The last time I flew, I got pulled aside so they could check the 11 drum cymbals I had in a carry-on bag. As they were looking, the guy next to me was getting his frisbee impounded. This thing was dirty, small, plastic, and obviously well-used. I supposed he could have thrown it in somebody's face, and taken the plane into the Empire State Building (?), but I just thought, "You stupid suckers. You're taking this guy's frisbee, and letting me through with 11 discs that could probably take somebody's head off if I threw them hard enough, not to mention provide a wicked cutting edge if I snapped one in half."
Ah, yes, but you aren't Jewish, Russian, homosexual, dirty, a PITA to the government, or an activist. Why would they stop you?
Reminds me of that bit in Airplane I where airport security is checking people. There's a whole group of evil-looking Arabs coming through carrying rocket launchers, machine guns, large bags, hand grenades, etc. Right in the middle of the line is a little old gray-haired lady. Security teams burst out and slam her up against the wall and start searching her, waving everyone else through.
Linux has good games, laddie buck
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Interesting point, but I really doubt that this is aimed at the general consumer. It's for Joe Linux, who prides himself on doing nifty tech things with Linux.
Okay, Tux Racer may not be the most amazing thing in the world, but it's fun for a couple hours.
Freeciv...why is freeciv bad? You don't like civilization? There are some differences, but aside from the fact that civ had more artists (and, IMHO, a worse interface) and is a bit easier to use, not huge difference in fun factor.
Lets consider some others:
zangband/ToME/angband/nethack/etc: These *are* a lot of fun. Diablo has much more simplistic, boring gameplay, and it took off all over. Most variants have a pretty simple text or 2d graphics based interface without music, but some are a bit more elaborate. Be a bit of a pain to play on the controller, yes...
Chromium BSU: flashy scrolling shooter. Could use the 3d hardware in the X-box.
Dunno if you can just use ordinary ol' x86 binaries (particularly considering RAM usage), but:
Abuse: This was a *blast* when it came out -- I played it over and over. It's looking a little dated now, but it's still a good game. Free now -- thanks crack.com.
There's part of the amazing Exile series available for Linux. (shareware)
Maelstrom may be too "simple" for you, as it's only an astroids clone, but it was a very well known game on the Mac for a long time, and I still like it.
There are a host of Loki ports that you can't get any more except used. Lots of good stuff from LGames, though I'm not as big a fan of their stuff as some other people are.
Finally, text-based but really, really sophisticated, good, and almost all of them free, there are text-based interactive fiction (Try Tower of Babel before giving up on this...first one I ever beat without cheating, and it's *soooooo* good). The Interactive Fiction Archive has games and players.
Finally, many good games can be played through WINE -- Starcraft, Fallout, Max Payne, Half Life...
These are just some of the games that I enjoy under Linux. There are lots more (admittedly, some of lower quality) available at the SDL Games Page and the Linux Games Tome.
Linux games usually take a bit more (okay, often a lot:-) ) more effort to set up properly. But they're often very customizable, you can actually have an impact on the game design ("This game needs feature X"), and you don't have to leave the comfortable environs of Linux. And the environment is getting better, not worse.
Re:Please enlighten a doofus
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It's a fun technical project. I don't think many of them are on a jihad to try to attack MS. It's just the sort of thing engineering sorts do when they're into their field and have free time.
The mice are okay -- they have lots of buttons, though I think they feel kind of cheap compared to their Logitech counterparts and I *hate* where they put their fifth and sixth buttons -- off to the side, not underneath your fingers.
But MS keyboards just suck, outright.
Re:This is NOT a good thing.
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Granted, it does make their installed base look larger, which can be convincing to game developers. If enough people don't buy MS software, though, I think we'll be okay.
The next distributed project
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It'll be just like the distributed RC56 contest...just this time, it's to break MS's signing key.:-)
Well, probably because CMU has done a lot of speech recognition stuff that was used in this. The translation table stuff is just dumped on top -- happens to be the latest work. You talk about how festival is crucial -- Alan Black, of festival fame works at CMU. You mentioned sphinx, I believe.
Don't knock CMU -- they're an international leader in this area.
The real computer science work was in developing a metalanguage represenation and a method of mapping the language to that metalanguage and back. Filling in the actual mappings is something that you can hand off to translators or native speakers.
Actually, (believe it or not, I didn't read the story), CMU's had a system that sounds exactly like this (speech->computer metarepresentation->speech) that gets 95% accuracy.
Plus, research speech recognition is well ahead of most consumer-available speech recognition...but also requires custom hardware or more resources.
People who would rather visit slashdot.org than work on their latest assignment.
I agree fully, though Slashdot is as reasonable a news site as any (in their headlines) for getting tech news, which can be quite imporant ("New Windows Worm Attacks IIS 5.3.1 installations"). It can be used reasonably.
People who would rather try getting Linux running on their companies server than maintaing whatever's already on it
I don't buy this. If the company really has no need to expand that server's services in the future, isn't throwing any more money at the server software, and is comfortable with whatever degree of technology lock-in they're suffering, *then* there is no reason to try Linux.
There's a lot of money being blown on IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft servers because at purchase time, no one wants to try a sudden, jolting transition, and no one bothered to do a gradual, gentle one earlier. These gradual changes can save the company a lot of money over the long term. If an IT person has spare time, he *should* be experimenting with cheaper software alternatives for the company.
People who think they can show up to work dressed like a slob and that people will respect them because they are 'elite hax0rs.
I *hate* the entire "dress up to go to work" ethic. Now, don't get me wrong. You have to interact with people over the course of the day, and they don't want you wearing a thong or a "Big Johnson" T-shirt. That's legitimate. And some positions (sales, for instance) really do put a *lot* of emphasis on making a corporate impression for the company. So I can understand dressing up there. But I really don't see the point in blowing a bunch of time and money getting dress shoes. They don't improve my productivity -- if anything they hurt it. I spend most of my day looking at a computer screen and maybe occasionally a telephone. I'm not talking face to face with customers. Why should anyone care whether I have a tie or whether I have an expensive dress shirt?
Fortunately, the ridiculous emphasis on clothing has been recognized and mostly eliminated in the last few years -- compared to the 70s or the 80s, clothing requirements are far, far more lenient. A shirt with a collar and slacks pretty much are enough most places I've seen (and slacks=>blue jeans at others).
I think that, regardless of your field, if you're a good worker and know your stuff (and everyone *thinks* they do...not the same thing), then you can get a decent job.
I'm reading this and do all my work on a PII/266. It's fine for compiling software and doing work.
Computer have become a bit of a status symbol -- most people don't get a company jet or car, but they do get a computer, and their value to the company is represented by how much the company blows on them. Ever since desktops become a commodity item, no manager would be caught dead getting a new desktop -- it has to be ridiculously expensive laptops.
In terms of CPU power required, I'd rank stuff on this kind of order:
video/modeling heavy-duty 2d graphics (not web graphics, laddies) software development DTP secretarial work (word processing, filling in forms) executives
Now, the funny thing is that executives, who in my experience use their expensive laptops primarily for checking email, perhaps do a little bit of word processing, and maybe browse news sites, are the ones to get the most powerful computers. Well, no, the 3d modeling/video people go first, but after that, execs. And it's not that they need or use that many cycles...but they can exhibit their value to the company by flaunting their expensive business-class computers.
I can't imagine a system that a PII/266 isn't reasonable to compile, unless you have literally *hundreds* of developers constantly modifying files, and so have to recompile most of your project on each compile, instead of just a file or two. I mean, if you're coding on Mozilla or X, you still are only modifying a few files yourself, and you can happily deal with compile times there.
Of course, if you're recompiling whole projects every compile, then I could see the need, but in that case you're also doing something wrong in your design...
Not only that, a lot of people are due to be fired. You can't have a period of very high employee demand w/o hiring a lot of incompetents/poor workers. IT was a "golden job" for a short period of time, great for workers. Now it's turning into a regular ol' job. You have to know your stuff, you can't blow obscene amounts of money, you need to do a decent job of interacting with other people.
And the people on Slashdot wanting to eliminate H1Bs to "protect" foreign workers (if they could get a better job overseas, they'd be there now instead of hassling with immigration), wanting to raise salaries more to "improve IT" (what we need are competent IT personnel at existing salaries...no more "I used a computer for three years and dropped out as a college freshman to go web designer/IT" types) and so on and so forth...well, they're just not being realistic.
Most of the people getting fired are just plain incompetent or overpaid (and in denial about same), and the company has been wanting to get rid of them forever...and as IT demand has finally dropped a bit, they can afford to do so. That isn't true of every last person, but if there's two people out of twenty fired, and allowing for a decent margin of inaccurate evaulation, the fired people are going to be the worst workers.
If you were fired, it's possible that, astounding as it sounds, the problem is not H1Bs, your company, terrorists, open source, or corporate corruption. It may just be you -- you might want to take a look at yourself, figure out how to make yourself a more attractive employee, maybe make your salary demands more reasonable, and then try again.
Matrox had good Linux support for a while, but this seems to have falled by the wayside recently -- perhaps they didn't make enough Linux $$$ to justify further development.
Probably because there *aren't* all that many Linux game developers out there at all. I've thought about game development a few times, but it comes down to the fact that games take a lot of work to do, do less good for people than "real" software like the GIMP and bash do, and that there aren't a lot of game graphic artists willing to volunteer their time. If you wanted to make something like an open-source Fallout 2, that's what you need. There are plenty of programmers -- not nearly enough artists involved. I think that some of this can be aleviated by producing better tools for them (or perhaps this is just wishful thinking, as I program). Make GIMP better, get more graphic artists on Linux willing to do stuff. Want better fonts? Make a *good* Linux vector font editor.
Just because the drive reports that the cache is off doesn't mean that it is. As a matter of fact, there was a bit of a problem when drive manufacturers tried pulling this with write caching instead of just read caching a while back, resulting in potentially lost data.
You *do* realize that a lot of the data involved has to be coming from a cache to get those kind of numbers? That this is *never* going to be the case when copying, say, a movie file?
(a) They're talking about megabytes (MB) not megabits (Mb), an (b) if you're doing straight file writes they're going to RAM and will be written from the buffer cache later.
Slashdot Mirror
The last time I flew, I got pulled aside so they could check the 11 drum cymbals I had in a carry-on bag. As they were looking, the guy next to me was getting his frisbee impounded. This thing was dirty, small, plastic, and obviously well-used. I supposed he could have thrown it in somebody's face, and taken the plane into the Empire State Building (?), but I just thought, "You stupid suckers. You're taking this guy's frisbee, and letting me through with 11 discs that could probably take somebody's head off if I threw them hard enough, not to mention provide a wicked cutting edge if I snapped one in half."
Ah, yes, but you aren't Jewish, Russian, homosexual, dirty, a PITA to the government, or an activist. Why would they stop you?
Reminds me of that bit in Airplane I where airport security is checking people. There's a whole group of evil-looking Arabs coming through carrying rocket launchers, machine guns, large bags, hand grenades, etc. Right in the middle of the line is a little old gray-haired lady. Security teams burst out and slam her up against the wall and start searching her, waving everyone else through.
Yeah. NetBSD needs to be more portable. ;-)
Interesting point, but I really doubt that this is aimed at the general consumer. It's for Joe Linux, who prides himself on doing nifty tech things with Linux.
:-) ) more effort to set up properly. But they're often very customizable, you can actually have an impact on the game design ("This game needs feature X"), and you don't have to leave the comfortable environs of Linux. And the environment is getting better, not worse.
Okay, Tux Racer may not be the most amazing thing in the world, but it's fun for a couple hours.
Freeciv...why is freeciv bad? You don't like civilization? There are some differences, but aside from the fact that civ had more artists (and, IMHO, a worse interface) and is a bit easier to use, not huge difference in fun factor.
Lets consider some others:
zangband/ToME/angband/nethack/etc: These *are* a lot of fun. Diablo has much more simplistic, boring gameplay, and it took off all over. Most variants have a pretty simple text or 2d graphics based interface without music, but some are a bit more elaborate. Be a bit of a pain to play on the controller, yes...
Chromium BSU: flashy scrolling shooter. Could use the 3d hardware in the X-box.
Dunno if you can just use ordinary ol' x86 binaries (particularly considering RAM usage), but:
Quake 3 (use the 3d hardware). Not free.
Abuse: This was a *blast* when it came out -- I played it over and over. It's looking a little dated now, but it's still a good game. Free now -- thanks crack.com.
Pingus is apparently shaping up pretty well.
There's part of the amazing Exile series available for Linux. (shareware)
Maelstrom may be too "simple" for you, as it's only an astroids clone, but it was a very well known game on the Mac for a long time, and I still like it.
While I'm not a tremendous fan of Illwinter's Conquest of Elysium II, their Dominions: Priests, Prophets, and Pretenders is a non-flashy but very deep, very good strategy game. Shareware.
There's a DOS-style shooter from Mountain King Studios, Raptor. (shareware)
Finally, there are all the emulators and whatnot...take a look at GNUboy, TuxNES, snes9x, DGen/SDL,
FreeSCI, Sarien, Exult, XU4, ScummVM, Basilisk II, YAE and others.
There are a host of Loki ports that you can't get any more except used. Lots of good stuff from LGames, though I'm not as big a fan of their stuff as some other people are.
Finally, text-based but really, really sophisticated, good, and almost all of them free, there are text-based interactive fiction (Try Tower of Babel before giving up on this...first one I ever beat without cheating, and it's *soooooo* good). The Interactive Fiction Archive has games and players.
Finally, many good games can be played through WINE -- Starcraft, Fallout, Max Payne, Half Life...
These are just some of the games that I enjoy under Linux. There are lots more (admittedly, some of lower quality) available at the SDL Games Page and the Linux Games Tome.
Linux games usually take a bit more (okay, often a lot
It's a fun technical project. I don't think many of them are on a jihad to try to attack MS. It's just the sort of thing engineering sorts do when they're into their field and have free time.
You *like* MS peripherals?
The mice are okay -- they have lots of buttons, though I think they feel kind of cheap compared to their Logitech counterparts and I *hate* where they put their fifth and sixth buttons -- off to the side, not underneath your fingers.
But MS keyboards just suck, outright.
Granted, it does make their installed base look larger, which can be convincing to game developers. If enough people don't buy MS software, though, I think we'll be okay.
It'll be just like the distributed RC56 contest...just this time, it's to break MS's signing key. :-)
Well, probably because CMU has done a lot of speech recognition stuff that was used in this. The translation table stuff is just dumped on top -- happens to be the latest work. You talk about how festival is crucial -- Alan Black, of festival fame works at CMU. You mentioned sphinx, I believe.
Don't knock CMU -- they're an international leader in this area.
The real computer science work was in developing a metalanguage represenation and a method of mapping the language to that metalanguage and back. Filling in the actual mappings is something that you can hand off to translators or native speakers.
Actually, (believe it or not, I didn't read the story), CMU's had a system that sounds exactly like this (speech->computer metarepresentation->speech) that gets 95% accuracy.
Plus, research speech recognition is well ahead of most consumer-available speech recognition...but also requires custom hardware or more resources.
Translation: KDE's open-source dev team blows MS's out of the water in bug fixing.
Spoken truly. If I wasn't inexplicably perma-banned from moderation, I'd mod you up.
I've noticed that as my colleages machines have been upgraded, their code has gotten slower and slower.
Give your coders slow machines with many features. Your final code will then run efficiently and support all sorts of extras.
People who would rather visit slashdot.org than work on their latest assignment.
I agree fully, though Slashdot is as reasonable a news site as any (in their headlines) for getting tech news, which can be quite imporant ("New Windows Worm Attacks IIS 5.3.1 installations"). It can be used reasonably.
People who would rather try getting Linux running on their companies server than maintaing whatever's already on it
I don't buy this. If the company really has no need to expand that server's services in the future, isn't throwing any more money at the server software, and is comfortable with whatever degree of technology lock-in they're suffering, *then* there is no reason to try Linux.
There's a lot of money being blown on IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft servers because at purchase time, no one wants to try a sudden, jolting transition, and no one bothered to do a gradual, gentle one earlier. These gradual changes can save the company a lot of money over the long term. If an IT person has spare time, he *should* be experimenting with cheaper software alternatives for the company.
People who think they can show up to work dressed like a slob and that people will respect them because they are 'elite hax0rs.
I *hate* the entire "dress up to go to work" ethic. Now, don't get me wrong. You have to interact with people over the course of the day, and they don't want you wearing a thong or a "Big Johnson" T-shirt. That's legitimate. And some positions (sales, for instance) really do put a *lot* of emphasis on making a corporate impression for the company. So I can understand dressing up there. But I really don't see the point in blowing a bunch of time and money getting dress shoes. They don't improve my productivity -- if anything they hurt it. I spend most of my day looking at a computer screen and maybe occasionally a telephone. I'm not talking face to face with customers. Why should anyone care whether I have a tie or whether I have an expensive dress shirt?
Fortunately, the ridiculous emphasis on clothing has been recognized and mostly eliminated in the last few years -- compared to the 70s or the 80s, clothing requirements are far, far more lenient. A shirt with a collar and slacks pretty much are enough most places I've seen (and slacks=>blue jeans at others).
I think that, regardless of your field, if you're a good worker and know your stuff (and everyone *thinks* they do...not the same thing), then you can get a decent job.
I really, really doubt that the bottleneck is the CPU -- more likely piss-poor software or the disk.
I have a hard time thinking of a computing task that really, honestly needs hundreds of millions of operations a second.
I'm reading this and do all my work on a PII/266. It's fine for compiling software and doing work.
Computer have become a bit of a status symbol -- most people don't get a company jet or car, but they do get a computer, and their value to the company is represented by how much the company blows on them. Ever since desktops become a commodity item, no manager would be caught dead getting a new desktop -- it has to be ridiculously expensive laptops.
In terms of CPU power required, I'd rank stuff on this kind of order:
video/modeling
heavy-duty 2d graphics (not web graphics, laddies)
software development
DTP
secretarial work (word processing, filling in forms)
executives
Now, the funny thing is that executives, who in my experience use their expensive laptops primarily for checking email, perhaps do a little bit of word processing, and maybe browse news sites, are the ones to get the most powerful computers. Well, no, the 3d modeling/video people go first, but after that, execs. And it's not that they need or use that many cycles...but they can exhibit their value to the company by flaunting their expensive business-class computers.
I can't imagine a system that a PII/266 isn't reasonable to compile, unless you have literally *hundreds* of developers constantly modifying files, and so have to recompile most of your project on each compile, instead of just a file or two. I mean, if you're coding on Mozilla or X, you still are only modifying a few files yourself, and you can happily deal with compile times there.
Of course, if you're recompiling whole projects every compile, then I could see the need, but in that case you're also doing something wrong in your design...
Not only that, a lot of people are due to be fired. You can't have a period of very high employee demand w/o hiring a lot of incompetents/poor workers. IT was a "golden job" for a short period of time, great for workers. Now it's turning into a regular ol' job. You have to know your stuff, you can't blow obscene amounts of money, you need to do a decent job of interacting with other people.
And the people on Slashdot wanting to eliminate H1Bs to "protect" foreign workers (if they could get a better job overseas, they'd be there now instead of hassling with immigration), wanting to raise salaries more to "improve IT" (what we need are competent IT personnel at existing salaries...no more "I used a computer for three years and dropped out as a college freshman to go web designer/IT" types) and so on and so forth...well, they're just not being realistic.
Most of the people getting fired are just plain incompetent or overpaid (and in denial about same), and the company has been wanting to get rid of them forever...and as IT demand has finally dropped a bit, they can afford to do so. That isn't true of every last person, but if there's two people out of twenty fired, and allowing for a decent margin of inaccurate evaulation, the fired people are going to be the worst workers.
If you were fired, it's possible that, astounding as it sounds, the problem is not H1Bs, your company, terrorists, open source, or corporate corruption. It may just be you -- you might want to take a look at yourself, figure out how to make yourself a more attractive employee, maybe make your salary demands more reasonable, and then try again.
My two cents, unpopular as it may be.
Matrox had good Linux support for a while, but this seems to have falled by the wayside recently -- perhaps they didn't make enough Linux $$$ to justify further development.
Probably because there *aren't* all that many Linux game developers out there at all. I've thought about game development a few times, but it comes down to the fact that games take a lot of work to do, do less good for people than "real" software like the GIMP and bash do, and that there aren't a lot of game graphic artists willing to volunteer their time. If you wanted to make something like an open-source Fallout 2, that's what you need. There are plenty of programmers -- not nearly enough artists involved. I think that some of this can be aleviated by producing better tools for them (or perhaps this is just wishful thinking, as I program). Make GIMP better, get more graphic artists on Linux willing to do stuff. Want better fonts? Make a *good* Linux vector font editor.
Just because the drive reports that the cache is off doesn't mean that it is. As a matter of fact, there was a bit of a problem when drive manufacturers tried pulling this with write caching instead of just read caching a while back, resulting in potentially lost data.
Some people go the other way -- that they don't like single-button trackpads.
I'd say it's reasonable.
Because I do floating point ops so frequently...
You *do* realize that a lot of the data involved has to be coming from a cache to get those kind of numbers? That this is *never* going to be the case when copying, say, a movie file?
(a) They're talking about megabytes (MB) not megabits (Mb), an (b) if you're doing straight file writes they're going to RAM and will be written from the buffer cache later.