So, to be more general, we have more uses, but except firewalling, all of them reside on the server side.
All are services, virtually none workstation-related. While I'm aware, that OpenBSD makes a workstation, too, of course, I'm guessing it really excels as being a secure service provider, be it server or firewall/gateway.
Having said that, there's still the problem of production use in larger environments (universities e.g.), and I'd guess there has been need for SMP in terms computing power for quite some time.
How did they solve that till now (and for the forseeable future, till SMP gets stable)? Clustering?
I welcome your focus on security, but "being a little behind the times in technology"???
OpenBSD may be the safest web server around. But without SMP it doesn't suit the servers needing the most protection, does it? Nearly every "serious" web server is SMP - at least in corporations, or am I wrong?
Having said that, it would be interesting how long it will be till SMP is considered a safe and stable feature in OpenBSD (else it would not be worthwhile, according to your comment - and I guess I agree there)?
The OpenBSD project simply has too few resources, and that's for sure! And that has nothing to do with "different set of priorities then Linux". I'm pretty sure, that Linux developers are numerous enough to aim for all three goals: reliability, safety and efficiency.
Don't give lessons and advice, if you have none to offer - especially about reading:
An earlier post was claiming that the Internet was created on BSD. While without any doubt the TCP/IP stack was, one can argue the Internet existed before, in form of the ARPANET, powered by DEC VMS workstations.
By actually reading the post and the former post you could have extracted that information - if you wanted.
Undoubtedly the TCP/IP stack was instrumental to the widespread use of the Internet - but that wasn't what I was replying to, was I?;)
Besides, another, earlier post tried to make the point, that I should read some O'Reilly (or whatever other publisher) books to update my history knowledge... Well that's crap.
Not because of the idea - One could quite well spend his time studying computing history with books really focused on the topic, like Salus' book. But normally O'Reilly and other books of similar series from other publishers are bought and read mostly for teaching practical knowledge, not history.
Besides, whatever historical knowledge (or life's experience) one may have with BSD, it does not touch the fact whether BSD is worthwhile today in any way. It does not change the technological viability, or the commercial success, or anything besides one's own attitude about BSD. Frankly said, in this context history doesn't matter.
What BSD should be more worried about, is that Linus' Torvalds and his gang of merry kernel hackers made a technological comparable kernel in the time from 1991 till now, and BSD, finally unencumbered since 1993 (IIRC the Novell/USL settlement's date with BSD), starting with a fully featured UNIX kernel, wasn't able to outpace Linux.
Recent single-processor benchmarking I read, FreeBSD and Linux (both most recent versions) scale quite similarly with increasing load (mostly constant both) - NetBSD and OpenBSD couldn't compare.
I wouldn't bet that FreeBSD would compare equally on multi-processor systems, especially because of its less finer-grained locking (as I've honestly admit I've only been told). I've further been told, that FreeBSD doesn't scale up 16-32 processors, as Linux does. On both these statements I'm more than willing to be corrected, because I'm only referring to memory here.
Oh, and BTW: Besides, OpenVMS is the most stable and reliable clustering system currently available. You may have read something similar the last year around.
When looking at the Linux kernel mailing list digest at kerneltrap.org, I see no hostility vs. the BSDs. When looking at the OpenBSD posts, I see a lot of hostility towards Linux.
The attitude on the OpenBSD mailing list, or at least some of its subscribers, seems to be like this:
"I'd say it's more of a direct consequence of Linux kernel developers
inability to live without hardware-accelerated 3D to play Quake or whatever.
Yet another reason I'm using OpenBSD."
(Marsh J. Ray, Wed, 02 Jun 2004 09:25:10 -0400)
Try running a Nvidia or ATI or Atheros or one of many other cards on
Linux without using a binary module. The existance and use of these is
a direct consequence of Linux's cop-out lassez-faire attitude in
allowing them.
(Damien Miller, Wed, 02 Jun 2004 22:38:45 +1000)
This is not exactly Ghandi-style. These are at best mini-Dschinghis Khans griping with the fact, that Linus' operating system is more successful than theirs. These are comments of the style: We are, we were, and we will be superior, and the rest is not-invented-here.
These fine specimens of the mailing list seem to show, that there's enough zealotry in BSD already, and no reason to point a finger at Linux.
While this surely not presents the total community of OpenBSD, or BSD as a whole, this somehow puts your previous post to shame, doesn't it?
BTW, AFAIK Unix wasn't the 1st system with Internet connection:
Then, in 1980, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency needed a team to implement its brand-new TCP/IP protocol stack on the VAX under Unix. The PDP-10s that powered the ARPANET at that time were aging, and indications that DEC might be forced to cancel the 10 in order to support the VAX were already in the air. DARPA considered contracting DEC to implement TCP/IP, but rejected that idea because they were concerned that DEC might not be responsive to requests for changes in their proprietary VAX/VMS operating system [Libes-Ressler]. Instead, DARPA chose Berkeley Unix as a platform -- explicitly because its source code was available and unencumbered [Leonard].
Berkeley's Computer Science Research Group was in the right place at the right time with the strongest development tools; the result became arguably the most critical turning point in Unix's history since its invention.
Until the TCP/IP implementation was released with Berkeley 4.2 in 1983, Unix had had only the weakest networking support. Early experiments with Ethernet were unsatisfactory. An ugly but serviceable facility called UUCP (Unix to Unix Copy Program) had been developed at Bell Labs for distributing software over conventional telephone lines via modem.[16] UUCP could forward Unix mail between widely separated machines, and (after Usenet was invented in 1981) supported Usenet, a distributed bulletin-board facility that allowed users to broadcast text messages to anywhere that had phone lines and Unix systems.
(taken from "The Art of Unix Programming" by Eric S. Raymond)
Of course nobody is giving VMS any credit no matter what it accomplishes anyway...;)
Thanks to BSD Unix and its friendly licence the TCP/IP (and the Internet) was born.
Well, aren't we going a bit back in history to praise *BSD? It's like saying *BSD's biggest achievements are already in the past.;)
Your "friendly license" is actually feeding Microsoft with free (as in no cost) code for killing Unix.
I guess this issue is much more "killing *BSD" than anything else. And *BSD developers seem to happily sit and wait for it to happen, because they don't seem to care about anything outside their little cocoons, at least that's the impression I get from coverage on kerneltrap.org.
Of course, as long as most of the *BSD guys sit on their laurels or develop for niches, and bathe in their historic glory, they will eventually become completely obsolete. Without the competition from Linux the *BSD developers wouldn't even care... Nothing worse than those youngsters dethroning the graybeards, that want to control who's allowed to play and who not.
Enough about trolling the flamebait! My point was actually: The guy in the original post had some points of anecdotical evidence, and I was responding on his level, clearly and quickly attracting your answer - which will be triggering an angry response to the first part of my post, condescending as can be. Isn't that "slashdotty"?
Frankly I do not care whether someone uses FreeBSD or Linux, they seem equally usable. I'm using Debian GNU/Linux, and it administers quite similarly to FreeBSD, and I simply looked into it first. Since me and my friends simply favor hardware support, FreeBSD is ruled out. I didn't buy a 3D graphics adapter for nothing, for example.
BTW, the figure of 2 million active sites does sound a bit more impressive than it actually is. When looking into their current survey you see 20 million sites, ~70% running Apache. So most sites aren't running FreeBSD, and it would be interesting if they listed "market share", not total numbers. Maybe totals still go up, but market share is sinking, or both rise. You cannot extract that (quickly) from the charts.
Nothing easier than getting the *BSD crowd angry...
My FreeBSD install died on a PII machine when trying to install a considerable amount of packages (not ports) - who tested that?;)
Why should I use a Linux compatibility layer if I can simply stick to Linux? (what all the apps where developed for anyway)
Oh, and shame to all Linux distributions, because you had a problem with one program for one distribution!
Hail to anecdotical evidence!;)
Guess what: Doing Linux drivers, Linux on embedded hardware, Linux administration, and Linux application programming gives me a job. Doing all of these things for *BSD, guess what it gives me??? A nice luke-warm thank-you! Go figure...
Linux: More drivers, more ready-to-run software, more choices, more developers, more community, more mailing lists, more innovation on the application level (virtually none of the FOSS apps are primarily targetted on BSD). Less code throw-away to Apple (OS X - FreeBSD) and Microsoft (Unix Services for Windows - OpenBSD). More books. More preinstalled computers. More platforms to run productive on (not proof-of-concept as NetBSD - kudos, though). More future, way more future.
Especially if such a project would show them how to handle paperwork or to deal with the local administration. It may not be _that_ much of a problem in the US, but e.g. in Germany the bureaucracy is really overwhelming.
How would you handle the openness? GPL-ish? (Every sub-franchise gets the whole deal) Or BSD-ish? (You may keep some of your secrets)
Actually the Noah story is spread throughout the world and throughout all cultures. The great flood is in nearly any kind of culture with a written history/myth collection, across all dividing oceans and continents - always in combination with an act of God.
But surely it has nothing to do with the Biblic God (especially the Old Testament I don't believe a word of, at least not that anything happened like written). Because, if God elected the Hebrews, and did only save Noah, why have all these cultures differing stories about the flood?
To me, the great flood is real, because of the evidence from all around the world. This does not include the God of the Old Testament (which changes his mind from story to story, is not omniscient, and quickly throws a fit - not very godlike).
Oh, and I do believe in God. Just not in fairy tales.
My reply is clearly stating that I'm biased, unlike the article, right in the header. Am I some "fair-and-balanced" Fox News anchorman, or what? It's my opinion, and I'm clearly stating it, so get lost.
I'm not excusing anything in my post, and I don't think there's anything to excuse for. You're simply distorting what I'm saying:
- I managed with MY time and MY hardware to get it work. Not on his hardware, or for someone else. - If you spend 1200 Euros on a computer without knowing what's inside, you better invest that dough into some courses... And if you're buying a computer, and want Linux, why not go with a computer where it is preinstalled? (That would BTW guarantee the hardware works out of the box, the same and only way Windows guarantees that , too, for most users). - We have now proof of one sound-card not working for that author, and as long as we get no better statistical data than this, I'm simply replying on the same level, too: I know there's a sound card that doesn't work right with Windows. Most sound hardware actually works pretty well for Linux, so you have no point.
You better do something about your aggressions, troll (keep down with the big YOUs). Maybe when you grow up you stop taking it that personal here on/. It usually isn't.
I am fiddling with Linux since '98, and I am Debian cultist since '99. I've tried out SuSE and Red Hat, too. I'm never going back to M$ for anything.
Yes, I did have a hard time getting my sound to work, because of ALSA and Debian's ALSA configuration. But my AC97 crappy onboard sound works well, my old SB16 compatible works well, and I have great players for sound (XMMS, mpg321) and video (mplayer, xine) that can kick the shit out of anything shipping with Windows... and a lot of commercial mainstream software, too!
BTW, I needed to unload ALSA and load OSS drivers to play Quake2... missing mmap feature from the driver at that time. But still no show-stopper.
I do not know why having problems with sound is a killer, either, and I am a BIG fan of music, and have ripped my CD collection to MP3. Sound is only important for listening to music and playing games. The 1st one you can use your CD-Player for (most likely Joe Average User does not rip CDs, and getting CDs to work in computer drives gets harder all the time, you should know), and maybe even need to, and the 2nd one is the Windows/DOS/console domain anyway!
Having a 500 - 1200 Euro computer (depending on the configuration and where you buy it), and making trouble about a 20$ sound adapter (and investing two days of time, and installing Slackware twice, uhhh!) does sound pretty much like trolling to me.
Besides, commercial driver offers suck often enough even from the good hardware providers - TerraTec! Needed to delete files to stop it hanging up IRQs in DOS that killed Windows sound... hm. Should have returned the whole computer, and asked the money back from Billygruff Gates, shouldn't I? That's actually a bizarre thought IMO.
With ALSA being finally the officially adopted sound standard solution, with a really nice archtitecture and professional sound capabilities, Linux sound is actually capable enough to do some real stuff with it, where supported.
Oh! And if the card was a clone, most likely it would have worked, but the correct driver wasn't loaded. The PCI device info would show the real manufacturer, and a driver for the chipset would have been most likely be available, but maybe not loaded during autoprobing. A complete autoprobing devince information database BTW is the only reason I could think of why one could try installing several dists to try solve the problem. Simply trying to load - one after another - all sound modules may have accomplished more. OK, just a guess, but a worthy guess!
Had to do this with a "Linux compatible" ethernet, where the manufacturer doesn't even name the driver to use... but the card works fine!
Measuring cosmic rays to detect hollow spaces in the pyramids at Gizeh in the 60s didn't work actually. Or at least it did give unexpected results.
After the method was verified, they tried to apply it to at least one Gizeh pyramid. The measurement was really weird, and with contradictory results, that at least seem to suggest that either we know shit about the internals of those pyramids or the method didn't really work completely then.
Established Egyptology still derives the Cheops/Chufu connection to the so-called Cheops pyramid from a faked inscription (proven to have been made by its "discoverer", with a paint, that didn't exist in Ancient Egypt, and a "syntax error", that did exactly match with an error in an Egyptology magazine of that time) and a small statuette, that could be Cheops, nearby! Oh, Chephren's pyramid is named so, because we found a small tablet with his name near it. If Egyptology believes in falsifications and stuff ancient tourists could have dropped, let's side with the physicists!!
Given that, I'd say maybe the method already works since the last 40 years, and its about time we start using it.:)
Oh, and BTW: Jaffar Kree! (Whatever that means, but you can use it for anything in the series)
Someone compared the Apache and the XFree86 license. This is not valid. Apache is a program, like many others, that can be perfectly run on a GNU/Linux or BSD platform, without being GPL-compatible. X11 is part of a modern UNIX/Linux infrastructure on desktop PCs, and changes to its license or the license of its libraries have far more consequences, because a lot of programs link to it (and of course there are extensions to it, too).
People tell, in their most impolite manner, other people around here, that the libs' licenses haven't changed yet. NOT YET! Being as selfcentered as the XFree86 project seems to be, it may not have noticed how many people depend on its code, and the project could have been much more polite and informative about its intentions. It's long enough around to know, so I guess they don't want to. To an outsider XFree86 seems to be a top-down and authoritarian project, with internal power plays and many hurt feelings, often enough bordering on the unprofessional. Maybe it was the last straw for the distributions. Being GPL-compatible IN THE LONG RUN matters.
Even BSD needs to be GPL-compatible in its infrastructure, because it depends on a lot of GPL code.
Oh, and a personal sidenote on freedom: I side with Kant. You can only be free, if you respect the freedom of others. Unlimited freedom for one person would in the long run limit the freedom of others. So taking part in society comes with duties. I think the GPL models this perfectly: You cannot take away and hide your changes to GPL'd code. You cannot stay "on the shoulders of giants", and hide what you've done. The necessity to provide source with GPL'd code enhances the freedom of the users and future developers, because it limits the freedom of present developers.
Try that with a BSD or MIT license. M$ Kerberos (MIT license) or M$ Services For Unix (derived from OpenBSD) anyone?
So please never underestimate the power of the GPL. It has attracted more open-source workforce in ten years than 30 years of BSD. Don't throw it away easily, because BSD benefits, too.
But the standard they created rocks! While the Atari stick broke in the 1st year after I had inherited it (darn you Summer/Winter/California Games!), my Competition Pro, I bought at 1st with my C64 is still alive today, and survived any other choice for secondary stick...
Nearly immediately after the switch to a PC I stopped playing arcade or action games completely, because without those good ole simple sticks games weren't really fun to play. And all because of that shitty flight sim!
Well, all you arrogant BSD fanboys out there, just keep quiet! You're not a penny's worth better than the zealot l33t minority in the Linux community, maybe even the same people just liking to play the devil's advocate: "Oh I'm so funny and so witty and just know to upset/.ers!"
Basically you're a bunch of liars, and you know it! Where's this mess of rebooting Linux computers? Aren't there 1,000s of well-administered Linux servers in the world with uptimes of years? And what forces you to use the latest vendor upgrade and kernel, if you can use Debian stable with a 2.2 kernel?
The other way round: How stable would you be, if were running the CURRENT release????!!!! No, you're running RELEASE at least, and always STABLE for a production system, so why don't you with Linux distributions and kernels??? It's not like they just get unavailable the moment something new hits the servers...
On a personal note: When I 1st tried BSD, it become slower and slower on install, with every package I installed (4.4-RELEASE that must have been), and I finally rebooted that and kicked the installation after two hours. BTW, it we're the same software packages I had on my Debian Potato box... So don't say I didn't try, and don't say I will be overwhelmed by all that powerfull technology.. if it doesn't work as well as 2.2 Linux kernel on a plain vanilla Celeron I or PII, I'm not that much impressed. Even if it may have been fixed, it was deemed worthy enough for a release! And I don't give up simply of that, next I'm installing 5.2-RELEASE off the net, on my PIII, and expect it to do better from the benchmarks I saw.
But how free is BSD really? Nothing can harm your copy, but you'll need new releases and fixes, too! Please take away _ALL_ the zealous GPL programs from your BSD distributions! And then hope, that the BSD community will never run out of money, because their usage count is way too low to excite anyone in the industry with serious money.. Even they cannot live without money, cannot arrange hackfests, meetings and conferences, servers and hardware purchases. Linux developers will not only get paid for their skills, but often enough are already paid for adding stuff to Linux. While BSD Unixers get money for their skills, too, virtually none of them will get paid to do BSD development, and the more Linux grows, the less oportunities will remain to do so.
Oh, remember free? Windows Services for Unix - *BSD code? Yes. You're actually helping Microsoft migrating people off of any kind of Unix with your license. That's the kind of freedom a contributing developer surely has not in mind, when contributing to free software!
BSD is not dying. Yet! BSD will die, if all that remains are zealots like you, that don't see that there's more than their own good, and that communities cannot survive if they're giving it all away. Now FreeBSD is technically superb, though not better than Linux. OpenBSD is secure, but already falling behind in efficiency, and if continuing so, they will no longer be a choice for servers. So secure, but unwanted. NetBSD did many great things for us, but they are dying and withering most of all.
Without the wave of GPL'd software, would any of these still exist and be worthwhile? I think not. You're presenting *BSD as a system and Linux as a kernel. They should call them GNU/*BSDs, showing the emperor is already naked without the GPL to wrap himself into! As would be SUN Solaris without GNOME and stuff, etc.
Consider this: Run a BSD workstation without GPL software. Without all the window managers. Oh, and skip Apache, it's simply to Linux-oriented, isn't it? And not BSD-licensed. Live free, free from non-BSD licensed software. Tell me, what good is that box then still for?
Man, I hate SCO, no matter whatever they say or how they behave.
AT&T did not invent Unix. Unix was not invented in a business plan, or on purpose, it was a great concept some engineers had that had a unique situation at AT&T that the firm could NOT market their OS. Not being able to sell Unix made it what it is. Without the Berkeley people, Unix wouldn't have become that important. And when able to, AT&T nearly killed Unix, only to be proven wrong by the courts when trying to claim the work of the Berkeley guys as their own.
SCO did not in any way add to the progress of Unix. They were always a closed-source vendor when they were a Unix vendor. They did not invent Linux either. Their claims and exploitation of the legal system try to exploit thousands of coders and deprive them of their work the same way AT&T tried to.
You simply must hate those guys. People who would rather see the commons die and wither than to exploit it any way less.
They have no patents. They try to claim ownership on code that clearly originates from BSD. They try to claim ownership of IBM and SGI code, not a bit from they did invent! IBM ported their contribution from OS/2. SGI ported their own code. Unix licenses seem to be only there to allow the owner of the copyright to rake in the work of others!
Man, I do hope Red Hat does succeed with their attempt to force SCO to lay their cards on the table, so we all will be able to see the emperor is naked and this FUD campaign to raise stock prices collapses!
It's finally time to give Unix back to all of its contributors, and not let it remain withering and dying in the hands of the technologically inept and morally corrupt.
I seriously doubt any non-BSD code of Unix is in Linux. But I think, that anything that is still salvageable and usable certainly belongs there. Had only Caldera open-sourced it when they were not just socket-puppets, then Unix would have been finally free!
Curse the short-sightedness of AT&T, USL, Novell, Caldera and SCO. We're all in the hands of corporate gangsters, that have no shame or respect for anything. We need to stop this cutthroat version of capitalism and establish at least some rules of conduct, bring back some fairness to economy and society.
The American way of plunder, pillage and burn will lead to disaster, be it to Unix/Linux, or be it to the world in its whole.
No, no, those ecologists are all fanatics, but wait: Is it really a good idea to use a technology which leaves you with thousand's of tons of radioactive waste? Which is extremely poisonous, can be used for building WMDs and dirty bombs, and will stay that way for 10,000s of years? Those darn fanatics!;)
Example: There is a nuclear waste deposit "near" Lake Michigan, that is leaking radioactive material into the ground water. The extremely wide-spread net of ground water channels in this area is actually dispersing nuclear waste material into Lake Michigan at a yet not very well known rate. This is just one of the most important drinking water reservoirs in the Northern USA. Darn those fanatics!;)
As long as nuclear energy produces that much hard-to-handle waste, and as long as nuclear waste is still handled like this (compare Great Britain - Sellafield as well: Dump it in a hole, boys!), nuclear energy is simply crap.
There are enough games and developers that deserve being flamed.
E.g. Strategy First (publisher) and Paradox (designer) for Hearts Of Iron. Being a WW2 simulation/strategy game, it offers a lot of advantages over other games of the same kind, but those advantages could not recompense one for the fact that after several patches the game basic principles were neither balanced nor did work well. There were tons of bugs, the AI was inept to the extreme, and even CTDs were rather common in the first revisions. There was the 1st patch available between gold and release.
How do I come to buy such a game? After Europa Universalis I+II Paradox had quite a reputation in strategy gaming. Game testers hyped the feature-loaded game. Beta test was conducted by community members.
So what went wrong? Strategy First as publisher pushed a release that was too early. Paradox released a game to their publisher of which they must have known it was buggy to the hilt. The game testers hyped a game which flaws they must have percepted when testing it. And the community failed to point out most bugs and flaws when beta testing.
Now if publisher, developers, reviewers, critics testers and community fail you, wouldn't you vent your frustration on the forums? I did. At least it recompensed me somewhat for spending money on that game, which I received not the promised value for (though I keep monitoring patch levels).
The gaming industry is in a sorry state, and doesn't even know how to spell quality. It deserves being flamed, especially big firms like Sierra, who surely could do a better job than they do.
Hi! My name is Korpo and I'm a cheater. And I'm not going to stop it!
I'm 24 and don't have the time or patience to sit for days in front of a game like "Vice City" to master its handling and getting skilled at the acrobatics just like a 14-year-old. Clearly designed for the the kids that have plenty of time and want a challenge, "Vice City" doesn't even have a Beginner, or Rooky level. You're only going to see the end of the game if you're really good. REALLY good!
It is a great, immersive game. But I wouldn't get to see more than a quarter of it wouldn't I have resorted to cheating. That's sick, because the gaming experience is for a lot of lesser skilled players simply not accessible without cheating.
I simply want to see the full game, all subplots, mini-stories, etc. In a RPG or strategy that's no problem for me, since there you can plan and make a great strategy, execute it and win. RTS and 1st-person-shooters on the other hand are worth a look as well, but I find the games overly hard.
Back as a teenager with a C64 I was equally good at the joystick arcade, but now I want to enjoy playing a game, and don't want to have big stress and trouble, because the game is designed for Junior-Hardcore-Play-The-Game-7-Hours-A-Day-All-We ek and doesn't offer any way to ease it up EXCEPT cheating.
Perhaps not player ethics is at stake. Perhaps it's not the cheaters who are doing anything wrong. It's the game designers, with their narrow focus on the kids, that only "bugfix" their overly hard games with cheats.
Maybe beating a hard game gives you a sense of accomplishment. But this is purely virtual, remember! You have accomplished anything real, you have not hacked a piece of code, have not read a book, learned something or done something useful. This virtual sense of accomplishment is the real problem, because it is widespread in the Western societies, and people are no more wanting to getting something real accomplished in their lives, with their computers...
Yeah, overexaggerating I know! But I cheat, and it could be worse... what the xxxx!
You have a one-in-all package: 2D and 3D support state-of-the-art, sound state-of-the art, etc. It's more feature-complete, it's widely supported, it's well-supported. If M$ got anything right, then this it is!
Without SDL, there would be even less native Linux games, because the tedious task of bringing all those libraries together, assuring they are installed, building vs. them etc. and supporting multiple sound systems (ALSA, OSS, Esound... hey this is Linux!) is really not only NO FUN AT ALL, it should not be the job of a game developer or a game porter. Hail SDL!
Bring in those engines, those servers! If you build them, they will come.
The community simply has to do its utmost to provide as much as possible pre-built and available for the game developers, and there will be hope, either for Linux people making their own games or small-to-medium companies doing ports.
Or the community simply doesn't care enough.
Remember: Nowadays making a game is a lot about visual art, fitting sound, etc. That's no coder stuff! Maybe that explains the lack of Linux games, because the Linux "audience" simply doesn't care enough and does not include the right people for the job. If I think what a LOUSY (!!!) interface the feature-complete GIMP has, I'm pretty sure there are NOT a lot of the design crowd present in Linux.
I know, games should mainly rely on a clever or addictive basic principle, on well-thought-out concepts, loving detail, strong storylines, etc. And I love those games that do, often enough in stark contrast to their lousy interface and/or graphics. But face reality: If your games should go mainstream, expect to invest in the eye-candy.
If you want to lure the mainstream onto Linux, give best-possible support to designers: Engines, user-friendly design programs for 2D and 3D art, for manipulating video and music, ONE interface for accessing a system's features (beefing up SDL).
We did get Hollywood to go Linux. Or Hollywood convinced itself to go Linux. That should prove Linux usability and multimedia performance. But: Hollywood did not target Linux as a platform, but as a tool.
Perhaps we can at least get the game companies to use Linux as a tool (as some already do). If using Linux seems worthwhile or even the best option, porting games may be too! Especially small-to-medium game businesses could gain a lot by cooperating with the community, and the community could gain a lot if providing them with tools and services, even their own businesses.
Remember: Tools may be free, engine may be free, game may be closed-source provided there will be a Linux port, and all are happy. It's a bargain. Ain't it always?
Heise is a German publisher of computer magazines. Stop bashing it, if you don't understand an article you haven't translated yourself or haven't read in original. Heise titles iX and c't are actually among the best computer/hardware/developer magazines on this planet. And Heise Telepolis is a valuable alternative news source. Period.
Did anybody mention that SCO is not only trying to steal millions of LOC of all other Linux contributors by this scam, Caldera/SCO/what-the-fXXX-they want-to-call-themselves even tried (or did?) change to a per-seat licensing scheme for their Linux dist, pretty M$-like. *echhh*
As mentioned in the comments to another article, the GPL has already been found valid and a just license in the MySQL case. Trying to invalidate it with some lawyer bla won't work with this precedent made in the MySQL case. "We" already have won such a case, SCO not. Period.
I found this out when being "forced" to hit that shiny MetaModerate button. *shudder*
Isn't one of the main arguments of most file sharers: "I can't afford to buy it all, so I check out the stuff and then buy the best of it, that I can actually afford." ??
At least this has been an excuse for software piracy or filesharing or whatever.
I'm not against filesharing.
I'm just saying: Most people in MIT pay quite a lot for their ability to study there. And quite some of those can actually afford this without a really big problem.
Are those prominent filesharers now in danger of being sued actually those few that cannot afford to buy CDs, DVDs etc., or is it more likely, that there are some among them, that could afford to buy.
Why don't they?
Perhaps they do, as suggested by many statistics, and really buy a lot of music.
Perhaps they don't. But why collect JUNK ("I wouldn't pay for it" is my definition of junk), share it, and risk being sued?
Is this some "mine is bigger than yours" phenomenon?
Though we're bordering on offtopic here, because this discussion isn't as closely related to the kernel as it could be, I'm fairly convinced needs no focus as you imply.
First of all, the Linux kernel is and will be the most important readily available high performance computing platform. I cannot imagine a design decision with more than temporary character that will slow down the kernel. Through constant improvement it will lead on all 64bit platforms, Dec Alpha, PowerPC, IA-64 and x86-64. We all know, in the long run, open source isn't beatable in improvement. The kernel is already far on the right side of that curve.
Now, should Linux developers at large focus on scientific computing, or the desktop, on both? Actually this is a "no-question". The development force of open source will always distribute itself along its own best interests, not because of what anybody told them. Till now the technical gurus of programming turned the core of the GNU/Linux OS in what it is, but the evergrowing developer community is attracting more and more apps developers (they are simply more readily available). So while the kernel project is readily scaling to bigger and bigger feats, the app world will still aim for the desktop, the poweruser's desktop first. Simply because there are many people that want to provide apps and simply will do. This will not impair kernel development in any way, and anyhow those people have no different needs from the kernel as the scientists have: stable, efficient, robust.
Since the POSIX and other standards strongly decoupled OS internals from the apps developers (what's going on behind the scenes is no business of the apps developer) we have the power to do it both, in parallel, with no friction.
A little time ago, when I got to play with Adobe Acrobat (I tried to edit existing PDFs - that's an odyssey kind of errand to do!), I find out, is that Adobe has integrated some collaboration features into PDF.
You can comment on a document, attach notes to it, and if the document is going through e.g. a whole department (like paper files in a gov't department), everyone gets to get their own color, etc., to distinguish who made changes.
The original content stays, as it is, and all of these notes etc. can be removed at will.
(Man, I hope I'm not completely wrong here, it's been some time - it was in Adobe Acrobat 5 - I'm pretty sure) ;
Slashdot Mirror
So, to be more general, we have more uses, but except firewalling, all of them reside on the server side.
All are services, virtually none workstation-related. While I'm aware, that OpenBSD makes a workstation, too, of course, I'm guessing it really excels as being a secure service provider, be it server or firewall/gateway.
Having said that, there's still the problem of production use in larger environments (universities e.g.), and I'd guess there has been need for SMP in terms computing power for quite some time.
How did they solve that till now (and for the forseeable future, till SMP gets stable)? Clustering?
I welcome your focus on security, but "being a little behind the times in technology"???
OpenBSD may be the safest web server around. But without SMP it doesn't suit the servers needing the most protection, does it? Nearly every "serious" web server is SMP - at least in corporations, or am I wrong?
Having said that, it would be interesting how long it will be till SMP is considered a safe and stable feature in OpenBSD (else it would not be worthwhile, according to your comment - and I guess I agree there)?
The OpenBSD project simply has too few resources, and that's for sure! And that has nothing to do with "different set of priorities then Linux". I'm pretty sure, that Linux developers are numerous enough to aim for all three goals: reliability, safety and efficiency.
Don't give lessons and advice, if you have none to offer - especially about reading:
;)
An earlier post was claiming that the Internet was created on BSD. While without any doubt the TCP/IP stack was, one can argue the Internet existed before, in form of the ARPANET, powered by DEC VMS workstations.
By actually reading the post and the former post you could have extracted that information - if you wanted.
Undoubtedly the TCP/IP stack was instrumental to the widespread use of the Internet - but that wasn't what I was replying to, was I?
Besides, another, earlier post tried to make the point, that I should read some O'Reilly (or whatever other publisher) books to update my history knowledge... Well that's crap.
Not because of the idea - One could quite well spend his time studying computing history with books really focused on the topic, like Salus' book. But normally O'Reilly and other books of similar series from other publishers are bought and read mostly for teaching practical knowledge, not history.
Besides, whatever historical knowledge (or life's experience) one may have with BSD, it does not touch the fact whether BSD is worthwhile today in any way. It does not change the technological viability, or the commercial success, or anything besides one's own attitude about BSD. Frankly said, in this context history doesn't matter.
What BSD should be more worried about, is that Linus' Torvalds and his gang of merry kernel hackers made a technological comparable kernel in the time from 1991 till now, and BSD, finally unencumbered since 1993 (IIRC the Novell/USL settlement's date with BSD), starting with a fully featured UNIX kernel, wasn't able to outpace Linux.
Recent single-processor benchmarking I read, FreeBSD and Linux (both most recent versions) scale quite similarly with increasing load (mostly constant both) - NetBSD and OpenBSD couldn't compare.
I wouldn't bet that FreeBSD would compare equally on multi-processor systems, especially because of its less finer-grained locking (as I've honestly admit I've only been told). I've further been told, that FreeBSD doesn't scale up 16-32 processors, as Linux does. On both these statements I'm more than willing to be corrected, because I'm only referring to memory here.
Oh, and BTW:
Besides, OpenVMS is the most stable and reliable clustering system currently available. You may have read something similar the last year around.
This is actually funny.
When looking at the Linux kernel mailing list digest at kerneltrap.org, I see no hostility vs. the BSDs. When looking at the OpenBSD posts, I see a lot of hostility towards Linux.
The attitude on the OpenBSD mailing list, or at least some of its subscribers, seems to be like this:
(Marsh J. Ray, Wed, 02 Jun 2004 09:25:10 -0400)(Damien Miller, Wed, 02 Jun 2004 22:38:45 +1000)
This is not exactly Ghandi-style. These are at best mini-Dschinghis Khans griping with the fact, that Linus' operating system is more successful than theirs. These are comments of the style: We are, we were, and we will be superior, and the rest is not-invented-here.
These fine specimens of the mailing list seem to show, that there's enough zealotry in BSD already, and no reason to point a finger at Linux.
While this surely not presents the total community of OpenBSD, or BSD as a whole, this somehow puts your previous post to shame, doesn't it?
BTW, AFAIK Unix wasn't the 1st system with Internet connection:
(taken from "The Art of Unix Programming" by Eric S. Raymond)Of course nobody is giving VMS any credit no matter what it accomplishes anyway ... ;)
Guess you're in for a history lesson, too.
Well, aren't we going a bit back in history to praise *BSD? It's like saying *BSD's biggest achievements are already in the past. ;)
Your "friendly license" is actually feeding Microsoft with free (as in no cost) code for killing Unix.
I guess this issue is much more "killing *BSD" than anything else. And *BSD developers seem to happily sit and wait for it to happen, because they don't seem to care about anything outside their little cocoons, at least that's the impression I get from coverage on kerneltrap.org.
Of course, as long as most of the *BSD guys sit on their laurels or develop for niches, and bathe in their historic glory, they will eventually become completely obsolete. Without the competition from Linux the *BSD developers wouldn't even care... Nothing worse than those youngsters dethroning the graybeards, that want to control who's allowed to play and who not.
Enough about trolling the flamebait! My point was actually: The guy in the original post had some points of anecdotical evidence, and I was responding on his level, clearly and quickly attracting your answer - which will be triggering an angry response to the first part of my post, condescending as can be. Isn't that "slashdotty"?
Frankly I do not care whether someone uses FreeBSD or Linux, they seem equally usable. I'm using Debian GNU/Linux, and it administers quite similarly to FreeBSD, and I simply looked into it first. Since me and my friends simply favor hardware support, FreeBSD is ruled out. I didn't buy a 3D graphics adapter for nothing, for example.
BTW, the figure of 2 million active sites does sound a bit more impressive than it actually is. When looking into their current survey you see 20 million sites, ~70% running Apache. So most sites aren't running FreeBSD, and it would be interesting if they listed "market share", not total numbers. Maybe totals still go up, but market share is sinking, or both rise. You cannot extract that (quickly) from the charts.
Nothing easier than getting the *BSD crowd angry...
Well, well...
;)
;)
My FreeBSD install died on a PII machine when trying to install a considerable amount of packages (not ports) - who tested that?
Why should I use a Linux compatibility layer if I can simply stick to Linux? (what all the apps where developed for anyway)
Oh, and shame to all Linux distributions, because you had a problem with one program for one distribution!
Hail to anecdotical evidence!
Guess what: Doing Linux drivers, Linux on embedded hardware, Linux administration, and Linux application programming gives me a job. Doing all of these things for *BSD, guess what it gives me??? A nice luke-warm thank-you! Go figure...
Linux: More drivers, more ready-to-run software, more choices, more developers, more community, more mailing lists, more innovation on the application level (virtually none of the FOSS apps are primarily targetted on BSD). Less code throw-away to Apple (OS X - FreeBSD) and Microsoft (Unix Services for Windows - OpenBSD). More books. More preinstalled computers. More platforms to run productive on (not proof-of-concept as NetBSD - kudos, though). More future, way more future.
Especially if such a project would show them how to handle paperwork or to deal with the local administration. It may not be _that_ much of a problem in the US, but e.g. in Germany the bureaucracy is really overwhelming.
How would you handle the openness? GPL-ish? (Every sub-franchise gets the whole deal) Or BSD-ish? (You may keep some of your secrets)
Actually the Noah story is spread throughout the world and throughout all cultures. The great flood is in nearly any kind of culture with a written history/myth collection, across all dividing oceans and continents - always in combination with an act of God.
But surely it has nothing to do with the Biblic God (especially the Old Testament I don't believe a word of, at least not that anything happened like written). Because, if God elected the Hebrews, and did only save Noah, why have all these cultures differing stories about the flood?
To me, the great flood is real, because of the evidence from all around the world. This does not include the God of the Old Testament (which changes his mind from story to story, is not omniscient, and quickly throws a fit - not very godlike).
Oh, and I do believe in God. Just not in fairy tales.
My reply is clearly stating that I'm biased, unlike the article, right in the header. Am I some "fair-and-balanced" Fox News anchorman, or what? It's my opinion, and I'm clearly stating it, so get lost.
/. It usually isn't.
I'm not excusing anything in my post, and I don't think there's anything to excuse for. You're simply distorting what I'm saying:
- I managed with MY time and MY hardware to get it work. Not on his hardware, or for someone else.
- If you spend 1200 Euros on a computer without knowing what's inside, you better invest that dough into some courses... And if you're buying a computer, and want Linux, why not go with a computer where it is preinstalled? (That would BTW guarantee the hardware works out of the box, the same and only way Windows guarantees that , too, for most users).
- We have now proof of one sound-card not working for that author, and as long as we get no better statistical data than this, I'm simply replying on the same level, too: I know there's a sound card that doesn't work right with Windows. Most sound hardware actually works pretty well for Linux, so you have no point.
You better do something about your aggressions, troll (keep down with the big YOUs). Maybe when you grow up you stop taking it that personal here on
I am fiddling with Linux since '98, and I am Debian cultist since '99. I've tried out SuSE and Red Hat, too. I'm never going back to M$ for anything.
:)
Yes, I did have a hard time getting my sound to work, because of ALSA and Debian's ALSA configuration. But my AC97 crappy onboard sound works well, my old SB16 compatible works well, and I have great players for sound (XMMS, mpg321) and video (mplayer, xine) that can kick the shit out of anything shipping with Windows... and a lot of commercial mainstream software, too!
BTW, I needed to unload ALSA and load OSS drivers to play Quake2... missing mmap feature from the driver at that time. But still no show-stopper.
I do not know why having problems with sound is a killer, either, and I am a BIG fan of music, and have ripped my CD collection to MP3. Sound is only important for listening to music and playing games. The 1st one you can use your CD-Player for (most likely Joe Average User does not rip CDs, and getting CDs to work in computer drives gets harder all the time, you should know), and maybe even need to, and the 2nd one is the Windows/DOS/console domain anyway!
Having a 500 - 1200 Euro computer (depending on the configuration and where you buy it), and making trouble about a 20$ sound adapter (and investing two days of time, and installing Slackware twice, uhhh!) does sound pretty much like trolling to me.
Besides, commercial driver offers suck often enough even from the good hardware providers - TerraTec! Needed to delete files to stop it hanging up IRQs in DOS that killed Windows sound... hm. Should have returned the whole computer, and asked the money back from Billygruff Gates, shouldn't I? That's actually a bizarre thought IMO.
With ALSA being finally the officially adopted sound standard solution, with a really nice archtitecture and professional sound capabilities, Linux sound is actually capable enough to do some real stuff with it, where supported.
Oh! And if the card was a clone, most likely it would have worked, but the correct driver wasn't loaded. The PCI device info would show the real manufacturer, and a driver for the chipset would have been most likely be available, but maybe not loaded during autoprobing. A complete autoprobing devince information database BTW is the only reason I could think of why one could try installing several dists to try solve the problem. Simply trying to load - one after another - all sound modules may have accomplished more. OK, just a guess, but a worthy guess!
Had to do this with a "Linux compatible" ethernet, where the manufacturer doesn't even name the driver to use... but the card works fine!
My 2 cents... Euro cents!
Measuring cosmic rays to detect hollow spaces in the pyramids at Gizeh in the 60s didn't work actually. Or at least it did give unexpected results.
:)
After the method was verified, they tried to apply it to at least one Gizeh pyramid. The measurement was really weird, and with contradictory results, that at least seem to suggest that either we know shit about the internals of those pyramids or the method didn't really work completely then.
Established Egyptology still derives the Cheops/Chufu connection to the so-called Cheops pyramid from a faked inscription (proven to have been made by its "discoverer", with a paint, that didn't exist in Ancient Egypt, and a "syntax error", that did exactly match with an error in an Egyptology magazine of that time) and a small statuette, that could be Cheops, nearby! Oh, Chephren's pyramid is named so, because we found a small tablet with his name near it. If Egyptology believes in falsifications and stuff ancient tourists could have dropped, let's side with the physicists!!
Given that, I'd say maybe the method already works since the last 40 years, and its about time we start using it.
Oh, and BTW: Jaffar Kree! (Whatever that means, but you can use it for anything in the series)
Some of the things I noticed:
Someone compared the Apache and the XFree86 license. This is not valid. Apache is a program, like many others, that can be perfectly run on a GNU/Linux or BSD platform, without being GPL-compatible. X11 is part of a modern UNIX/Linux infrastructure on desktop PCs, and changes to its license or the license of its libraries have far more consequences, because a lot of programs link to it (and of course there are extensions to it, too).
People tell, in their most impolite manner, other people around here, that the libs' licenses haven't changed yet. NOT YET! Being as selfcentered as the XFree86 project seems to be, it may not have noticed how many people depend on its code, and the project could have been much more polite and informative about its intentions. It's long enough around to know, so I guess they don't want to. To an outsider XFree86 seems to be a top-down and authoritarian project, with internal power plays and many hurt feelings, often enough bordering on the unprofessional. Maybe it was the last straw for the distributions. Being GPL-compatible IN THE LONG RUN matters.
Even BSD needs to be GPL-compatible in its infrastructure, because it depends on a lot of GPL code.
Oh, and a personal sidenote on freedom: I side with Kant. You can only be free, if you respect the freedom of others. Unlimited freedom for one person would in the long run limit the freedom of others. So taking part in society comes with duties. I think the GPL models this perfectly: You cannot take away and hide your changes to GPL'd code. You cannot stay "on the shoulders of giants", and hide what you've done. The necessity to provide source with GPL'd code enhances the freedom of the users and future developers, because it limits the freedom of present developers.
Try that with a BSD or MIT license. M$ Kerberos (MIT license) or M$ Services For Unix (derived from OpenBSD) anyone?
So please never underestimate the power of the GPL. It has attracted more open-source workforce in ten years than 30 years of BSD. Don't throw it away easily, because BSD benefits, too.
And those st1x suxx0rs. No, really!
But the standard they created rocks! While the Atari stick broke in the 1st year after I had inherited it (darn you Summer/Winter/California Games!), my Competition Pro, I bought at 1st with my C64 is still alive today, and survived any other choice for secondary stick...
Nearly immediately after the switch to a PC I stopped playing arcade or action games completely, because without those good ole simple sticks games weren't really fun to play. And all because of that shitty flight sim!
Well, all you arrogant BSD fanboys out there, just keep quiet! You're not a penny's worth better than the zealot l33t minority in the Linux community, maybe even the same people just liking to play the devil's advocate: "Oh I'm so funny and so witty and just know to upset /.ers!"
Basically you're a bunch of liars, and you know it! Where's this mess of rebooting Linux computers? Aren't there 1,000s of well-administered Linux servers in the world with uptimes of years? And what forces you to use the latest vendor upgrade and kernel, if you can use Debian stable with a 2.2 kernel?
The other way round: How stable would you be, if were running the CURRENT release????!!!! No, you're running RELEASE at least, and always STABLE for a production system, so why don't you with Linux distributions and kernels??? It's not like they just get unavailable the moment something new hits the servers...
On a personal note: When I 1st tried BSD, it become slower and slower on install, with every package I installed (4.4-RELEASE that must have been), and I finally rebooted that and kicked the installation after two hours. BTW, it we're the same software packages I had on my Debian Potato box... So don't say I didn't try, and don't say I will be overwhelmed by all that powerfull technology.. if it doesn't work as well as 2.2 Linux kernel on a plain vanilla Celeron I or PII, I'm not that much impressed. Even if it may have been fixed, it was deemed worthy enough for a release! And I don't give up simply of that, next I'm installing 5.2-RELEASE off the net, on my PIII, and expect it to do better from the benchmarks I saw.
But how free is BSD really? Nothing can harm your copy, but you'll need new releases and fixes, too! Please take away _ALL_ the zealous GPL programs from your BSD distributions! And then hope, that the BSD community will never run out of money, because their usage count is way too low to excite anyone in the industry with serious money.. Even they cannot live without money, cannot arrange hackfests, meetings and conferences, servers and hardware purchases. Linux developers will not only get paid for their skills, but often enough are already paid for adding stuff to Linux. While BSD Unixers get money for their skills, too, virtually none of them will get paid to do BSD development, and the more Linux grows, the less oportunities will remain to do so.
Oh, remember free? Windows Services for Unix - *BSD code? Yes. You're actually helping Microsoft migrating people off of any kind of Unix with your license. That's the kind of freedom a contributing developer surely has not in mind, when contributing to free software!
BSD is not dying. Yet! BSD will die, if all that remains are zealots like you, that don't see that there's more than their own good, and that communities cannot survive if they're giving it all away. Now FreeBSD is technically superb, though not better than Linux. OpenBSD is secure, but already falling behind in efficiency, and if continuing so, they will no longer be a choice for servers. So secure, but unwanted. NetBSD did many great things for us, but they are dying and withering most of all.
Without the wave of GPL'd software, would any of these still exist and be worthwhile? I think not. You're presenting *BSD as a system and Linux as a kernel. They should call them GNU/*BSDs, showing the emperor is already naked without the GPL to wrap himself into! As would be SUN Solaris without GNOME and stuff, etc.
Consider this: Run a BSD workstation without GPL software. Without all the window managers. Oh, and skip Apache, it's simply to Linux-oriented, isn't it? And not BSD-licensed. Live free, free from non-BSD licensed software. Tell me, what good is that box then still for?
Man, I hate SCO, no matter whatever they say or how they behave.
AT&T did not invent Unix. Unix was not invented in a business plan, or on purpose, it was a great concept some engineers had that had a unique situation at AT&T that the firm could NOT market their OS. Not being able to sell Unix made it what it is. Without the Berkeley people, Unix wouldn't have become that important. And when able to, AT&T nearly killed Unix, only to be proven wrong by the courts when trying to claim the work of the Berkeley guys as their own.
SCO did not in any way add to the progress of Unix. They were always a closed-source vendor when they were a Unix vendor. They did not invent Linux either. Their claims and exploitation of the legal system try to exploit thousands of coders and deprive them of their work the same way AT&T tried to.
You simply must hate those guys. People who would rather see the commons die and wither than to exploit it any way less.
They have no patents. They try to claim ownership on code that clearly originates from BSD. They try to claim ownership of IBM and SGI code, not a bit from they did invent! IBM ported their contribution from OS/2. SGI ported their own code. Unix licenses seem to be only there to allow the owner of the copyright to rake in the work of others!
Man, I do hope Red Hat does succeed with their attempt to force SCO to lay their cards on the table, so we all will be able to see the emperor is naked and this FUD campaign to raise stock prices collapses!
It's finally time to give Unix back to all of its contributors, and not let it remain withering and dying in the hands of the technologically inept and morally corrupt.
I seriously doubt any non-BSD code of Unix is in Linux. But I think, that anything that is still salvageable and usable certainly belongs there. Had only Caldera open-sourced it when they were not just socket-puppets, then Unix would have been finally free!
Curse the short-sightedness of AT&T, USL, Novell, Caldera and SCO. We're all in the hands of corporate gangsters, that have no shame or respect for anything. We need to stop this cutthroat version of capitalism and establish at least some rules of conduct, bring back some fairness to economy and society.
The American way of plunder, pillage and burn will lead to disaster, be it to Unix/Linux, or be it to the world in its whole.
Ye good ole fairy tale of clean nuclear energy.
;)
;)
No, no, those ecologists are all fanatics, but wait: Is it really a good idea to use a technology which leaves you with thousand's of tons of radioactive waste? Which is extremely poisonous, can be used for building WMDs and dirty bombs, and will stay that way for 10,000s of years? Those darn fanatics!
Example: There is a nuclear waste deposit "near" Lake Michigan, that is leaking radioactive material into the ground water. The extremely wide-spread net of ground water channels in this area is actually dispersing nuclear waste material into Lake Michigan at a yet not very well known rate. This is just one of the most important drinking water reservoirs in the Northern USA. Darn those fanatics!
As long as nuclear energy produces that much hard-to-handle waste, and as long as nuclear waste is still handled like this (compare Great Britain - Sellafield as well: Dump it in a hole, boys!), nuclear energy is simply crap.
There are enough games and developers that deserve being flamed.
E.g. Strategy First (publisher) and Paradox (designer) for Hearts Of Iron. Being a WW2 simulation/strategy game, it offers a lot of advantages over other games of the same kind, but those advantages could not recompense one for the fact that after several patches the game basic principles were neither balanced nor did work well. There were tons of bugs, the AI was inept to the extreme, and even CTDs were rather common in the first revisions. There was the 1st patch available between gold and release.
How do I come to buy such a game? After Europa Universalis I+II Paradox had quite a reputation in strategy gaming. Game testers hyped the feature-loaded game. Beta test was conducted by community members.
So what went wrong? Strategy First as publisher pushed a release that was too early. Paradox released a game to their publisher of which they must have known it was buggy to the hilt. The game testers hyped a game which flaws they must have percepted when testing it. And the community failed to point out most bugs and flaws when beta testing.
Now if publisher, developers, reviewers, critics testers and community fail you, wouldn't you vent your frustration on the forums? I did. At least it recompensed me somewhat for spending money on that game, which I received not the promised value for (though I keep monitoring patch levels).
The gaming industry is in a sorry state, and doesn't even know how to spell quality. It deserves being flamed, especially big firms like Sierra, who surely could do a better job than they do.
Hi! My name is Korpo and I'm a cheater. And I'm not going to stop it!
e ek and doesn't offer any way to ease it up EXCEPT cheating.
I'm 24 and don't have the time or patience to sit for days in front of a game like "Vice City" to master its handling and getting skilled at the acrobatics just like a 14-year-old. Clearly designed for the the kids that have plenty of time and want a challenge, "Vice City" doesn't even have a Beginner, or Rooky level. You're only going to see the end of the game if you're really good. REALLY good!
It is a great, immersive game. But I wouldn't get to see more than a quarter of it wouldn't I have resorted to cheating. That's sick, because the gaming experience is for a lot of lesser skilled players simply not accessible without cheating.
I simply want to see the full game, all subplots, mini-stories, etc. In a RPG or strategy that's no problem for me, since there you can plan and make a great strategy, execute it and win. RTS and 1st-person-shooters on the other hand are worth a look as well, but I find the games overly hard.
Back as a teenager with a C64 I was equally good at the joystick arcade, but now I want to enjoy playing a game, and don't want to have big stress and trouble, because the game is designed for Junior-Hardcore-Play-The-Game-7-Hours-A-Day-All-W
Perhaps not player ethics is at stake. Perhaps it's not the cheaters who are doing anything wrong. It's the game designers, with their narrow focus on the kids, that only "bugfix" their overly hard games with cheats.
Maybe beating a hard game gives you a sense of accomplishment. But this is purely virtual, remember! You have accomplished anything real, you have not hacked a piece of code, have not read a book, learned something or done something useful. This virtual sense of accomplishment is the real problem, because it is widespread in the Western societies, and people are no more wanting to getting something real accomplished in their lives, with their computers...
Yeah, overexaggerating I know! But I cheat, and it could be worse... what the xxxx!
As for OpenGL replacing DirectX: Hah!
... hey this is Linux!) is really not only NO FUN AT ALL, it should not be the job of a game developer or a game porter. Hail SDL!
You have a one-in-all package: 2D and 3D support state-of-the-art, sound state-of-the art, etc. It's more feature-complete, it's widely supported, it's well-supported. If M$ got anything right, then this it is!
Without SDL, there would be even less native Linux games, because the tedious task of bringing all those libraries together, assuring they are installed, building vs. them etc. and supporting
multiple sound systems (ALSA, OSS, Esound
Bring in those engines, those servers! If you build them, they will come.
The community simply has to do its utmost to provide as much as possible pre-built and available for the game developers, and there will be hope, either for Linux people making their own games or small-to-medium companies doing ports.
Or the community simply doesn't care enough.
Remember: Nowadays making a game is a lot about visual art, fitting sound, etc. That's no coder stuff! Maybe that explains the lack of Linux games, because the Linux "audience" simply doesn't care enough and does not include the right people for the job. If I think what a LOUSY (!!!) interface the feature-complete GIMP has, I'm pretty sure there are NOT a lot of the design crowd present in Linux.
I know, games should mainly rely on a clever or addictive basic principle, on well-thought-out concepts, loving detail, strong storylines, etc. And I love those games that do, often enough in stark contrast to their lousy interface and/or graphics. But face reality: If your games should go mainstream, expect to invest in the eye-candy.
If you want to lure the mainstream onto Linux, give best-possible support to designers: Engines, user-friendly design programs for 2D and 3D art, for manipulating video and music, ONE interface for accessing a system's features (beefing up SDL).
We did get Hollywood to go Linux. Or Hollywood convinced itself to go Linux. That should prove Linux usability and multimedia performance. But: Hollywood did not target Linux as a platform, but as a tool.
Perhaps we can at least get the game companies to use Linux as a tool (as some already do). If using Linux seems worthwhile or even the best option, porting games may be too! Especially small-to-medium game businesses could gain a lot by cooperating with the community, and the community could gain a lot if providing them with tools and services, even their own businesses.
Remember: Tools may be free, engine may be free, game may be closed-source provided there will be a Linux port, and all are happy. It's a bargain. Ain't it always?
Heise is a German publisher of computer magazines. Stop bashing it, if you don't understand an article you haven't translated yourself or haven't read in original. Heise titles iX and c't are actually among the best computer/hardware/developer magazines on this planet. And Heise Telepolis is a valuable alternative news source. Period.
Did anybody mention that SCO is not only trying to steal millions of LOC of all other Linux contributors by this scam, Caldera/SCO/what-the-fXXX-they want-to-call-themselves even tried (or did?) change to a per-seat licensing scheme for their Linux dist, pretty M$-like. *echhh*
As mentioned in the comments to another article, the GPL has already been found valid and a just license in the MySQL case. Trying to invalidate it with some lawyer bla won't work with this precedent made in the MySQL case. "We" already have won such a case, SCO not. Period.
I found this out when being "forced" to hit that shiny MetaModerate button. *shudder*
I don't know how far you would extend "all the way", but I thought QNX was implemented on top of the Mach Microkernel, all the way C++.
Just a thought, I am not completely sure of it.
Isn't one of the main arguments of most file sharers: "I can't afford to buy it all, so I check out the stuff and then buy the best of it, that I can actually afford." ??
At least this has been an excuse for software piracy or filesharing or whatever.
I'm not against filesharing.
I'm just saying: Most people in MIT pay quite a lot for their ability to study there. And quite some of those can actually afford this without a really big problem.
Are those prominent filesharers now in danger of being sued actually those few that cannot afford to buy CDs, DVDs etc., or is it more likely, that there are some among them, that could afford to buy.
Why don't they?
Perhaps they do, as suggested by many statistics, and really buy a lot of music.
Perhaps they don't. But why collect JUNK ("I wouldn't pay for it" is my definition of junk), share it, and risk being sued?
Is this some "mine is bigger than yours" phenomenon?
Though we're bordering on offtopic here, because this discussion isn't as closely related to the kernel as it could be, I'm fairly convinced needs no focus as you imply.
First of all, the Linux kernel is and will be the most important readily available high performance computing platform. I cannot imagine a design decision with more than temporary character that will slow down the kernel. Through constant improvement it will lead on all 64bit platforms, Dec Alpha, PowerPC, IA-64 and x86-64. We all know, in the long run, open source isn't beatable in improvement. The kernel is already far on the right side of that curve.
Now, should Linux developers at large focus on scientific computing, or the desktop, on both? Actually this is a "no-question". The development force of open source will always distribute itself along its own best interests, not because of what anybody told them. Till now the technical gurus of programming turned the core of the GNU/Linux OS in what it is, but the evergrowing developer community is attracting more and more apps developers (they are simply more readily available). So while the kernel project is readily scaling to bigger and bigger feats, the app world will still aim for the desktop, the poweruser's desktop first. Simply because there are many people that want to provide apps and simply will do. This will not impair kernel development in any way, and anyhow those people have no different needs from the kernel as the scientists have: stable, efficient, robust.
Since the POSIX and other standards strongly decoupled OS internals from the apps developers (what's going on behind the scenes is no business of the apps developer) we have the power to do it both, in parallel, with no friction.
A little time ago, when I got to play with Adobe Acrobat (I tried to edit existing PDFs - that's an odyssey kind of errand to do!), I find out, is that Adobe has integrated some collaboration features into PDF.
You can comment on a document, attach notes to it, and if the document is going through e.g. a whole department (like paper files in a gov't department), everyone gets to get their own color, etc., to distinguish who made changes.
The original content stays, as it is, and all of these notes etc. can be removed at will.
(Man, I hope I'm not completely wrong here, it's been some time - it was in Adobe Acrobat 5 - I'm pretty sure) ;