That's a special case, then, if they use the same portage repositories as Gentoo for all but their distribution-specific files. That means the packages the Sabayon team puts together are the only ones they have to worry about so long as they don't break portage. Any lag from the individual projects to Sabayon for most packages would then be only what Gentoo users would get anyway.
Barry Kauler (the guy behind Puppy) has always worked hard on the automated rebuilding of the distro, including remastering a Puppy CD with a different package selection from an existing Puppy installation. Right now, he's working on a set of programs that will build a Puppy distro from one of a number of other distros (including automatically stripping excess files out of the packages and configuring them for minimal resource usage as much as can be managed). The project is called "Woof", and it will build a Puppy distro from T2, Arch, Slackware, Debian, or Ubuntu in just a few steps. The resulting distro is familiar to Puppy users but is binary compatible with whichever distro was used to build it and can use that distro's repositories. It's still a work in progress, but it's a nice way for a smaller, specialized distro to offer a wide variety of packages with no additional lag time.
I'm not involved in Puppy's development. I am a happy user of it on several of my systems, and I have used the existing tools to make private LiveCD spinoffs for particular systems.
Tracking the projects is one thing. Testing and integration by the top-level distributions can take some time, and it'd defeat the purpose of using them if they didn't take the time to smooth out bumps of using a bunch of different packages together.
To me, a more interesting question is how far behind do the second and third tier distributions that source from Arch, Red Hat, Fedora, Mandriva, Debian, OpenSuse, Ubuntu, Slackware, and Puppy lag behind? Obviously with Yellow Dog, White Box, CentOS, PCLinux OS, MEPIS, NimbleX, ZenWalk, etc out there being based on other distros, some questions arise.
Some distros (notably Slackware, Mandriva, and Sabayon themselves) went from being based on other distros and started at some point doing the package integrations themselves. Which ones still wait for a stable version of another distro and start customizing it before they release? Their packages are often far behind those of the distros upon which they are built. Ones that update direct from the included projects have a huge head start on usability, features, and security updates over distros that depend on the work of another distro upstream.
Tracking the integration time of the first-tier distros answers some important questions, but with the huge number of distros out there depending on those, perhaps the more important questions will have to wait for another study.
I wouldn't have corrected the grammar on its own, but since I was responding anyway...;-) Besides, there are a couple of those phrases I see these days and consider a joke worth continuing. Yeah, I'm an asshole.
Well, as for levels, classes, and skills, there are discussions we could have over what's considered a class. In original D&D (the original published books, first edition, not the original computer game) your race and your class were the same thing. A dwarf did this while an elf did that. In other games, including later D&D editions, classes were separate (although sometimes still a race was limited to certain classes or vice-versa). A level in that class would give you a certain lump of new benefits. Then, there's the dual-classing in which you can get two different packages of stuff. Then there are classes in some games that only give bonuses or detriments to skills, attributes, or special abilities you gain by usage or by spending points. A class or archetype, or "career" in some games, may or may not have levels associated with it, depending on the game.
A skill-point system assumes your character trains in the skills in your downtime between adventures. Some games require that the player can only assign skill points to a skill that was used at least X times (as low as one) during the session. That gives a bit of the feel of a usage-based advancement system, but is more open. A pure usage-based skill advancement assumes the characters have no downtime between adventures in which to train, which for some settings and genres makes perfect sense. Either ties the advancement to the skill itself rather than some generalization about the character's job or title. They just allow the advancement to be tied more tightly (straight usage-based) or more loosely (point-based) to the flow of time the character is actually being role-played by the player.
Some games, like Dark Conspiracy from GDW for example, use a "career" template (or more, as Dark Conspiracy does) to give a starting skill set to a character but allows further development to be via a different mechanism (spending points in this case). Spending points makes sense in Dark Conspiracy, because most of the player characters in the genre have day jobs to support themselves and go on missions in their spare time. What they do on a mission wouldn't limit what they can study or practice between missions.
In a game in which the character's full-time activity is in the session and the characters pick up exactly where they left off from a previous adventure at the start of every session (which is how many computer-based RPGs are set up), the character only getting more skill proficiency by using the skill or actively training in it in the game session makes sense.
Either of these leaves the skills independent of one over character or class level. Even if a character is limited to what skills he or she can take by a class, the skills might be raised individually and not per level of the class.
If you're really interested in discussing RPG theory and how permutations of game concepts and rules effect game play in different genres and settings, then you'd probably want to check out The Forge where many game designers hang out and share ideas.
DNS, and in particular BIND, the reference implementation, is decidedly not IP-centric, but it has tended to be used that way. It can hold pretty mu8ch anything for the addresses (or even other types of data). The interface to it does tend to be only TCP/IP, but that wouldn't have been a major hurdle to overcome. A DNS server that's accessible via TCP/IP and some other protocol wouldn't have riled many people.
Windows for Workgroups had a small 32-bit API in version 3.11 already. Remember Win32s? NT was supposed to be the next Windows, and it and OS/2 were supposed to be compatible. Then, the entirely incompatible Windows 95 came out, and most Windows 95 applications couldn't be made to run properly on OS/2 no matter what library games you played. The complaint isn't that old DOS or OS/2 2.x apps couldn't run on Windows NT. It's that Microsoft purposely made 95 and its apps incompatible with OS/2 to kill one of OS/2's main selling points: that it was compatible with Windows applications.
In Battlefield 2, each class got a progression of primary weapons based on past achievements. In multiplayer at least (I haven't played it much single-player) you start with your choice of the base primary weapon or your upgraded primary weapon for the class.
No. Skill-based in many games means you get to choose which skills go up when. Play Shadowrun or Rifts and AD&D or Treasures and Trolls on paper and see the difference. Some skill-based games base gains on use. Some use skill points. Level-based games raise a predefined set of abilities a set amount at every new level. There's no "must be skill points you can apply" or "must be use-based per skill" that makes one or the other level-based.
These two systems (skills vs. levels) actually come from the pen-and-paper RPG games of the last thirty years. That they are big news in the computerized games is just evidence that you can never please everyone with a single choice. Now, when the computer game people discover dice pools and talent dice that some pen and paper games have, the issue will get even more muddied in computer-driven games.
That's a good read, but when will people with real-world credentials start to realize there's no use writing for the Times if you want your story trusted?
It isn't paranoia if they've done it to you more than once already to think they might do it again. And yes, I can name the "they" -- Microsoft. It's more than one person, after all. A corporation by definition is a "conspiracy", although not necessarily with the negative connotations that word carries. It's always one group of people working together for a common goal which furthers the interests of their group above and before the interests of others. Perhaps when looking for conspiracy nuts you find them easily when corporations are being discussed, but that doesn't mean anyone's actually paranoid.
The idea of embracing and extending is an old one. First, you offer to work with someone. Then, you slip in nonstandard extensions that aren't as widely available, but convince people they are an improvement. Then, you either pull out compatibility with the old standard or count on enough people using your new, non-standard version that people using the open version are left behind.
Microsoft has tried this with TCP/IP, name services (WINS rather than DNS), network protocols (NetBEUI), office suites (MS Office was once capable of opening and saving the formats of suites which were then more popular, but thanks to preloads and trial versions dropped support for the competition's file formats once it was the market leader), filesystems (it's still suing over variations of FAT), and even the joint development of operating systems (a cross-license and joint development agreement between Microsoft and IBM for Windows and OS/2 ran out just before Microsoft unleashed Windows 95, which was gratuitously incompatible with the Windows APIs in OS/2).
And if you understood CIDR, you'd know that 10/8 means you have from 10.0.0.1 to 10.255.255.254 on the same subnet. This is much like the issue of not understanding CIDR and thinking that the.1 and.255 addresses are actually useful to you in a/24 subnet.
None intended or taken here, either. I might very well like to invite you over for whiskey, cigars, poker, and RTS LAN parties if I knew you. I just don't know you. Sometimes playing games with strangers is fun, but playing them with friends you've known for years is typically more fun.
It'd be easier for them to just upgrade.NET to be incompatible with everything they promised not to sue over. Then they can sue when people upgrade, because there's no promise covering the new versions.
How is that, if you use the publicly advertised IP that connects to Battle.net? Unless you're using multiple real IPv4 addresses for your home, you're going to be connecting to their server all from the same IP, and only your router knows which packets go back to which PC behind it.
Please explain to me how TCP/IP only handles 255 computers. You know the Internet is TCP/IP, right, with over 4 billion addresses? If you understand CIDR, you can easily have a broadcast to more than 255 addresses, too. Isn't it more likely that the game lobby software is what limits the size of the players in each lobby?
Well, Supreme Commander isn't that far off. It's by the same designer and everything. Spring might count as TA2 for that matter. Kingdoms doesn't really, but that still leaves two paths to a rightful TA3 even if it never gets named that.
Who the fuck wants to be consolidated into a community experience? I want to play my game with my friends. Fuck the rest of you. I don't know you, and you're not invited over for whiskey, cigars, poker, and RTS gaming. It's my game when I buy it, and I'll play it how the hell I want or I won't buy it.
If IPX was painful, you were doing it wrong. Having TCP/IP will still be necessary if you're using the Internet, because the Internet uses TCP/IP. I'll play Total Annihilation or StarCraft I before I drop $60 on a game I can't play without their shitty overloaded server.
Q. Did I list one reason, or more than one? A. More than one.
Q. Did I say the list was exhaustive? A. No, I did not.
Google's search uses a lot of bandwidth, sure, but search results are not bandwidth intensive per user. Blogger isn't, either, and neither are their ads. GMail can be somewhat bandwidth-intensive depending on the user. Google Voice and YouTube are bandwidth-intensive. Apparently you fail to recognize the difference.
Marketing is often 10% to 25% of a company's budget. You don't see one minute TV spots for Google, do you? Google doesn't advertise on the radio, or before movies at the cinema or on DVD. If $300,000,000 helps gets them users and advertisers that support the rest of the business, you can consider it part of their marketing fund. Their gross revenues top 5 billion dollars per quarter. Fourth quarter of 2008, they made over a billion dollars net before one-time charges. So YouTube's losses per year are about 25% of their net income per quarter. How much ad revenue do you think goes through GMail and Google search because they also own YouTube? Maybe 7% or more?
$10,000 goes a long way toward starting over if you've just lost your entire business. It at least pays the movers and a couple months worth of living expenses.
There are more specific questions about how they could gain value from YouTube. Will Google, which reportedly uses a homogeneous infrastructure for all of its apps, learn important and valuable lessons from hosting a popular high-bandwidth site on that infrastructure? Will they gain important mindshare in other markets because of it? Will they learn important rules about search, user interaction, or advertising markets which they can apply to other services they offer?
The problem in a country like the US probably wouldn't be an openly bad leader who claimed to be serving his own ends. It'd be a demagogue who claimed to be doing the country a favor under some extreme circumstances, and who would try to convince as many people to be on his or her side as possible.
Remember Joe McCarthy. The first place you'd see "un-American ideals" or "un-American actions" applied is to the ranks of the military if someone really wanted to wield them against the citizenry. A despot will kick out many loyal to the people and recruit many loyal to the command structure before cracking down too hard. It's how Stalin, Mao, Saddam Hussein, and others did things. First you strengthen your support among the troops, then you thin out dissenters among the people, then you intimidate the rest using the troops. Finally, you put in the Gestapo/KGB/Stassi equivalent to keep people under surveillance so you can keep them cowed or stifle new dissenters early.
I don't expect visitors to know English very well, unless they're also from an English-speaking country or claimed to know English well (for a job or similar). I do expect immigrants to try to pick some up, or to bring along a friend or family member to help when they want to do business with me. I'll try to communicate with anyone, but it's much easier if they have at least some English vocabulary.
Some people here are backward and insular, but believe it or not many Americans get pissed at other Americans for that attitude. Most immigrants really do at least try to learn enough of the language to make their lives easier. Most people I've run across will deal just fine with people who appear to make an effort.
It does get a little old, though, being in a predominantly English-speaking country and having to order a sandwich in Spanish at a fast food franchise. Luckily, that's not an issue for me, and the numbered value meals on the menu are actually a big help in that regard for others. Special orders can be a pain for some people, though. Most people here would expect that at least the shift manager at a business (at least one not in an all-immigrant neighborhood) could communicate with the majority's first language.
Slashdot Mirror
That's a special case, then, if they use the same portage repositories as Gentoo for all but their distribution-specific files. That means the packages the Sabayon team puts together are the only ones they have to worry about so long as they don't break portage. Any lag from the individual projects to Sabayon for most packages would then be only what Gentoo users would get anyway.
Barry Kauler (the guy behind Puppy) has always worked hard on the automated rebuilding of the distro, including remastering a Puppy CD with a different package selection from an existing Puppy installation. Right now, he's working on a set of programs that will build a Puppy distro from one of a number of other distros (including automatically stripping excess files out of the packages and configuring them for minimal resource usage as much as can be managed). The project is called "Woof", and it will build a Puppy distro from T2, Arch, Slackware, Debian, or Ubuntu in just a few steps. The resulting distro is familiar to Puppy users but is binary compatible with whichever distro was used to build it and can use that distro's repositories. It's still a work in progress, but it's a nice way for a smaller, specialized distro to offer a wide variety of packages with no additional lag time.
I'm not involved in Puppy's development. I am a happy user of it on several of my systems, and I have used the existing tools to make private LiveCD spinoffs for particular systems.
Tracking the projects is one thing. Testing and integration by the top-level distributions can take some time, and it'd defeat the purpose of using them if they didn't take the time to smooth out bumps of using a bunch of different packages together.
To me, a more interesting question is how far behind do the second and third tier distributions that source from Arch, Red Hat, Fedora, Mandriva, Debian, OpenSuse, Ubuntu, Slackware, and Puppy lag behind? Obviously with Yellow Dog, White Box, CentOS, PCLinux OS, MEPIS, NimbleX, ZenWalk, etc out there being based on other distros, some questions arise.
Some distros (notably Slackware, Mandriva, and Sabayon themselves) went from being based on other distros and started at some point doing the package integrations themselves. Which ones still wait for a stable version of another distro and start customizing it before they release? Their packages are often far behind those of the distros upon which they are built. Ones that update direct from the included projects have a huge head start on usability, features, and security updates over distros that depend on the work of another distro upstream.
Tracking the integration time of the first-tier distros answers some important questions, but with the huge number of distros out there depending on those, perhaps the more important questions will have to wait for another study.
So we can bail out Wells Fargo for unforeseen expenses they incurred?
I wouldn't have corrected the grammar on its own, but since I was responding anyway... ;-) Besides, there are a couple of those phrases I see these days and consider a joke worth continuing. Yeah, I'm an asshole.
Well, as for levels, classes, and skills, there are discussions we could have over what's considered a class. In original D&D (the original published books, first edition, not the original computer game) your race and your class were the same thing. A dwarf did this while an elf did that. In other games, including later D&D editions, classes were separate (although sometimes still a race was limited to certain classes or vice-versa). A level in that class would give you a certain lump of new benefits. Then, there's the dual-classing in which you can get two different packages of stuff. Then there are classes in some games that only give bonuses or detriments to skills, attributes, or special abilities you gain by usage or by spending points. A class or archetype, or "career" in some games, may or may not have levels associated with it, depending on the game.
A skill-point system assumes your character trains in the skills in your downtime between adventures. Some games require that the player can only assign skill points to a skill that was used at least X times (as low as one) during the session. That gives a bit of the feel of a usage-based advancement system, but is more open. A pure usage-based skill advancement assumes the characters have no downtime between adventures in which to train, which for some settings and genres makes perfect sense. Either ties the advancement to the skill itself rather than some generalization about the character's job or title. They just allow the advancement to be tied more tightly (straight usage-based) or more loosely (point-based) to the flow of time the character is actually being role-played by the player.
Some games, like Dark Conspiracy from GDW for example, use a "career" template (or more, as Dark Conspiracy does) to give a starting skill set to a character but allows further development to be via a different mechanism (spending points in this case). Spending points makes sense in Dark Conspiracy, because most of the player characters in the genre have day jobs to support themselves and go on missions in their spare time. What they do on a mission wouldn't limit what they can study or practice between missions.
In a game in which the character's full-time activity is in the session and the characters pick up exactly where they left off from a previous adventure at the start of every session (which is how many computer-based RPGs are set up), the character only getting more skill proficiency by using the skill or actively training in it in the game session makes sense.
Either of these leaves the skills independent of one over character or class level. Even if a character is limited to what skills he or she can take by a class, the skills might be raised individually and not per level of the class.
If you're really interested in discussing RPG theory and how permutations of game concepts and rules effect game play in different genres and settings, then you'd probably want to check out The Forge where many game designers hang out and share ideas.
DNS, and in particular BIND, the reference implementation, is decidedly not IP-centric, but it has tended to be used that way. It can hold pretty mu8ch anything for the addresses (or even other types of data). The interface to it does tend to be only TCP/IP, but that wouldn't have been a major hurdle to overcome. A DNS server that's accessible via TCP/IP and some other protocol wouldn't have riled many people.
Windows for Workgroups had a small 32-bit API in version 3.11 already. Remember Win32s? NT was supposed to be the next Windows, and it and OS/2 were supposed to be compatible. Then, the entirely incompatible Windows 95 came out, and most Windows 95 applications couldn't be made to run properly on OS/2 no matter what library games you played. The complaint isn't that old DOS or OS/2 2.x apps couldn't run on Windows NT. It's that Microsoft purposely made 95 and its apps incompatible with OS/2 to kill one of OS/2's main selling points: that it was compatible with Windows applications.
In Battlefield 2, each class got a progression of primary weapons based on past achievements. In multiplayer at least (I haven't played it much single-player) you start with your choice of the base primary weapon or your upgraded primary weapon for the class.
No. Skill-based in many games means you get to choose which skills go up when. Play Shadowrun or Rifts and AD&D or Treasures and Trolls on paper and see the difference. Some skill-based games base gains on use. Some use skill points. Level-based games raise a predefined set of abilities a set amount at every new level. There's no "must be skill points you can apply" or "must be use-based per skill" that makes one or the other level-based.
BTW, it's "intents and purposes".
These two systems (skills vs. levels) actually come from the pen-and-paper RPG games of the last thirty years. That they are big news in the computerized games is just evidence that you can never please everyone with a single choice. Now, when the computer game people discover dice pools and talent dice that some pen and paper games have, the issue will get even more muddied in computer-driven games.
That's a good read, but when will people with real-world credentials start to realize there's no use writing for the Times if you want your story trusted?
It isn't paranoia if they've done it to you more than once already to think they might do it again. And yes, I can name the "they" -- Microsoft. It's more than one person, after all. A corporation by definition is a "conspiracy", although not necessarily with the negative connotations that word carries. It's always one group of people working together for a common goal which furthers the interests of their group above and before the interests of others. Perhaps when looking for conspiracy nuts you find them easily when corporations are being discussed, but that doesn't mean anyone's actually paranoid.
The idea of embracing and extending is an old one. First, you offer to work with someone. Then, you slip in nonstandard extensions that aren't as widely available, but convince people they are an improvement. Then, you either pull out compatibility with the old standard or count on enough people using your new, non-standard version that people using the open version are left behind.
Microsoft has tried this with TCP/IP, name services (WINS rather than DNS), network protocols (NetBEUI), office suites (MS Office was once capable of opening and saving the formats of suites which were then more popular, but thanks to preloads and trial versions dropped support for the competition's file formats once it was the market leader), filesystems (it's still suing over variations of FAT), and even the joint development of operating systems (a cross-license and joint development agreement between Microsoft and IBM for Windows and OS/2 ran out just before Microsoft unleashed Windows 95, which was gratuitously incompatible with the Windows APIs in OS/2).
And if you understood CIDR, you'd know that 10/8 means you have from 10.0.0.1 to 10.255.255.254 on the same subnet. This is much like the issue of not understanding CIDR and thinking that the .1 and .255 addresses are actually useful to you in a /24 subnet.
None intended or taken here, either. I might very well like to invite you over for whiskey, cigars, poker, and RTS LAN parties if I knew you. I just don't know you. Sometimes playing games with strangers is fun, but playing them with friends you've known for years is typically more fun.
It'd be easier for them to just upgrade .NET to be incompatible with everything they promised not to sue over. Then they can sue when people upgrade, because there's no promise covering the new versions.
How is that, if you use the publicly advertised IP that connects to Battle.net? Unless you're using multiple real IPv4 addresses for your home, you're going to be connecting to their server all from the same IP, and only your router knows which packets go back to which PC behind it.
Please explain to me how TCP/IP only handles 255 computers. You know the Internet is TCP/IP, right, with over 4 billion addresses? If you understand CIDR, you can easily have a broadcast to more than 255 addresses, too. Isn't it more likely that the game lobby software is what limits the size of the players in each lobby?
Well, Supreme Commander isn't that far off. It's by the same designer and everything. Spring might count as TA2 for that matter. Kingdoms doesn't really, but that still leaves two paths to a rightful TA3 even if it never gets named that.
Who the fuck wants to be consolidated into a community experience? I want to play my game with my friends. Fuck the rest of you. I don't know you, and you're not invited over for whiskey, cigars, poker, and RTS gaming. It's my game when I buy it, and I'll play it how the hell I want or I won't buy it.
If IPX was painful, you were doing it wrong. Having TCP/IP will still be necessary if you're using the Internet, because the Internet uses TCP/IP. I'll play Total Annihilation or StarCraft I before I drop $60 on a game I can't play without their shitty overloaded server.
Q. Did I list one reason, or more than one?
A. More than one.
Q. Did I say the list was exhaustive?
A. No, I did not.
Google's search uses a lot of bandwidth, sure, but search results are not bandwidth intensive per user. Blogger isn't, either, and neither are their ads. GMail can be somewhat bandwidth-intensive depending on the user. Google Voice and YouTube are bandwidth-intensive. Apparently you fail to recognize the difference.
Marketing is often 10% to 25% of a company's budget. You don't see one minute TV spots for Google, do you? Google doesn't advertise on the radio, or before movies at the cinema or on DVD. If $300,000,000 helps gets them users and advertisers that support the rest of the business, you can consider it part of their marketing fund. Their gross revenues top 5 billion dollars per quarter. Fourth quarter of 2008, they made over a billion dollars net before one-time charges. So YouTube's losses per year are about 25% of their net income per quarter. How much ad revenue do you think goes through GMail and Google search because they also own YouTube? Maybe 7% or more?
$10,000 goes a long way toward starting over if you've just lost your entire business. It at least pays the movers and a couple months worth of living expenses.
There are more specific questions about how they could gain value from YouTube. Will Google, which reportedly uses a homogeneous infrastructure for all of its apps, learn important and valuable lessons from hosting a popular high-bandwidth site on that infrastructure? Will they gain important mindshare in other markets because of it? Will they learn important rules about search, user interaction, or advertising markets which they can apply to other services they offer?
Windows 7 RC -- because your time is free to Microsoft, and your data is less important than your Ballmer fanboi suckass score.
The problem in a country like the US probably wouldn't be an openly bad leader who claimed to be serving his own ends. It'd be a demagogue who claimed to be doing the country a favor under some extreme circumstances, and who would try to convince as many people to be on his or her side as possible.
Remember Joe McCarthy. The first place you'd see "un-American ideals" or "un-American actions" applied is to the ranks of the military if someone really wanted to wield them against the citizenry. A despot will kick out many loyal to the people and recruit many loyal to the command structure before cracking down too hard. It's how Stalin, Mao, Saddam Hussein, and others did things. First you strengthen your support among the troops, then you thin out dissenters among the people, then you intimidate the rest using the troops. Finally, you put in the Gestapo/KGB/Stassi equivalent to keep people under surveillance so you can keep them cowed or stifle new dissenters early.
I don't expect visitors to know English very well, unless they're also from an English-speaking country or claimed to know English well (for a job or similar). I do expect immigrants to try to pick some up, or to bring along a friend or family member to help when they want to do business with me. I'll try to communicate with anyone, but it's much easier if they have at least some English vocabulary.
Some people here are backward and insular, but believe it or not many Americans get pissed at other Americans for that attitude. Most immigrants really do at least try to learn enough of the language to make their lives easier. Most people I've run across will deal just fine with people who appear to make an effort.
It does get a little old, though, being in a predominantly English-speaking country and having to order a sandwich in Spanish at a fast food franchise. Luckily, that's not an issue for me, and the numbered value meals on the menu are actually a big help in that regard for others. Special orders can be a pain for some people, though. Most people here would expect that at least the shift manager at a business (at least one not in an all-immigrant neighborhood) could communicate with the majority's first language.