dumps, you are missing out on a FANTASTIC debugging tool. If a crash occurs, it may be impossible to exactly reproduce it, load up a debugger with the program code and the core, and suddenly it exactly as if you had been running the program within a debugger the whole time!
Exactly what is intellisense? Personally, I hate emacs, but love vi. (Which can be run under windows too. I can't think of any features I'd like that vi doesn't have.
X is not that unstable, bloated, debateable, but still pretty solid, not as solid as the kernel, but solid. At least when X crashes, 97% of the time a reboot is not required. Even if X crashed as much as windows, at least time to recovery is short, as you can immediately restart X without reboot.
As to the blackbox model, that is plain bs. In the OSS world, most things could be treated as a black box, and work fine. You never *have* to look at source if you don't want. You certainly can't argue that it *hurts* you to be able to see how the calls you need are implemented.
And dependence on the registry is NOT akin to depending on the file system. That is the dumbest comparison I have ever heard. The registry is a centralized database of settings used by programs stored in a proprietary format in a singular spot on the disk, where if one thing corrupts it, many applications cease to function, a central spot for malicious programs to look for sensitive information. Sure something can corrupt the superblocks of a unix filesystem, but windows filesystem is also vulnerable, if not more so. The registry adds whole new dimensions of problems in security, reliability, and system administration. I have seen registries get so trashed before, and I have grown to hate having to be the administrator of such crap.
In sight of me there are: 7 Sprite logos (cans) 1 7 up logo (can) 2 brainbench (certificates) 2 fujitsu (ledger and water bottle) 1 Chick-fil-a cup 1 fedex box 1 ericsson mini volleyball 1 microsoft koosh yo yo 1 tadpole sparc laptop 14 sun microsystems logos (2 monitors, 3 keyboards, 2 mice, 2 ultras, 2 copies of solaris 8, 1 solaris 7, 1 external tape drive and 1 external cd drive) Strange how microsoft managed to get their logo even into my little intel-free world.
Oh yeah, like Solaris never has patches/maintenance updates, and Windows *certainly* doesn't have hotfixes/service packs.
Face it, every OS has problems, programmers are only human. As far as linux goes, I trust it more than Windows, haven't decided vs. Solaris, and probably a bit less than OpenBSD.
This comment will mostly get overlooked among so many, but here goes:
Kimagure Orange Road: Light-hearted story about teenage love triangle and ESPer powers. Both funny and sweet, my fav.
Rurouni Kenshin: The best assassin from the end of the Tokugawa dynasty swears off killing, but still protects his friends and the land. Funny, exciting, and a bit sweet.
Photon: An absolutely hilarious short series about a little kid with awesome powers.
Ah! My Goddess: Very cool romantic comedy about a college student and the goddess he loves. Oh and heaven is managed with a computer with bugs that can only be fixed with a mallet:)
Slayers: Hilarious series about a sorceress and her allies fighting bandits and demons and such (and cooler stuff).
Irresponsible Captain Tyler: The space force's misfits get lumped onto a single ship and what results is hilarious.
Your example used is a bad one. Driving is classified in the United States as a privilege, not as a right. So suspending ones driver's license is a *whole* lot different from suspending First Amendment *rights*. Perhaps it is legal under probation to revoke rights, but in this case, even if it is somehow legal, it is far from right. Preventing him from having access to equipment that *could* be used for his crimes is one thing (though still questionable) But not allowing him to speak on what he wishes? That is just too extreme.
Around my place of work, when people are between large projects, typically most of us get on our workstation, load up quake, and go at it. Evidentally this means that we will likely end up mounting machine guns in our cubicles and lobbing grenades over the walls. I think this is simply people going with what the public wants to believe, that something is to blame . Myself, I love getting in on these games occasionally, but I've always been known as/felt about as mild mannered as people get in real life. Everyone says I'm kind and accomadating and considerate, and I personally feel no malice, even with people who are not exactly the most agreeable in the world. People in fact complain that I'm so passive it gets annoying. The most violent people I know never play computer games at all. The study may have discovered a correlation between violent video games and violent behavior (which in and of itself can be questionable) but did they actually figure out which one was the cause and which was the effect?
Ahh, but what would you have said 10 years ago? I had a 286 (well maybe less than 10 years..) and thought "cool, it runs what I want".. 386s came out and I thought, "neat toy, but anything I want to do can be done on my 286". 486s came out not too much later and I was beginning to feel the hurt of not being able to run the latest things, games became more complex, everyday applications got sloppier with alorithms because they could afford to.. Finally got a Pentium 60 when they FIRST came out (i.e. people said oh my god, you have a *Pentium*, that things kicks!) This thing beat the crap out of my 286:) It could do everything I dreamt of! Nothing would need more! Three years later, It wasn't enough to do hardly anything that was coming out new, got a P200, which was fantastic and again I was the envy of my friends... Finally, a little over a year ago, I upgraded my P200 to an AMD k6/2 400, because the 200 was a bit sluggish, but probably wouldn't have bothered except someone was on a slooow system and wanted my P200.. Then it was fast and did great things, already it is what software makers tend to expect of home users.. I'm fine now, but I don't think it is ever safe to say "I plan to run it for over 10 years, I won't need any more processing power than that! "
One thing about Netscape, however, is all the proprietary, royalty laden stuff they put in that mozilla simply can't put in. That is why Netscape will be released. Many people want basic third-party extensions to netscape that mozilla, by nature, cannot include..
A new console only a year after the current is released? That kinda sucks. One of the great things about consoles has been lifetime. First off is relatively low cost. Second, once you buy, it's nice to know it will work great for a good long while before it is obsolete. the orginal 8-bit nintendo, about 6 years before the supernintendo, playsation has been around approximately 6 years before PSX2 moves in. Advances are great and everything, but I think it's better to keep the game manufacturers making cames for a particular platform longer than to bring out the hottest and greatest as quick as possilbe. Also bad is the proposed use of an Athlong 2 ghz.. Guess Sony is afraid of the X-Box and wants to make the same promises of "higher cost, heat, but look at all those hertz!" PC compatiblity may be good, but RISC is what has made consoles the low-power/low-heat powerhouses they've always been!
I remember TradeWars very fondly and have long awaited a port to UNIX systems.. I had been spending some time looking for this, and the majorBBS program Crossroads... sadly, crossroads still costs over 200 dollars. In this day and age I don't see how a game like crossroads can be worth that much, it is mostly nostalgia for me (and there are all kinds of new-fangled graphical/textual interfaces that do so much more, but I never got into them as much..)
BeOS may be awesome at multimedia creation (never tried it personally, except my TV card doesn't seem to work, a wintv no less!) But the media playback for standard formats is horrible. I own beos 4, got shipped 4.5, got the patches and even have 5 PE installed, but I cannot play many movies. Sure, older avis/movs play great, no sorenson (don't blame them) and avis with mpeg audio don't work. Also, I still don't understand why the MPEG codec they have is so inefficient. I mean, the least efficient stuff under linux( i.e. no hardware overlays, no use of assembly code) Takes about 50-60% to play, the most streamlined (still without hardware support, just a lot of MMX colorspace conversion/IDCT) 20-40%, but under be, Pulse goes through the roof and audio and video skips on a 400 Mhz machine playing a 352x240 MPG-1 systems stream! BeOS is snappy in so many ways, but if it is so much of a great multimedia OS, then why does playback seem to lag behind in support and efficiency?
Re:The MPAA is going to support LinDVD
on
More on LinDVD
·
· Score: 1
Oh that would help. Instead of having a few zealots trying to figure out everything and others being content with the binary-only, they'll have hoardes of alternative OS people trying to figure it out for playback.. Give people playback, and you won't have so many people trying to figure out how to, not caring if copying is made possible. Besides, blacklisting entire user bases of operating systems is plain silly. As if no Windows users do "bad stuff" (If I understood correctly, DeCSS was developed primarily under windows, with the support of linux added mainly to legitimize the product and get open source zealot support:) Case in point, I would be half tempted to work on playback system for linux if I didn't have the now somewhat working dxr2 board:) Since I have a working hardware solution under linux now, I'm more apathetic to software players... Now if there was a freely available software player with a closed, yet trustworthy (i.e. known *NOT* to transmit personal information/trash system) compnent, I'll bet you laziness sets in and people would care less about breaking CSS.
Slashdot Mirror
Most Open Source developers know that even at a source code level, it is hard to get things to compile and work the same way everywhere. Just between distributions, kernel & glibc patches, and libc and kernel versions differ making things really strange to get to work everywhere without problems. Trying to do something similar in binary is horrible in terms of support. The only thing for a company to do (which seems reasonable, but would also get flamed on slashdot) is to list a specific distribution as supported and categorically refuse to support anything else. That distribution would likely be Redhat (at least in the states). People wanting to run the application in another distro that has problems would have to either match redhat as best it can, ask for help elsewhere.
Of course I am of the opinion that linux in gerneral does not lend itself well to binary distrbution at all. Most Open Source developers
are so reliant upon people using the Open Source development model, that ABI compatibility is not important enough to give enough attention to keep old binaries working, most people can just recompile and go on with their lives.
Well, this might be changing, gcc developers, glibc, and the other big projects seem to be getting more concerned with ABI compatibility between versions, so who knows what will happen..
It could be done, but not too easily in a screen wide sense and even then, from an efficiency viewpoint it would be a bad thing to settle for. As an example let's look at the use of OpenGL in many 2D video players. OpenGL is widely supported and does nice scaling and filtering. However, the "proper" way would be to make use of YUV overlays, as it is more the right tool for the job. The only reason this is not happening is that YUV support is rare, and in those cards, there is also GL support, so the most universal solution is to use GL.
In other words, we are relying a lot on GL where more efficient methods exist. In these cases, GL implementations should be regarded as a temporary hack rather than a complete, viable solution.
I agree with you, and have had experience with most (not Tru64, SCO, or Irix though).
But you mispelled a few:
HP-UX should be: PHUX
AIX: Aches
Just my experience with those two makes those names much more appropriate... I'm not too much on calling Solaris "Slowlaris" as I use it on Ultras all day and I can't testify to any sluggishness compared to Linux..
Actually, there is quite a difference between
"UNIXalikes" maybe at the command line they are all similar, but even then there are significant differences by default. I'll just compare Solaris and standard GNU/Linux distros. The shell of choice in solaris is ksh, which behaves differently somewhat from bash, the linux favorite. Also, linux usually ships with GNU fileutils, while solaris does not. Just use ps on both and you'll realize that there are some fundamental differences in the way they interface.
In the GUI front, solaris still sticks by CDE, while Redhat tends to like to use GNOME, and mandrake uses kde.. Also, under solaris you basically get no VCs, which is also quite a large diff.
From the standpoint of development, the systems have really different behaving environments. Just try to use dlopen() under both and you'll see. Also, try to write a multi-threaded X app in Solaris and then port it to linux. Chances are, in linux, you'll get tons of async replies before you add mutexes, semaphores, and special X calls for threading. Solaris X environment is *much* more thread safe than XFree86.
No matter how you look at it, while "UNIXalikes" may be very similar, there are many fundamental differences that distinguish them and cause preferences one way or the other. All in all, things are probably about equal, just some prefer one style over another...
The only alternative is obviously *not* egcs, gcc 2.95.2 would be the choice. gcc 2.96 was/is broken in more ways than a compatibilty sense. Particularly the g++/libstdc++ that they shipped would miscompile many applications resulting in application lockups and such nightmares often. Most of these problems have since been fixed in rawhide and cvs gcc, but not in any updates that I can find in errata. Sure the rawhide packages work fine, but corporations want it to be an update, not installing something "unsupported" glibc is hosed too, but that is not exactly a virtue...
W3M sucks, use links! :) Just adding to the flamwar :) But seriously links does frames a lot better than w3m, but aside from that there are really similar :)
In an interesting twist, 2000 is ok, only locked up once while I was using it, pretty stable, but :) I like the way linux works better anyway (as far as user interaction and flexibilty). But I am feeling like criticism of 2000 flakiness is not as called for as it used to be.. In any case I'll continue on with my Unix of choice but will say that for once Micro$oft has done a good job of producing a decent product, though 2000's price tag was (and still is) unreasonable and I would never had bothered if my company did not pay for it.
it just does not support my IDE chipset correctly
nor my gamepad of choice, while linux supports
both. Who would have thought that linux would ever have better hardware support than a microsoft offering
The test code is available to everyone to test and find bugs. It is just extra precautions to use commercial testlabs since they can. No harm done, and many many eyes still examine all the bugs, just some testing is more well documented and assured than the rest. Dumping the kernel as 2.4.0 because it looks right to the more experimental users and having many more unknown bugs to fix may have been passable 3 or four years ago, but now Linux is sufficiently mainstream that such practices would be viewed as bad form, leave new users with a bad taste in their mouths, and forever be held up by m$ people as a shining example of the "weakness of linux"
There is a *huge* difference from having a desktop environment starting an application and a media player opening whatever file you can throw at it. A standard is needed, but right now it appears that it is more of a race of what is most popular and what gets most complete most quickly. Current, comprehensive Quicktime4 support is a lost cause for now, because of Sorenson, xanim is rather outdated now, SMPEG does a good job with MPG1, xmovie is nice, except for being a standalone player and not have its functionality through a lib. avifile is a really slick idea and can work quite well alongside smpeg to cover a great deal of file formats. I do not know much about livid, but I do know that real will probably stay in its current state for a long long time. Also promising to me is mpeglib (http://mpeglib.sourceforge.net/) Supporting, apparently, mpg-1, mpg2, and divx...
Some programs are attempting to bring together the functionality of whatever libraries are available for playback. Xtheater, xmps, LAMP are examples of projects in relatively similar states of development.. I suspect one of these may become a much bigger factor in the Linux community sometime soon.
does this upset people so much? If you *really* cannot wait for 2.4.0, run the 2.4.0test series. If they did release, it would be exactly this code anyway.. Makes no difference to me if it is termed "official" or not. Maybe for businesses, but for those applications it doesn't matter *too* much.. 2.2 seriesis good enough for most users, especially corporations that would be afraid of running test software. No one can claim vaporware because anyone can use it :)
Ahh memories. :)
:) I wouldn't mind a faster machine for game playing and fast compiling. If you really want to make a jump like that seem impressive, run enlightenment and efm, then you'll be complaining about how slow the latest 1.2 GHz is for UI :)
I think I was most impressed by my first upgrade.. 286/12 to Pentium 60.. Now that amazed me..
Then Pentium 200, not as amazing, but decent..
Then AMD K6/2 400, that was also impressive.
Nothing really compares to that first jump (understandably). One thing about the impressiveness is that in rememberence, the last time will always seem better. Also, you're not running the latest bloatware to slow sane computers down
As far as motherboard tech being old, that doesn't really hold for anything but PCI anymore. Memory bandwidth has been progressing at a pretty good rate, (especially with the upcoming DDR SDRAM), AGP has greatly improved possibilities with graphics. And of course the processor interface and chipsets overall have been improved significantly. The only area of motherboard tech to me that is still current, yet outdated is PCI. 33Mhz. bus just isn't what it used to be, especially if you want to put high speed disk controllers and such on it.
under the releases, there is a guiness directory,
that is where I have been downloading it from, since before the slashdot announcement. Not surprisingly, the transfer rate has dropped about 20 k/s since then.. I haven't found a single mirror with it yet though.. I guess they will make a redhat-7.0 directory soon enough.
If you don't use core dumps, you are missing out
on a FANTASTIC debugging tool. If a crash occurs, it may be impossible to exactly reproduce it, load up a debugger with the program code and the core, and suddenly it exactly as if you had been running the program within a debugger the whole time!
Exactly what is intellisense? Personally, I hate
emacs, but love vi. (Which can be run under
windows too. I can't think of any features I'd like that vi doesn't have.
X is not that unstable, bloated, debateable, but still pretty solid, not as solid as the kernel, but solid. At least when X crashes, 97% of the time a reboot is not required. Even if X crashed as much as windows, at least time to recovery is short, as you can immediately restart X without reboot.
As to the blackbox model, that is plain bs. In the OSS world, most things could be treated as a black box, and work fine. You never *have* to look at source if you don't want. You certainly can't argue that it *hurts* you to be able to see how the calls you need are implemented.
And dependence on the registry is NOT akin to depending on the file system. That is the dumbest comparison I have ever heard. The registry is a centralized database of settings used by programs stored in a proprietary format in a singular spot on the disk, where if one thing corrupts it, many applications cease to function, a central spot for malicious programs to look for sensitive information. Sure something can corrupt the superblocks of a unix filesystem, but windows filesystem is also vulnerable, if not more so. The registry adds whole new dimensions of problems in security, reliability, and system administration. I have seen registries get so trashed before, and I have grown to hate having to be the administrator of such crap.
In sight of me there are:
7 Sprite logos (cans)
1 7 up logo (can)
2 brainbench (certificates)
2 fujitsu (ledger and water bottle)
1 Chick-fil-a cup
1 fedex box
1 ericsson mini volleyball
1 microsoft koosh yo yo
1 tadpole sparc laptop
14 sun microsystems logos
(2 monitors, 3 keyboards, 2 mice, 2 ultras,
2 copies of solaris 8, 1 solaris 7,
1 external tape drive and 1 external cd drive)
Strange how microsoft managed to get their logo
even into my little intel-free world.
Oh yeah, like Solaris never has patches/maintenance updates, and Windows *certainly* doesn't have hotfixes/service packs.
Face it, every OS has problems, programmers are only human. As far as linux goes, I trust it more than Windows, haven't decided vs. Solaris, and probably a bit less than OpenBSD.
This comment will mostly get overlooked among so many, but here goes:
:)
Kimagure Orange Road: Light-hearted story about teenage love triangle and ESPer powers. Both funny and sweet, my fav.
Rurouni Kenshin: The best assassin from the end of the Tokugawa dynasty swears off killing, but still protects his friends and the land. Funny, exciting, and a bit sweet.
Photon: An absolutely hilarious short series about a little kid with awesome powers.
Ah! My Goddess: Very cool romantic comedy about a college student and the goddess he loves. Oh and heaven is managed with a computer with bugs that can only be fixed with a mallet
Slayers: Hilarious series about a sorceress and her allies fighting bandits and demons and such (and cooler stuff).
Irresponsible Captain Tyler: The space force's misfits get lumped onto a single ship and what results is hilarious.
I hated Akira myself, it put me to sleep.
Your example used is a bad one. Driving is classified in the United States as a privilege,
not as a right. So suspending ones driver's license is a *whole* lot different from suspending First Amendment *rights*. Perhaps it is legal under probation to revoke rights, but in this case, even if it is somehow legal, it is far from right. Preventing him from having access to equipment that *could* be used for his crimes is one thing (though still questionable) But not allowing him to speak on what he wishes? That is just too extreme.
Around my place of work, when people are between large projects, typically most of us get on our workstation, load up quake, and go at it. Evidentally this means that we will likely end up mounting machine guns in our cubicles and lobbing grenades over the walls. I think this is simply people going with what the public wants to believe, that something is to blame . Myself, I love getting in on these games occasionally, but I've always been known as/felt about as mild mannered as people get in real life. Everyone says I'm kind and accomadating and considerate, and I personally feel no malice, even with people who are not exactly the most agreeable in the world. People in fact complain that I'm so passive it gets annoying. The most violent people I know never play computer games at all. The study may have discovered a correlation between violent video games and violent behavior (which in and of itself can be questionable) but did they actually figure out which one was the cause and which was the effect?
Ahh, but what would you have said 10 years ago? I had a 286 (well maybe less than 10 years..) and thought "cool, it runs what I want".. 386s came out and I thought, "neat toy, but anything I want to do can be done on my 286". 486s came out not too much later and I was beginning to feel the hurt of not being able to run the latest things, games became more complex, everyday applications got sloppier with alorithms because they could afford to.. Finally got a Pentium 60 when they FIRST came out (i.e. people said oh my god, you have a *Pentium*, that things kicks!) This thing beat the crap out of my 286 :) It could do everything I dreamt of! Nothing would need more! Three years later, It wasn't enough to do hardly anything that was coming out new, got a P200, which was fantastic and again I was the envy of my friends... Finally, a little over a year ago, I upgraded my P200 to an AMD k6/2 400, because the 200 was a bit sluggish, but probably wouldn't have bothered except someone was on a slooow system and wanted my P200.. Then it was fast and did great things, already it is what software makers tend to expect of home users.. I'm fine now, but I don't think it is ever safe to say "I plan to run it for over 10 years, I won't need any more processing power than that! "
One thing about Netscape, however, is all the proprietary, royalty laden stuff they put in that mozilla simply can't put in. That is why Netscape will be released. Many people want basic third-party extensions to netscape that mozilla, by nature, cannot include..
A new console only a year after the current is released? That kinda sucks. One of the great things about consoles has been lifetime. First off is relatively low cost. Second, once you buy, it's nice to know it will work great for a good long while before it is obsolete. the orginal 8-bit nintendo, about 6 years before the supernintendo, playsation has been around approximately 6 years before PSX2 moves in. Advances are great and everything, but I think it's better to keep the game manufacturers making cames for a particular platform longer than to bring out the hottest and greatest as quick as possilbe.
Also bad is the proposed use of an Athlong 2 ghz.. Guess Sony is afraid of the X-Box and wants to make the same promises of "higher cost, heat, but look at all those hertz!" PC compatiblity may be good, but RISC is what has made consoles the low-power/low-heat powerhouses they've always been!
I remember TradeWars very fondly and have long awaited a port to UNIX systems.. I had been spending some time looking for this, and the majorBBS program Crossroads... sadly, crossroads still costs over 200 dollars. In this day and age I don't see how a game like crossroads can be worth that much, it is mostly nostalgia for me (and there are all kinds of new-fangled graphical/textual interfaces that do so much more, but I never got into them as much..)
BeOS may be awesome at multimedia creation (never tried it personally, except my TV card doesn't seem to work, a wintv no less!) But the media playback for standard formats is horrible. I own beos 4, got shipped 4.5, got the patches and even have 5 PE installed, but I cannot play many movies. Sure, older avis/movs play great, no sorenson (don't blame them) and avis with mpeg audio don't work. Also, I still don't understand why the MPEG codec they have is so inefficient. I mean, the least efficient stuff under linux( i.e. no hardware overlays, no use of assembly code) Takes about 50-60% to play, the most streamlined (still without hardware support, just a lot of MMX colorspace conversion/IDCT) 20-40%, but under be, Pulse goes through the roof and audio and video skips on a 400 Mhz machine playing a 352x240 MPG-1 systems stream! BeOS is snappy in so many ways, but if it is so much of a great multimedia OS, then why does playback seem to lag behind in support and efficiency?
Oh that would help. Instead of having a few zealots trying to figure out everything and others being content with the binary-only, they'll have hoardes of alternative OS people trying to figure it out for playback.. Give people playback, and you won't have so many people trying to figure out how to, not caring if copying is made possible. Besides, blacklisting entire user bases of operating systems is plain silly. As if no Windows users do "bad stuff" (If I understood correctly, DeCSS was developed primarily under windows, with the support of linux added mainly to legitimize the product and get open source zealot support :) Case in point, I would be half tempted to work on playback system for linux if I didn't have the now somewhat working dxr2 board :) Since I have a working hardware solution under linux now, I'm more apathetic to software players... Now if there was a freely available software player with a closed, yet trustworthy (i.e. known *NOT* to transmit personal information/trash system) compnent, I'll bet you laziness sets in and people would care less about breaking CSS.