Sorry to rant here, but hurd is a nice ongoing research project doomed to fail in the long run....
The reasons, to few developers, not to much interest by the people who initiated the project in the first run as it seems, almost no moving forward, critical things after 10 years not implemented (a decent filesystem etc...)
hurd is a nice concept with a partial implementation after 10 years, the time it will reach the finally usable status, Stallman and others will have died of age.
OpenGL used to be far ahead, but lets say it that way, Microsoft ripped it off excellently and then did an amazing work on top of it speedwise.
OpenGL got its kick in the butt by the speed the thing was moving forward, which you can measure in decades while Microsoft has an 12-18 month cycle (which is pretty normal in the industry) to introduce new versions and new features important to the gaming industry. Things in D3D might slow down however soon, unless something significantly new shows up on the 3d arena which can be ripped off.
Loki would have failed today as well. The problem is that most gamers who run Linux run it side by side with Windows so that they can boot into Windows for gaming.
The main problem Loki had besides that was, although their goals were excellent, that they only got licenses to mediocre games mostly and 90% of them were run of the mill shooters.
They did not observe it, they just got the news. The scientists were basically half imprisoned in a castle by the english, because they wanted to figure out how close germany was to the bomb.
There is a protocol of the surveilance and there is a theatre play made out of it.
(I am sure somewhere on the UK government site you can find the protocol, it is no secret)
To my knowledge the just figured the theory and what materials to use out by calculations, building the bomb is a different issue, but that does not change the fact that Germany could have had it, if the core scientists didnt refuse to work on it on a serious scale during war.
Well the problem is, that ATI does not dedicate too many developers towards the Linux drivers, they bascially dedicate the developers after market share.
Linux currently is a NVidia only game if you really want to have serious 3d stuff running, sad to admit it, but buying off the developers of the good firegl drivers from germany and asking them to move to Canada did not help things either in my opinion, because the direct contact to the FireGL developers was lost (although those people were not responsible for the low end cards, they constantly tried to help out and make the FiregL drivers compatible as much as possible)
So if you go with Linux and want to have 3d, forget ATI. I just wonder what SGI and others do which use ATI in combination with Linux, guess the FireGL driver development still is very good, but gone is the support from the developers themselves to fix things which the consumer card division constantly screws up, or the management which refuses the resources needed to get things up and running decently.
They have very good people, the problem with Microsoft I see is, that the fish starts to stink at the top. Microsoft never had a mentality of quality on the management side, they have this we want it all mentality, but as soon as they bascially dominate a market they move like insects to the next one to take over. See the Microsoft management like the kid in the sandbox which basically grabs at the toys of the other children and cries mine mine mine. So how does the qualiy play into the game. They keep their number of employees at exactly the level they are used to to perform this tactic. As soon as they have significant market share, the development bascially goes on a hiatus because the core people are moved to the next we will takeover project.
(The perfect example for this is IE and a bunch of other things) while trying to keep up the good ole monopoly by breaking and taking over standards.
So in the end, you get quality as long as there is competition and as soon as there is none, forget it.
To me the whole thing is more like a Pinky and Brain episode, to sad that this is not a cartoon.
Replace Pinky and Brain with Bill and Steve and you would even have a better cartoon.
It is not the X architecture it is the support for the i855/i865 which is not that good currently.
Intel is holding back many infos on that chipset.Given that Intel said it wanted to support Linux on Centrino and that is the standard chipset used by many Centrino notebooks this the whole we will support linux is not to amusing.
1400x1050 resolution was a big problem as well until sombody could figure out a way to patch the shadow bios.
Yes the funny thing is, OSS bascially roots down to the origins of computers, Microsofts business model roots down into the late 70s.
In the early days programs were seen as extended mathematics and basically shared without a single thought. Much of the unix development process happened that way, due to a constant exchange between AT&T and Berkeley.
The fiasco started as people saw, that they could earn money by not sharing and selling and, then the beancounters and lawyers jumped onto the ship and started suing.
Sort of like the wild west, where many people lived quite happy until the mine mine criers came and with it the crime, the laywers and all the bad things we know about the so called wild west (also the gold rush did its thing)
Actually the problem is deeper, I must say, in the recent past, thanks to the hotplug stuff, hal etc... I have seen more problems regarding hardware detection on the windows side than on Linux.
The problem of failed hardware detections, problems of stuff not working etc... lies much deeper. Blame Intel, once they took over IBM as the standards setter, the screwed lots of things up which IBM already had sold better. You can say many things about MCA, that IBM wanted to take over again etc... But the thing was excellent, it was fast, it had hardware detection that worked and was real plug and play. Then came Intel with PCI which had to take over the absymal ISA architecture (which basically was just a bunch of signal lines) and there we had only four possible interrupts, no clear definition on how the hardware detection should work no clear definition of interrupt sharing mechanisms given the absymal number of interrupts which the cards can use at all etc....
Now 15 years later we still have the problem and PCI-X finall hopefully will resolve all this, but until then, all this stuff only causes problems.
Actually Elektra is not like the registry, it is more like the config file mechanism which exists in java.
The registry is problematic, but the reason is different. That thing is an absymal data junkyard, ever program can dump its data into any position without caring anything, and there is no real structure behind it.
The Windows registry is sort of like a unix filesystem (there are huge similarites) you can dump your data into 5 different places and in the end nobody can figure out anymore where the data is.
Add to that the problematic editability and that the whole thing mostly is stored in ram, and you have a bigger mess than the config files (which the registry should have been a solution from) ever were.
Having some kind of middle layer which allows unified access on application level and having config files in the backend to store the data has been a wise approach in the past, and works in Java really well. Java has many problems, but the config file mechanism definitely is not, you dont even have to care where to store the files to, no parsing nothing, just a plain dom like tree to work on.
Great project, it was about time.
I know that system from Java, having a good library dealing with configuration files is great.
First, you have a nice standardized api, then you don't have to care, where to save the files, the parsing or what grammar you use.
In java all comes down to build a property entry pair or some kind of dom tree in newer versions and then simply say save (filename) and you dont have to care about the correct place to set the file the parsing anything. Sort of like having the advantages of the windows registry (good standardized access api) without the hazzles (entry clutter not really manually editable, one big database which resides in ram etc...)
Actually Germany itself was not so in the dark, the core scientists who basically could have figured it out, refused to work on it on a serious scale.
The english basically captured the core scientists which worked on the bomb, and put them into a camp under surveillance. After they got the news that the US had the bomb (the war was over by then) they seriously sat together and figured out how things were working correctly withing a few days (they did not have anything to prevent anymore and basically could focus on science again)
Don't forget germany had in the 20s and 30s some of the best physics scientists in existence and not all of them were jews and had to emigrate. So basically the knowledge was there, but call it the hand of god, that the scientists who could figure it out how to build it refused to do it innerly.
Lets leave this aside, but economics is in my opinion no real science, because it uses the wrong methods and aims for the wrong goals.
Economics comes all down to psychology (I would call economics the psychology of greed)
but yet they try to enforce the rules after the whole system is tried to be described after mathematics.
Modern mathematics failed basically in one area to be applied usefully and that is psychology.
All the models which are applied to economics usually only work out in the best case because the description only cann fill one angle instead of proximity patterns.
And in the end there usually comes the case where the system of formulas applied to being greedy crumbles to dust.
Modern economics is the closest thing to alchemy we have nowadays.
Why do I want to run Linux on a tablet PC.
It all comes down to being able to do what I want to do with my machine not being able to do what Microsoft wants me to do with it...
Re:If this is going to be like leisure larry...
on
Modern Maniac Mansion
·
· Score: 1
Yes.. I know that one, fun game, and good production quality.
Re:If this is going to be like leisure larry...
on
Modern Maniac Mansion
·
· Score: 1
The problem with the new Larry as far as I can judge the demo. The old one done by Al Lowe was a very good comedy, the new one is not very good humorwise...
Re:If this is going to be like leisure larry...
on
Modern Maniac Mansion
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Ah yes commercial pure adventure games with good to excellent production values released this year:
Syberia 2 (although the game is supposed to stink the production value is good)
Broken Sword 3
Dark Fall Lights Out
Tony Tough
Wanted a wild west adventure
Clever & Smart
Dark Mirror (Excellent, highly recommendable)
A Bad Mojo Remake
A Rerendered Runaway
Sherlock Holmes, the case of the Silver Earring
URU
Myst4
Return To Mysterious Island
Curse of Blackmoor Manor
Aura
Legacy: Dark Shadows
The Moment of Silence
And from the Freeware side of things probably around 10-20 others many based on AGS (I am not even counting the text adventures in here) some of them with very good production values.
Almost twice as many releases than in 2003 sounds like a dead genre to me. Adventure games are as dead as BSD.
Re:If this is going to be like leisure larry...
on
Modern Maniac Mansion
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Ahem Syberia came out 2003, Syberia 2 came out 2004 and the reason why part two did not sell too well was because it simply was not good.
Adventure games are not top sellers (The longes journes sold to my knowledge around 300.000 worldwide) but they still have their nieche market. They currently are done mostly by smaller studios who dont go after a million copies sold. Some of those studios are only 2-3 people and the games can be produced rather cheaply, due to the fact that the tools have become very good and very cheap.
So for those small teams, the still existing core market of around 30.000 - 300.000 copies worldwide seems to be enough to make a living.
Of course you wont see any adventure games anymore done by Lucasarts or done by Blizzard you cannot simply sell a million copies of such a game anymore and those companies never even touch an idea without having a remote chance of reaching that, but the adventure game genre is very vivid, with more games being released 2004 than the years before, they have found their audience and their audience is very happy that so many of them come out again.
The adventure game scene currently pretty much resembles the golden era of pc gaming around the early nineties, many small development studios, no real megasellers but lots of quality titles and developers who operate on a shoestring budget but can make a living out of it most times if the quality is right.
If you want something like ASP.Net but with better control and less we try to force a monopoly give JSF a chance in the long run, the controls are not there yet but it looks promising, especially given that already projects like myfaces exist.
Re:If this is going to be like leisure larry...
on
Modern Maniac Mansion
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Syberia sold enough to justify a sequel. Same goes for Tony Tough, Wanted and Runaway also a sequel to the Longest Journey is in the works.
They are by no means megasellers, but it seems like they make their mones if you can limit production costs.
According to the german Heise site, they currently have a patent application pending which basically patents most if not all of the techniques which others like spamassassin have used for years now.
The main problem is different. I don't think that not having enough bright people is the problem. The education is better over here in Europe, yet we face the same problems. The problem is, a technical field is hard, whereas a financial or law field is not that hard to study, yet in the financial sector the prospects of getting a decent paid job are much better than in the technical field, where you constantly here the complaints of the technical workers (those are academic people who spent years of their lifes studying the field) being to expensive the jobs have to be outsourced.
In the end all comes down to the fact, can I support a family with the job I will get from what I learn or is it impossible.
And if business allows a chance and if learning engineering just makes you a scapegoat then you people will flock into business despite the fact that many of them have their hearts in engineering.
I agree with you that only engineering and designing of new things can keep the wealth, and improve the wealth, but the general attitude is, engineering = you are a geek, social unept, you should not earn very much and if you are too expensive we shift the job to the third world anyway...
Well with the c64 it all came down to games, it simply was until the Atari ST ant the Amiga came out the home computer with the best graphics there was. (which was until 85 or so)
It basically blew the Apple2 and the Atari 400/800 away graphics and soundwise.
The Atari was promoted as 128 color machine, but the problem was that the mode only allowed color switch on a line level and in between the lines the colors were limited to four,
the hardware sprites were fixed to one color.
Only a handful of games were able to use that mode to a good extent one of them being alternate reality. The C64 offered at the same resolution real 16 colors and 4 color sprites blowing basically the competition away. The soundchip itself was unsurpassed until the Amiga showed up.
Apple hat nothing to set against in the home computer segment, they basically would not have survived if they did not have the mac back then which opened them the workstation and graphics artists segment.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry to rant here, but hurd is a nice ongoing research project doomed to fail in the long run.... The reasons, to few developers, not to much interest by the people who initiated the project in the first run as it seems, almost no moving forward, critical things after 10 years not implemented (a decent filesystem etc...) hurd is a nice concept with a partial implementation after 10 years, the time it will reach the finally usable status, Stallman and others will have died of age.
OpenGL used to be far ahead, but lets say it that way, Microsoft ripped it off excellently and then did an amazing work on top of it speedwise. OpenGL got its kick in the butt by the speed the thing was moving forward, which you can measure in decades while Microsoft has an 12-18 month cycle (which is pretty normal in the industry) to introduce new versions and new features important to the gaming industry. Things in D3D might slow down however soon, unless something significantly new shows up on the 3d arena which can be ripped off.
Loki would have failed today as well. The problem is that most gamers who run Linux run it side by side with Windows so that they can boot into Windows for gaming. The main problem Loki had besides that was, although their goals were excellent, that they only got licenses to mediocre games mostly and 90% of them were run of the mill shooters.
They did not observe it, they just got the news. The scientists were basically half imprisoned in a castle by the english, because they wanted to figure out how close germany was to the bomb. There is a protocol of the surveilance and there is a theatre play made out of it. (I am sure somewhere on the UK government site you can find the protocol, it is no secret) To my knowledge the just figured the theory and what materials to use out by calculations, building the bomb is a different issue, but that does not change the fact that Germany could have had it, if the core scientists didnt refuse to work on it on a serious scale during war.
Well the problem is, that ATI does not dedicate too many developers towards the Linux drivers, they bascially dedicate the developers after market share. Linux currently is a NVidia only game if you really want to have serious 3d stuff running, sad to admit it, but buying off the developers of the good firegl drivers from germany and asking them to move to Canada did not help things either in my opinion, because the direct contact to the FireGL developers was lost (although those people were not responsible for the low end cards, they constantly tried to help out and make the FiregL drivers compatible as much as possible) So if you go with Linux and want to have 3d, forget ATI. I just wonder what SGI and others do which use ATI in combination with Linux, guess the FireGL driver development still is very good, but gone is the support from the developers themselves to fix things which the consumer card division constantly screws up, or the management which refuses the resources needed to get things up and running decently.
They have very good people, the problem with Microsoft I see is, that the fish starts to stink at the top. Microsoft never had a mentality of quality on the management side, they have this we want it all mentality, but as soon as they bascially dominate a market they move like insects to the next one to take over. See the Microsoft management like the kid in the sandbox which basically grabs at the toys of the other children and cries mine mine mine. So how does the qualiy play into the game. They keep their number of employees at exactly the level they are used to to perform this tactic. As soon as they have significant market share, the development bascially goes on a hiatus because the core people are moved to the next we will takeover project. (The perfect example for this is IE and a bunch of other things) while trying to keep up the good ole monopoly by breaking and taking over standards. So in the end, you get quality as long as there is competition and as soon as there is none, forget it.
To me the whole thing is more like a Pinky and Brain episode, to sad that this is not a cartoon. Replace Pinky and Brain with Bill and Steve and you would even have a better cartoon.
It is not the X architecture it is the support for the i855/i865 which is not that good currently. Intel is holding back many infos on that chipset.Given that Intel said it wanted to support Linux on Centrino and that is the standard chipset used by many Centrino notebooks this the whole we will support linux is not to amusing. 1400x1050 resolution was a big problem as well until sombody could figure out a way to patch the shadow bios.
Yes the funny thing is, OSS bascially roots down to the origins of computers, Microsofts business model roots down into the late 70s. In the early days programs were seen as extended mathematics and basically shared without a single thought. Much of the unix development process happened that way, due to a constant exchange between AT&T and Berkeley. The fiasco started as people saw, that they could earn money by not sharing and selling and, then the beancounters and lawyers jumped onto the ship and started suing. Sort of like the wild west, where many people lived quite happy until the mine mine criers came and with it the crime, the laywers and all the bad things we know about the so called wild west (also the gold rush did its thing)
Actually the problem is deeper, I must say, in the recent past, thanks to the hotplug stuff, hal etc... I have seen more problems regarding hardware detection on the windows side than on Linux. The problem of failed hardware detections, problems of stuff not working etc... lies much deeper. Blame Intel, once they took over IBM as the standards setter, the screwed lots of things up which IBM already had sold better. You can say many things about MCA, that IBM wanted to take over again etc... But the thing was excellent, it was fast, it had hardware detection that worked and was real plug and play. Then came Intel with PCI which had to take over the absymal ISA architecture (which basically was just a bunch of signal lines) and there we had only four possible interrupts, no clear definition on how the hardware detection should work no clear definition of interrupt sharing mechanisms given the absymal number of interrupts which the cards can use at all etc.... Now 15 years later we still have the problem and PCI-X finall hopefully will resolve all this, but until then, all this stuff only causes problems.
Actually Elektra is not like the registry, it is more like the config file mechanism which exists in java. The registry is problematic, but the reason is different. That thing is an absymal data junkyard, ever program can dump its data into any position without caring anything, and there is no real structure behind it. The Windows registry is sort of like a unix filesystem (there are huge similarites) you can dump your data into 5 different places and in the end nobody can figure out anymore where the data is. Add to that the problematic editability and that the whole thing mostly is stored in ram, and you have a bigger mess than the config files (which the registry should have been a solution from) ever were. Having some kind of middle layer which allows unified access on application level and having config files in the backend to store the data has been a wise approach in the past, and works in Java really well. Java has many problems, but the config file mechanism definitely is not, you dont even have to care where to store the files to, no parsing nothing, just a plain dom like tree to work on.
Great project, it was about time. I know that system from Java, having a good library dealing with configuration files is great. First, you have a nice standardized api, then you don't have to care, where to save the files, the parsing or what grammar you use.
In java all comes down to build a property entry pair or some kind of dom tree in newer versions and then simply say save (filename) and you dont have to care about the correct place to set the file the parsing anything. Sort of like having the advantages of the windows registry (good standardized access api) without the hazzles (entry clutter not really manually editable, one big database which resides in ram etc...)
Actually Germany itself was not so in the dark, the core scientists who basically could have figured it out, refused to work on it on a serious scale.
The english basically captured the core scientists which worked on the bomb, and put them into a camp under surveillance. After they got the news that the US had the bomb (the war was over by then) they seriously sat together and figured out how things were working correctly withing a few days (they did not have anything to prevent anymore and basically could focus on science again)
Don't forget germany had in the 20s and 30s some of the best physics scientists in existence and not all of them were jews and had to emigrate. So basically the knowledge was there, but call it the hand of god, that the scientists who could figure it out how to build it refused to do it innerly.
Lets leave this aside, but economics is in my opinion no real science, because it uses the wrong methods and aims for the wrong goals. Economics comes all down to psychology (I would call economics the psychology of greed) but yet they try to enforce the rules after the whole system is tried to be described after mathematics. Modern mathematics failed basically in one area to be applied usefully and that is psychology. All the models which are applied to economics usually only work out in the best case because the description only cann fill one angle instead of proximity patterns. And in the end there usually comes the case where the system of formulas applied to being greedy crumbles to dust. Modern economics is the closest thing to alchemy we have nowadays.
To check out the opie project, it runs neatly on Tablet based computers and is made for things like that (PDAs tablets...)
Why do I want to run Linux on a tablet PC. It all comes down to being able to do what I want to do with my machine not being able to do what Microsoft wants me to do with it...
Yes.. I know that one, fun game, and good production quality.
Clustered security holes...
The problem with the new Larry as far as I can judge the demo. The old one done by Al Lowe was a very good comedy, the new one is not very good humorwise...
And from the Freeware side of things probably around 10-20 others many based on AGS (I am not even counting the text adventures in here) some of them with very good production values.
Almost twice as many releases than in 2003 sounds like a dead genre to me. Adventure games are as dead as BSD.
Ahem Syberia came out 2003, Syberia 2 came out 2004 and the reason why part two did not sell too well was because it simply was not good.
Adventure games are not top sellers (The longes journes sold to my knowledge around 300.000 worldwide) but they still have their nieche market. They currently are done mostly by smaller studios who dont go after a million copies sold. Some of those studios are only 2-3 people and the games can be produced rather cheaply, due to the fact that the tools have become very good and very cheap.
So for those small teams, the still existing core market of around 30.000 - 300.000 copies worldwide seems to be enough to make a living.
Of course you wont see any adventure games anymore done by Lucasarts or done by Blizzard you cannot simply sell a million copies of such a game anymore and those companies never even touch an idea without having a remote chance of reaching that, but the adventure game genre is very vivid, with more games being released 2004 than the years before, they have found their audience and their audience is very happy that so many of them come out again.
The adventure game scene currently pretty much resembles the golden era of pc gaming around the early nineties, many small development studios, no real megasellers but lots of quality titles and developers who operate on a shoestring budget but can make a living out of it most times if the quality is right.
If you want something like ASP.Net but with better control and less we try to force a monopoly give JSF a chance in the long run, the controls are not there yet but it looks promising, especially given that already projects like myfaces exist.
Syberia sold enough to justify a sequel. Same goes for Tony Tough, Wanted and Runaway also a sequel to the Longest Journey is in the works. They are by no means megasellers, but it seems like they make their mones if you can limit production costs.
According to the german Heise site, they currently have a patent application pending which basically patents most if not all of the techniques which others like spamassassin have used for years now.
The main problem is different. I don't think that not having enough bright people is the problem. The education is better over here in Europe, yet we face the same problems. The problem is, a technical field is hard, whereas a financial or law field is not that hard to study, yet in the financial sector the prospects of getting a decent paid job are much better than in the technical field, where you constantly here the complaints of the technical workers (those are academic people who spent years of their lifes studying the field) being to expensive the jobs have to be outsourced. In the end all comes down to the fact, can I support a family with the job I will get from what I learn or is it impossible. And if business allows a chance and if learning engineering just makes you a scapegoat then you people will flock into business despite the fact that many of them have their hearts in engineering. I agree with you that only engineering and designing of new things can keep the wealth, and improve the wealth, but the general attitude is, engineering = you are a geek, social unept, you should not earn very much and if you are too expensive we shift the job to the third world anyway...
Well with the c64 it all came down to games, it simply was until the Atari ST ant the Amiga came out the home computer with the best graphics there was. (which was until 85 or so) It basically blew the Apple2 and the Atari 400/800 away graphics and soundwise. The Atari was promoted as 128 color machine, but the problem was that the mode only allowed color switch on a line level and in between the lines the colors were limited to four, the hardware sprites were fixed to one color. Only a handful of games were able to use that mode to a good extent one of them being alternate reality. The C64 offered at the same resolution real 16 colors and 4 color sprites blowing basically the competition away. The soundchip itself was unsurpassed until the Amiga showed up. Apple hat nothing to set against in the home computer segment, they basically would not have survived if they did not have the mac back then which opened them the workstation and graphics artists segment.