The key to Linux succeeding on the desktop is DRM. No, really. Once the vast majority of people who pirate windows are no longer able to do so, they will no doubt get a "pirated" Linux instead. Seamless integration of windows "emulation" would also help. Whenever they get it working, that is. WineX is getting there, but nowhere near where it needs to go.
Megacorps are EVIL! EVIL I say! And they will bring DOOOM TO US ALL!!! But... they are wasting $10 million on a legal defense fund to help Linus! YAY MEGACORPS!
What do we know about that star and its surroundings? Is it likely to have inhabitable planets or is it bathed by lethal radiation from neighboring novas? How long before we can actually check these stars for Earth-like planets? Last I heard, we now had the ability to detect planets slightly smaller than Jupiter. Will we find, or even see, an inhabitable planet within a few decades?
I dont know anything about firewalls but Teamspeak has both a win32 and linux version, I've used it a lot, it has very low bandwidth comsumption and it's completely painless to set up.
Bzzt. Wrong. Telecommunications comes from the greek "tele-" which means far off, distant, remote. Television - seeing stuff that is potentially far away. Telephone (-phone = sound, as in gramophone) hearing sounds, in particular voices that are supposedly distant from you. "Telecommunications" are thus non-medium-specific. They can be wired or wireless, and consist of sounds, images or data in general.
In SL everything is always and permanently labeled with the name of its creator. It's not immediately visible, but the info is easy to retrieve by opening the object properties in a little window. We also have a "right of first sale" that specifies everything that is not set as fully copyable may be resold even if it is for profit. We have a script library where everyone may put their scripts, and also a bazaar for freely distributable objects. By the way, one of the clothes every newbie gets for free in the game's default inventory is a Tux tee:)
Yeah, I play that too, except the graphics suck, most of the players are fat or ugly, or both. You can't fly around without some expensive vehicles, and money doesnt come for free every week, plus you cant build anything decent in 5 minutes, or instantly buy and sell land, or teleport, or fly around shooting your friends with realistic weapons without being afraid of dying, etc, etc... When you get sick of your house and want to make it bigger, you can do it in 5 seconds by stretching it. You can lift your entire house up in the air if you feel like it, or even put a vehicle script in it and drive it around, and of course you can also just put it into your pocket and take it with you while you teleport to the other side of the world. Oh, and in real life, when you're $1500 in the hole, you will probably not be able to get out of debt by teaching 3 classes or holding 3 parties or any sort of event.
Yup, I myself am from Portugal, I've been there since april and I've made no attempt to hide my nationality. Actually I advertise it with pride since I'm the only portuguese person there so far:)
Object and land banking are a reality, a lot of people do it so resources in some areas are a it scarce. Taxes are $48 per 4x4 meter plot of land, $96 in a few "expensive" regions, but you get discounts based on population density. Taxes on objects are $1 per basic object, but they increase with the volume and altitude of said object. Although your stipend and rating bonus will never increase your liquid cash beyond $3500, it is used to pay taxes on everything, so you can have a bonus of $4000, pay $3000 in taxes and get the other $1000 in cash.
Well, define operating system. I wouldnt buy a floppy with COMMAND.COM, IO.SYS and MSDOS.SYS, or whatever the correspondent files are in NT-based systems, only to be told I needed to buy a separate GUI pack and application pack... the software that comes with a computer should meet people's reasonable expectations. People expect to be able to burn CDs and browse the web nowadays. Actually I've been screaming for integrated CD burning since Windows 95! Took them long enough, dammit! Bundling is often a good thing when it isnt done to abuse a monopoly position. Linux distros bundle one heck of a lot more than Windows does and we all love them for it. At least I do. I wish Windows came with as many cool games and apps as your average Red Hat or Mandrake ISO...
A couple of things: Stipends are weekly and as for trolls/griefers, Linden Lab takes very good care of their game, having several Liaisons in the game to help players, announce events, and get rid of unwanted people. They're all very nice and friendly, and most if not all are veteran players working from their home, though now that they're working for Linden Lab they usually dont spend as much time on their player accounts. All the devs and employees in general have accounts in the game, and even the CEO plays it frequently. He is a very nice guy, who actually acts like a normal human being instead of vomiting marketing speak:) Now go and play the damn game already, you get a free trial week and nothing is charged to your credit card unless you actively and voluntarily choose to go to the website again at the end of it and join the game as a resident. The one thing SL is currently lacking is people.
You were accepted into the beta? When? The beta was over months ago! In June, IIRC. There's lots of stuff to do over there even if you dont want to build anything. There's a huge racetrack, free vehicles, a pretty big amusement park, casino games, and the best thing about all of this is that you dont have to keep pumping money into the system. Want clothes? You have built-in tools for making your own clothes. Want a car, a hoverboard, a balloon, a rocket, a boat? You can easily make them yourself, or buy them off another player. Most content in the game is entirely user-made, including the LindenWorld theme park and the DarkLife RPG, both of which I am a part of. There's classes to teach you everything you need to know, and all sorts of events, parties, contests, the works. Everyone is pretty helpful (the game is more collaborative than competitive) and if you decide to try it, look for Eggy Lippmann in there and i'll take you through the basics.
Pangaea broke up around 200 million years ago, and dinosaurs appeared around 210 million years ago, so only the very earliest of dinosaurs were around to see it happen, considering that they were around for another 135 million years after that. I'd hate like hell for anyone to be misinformed;)
Then try Second Life where there are no experience points and the whole point of the game is to be creative and come up with your own stuff:) You can build anything in there using basic 3D shapes, textures, sounds and there's also a powerful scripting language that lets you make your objects do just about anything. The tools are so powerful that there is already an entirely player-built amusement park featuring ridable rollercoasters with realistic physics, a giant pinball game where you are the "ball", a spook house, an everquestish dungeon, a casino, various sports... the only limit is yourself:) I'm Eggy Lippmann in there, look me up during your free trial week if you need some help getting started - people in there are generally very helpful and kind to newbies and we have several player-run classes where you can learn all about the game, as well as all sorts of parties, contests and events in general.
You would be surprised at how easy it is to hook up all manner of ancient boxen to the internet. Hint: Ethernet and RS232 have been available for decades:)
Your problem is that you are thinking of it as a game. It's not a game like EQ or Counter Strike. If you are a creative person that likes to tinker in Photoshop or Bryce or even Legos you will enjoy this game to bits. If on the other hand, TV is your idea of entertainment, where the role you play is minimal since everything's been set up for you previously, stay away. I'm not a professional and your computer IS crap, since mine is two years old with the exception of a graphics card that cost less than $100. You cant seriously expect to play new games without new hardware, but SL's minimum requirements are a P3 800 anyway. SL is designed to run at TEN fps and usually runs well above that. Only shooter types of games really need high fps anyway. FF7 was designed to run at 15fps and no one complained about it. The restrictions on trials have since been removed, and yes you should think long and hard before paying as much for this game as you pay for some starbucks coffee, which you probably drink daily instead of monthly.
To the trollish AC parent: It's not really a game or a competition of any kind, it's an open ended collaborative creative environment. The idea is that you are provided with tools to build your own world and get your entertainment value from expressing your creativity instead of repetitively shooting everything that moves or hitting a bajillion random monsters with random swords. You can build a replica of any real-life object with the building tools provided - I built and run a smaller version of the MGM Grand right next to very close replicas of the Washington Monument and Fanway Park - or you can think up your own original stuff to build. Through scripting it is possible to create ANY game. I am working on an in-game civilization clone myself and I know someone has made Qbert and donkey kong. There are also several card games at my casino, and some people have made chess tables and dominoes. You can fight other people, with projectile guns or close combat weapons, but only on damage enabled areas. There is an entire server called Rizal which is dedicated to sports and games in general and events are held there on a regular basis. I'm sorry if you didnt like the game, its not really fit for the average joe tv watcher who wants his prepackaged entertainment handed to him in a silver platter. In SL you are a content provider rather than a content consumer, and the software merely provides you with the tools to create and view said content. Sorta like a 3D version of the web minus evil money grubbing megacorps. As for slow and buggy, I dont know when you tried it or what crappy computer you have but I have zero crashes and usually get 30fps on an fx5200. If you consider the fact that everything is STREAMED in real time to your computer and so there is NETWORK LAG to account for on every frame, not to mention AGP upload lag as well, the game is a remarkable technical achievement and anyone who wishes to get their free trial week should not let an ignorant AC stop them.
Uh, the game does include a system for land purchase, in fact if you build something outside of your plot of land its possible for the land's owner to delete your objects. You can also set No Build flags so ppl wont litter. The problem is that servers can only hold so many objects, and instead of giving someone a fixed quota, they created an economy. Rich people can build more, poor people can build less, and the taxes balance it out so that a very rich person will lose all their money to taxes if they are building too much (overusing server resources). You can have a free trial week if you want to see the game for yourself. I heartily recommend it.
As a member of the group who created the tax protest, I can tell you very well what it was about. In SL, each region is a server with clearly defined limitations - 10 thousand prims, which stands for primitive shapes (cube, sphere, cylinder...) Instead of getting a fixed amount of space, like what happens when you purchase some space for a webpage, the developers thought it would be better to create a virtual economy to distribute resources to everyone. Just to give you an idea, a prim costs 10 Linden dollars and is taxed at $1 per week, more if its far above the ground, if its very large, or if it is a light. Taxes are meant to prevent rapid resource depletion. Without an economy in place, a malicious user could fill up a server in seconds, and a particularly creative user playing normally could very well fill it up on his own. As you can see, the limits imposed by the game constraint our imagination a bit, and force us to learn some efficient 3d design techniques, keeping the details in the textures and doing only the basic structure with actual polygons. This is what everyone's angry about. They came to SL with the expectation that they could build to their heart's content, and started doing so, but quickly hit a wall where their income could not pay for their taxes anymore. So naturally they felt frustrated because they didnt want to delete anything. The tax system has been tweaked a bit and now everything is going fine. If you guys have any questions about SL or the tax protest I'll do my best to answer them.
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The key to Linux succeeding on the desktop is DRM.
No, really. Once the vast majority of people who pirate windows are no longer able to do so, they will no doubt get a "pirated" Linux instead.
Seamless integration of windows "emulation" would also help. Whenever they get it working, that is. WineX is getting there, but nowhere near where it needs to go.
Megacorps are EVIL! EVIL I say! And they will bring DOOOM TO US ALL!!!
But... they are wasting $10 million on a legal defense fund to help Linus! YAY MEGACORPS!
What do we know about that star and its surroundings? Is it likely to have inhabitable planets or is it bathed by lethal radiation from neighboring novas?
How long before we can actually check these stars for Earth-like planets? Last I heard, we now had the ability to detect planets slightly smaller than Jupiter. Will we find, or even see, an inhabitable planet within a few decades?
I dont know anything about firewalls but Teamspeak has both a win32 and linux version, I've used it a lot, it has very low bandwidth comsumption and it's completely painless to set up.
Uh dude I was a pimp when we were still in Beta :P
You can be anything you want in there. There's a bunch of strippers and even a prostitute =)
Bzzt. Wrong. Telecommunications comes from the greek "tele-" which means far off, distant, remote. Television - seeing stuff that is potentially far away. Telephone (-phone = sound, as in gramophone) hearing sounds, in particular voices that are supposedly distant from you.
"Telecommunications" are thus non-medium-specific. They can be wired or wireless, and consist of sounds, images or data in general.
I think you should read the latest MS EULAs more carefully... they already claim ownership of everything you do with your computer.
In SL everything is always and permanently labeled with the name of its creator. It's not immediately visible, but the info is easy to retrieve by opening the object properties in a little window. :)
We also have a "right of first sale" that specifies everything that is not set as fully copyable may be resold even if it is for profit.
We have a script library where everyone may put their scripts, and also a bazaar for freely distributable objects.
By the way, one of the clothes every newbie gets for free in the game's default inventory is a Tux tee
Yeah, I play that too, except the graphics suck, most of the players are fat or ugly, or both. You can't fly around without some expensive vehicles, and money doesnt come for free every week, plus you cant build anything decent in 5 minutes, or instantly buy and sell land, or teleport, or fly around shooting your friends with realistic weapons without being afraid of dying, etc, etc...
When you get sick of your house and want to make it bigger, you can do it in 5 seconds by stretching it. You can lift your entire house up in the air if you feel like it, or even put a vehicle script in it and drive it around, and of course you can also just put it into your pocket and take it with you while you teleport to the other side of the world.
Oh, and in real life, when you're $1500 in the hole, you will probably not be able to get out of debt by teaching 3 classes or holding 3 parties or any sort of event.
Yup, I myself am from Portugal, I've been there since april and I've made no attempt to hide my nationality. Actually I advertise it with pride since I'm the only portuguese person there so far :)
Object and land banking are a reality, a lot of people do it so resources in some areas are a it scarce. Taxes are $48 per 4x4 meter plot of land, $96 in a few "expensive" regions, but you get discounts based on population density.
Taxes on objects are $1 per basic object, but they increase with the volume and altitude of said object.
Although your stipend and rating bonus will never increase your liquid cash beyond $3500, it is used to pay taxes on everything, so you can have a bonus of $4000, pay $3000 in taxes and get the other $1000 in cash.
Well, define operating system. I wouldnt buy a floppy with COMMAND.COM, IO.SYS and MSDOS.SYS, or whatever the correspondent files are in NT-based systems, only to be told I needed to buy a separate GUI pack and application pack... the software that comes with a computer should meet people's reasonable expectations. People expect to be able to burn CDs and browse the web nowadays. Actually I've been screaming for integrated CD burning since Windows 95! Took them long enough, dammit!
Bundling is often a good thing when it isnt done to abuse a monopoly position. Linux distros bundle one heck of a lot more than Windows does and we all love them for it. At least I do. I wish Windows came with as many cool games and apps as your average Red Hat or Mandrake ISO...
Google already knows that
You may have intended this as a joke, but i've found that most of the gunk and dust bunnies clogging up my puter are 99% hair.
A couple of things: Stipends are weekly and as for trolls/griefers, Linden Lab takes very good care of their game, having several Liaisons in the game to help players, announce events, and get rid of unwanted people. :)
They're all very nice and friendly, and most if not all are veteran players working from their home, though now that they're working for Linden Lab they usually dont spend as much time on their player accounts.
All the devs and employees in general have accounts in the game, and even the CEO plays it frequently. He is a very nice guy, who actually acts like a normal human being instead of vomiting marketing speak
Now go and play the damn game already, you get a free trial week and nothing is charged to your credit card unless you actively and voluntarily choose to go to the website again at the end of it and join the game as a resident.
The one thing SL is currently lacking is people.
You were accepted into the beta? When? The beta was over months ago! In June, IIRC.
There's lots of stuff to do over there even if you dont want to build anything. There's a huge racetrack, free vehicles, a pretty big amusement park, casino games, and the best thing about all of this is that you dont have to keep pumping money into the system.
Want clothes? You have built-in tools for making your own clothes. Want a car, a hoverboard, a balloon, a rocket, a boat? You can easily make them yourself, or buy them off another player.
Most content in the game is entirely user-made, including the LindenWorld theme park and the DarkLife RPG, both of which I am a part of.
There's classes to teach you everything you need to know, and all sorts of events, parties, contests, the works. Everyone is pretty helpful (the game is more collaborative than competitive) and if you decide to try it, look for Eggy Lippmann in there and i'll take you through the basics.
Whoa there, my 3-yr old PC boots in 30 seconds or less, what the heck do you have installed?
You mean the Sega Saturn. The Genesis was a 16 bit console contemporary to the SNES, while the Saturn actually had 3D graphics like the PSX and N64.
Pangaea broke up around 200 million years ago, and dinosaurs appeared around 210 million years ago, so only the very earliest of dinosaurs were around to see it happen, considering that they were around for another 135 million years after that. ;)
I'd hate like hell for anyone to be misinformed
Then try Second Life where there are no experience points and the whole point of the game is to be creative and come up with your own stuff :) :)
You can build anything in there using basic 3D shapes, textures, sounds and there's also a powerful scripting language that lets you make your objects do just about anything.
The tools are so powerful that there is already an entirely player-built amusement park featuring ridable rollercoasters with realistic physics, a giant pinball game where you are the "ball", a spook house, an everquestish dungeon, a casino, various sports... the only limit is yourself
I'm Eggy Lippmann in there, look me up during your free trial week if you need some help getting started - people in there are generally very helpful and kind to newbies and we have several player-run classes where you can learn all about the game, as well as all sorts of parties, contests and events in general.
You would be surprised at how easy it is to hook up all manner of ancient boxen to the internet. Hint: Ethernet and RS232 have been available for decades :)
Your problem is that you are thinking of it as a game. It's not a game like EQ or Counter Strike.
If you are a creative person that likes to tinker in Photoshop or Bryce or even Legos you will enjoy this game to bits.
If on the other hand, TV is your idea of entertainment, where the role you play is minimal since everything's been set up for you previously, stay away.
I'm not a professional and your computer IS crap, since mine is two years old with the exception of a graphics card that cost less than $100. You cant seriously expect to play new games without new hardware, but SL's minimum requirements are a P3 800 anyway. SL is designed to run at TEN fps and usually runs well above that. Only shooter types of games really need high fps anyway. FF7 was designed to run at 15fps and no one complained about it.
The restrictions on trials have since been removed, and yes you should think long and hard before paying as much for this game as you pay for some starbucks coffee, which you probably drink daily instead of monthly.
To the trollish AC parent:
It's not really a game or a competition of any kind, it's an open ended collaborative creative environment. The idea is that you are provided with tools to build your own world and get your entertainment value from expressing your creativity instead of repetitively shooting everything that moves or hitting a bajillion random monsters with random swords.
You can build a replica of any real-life object with the building tools provided - I built and run a smaller version of the MGM Grand right next to very close replicas of the Washington Monument and Fanway Park - or you can think up your own original stuff to build.
Through scripting it is possible to create ANY game. I am working on an in-game civilization clone myself and I know someone has made Qbert and donkey kong. There are also several card games at my casino, and some people have made chess tables and dominoes.
You can fight other people, with projectile guns or close combat weapons, but only on damage enabled areas. There is an entire server called Rizal which is dedicated to sports and games in general and events are held there on a regular basis. I'm sorry if you didnt like the game, its not really fit for the average joe tv watcher who wants his prepackaged entertainment handed to him in a silver platter. In SL you are a content provider rather than a content consumer, and the software merely provides you with the tools to create and view said content. Sorta like a 3D version of the web minus evil money grubbing megacorps.
As for slow and buggy, I dont know when you tried it or what crappy computer you have but I have zero crashes and usually get 30fps on an fx5200. If you consider the fact that everything is STREAMED in real time to your computer and so there is NETWORK LAG to account for on every frame, not to mention AGP upload lag as well, the game is a remarkable technical achievement and anyone who wishes to get their free trial week should not let an ignorant AC stop them.
Uh, the game does include a system for land purchase, in fact if you build something outside of your plot of land its possible for the land's owner to delete your objects.
You can also set No Build flags so ppl wont litter.
The problem is that servers can only hold so many objects, and instead of giving someone a fixed quota, they created an economy. Rich people can build more, poor people can build less, and the taxes balance it out so that a very rich person will lose all their money to taxes if they are building too much (overusing server resources).
You can have a free trial week if you want to see the game for yourself. I heartily recommend it.
As a member of the group who created the tax protest, I can tell you very well what it was about.
In SL, each region is a server with clearly defined limitations - 10 thousand prims, which stands for primitive shapes (cube, sphere, cylinder...)
Instead of getting a fixed amount of space, like what happens when you purchase some space for a webpage, the developers thought it would be better to create a virtual economy to distribute resources to everyone.
Just to give you an idea, a prim costs 10 Linden dollars and is taxed at $1 per week, more if its far above the ground, if its very large, or if it is a light.
Taxes are meant to prevent rapid resource depletion. Without an economy in place, a malicious user could fill up a server in seconds, and a particularly creative user playing normally could very well fill it up on his own.
As you can see, the limits imposed by the game constraint our imagination a bit, and force us to learn some efficient 3d design techniques, keeping the details in the textures and doing only the basic structure with actual polygons.
This is what everyone's angry about. They came to SL with the expectation that they could build to their heart's content, and started doing so, but quickly hit a wall where their income could not pay for their taxes anymore. So naturally they felt frustrated because they didnt want to delete anything. The tax system has been tweaked a bit and now everything is going fine.
If you guys have any questions about SL or the tax protest I'll do my best to answer them.