Yes, you're right. A mere 4 days after the source has been released and made available to them, they have a) managed to organize themselves, b) get a fair comprehension of the code base, c) start working on it, and d) release a fairly functional (hey, when Duke3D first came out, I played it w/ just the keyboard - I suspect many others did too) binary that is at least playable.
Compare this to, say, Duke Nukem Forever, which has been in development for uncounted years, and all we've seen is a couple screenshots (and none in the last couple years, either).
What's more, open source isn't having, "problems" - not unless you consider linux's ability to make strides against MS on the desktop market a problem (something both IBM, Apple, and untold forgotten companies have had problems doing for 20 years).
I wonder how long it'll be until someone replaces the BUILD engine with the 3d rendering abilities of the Quake engine for better gameplay? It could use the same textures for most things. I s'pose it depends on how well each game is programmed, how modularized it is, and how long it takes to convert Duke3d or Quake to the other's respective language.
Descent must've had many of the same capabilities. I recall custom multiplayer (and some single player, default) maps that would allow two people to occupy the same space in a room that they entered through different doorways, and not be able to detect each other.
I too took a look at the 3DRealms site and found the source on the 1st. I was sure it was a farce - until I built it.
It's funny - this shows that 3DRealms actually managed to pull a pretty good April Fool's joke on the slashdot Taco Gang by doing something geeky and credible on the 1st.;) It's release alongside "Duke Nukem Forever released....!... on Atari 2600" was also good for effect - it made the source release (something unexpected) obscene by proxy.
If you think NWN is a huge timesink, then you've obviously never played the original Baldur's Gate. We're talking about a magnitude scale of at least 4 here.
At the end of Baldur's Gate, after having thuroughly explored every nook and cranny of the world, I'd accumilated 212 game days of play. That's approximately 2 hours per game day: 424 hours. (If I recall the conversion properly.) That's 17 and 2/3rd days, straight. Now, consider your average person sleeps 8 hours a night, it equals roughly 26.5 days of gameplay, not taking into account things like bathing, eating, and work.
And that statistic doesn't even begin to take into account the many hours spent saving, loading, and replaying sections of the game that are all but impossible to perform well. I'd say that, realistically, you can easily double or triple my figures.
In contrast, it took me less than a week to beat NWN while going about school, sleeping, eating, and other various activities.
Nonsense. Laptops keep getting larger - what are they up to now, 15" LCDs in the highend ones? People are using them as 'desktop replacements' which is just ludicrous. They're ill suited for that.
As far as thicker: not in this world. Laptops would lose all functionality if they got much larger. This is why they're trying to make them smaller (at least some companies are, noteably Sony and Fujitsu *drool*).
People have been tlaking for years about how kludged together the current internet infrastructure is; my question is, might something like this make for a feasable replacement, or at least a suppliment to what is already out there? I can see this being very useful indeed. You'd be able to de-centralize the root servers, and have them be distributed from
The point of my statement was to draw emphasis to the absurdity of the previous poster's claim that WWII weapons during the middle ages would have won the Crusades for Europe.
A Hitler speech? From 25 years ago, a good long time after WW2 stuff was done with? In german? Repeated by GW Bush word for word? The same GW Bush that's President of the USA?
I suspect the same thing will happen to the JFK assassination papers. I doubt they even still exist, but the gov't will likely claim they're being held for 'further study' - even though the gov't claimed back then that there was nothing to study, and the case was closed.
Could I please have whatever the submitter and timothy are abusing? I need a healthy departure from reality.
As has been mentioned, a $100 child's (debateable, I know) portable game system and a $600 semi-pro digital camera have nothing in common other than that they have those neat little resistors and electronic things in them! It's like comparing apples and... caviar. There's nothing similar about these items.
I'm not exactly sure what you're saying here. Maybe you could clarify for me. What I hear you saying is, "So what? Hire a UNIX/linux guy. UNIX/linux on a mainframe can do the same work just as well, if not better, than the native OS." Am I correct? Having never used (or seen) a mainframe myself, I can't easily speculate.
First, as a little background, let me state that I've applied at dozens of colleges and gotten accepted, and have looked into the whole college admittance thing pretty thuroughly in the last 4 years or so, so I like to think I'm fairly knowledgeable of the whole financial aid, scholarship, and admittance game.
1.) Probably significantly, especially in this economy. Age often helps determine wage: if you're starting at 30k a year at 18, as opposed to 40k at 22 then you're already several thousand dollars behind the curve.
2.) I'd go EE if I had your skillset and interests most certainly, especially because of (once again) the economy.
3.) My experience with college is that it depends on where you go to school (and what they have to offer), what you consider a 'good' course, and your previous experience. I've been to two different colleges, and neither really did it for me - I don't learn well in lecture environments because people go too slowly, the information isn't particularly interesting, and other instances like that.
I'd say that if you went to a middle-of-the-road high school, did well, and didn't particularly enjoy it, you probably won't enjoy college course work much or at all. Large colleges have the same homework/test structure as high schools (and they're mostly the accuscan variety). A small college will have a lot of essays and intensive instruction, which I'd definately say is better.
Overall, however, I found college courses to be oriented towards those that didn't know what they were doing with their lives to help them give them a broader knowledge base, and to hopefully give them direction (not absolutely, of course - that's just my take). I ended up withdrawing from school as a result, and haven't regretted it yet. It's given me the freedom to persue things on my own. If you're a very self-motivated person (as it apears you are) you might want to consider forgoing college and just starting something up on your own. If you feel technically inclined/motivated enough to do it, that is.
4.) Yeah, it'll probably help, but probably not that much. If you're trying to goto MIT, chances are most students already do things like that (HAM radio, companies on the side, small engine design, etc.) so it'll almost be a prerequisite, while at a lesser school, it'll possibly gain you scholarships. My experience is that unless it's somewhere like Stanford, Duke, or such, as long as you meet the mininum requirements, they'll gladly accept you in - almost too eagerly. I suspect that unless they have a special tech scholarship, things such as that will be relatively unimportant to the school.
5.) That's a tough question. On one hand, I was nowhere near ready for 'the real world' when I had graduated from high school, so I'd probably go to college. While I don't think I really benefited from the course work directly (I'd probably have learned more reading/studying on my own) I do think that I grew as a person, and that was definately beneficial. I was able to figure out more exactly what my interests were - beyond my abilities. Sure, I was good with computers and a decent enough programmer, but I found I'd rather be doing something else. (I'm doing computer stuff now out in the real world, but I didn't want to become yet another programming drone.)
While college is mostly about the social aspect, people say (this is true)... it was pretty undesireable for me. Most people are still too immature and unknowledgeable at college age to hold an intellectual conversation, and most get togethers involve beer and loud music (unless you're lucky to find a group of like-minded people). Finding the right kind of people largely depends on the kind of school you go to. If you go to a large university, there'll be a large selection, but if you go to a small, CS/EE focused college, there'll likely be people that are much more focused on that particular field and spend larger amounts of time doing that kind of hting on their free time.
The main people I know with fast, new, and custom systems are overclockers. They push the envelope and cause other people to envy what they have time in and time out: "Oh, your system is so fast. I want a machine like that."
These are also the people that buy OEM CPUs - which bring more money into the CPU manufacturers than do systems from Dell, etc. Thus, OCers bring in more per capita income to CPU companies, as well as making impressions on other people to get OEM hardware.
On top of that, these are the people that upgrade their system every several months without much thought. That's a lot more money than even 2 Dell systems over a period of 3 years or so.
Using this as a basis, overclockers are not only a significant source of income, they're good for marketing, public relations, and further sales. They're also a significantly higher source of income than their market percentage would suggest (whatever that percentage is).
It would be beyond fantastic for the next Civilization game, though. Especially if the civ people fix some of the combat innacuracies (like a pikeman killing mobile infantry, or calvary destorying an army of infantry)
No, it would likely replace X-win entirely. You'd get UNIX-style process management, be able to run bash and such natively, but no X applications would would not work on their "WinX" server, and you'd be able to write win32 api wrapers for grep, bind, and such - or they'd be included. That, and you'd have the ability to run all your lovely win32 applications.
I can't say this'd be a bad thing. Not for software users, at least, provided the licensing restrictions weren't insane the price wasn't horrible. (Granted, there'd be people skirting those restrictions thorugh warez/cracks anyway...) And I doubt MS would do anyhting of the sort anway.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, you're right. A mere 4 days after the source has been released and made available to them, they have a) managed to organize themselves, b) get a fair comprehension of the code base, c) start working on it, and d) release a fairly functional (hey, when Duke3D first came out, I played it w/ just the keyboard - I suspect many others did too) binary that is at least playable.
Compare this to, say, Duke Nukem Forever, which has been in development for uncounted years, and all we've seen is a couple screenshots (and none in the last couple years, either).
What's more, open source isn't having, "problems" - not unless you consider linux's ability to make strides against MS on the desktop market a problem (something both IBM, Apple, and untold forgotten companies have had problems doing for 20 years).
Please stop being a troll.
You say 4 days as if that's a long time.
I wonder how long it'll be until someone replaces the BUILD engine with the 3d rendering abilities of the Quake engine for better gameplay? It could use the same textures for most things. I s'pose it depends on how well each game is programmed, how modularized it is, and how long it takes to convert Duke3d or Quake to the other's respective language.
Descent must've had many of the same capabilities. I recall custom multiplayer (and some single player, default) maps that would allow two people to occupy the same space in a room that they entered through different doorways, and not be able to detect each other.
IIRC, Descent was a full-3d engine.
I too took a look at the 3DRealms site and found the source on the 1st. I was sure it was a farce - until I built it.
;) It's release alongside "Duke Nukem Forever released....!. .. on Atari 2600" was also good for effect - it made the source release (something unexpected) obscene by proxy.
It's funny - this shows that 3DRealms actually managed to pull a pretty good April Fool's joke on the slashdot Taco Gang by doing something geeky and credible on the 1st.
Well... I may have forgotten to eat or go to class a couple times... here or there... or such. :)
It's April 1st at 8:40PM Central. Why have I not seen a, "Duke Nukem Forever Released" slashdot header?
I wonder if somoene in the Taco Gang is deathly ill? I can think of no other explaination myself.
If you think NWN is a huge timesink, then you've obviously never played the original Baldur's Gate. We're talking about a magnitude scale of at least 4 here.
At the end of Baldur's Gate, after having thuroughly explored every nook and cranny of the world, I'd accumilated 212 game days of play. That's approximately 2 hours per game day: 424 hours. (If I recall the conversion properly.) That's 17 and 2/3rd days, straight. Now, consider your average person sleeps 8 hours a night, it equals roughly 26.5 days of gameplay, not taking into account things like bathing, eating, and work.
And that statistic doesn't even begin to take into account the many hours spent saving, loading, and replaying sections of the game that are all but impossible to perform well. I'd say that, realistically, you can easily double or triple my figures.
In contrast, it took me less than a week to beat NWN while going about school, sleeping, eating, and other various activities.
Nonsense. Laptops keep getting larger - what are they up to now, 15" LCDs in the highend ones? People are using them as 'desktop replacements' which is just ludicrous. They're ill suited for that.
As far as thicker: not in this world. Laptops would lose all functionality if they got much larger. This is why they're trying to make them smaller (at least some companies are, noteably Sony and Fujitsu *drool*).
People have been tlaking for years about how kludged together the current internet infrastructure is; my question is, might something like this make for a feasable replacement, or at least a suppliment to what is already out there? I can see this being very useful indeed. You'd be able to de-centralize the root servers, and have them be distributed from
The point of my statement was to draw emphasis to the absurdity of the previous poster's claim that WWII weapons during the middle ages would have won the Crusades for Europe.
"Me too!" said the liberal sheep.
Likewise, quite a few PG-rated films from the 70's would be rated R today due to nudity/sexuality.
Just like a single machine gun (an AK47, say) with unlimitted ammunition would have won the war for either side in nearly any conflict prior to WWI.
A Hitler speech? From 25 years ago, a good long time after WW2 stuff was done with? In german? Repeated by GW Bush word for word? The same GW Bush that's President of the USA?
Brahahahahahahaha
Thanks, I needed a laugh.
I suspect the same thing will happen to the JFK assassination papers. I doubt they even still exist, but the gov't will likely claim they're being held for 'further study' - even though the gov't claimed back then that there was nothing to study, and the case was closed.
Could I please have whatever the submitter and timothy are abusing? I need a healthy departure from reality.
As has been mentioned, a $100 child's (debateable, I know) portable game system and a $600 semi-pro digital camera have nothing in common other than that they have those neat little resistors and electronic things in them! It's like comparing apples and... caviar. There's nothing similar about these items.
Slashdot, you have been topic trolled.
You should join the music industry.
That's "Ob/Gyn". Don't post unless you know what you're talking about.
I'm not exactly sure what you're saying here. Maybe you could clarify for me. What I hear you saying is, "So what? Hire a UNIX/linux guy. UNIX/linux on a mainframe can do the same work just as well, if not better, than the native OS." Am I correct? Having never used (or seen) a mainframe myself, I can't easily speculate.
First, as a little background, let me state that I've applied at dozens of colleges and gotten accepted, and have looked into the whole college admittance thing pretty thuroughly in the last 4 years or so, so I like to think I'm fairly knowledgeable of the whole financial aid, scholarship, and admittance game.
1.) Probably significantly, especially in this economy. Age often helps determine wage: if you're starting at 30k a year at 18, as opposed to 40k at 22 then you're already several thousand dollars behind the curve.
2.) I'd go EE if I had your skillset and interests most certainly, especially because of (once again) the economy.
3.) My experience with college is that it depends on where you go to school (and what they have to offer), what you consider a 'good' course, and your previous experience. I've been to two different colleges, and neither really did it for me - I don't learn well in lecture environments because people go too slowly, the information isn't particularly interesting, and other instances like that.
I'd say that if you went to a middle-of-the-road high school, did well, and didn't particularly enjoy it, you probably won't enjoy college course work much or at all. Large colleges have the same homework/test structure as high schools (and they're mostly the accuscan variety). A small college will have a lot of essays and intensive instruction, which I'd definately say is better.
Overall, however, I found college courses to be oriented towards those that didn't know what they were doing with their lives to help them give them a broader knowledge base, and to hopefully give them direction (not absolutely, of course - that's just my take). I ended up withdrawing from school as a result, and haven't regretted it yet. It's given me the freedom to persue things on my own. If you're a very self-motivated person (as it apears you are) you might want to consider forgoing college and just starting something up on your own. If you feel technically inclined/motivated enough to do it, that is.
4.) Yeah, it'll probably help, but probably not that much. If you're trying to goto MIT, chances are most students already do things like that (HAM radio, companies on the side, small engine design, etc.) so it'll almost be a prerequisite, while at a lesser school, it'll possibly gain you scholarships. My experience is that unless it's somewhere like Stanford, Duke, or such, as long as you meet the mininum requirements, they'll gladly accept you in - almost too eagerly. I suspect that unless they have a special tech scholarship, things such as that will be relatively unimportant to the school.
5.) That's a tough question. On one hand, I was nowhere near ready for 'the real world' when I had graduated from high school, so I'd probably go to college. While I don't think I really benefited from the course work directly (I'd probably have learned more reading/studying on my own) I do think that I grew as a person, and that was definately beneficial. I was able to figure out more exactly what my interests were - beyond my abilities. Sure, I was good with computers and a decent enough programmer, but I found I'd rather be doing something else. (I'm doing computer stuff now out in the real world, but I didn't want to become yet another programming drone.)
While college is mostly about the social aspect, people say (this is true)... it was pretty undesireable for me. Most people are still too immature and unknowledgeable at college age to hold an intellectual conversation, and most get togethers involve beer and loud music (unless you're lucky to find a group of like-minded people). Finding the right kind of people largely depends on the kind of school you go to. If you go to a large university, there'll be a large selection, but if you go to a small, CS/EE focused college, there'll likely be people that are much more focused on that particular field and spend larger amounts of time doing that kind of hting on their free time.
Something that people seem to overl
Yes, it does.
The main people I know with fast, new, and custom systems are overclockers. They push the envelope and cause other people to envy what they have time in and time out: "Oh, your system is so fast. I want a machine like that."
These are also the people that buy OEM CPUs - which bring more money into the CPU manufacturers than do systems from Dell, etc. Thus, OCers bring in more per capita income to CPU companies, as well as making impressions on other people to get OEM hardware.
On top of that, these are the people that upgrade their system every several months without much thought. That's a lot more money than even 2 Dell systems over a period of 3 years or so.
Using this as a basis, overclockers are not only a significant source of income, they're good for marketing, public relations, and further sales. They're also a significantly higher source of income than their market percentage would suggest (whatever that percentage is).
It would be beyond fantastic for the next Civilization game, though. Especially if the civ people fix some of the combat innacuracies (like a pikeman killing mobile infantry, or calvary destorying an army of infantry)
No, it would likely replace X-win entirely. You'd get UNIX-style process management, be able to run bash and such natively, but no X applications would would not work on their "WinX" server, and you'd be able to write win32 api wrapers for grep, bind, and such - or they'd be included. That, and you'd have the ability to run all your lovely win32 applications.
I can't say this'd be a bad thing. Not for software users, at least, provided the licensing restrictions weren't insane the price wasn't horrible. (Granted, there'd be people skirting those restrictions thorugh warez/cracks anyway...) And I doubt MS would do anyhting of the sort anway.
Please do not take run-of-the mill quotes from horrible movies as fact.