Oh, dear. Poor SpinnWebe is going to get clobbered hard by the Slashdot Effect. His server has never had a very large pipe, and I fear either he or his provider are going to fall over hard once the hits start swarming in...
Nevertheless, I've been a follower of it for years, and I think it's worth bookmarking The Dysfunctional Family Circus, as well as its companion site, It's A Dysfunctional Life, which is exactly like the DFC, except it uses real-life photos. This one and this one are especially hilarious examples of what you can expect.
The phrase "IT executives" is a Big Red Flag to me. Having dealt with my share of IT Executives, I'm guessing this is a lovefest on how to "allow" Linux systems to operate with a minimum of problems on your precious NT-run network without breaking anything.
Conference agenda items are sure to include:
Linux and EMail: Transitioning from MS Exchange to 'sendmail'.
Robust File Sharing: Setting Up NFS Clients on Windoze Systems.
Security: No. Really. You Only Need Sixteen Permission Bits.
I saw a Japanese Dreamcast a few days ago in a gaming store, and I regret to report that I was very underwhelmed.
The two titles they had playing were Sonic Adventure and Virtua Fighter MP. The graphics in Sonic did not impress me at all. There was one fun bit with Sonic racing down a road (the wide-angle camera shot was fairly effective at giving a sense of speed), but most of the rest of the graphics were quite unremarkable (almost primitive in some spots).
Virtua Fighter was even more disappointing. They appear to be using the exact same motion capture files, so all that's changed are the graphics, which have been dressed up a bit. Further, when the characters step over water, their shadows disappear.
Since these are obviously Sega's "A" titles, I expected them to really show off what the machine was capable of. If this is the best Dreamcast can do, I fear Sega's in for a very bad year. They were, of course, utter fools to spend any time with WinCE at all. But even if you ignore that, from what I've read, Playstation-2 has little to worry about.
The film must run in the largest auditorium in the complex and cannot move to a smaller room for the minimum length of the run without permission from Fox;
Is this to ensure that Star Wars always gets the spotlight? Arrogance, or is he trying to ensure that the audience always enjoys the best screens the theatre may have? It seems like he's abusing his power just a bit in order for the viewers to have a good show...
Historical Perspective: George Lucas lives and works in Marin County, where I grew up. Over 20 years ago, when Star Wars was first released, it played in Marin's Northgate Theater, which was part of the Northgate Mall in Terra Linda. This was, without question, the crappiest theater in the whole county, if not the whole SF Bay area. It seated maybe 300 people, and the screen was incredibly tiny and had a very strong curve to its surface. No matter where you sat, you were sure to get a distorted picture, and poor sound.
And it was in this amazingly cheesy excuse for a theater that Star Wars stayed for the entirety of its run (six months?). I kept hoping they'd move it to the Cinema in Corte Madera, the best theater in Marin at that time, but noooo. I was quite jubilant when they finally gutted that place as part of the mall's remodeling. ("Empire" and "Jedi" did, however, premiere in the Cinema.)
I'd like to think that George remembers this, and wants to make certain that nothing like it ever happens again. I'd like to think that...
AltaVista used to be the first search engine I would visit. Up until recently, I was still entering the URL as http://altavista.digital.com/. None of the other search engines were detectably better, and so using AltaVista first became a matter of habit.
...Until someone pointed me at Google. I did searches on some of my own stuff, and other stuff I was interested in. Relevant links came up very quickly. In fact, over the last couple of weeks, I found out how useful Google is. I went searching through AltaVista first, but couldn't find anything in that forest of links it handed back. Then I remembered Google, and the links I wanted showed up in the first three pages. Every time, Google beat out AltaVista for presenting useful information.
As a result, I have now successfully retrained myself; Google is now the first search engine I check.
As an aside, I've discovered that Lycos is a scam. I submitted my home page to Lycos some time ago to be indexed. Recently I tried searching for it. Lycos didn't find it. Thinking that they forgot to index it, I went to resubmit it, and found they have a "Check to see if your page is indexed" form. So I entered my URL, and it said, "Yeah, your page is indexed with us." So I went back to the main page and entered some search terms that are fairly unique to my page, and it returned nothing. So I conclude that Lycos is a scam. I recommend avoiding it.
I disagree about the religious extremism bit; I don't remember them mentioning anything of a religious nature.
I inferred it. Religious extremists in the United States have been decrying Decaying Moral Values for a couple of decades now, mostly upon uninterested or better-informed ears. The defendants in this case look very much like the laundry lists proffered by The Moral Majority, and other organizations of similar credibility.
It's difficult to editorialize this without seeming like an insensitive bastard. The loss of children to parents is incalculable and unfathomable, and their pursuit of this action speaks rather directly to the degree of pain the loss of a loved one can cause.
So, with all due respect to the families who were affected by this tragedy, this suit has "Ambulance Chaser" and "Religious Extremism" written all over it.
It's fairly evident this suit has virtually nothing to do with recovering damages for a tragic loss, and nearly everything to do with advancing a misguided political and social agenda. It's impossible to say from the brief news release whether this was hatched by the parents, the laywers, or someone else.
In the past, parents stricken with such a tragic loss have traditionally formed memorial foundations, whose goal is to raise awareness of the conditions that contributed to their loved one's death. MADD, The Polly Klaas Foundation, and others come to mind. I would counsel the parents in this situation to do the same. It is a far more lasting and constructive contribution they could make than any contrived lawsuit could ever hope to accomplish.
Once again, I'll trot out my lovable chestnut:-), Digital Sculptures, wherein I describe the economic realities of digital media, and the future it portends.
Alsop does overlook one thing, however. IP law shouldn't be abolished completely. Some laws would need to remain to prevent theft of reputation.
Many (if not most) game developers will tell you that they need to get the OS out of the way so they can fulfill their need for speed. However, they also want their games to work transparently on multiple hardware platforms, which is what the OS layer is supposed to do for you, so they find themselves wanting it both ways.
It turns out that it is possible to get high-performance out of even heavy OSes like Linux, but the libraries need to be designed very carefully. A lot of thought needs to be devoted into isolating the bottlenecks, characterizing them, and then designing the library so that the bottleneck vanishes or is substantially diminished. This is not easy or quick work. It requires four people (at most) to sit and think a lot. (I know; I'm in the middle of something like it right now.)
I also posted a Roadmap for Linux Gaming to Slashdot some days ago, which I think may be applicable here.
I'll read the article when my copy of Game Developer arrives.
Because it destroys information you may need. By sticking just current position in a global, you lose the history of previous motions. You also don't know when the mouse arrived in that position; it could have been just a moment ago, it could have been last week. If the mouse is motionless, you may not need to recalculate the frame.
Basically, you want a high-speed event queue. This will let you handle the mouse motion anyway you want (including stuffing it in a global, if that best suits your app).
Incidentally, I wrote up a longish comment on some general ideas I've had concerning improving gaming support under Linux. It might prove an interesting read.
I don't have the time to critique the library in detail. While it has a couple of interesting utility routines (such as a LoadFile() function that will transparently handle compressed or archive files), the design of the library is rather primitive.
They use call-backs and sub-classed C++ object functions to implement their convenience functions. For example, every game frame, you have to call a particular function in the GameApp class so that keystrokes and mouse coordinates can be collected. This is extremely primitive. A better way to do this is to spawn a thread whose sole purpose in life is to collect input, process it, and enqueue it for use by the mainline thread. (As an aside, the current mouse coordinates are stored a globals; can you say, "Not thread-safe?")
So, I'm sorry, but after scanning the API documentation, I'm not very impressed. For people just learning how to write games, it's a marginally reasonable utility package. But it would have little use in a rich, commercial-quality, high-performance gaming environment.
But the distortions in Groening's work are quite strong. I'm still floored that they were able to take 3D objects and make them look like Life in Hell.
As someone with limited amateur-level experience in creating 3D art and animation, Futurama is simply incredible. They took "real" 3D objects and made it look like a forced-perspective 2D cartoon.
DirectX is pretty much an unmitigated disaster from an implementation standpoint. Direct3D is especially egregious.
If you look at DirectX, look at it only as a vague source of the kinds of features you'd like to implement in a well-designed API.
Schwab
Roadmap for Linux Gaming Support
on
Gaming on Linux
·
· Score: 5
Oh dear, you've gotten me started. As an occasional game author myself, I have some perspective on this (with lots of lessons learned the hard way from both sides), and it just happens that I've been thinking about this issue lately. Here are some things I believe Linux needs to improve its appeal to gamers and game developers.
Transparent Access to Full Screen Display Modes SVGAlib has been an excellent tool for a long time, but it's starting to show its age, and it supports considerably fewer cards than the current release of XFree86. Further, it's silly to have to write a driver for the same card two or more times (once inside XFree86, once inside SVGAlib, etc.). I've read the work of The GGI Project, and I suggest interested techies do, too. There are no glaring flaws in the design (though it has odd warts here and there), and with work it could become an excellent foundation for high-performance graphics device control and configuration. SVGAlib and XFree86 could both be built on top of this structure. Thus, drivers would need to be written only once. I've love to see this move forward.
Unlike Windoze display modes (which all come out of a fixed table), Linux should be able to generate any resolution and scan rate the card can physically generate. Multi-monitor support would also be nice, but this is much harder (trust me on this one). Also, you should be able to launch a full-screen app from inside XFree86, and neither XFree nor the app should care (being able to switch back and forth would be nice, too). Ambitious souls may care to emulate BeOS's "Workspaces", where each virtual desktop can be a different resolution, scan rate, and pixel depth.
There also needs to be work done on supporting VESA DDC (Display Data Channel) which allows the system to identify the attached monitor and determine its scanning limits (thus alleviating the need for the dreaded mode table in XFree86config; just ask the monitor what it can do). We may also need to beat up on VESA to make its standards more readily available.
Expansion of OpenGL Efforts OpenGL is the future of 3D gaming (just ask John Carmack). While Mesa is an excellent first step (and very complete), its performance is poor compared to OpenGL ICDs available for Windoze. Basically, we need to get the triangle counts up. Part of this can be done by optimizing Mesa. However, a significant portion of the rest has to be done by or in cooperation with the 3D card manufacturers.
A standard interface needs to be established between Mesa (or whatever OpenGL implementation ends up dominating) and the graphics cards. This will allow for Mesa and the hardware drivers to be evolved and optimized independently of each other. It also allows users to plug in any compliant card and expect it to work. This GL/hardware interface can be established at the driver level; the GGI people probably have suggestions on this.
Finally, everyone reading this article needs to beat up on the 3D card vendors to support Linux. Roughly half of all Quake servers are running on Linux. 3D card vendors live or die based on their Quake frame rates. Why should a server operator have to crash back into Windoze just to test out the latest RA/TF/CTF/LMCTF release? This alone is compelling enough reason for the 3D vendors to formally support Linux.
New Sound Architecture OSS is functional (it works well for Quake and MikMod), but modern gaming requires much more. Sound has always been my weak point, so I don't have a lot of concrete ideas here. ALSA (Advanced Linux Sound Architecture) looks interesting, but I lack the knowledge to evaluate it properly.
Basically, the goals of the sound API need to include extremely low latency and low overhead. The system shouldn't be eaten alive just mixing and playing back sounds. Also, for applications that do buffer sounds ahead of time, there should be an event system built in such that the application can be informed when a particular sample or sample segment has started playing. This allows the client to synchonize other events (explosion visuals?) with the audio.
Networking In my view, very little needs to be done here. Linux's socket API is one of the most reliable and complete implementations anywhere. There's no reason a game can't directly use network sockets.
Input Devices Again, the keynote here is low latency and high sample rate. Most PS/2 mice will run at higher baud rates (if you're running Windoze at the moment, grab a copy of PS/2 Mouse Rate and see for yourself), so the mouse drivers should have the ability to tweak this.
I'm not as convinced that USB is important, but in order to get that to work, you better start beating up on Intel for the specs now. Intel's documentation department can be slow to respond (I'd use the term "glacial," but that conveys an unwarranted sense of haste). USB is a non-trivial beast. Getting all the device types, hubs, and hot-plugging issues down is going to take time.
Anyway, that's pretty much what's on my laundry list. I also have specific ideas on how some of this might get implemented. If I wasn't so darned employed, I'd probably be working on some aspect of this stuff.
Amazon almost never screens user-written reviews, unless their attention is drawn to them by an irate publisher.
Case in point: A lot of bogus (and hilarious) reviews of the Family Circus anthology Daddy's Cap is On Backwards stayed on Amazon for weeks, most of them written by the denizens of the Dysfunctional Family Circus. Keane's publisher finally got wind of it (after its existence was published in a newspaper), and they have since been pulled down.
So, yeah, you can write anything you want and get it posted on Amazon as a review. They do effectively no checking.
If this is true, it may be what finally moves me away from Slackware and towards something else (leaning toward Debian at the moment, for no particular reason).
The solution to your examples is not censorship, but more speech. I, too, would like to see hate groups and Scientology blasted off the face of the Earth, but the only way to do that is for people to become informed about what The Real Deal is. And the only way that can happen is through unfettered communication, which includes seeing the original "offensive" material.
Once the bright light of information is shone on them, exploitive cults and hate groups simply fall apart. OTOH, if you censor them, then you place yourself in a position that is considerably more difficult to defend: "What are you trying to hide?"
As for graphic violence, I think it could do TV-watching kids a world of good if they occasionally got a dose of just how horrifying real murders, gun fights, and car wrecks can be.
Thirteen-year-olds should not be allowed to use school resources to look at porn.
Not to suggest that you are pro-censorship, but why is this the only example pro-censorship forces present as a defense for their views: Kids looking at sexually explicit material? Are there no other compelling arguments? And if there aren't, then how compelling can this sole argument really be?
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, dear. Poor SpinnWebe is going to get clobbered hard by the Slashdot Effect. His server has never had a very large pipe, and I fear either he or his provider are going to fall over hard once the hits start swarming in...
Nevertheless, I've been a follower of it for years, and I think it's worth bookmarking The Dysfunctional Family Circus, as well as its companion site, It's A Dysfunctional Life, which is exactly like the DFC, except it uses real-life photos. This one and this one are especially hilarious examples of what you can expect.
Schwab
Where do we send the resumes?
Schwab
The phrase "IT executives" is a Big Red Flag to me. Having dealt with my share of IT Executives, I'm guessing this is a lovefest on how to "allow" Linux systems to operate with a minimum of problems on your precious NT-run network without breaking anything.
Conference agenda items are sure to include:
Schwab
You had a front panel? You were lucky. We had to short out bare wires sticking out of the box...
Schwab
I saw a Japanese Dreamcast a few days ago in a gaming store, and I regret to report that I was very underwhelmed.
The two titles they had playing were Sonic Adventure and Virtua Fighter MP. The graphics in Sonic did not impress me at all. There was one fun bit with Sonic racing down a road (the wide-angle camera shot was fairly effective at giving a sense of speed), but most of the rest of the graphics were quite unremarkable (almost primitive in some spots).
Virtua Fighter was even more disappointing. They appear to be using the exact same motion capture files, so all that's changed are the graphics, which have been dressed up a bit. Further, when the characters step over water, their shadows disappear.
Since these are obviously Sega's "A" titles, I expected them to really show off what the machine was capable of. If this is the best Dreamcast can do, I fear Sega's in for a very bad year. They were, of course, utter fools to spend any time with WinCE at all. But even if you ignore that, from what I've read, Playstation-2 has little to worry about.
Schwab
Historical Perspective: George Lucas lives and works in Marin County, where I grew up. Over 20 years ago, when Star Wars was first released, it played in Marin's Northgate Theater, which was part of the Northgate Mall in Terra Linda. This was, without question, the crappiest theater in the whole county, if not the whole SF Bay area. It seated maybe 300 people, and the screen was incredibly tiny and had a very strong curve to its surface. No matter where you sat, you were sure to get a distorted picture, and poor sound.
And it was in this amazingly cheesy excuse for a theater that Star Wars stayed for the entirety of its run (six months?). I kept hoping they'd move it to the Cinema in Corte Madera, the best theater in Marin at that time, but noooo. I was quite jubilant when they finally gutted that place as part of the mall's remodeling. ("Empire" and "Jedi" did, however, premiere in the Cinema.)
I'd like to think that George remembers this, and wants to make certain that nothing like it ever happens again. I'd like to think that...
Schwab
AltaVista used to be the first search engine I would visit. Up until recently, I was still entering the URL as http://altavista.digital.com/. None of the other search engines were detectably better, and so using AltaVista first became a matter of habit.
...Until someone pointed me at Google. I did searches on some of my own stuff, and other stuff I was interested in. Relevant links came up very quickly. In fact, over the last couple of weeks, I found out how useful Google is. I went searching through AltaVista first, but couldn't find anything in that forest of links it handed back. Then I remembered Google, and the links I wanted showed up in the first three pages. Every time, Google beat out AltaVista for presenting useful information.
As a result, I have now successfully retrained myself; Google is now the first search engine I check.
As an aside, I've discovered that Lycos is a scam. I submitted my home page to Lycos some time ago to be indexed. Recently I tried searching for it. Lycos didn't find it. Thinking that they forgot to index it, I went to resubmit it, and found they have a "Check to see if your page is indexed" form. So I entered my URL, and it said, "Yeah, your page is indexed with us." So I went back to the main page and entered some search terms that are fairly unique to my page, and it returned nothing. So I conclude that Lycos is a scam. I recommend avoiding it.
Schwab
I inferred it. Religious extremists in the United States have been decrying Decaying Moral Values for a couple of decades now, mostly upon uninterested or better-informed ears. The defendants in this case look very much like the laundry lists proffered by The Moral Majority, and other organizations of similar credibility.
Agreed, and none too well veiled at that.
Schwab
It's difficult to editorialize this without seeming like an insensitive bastard. The loss of children to parents is incalculable and unfathomable, and their pursuit of this action speaks rather directly to the degree of pain the loss of a loved one can cause.
So, with all due respect to the families who were affected by this tragedy, this suit has "Ambulance Chaser" and "Religious Extremism" written all over it.
It's fairly evident this suit has virtually nothing to do with recovering damages for a tragic loss, and nearly everything to do with advancing a misguided political and social agenda. It's impossible to say from the brief news release whether this was hatched by the parents, the laywers, or someone else.
In the past, parents stricken with such a tragic loss have traditionally formed memorial foundations, whose goal is to raise awareness of the conditions that contributed to their loved one's death. MADD, The Polly Klaas Foundation, and others come to mind. I would counsel the parents in this situation to do the same. It is a far more lasting and constructive contribution they could make than any contrived lawsuit could ever hope to accomplish.
Schwab
Stewart is closer to the truth than he realizes.
Once again, I'll trot out my lovable chestnut :-), Digital Sculptures, wherein I describe the economic realities of digital media, and the future it portends.
Alsop does overlook one thing, however. IP law shouldn't be abolished completely. Some laws would need to remain to prevent theft of reputation.
Schwab
Many (if not most) game developers will tell you that they need to get the OS out of the way so they can fulfill their need for speed. However, they also want their games to work transparently on multiple hardware platforms, which is what the OS layer is supposed to do for you, so they find themselves wanting it both ways.
It turns out that it is possible to get high-performance out of even heavy OSes like Linux, but the libraries need to be designed very carefully. A lot of thought needs to be devoted into isolating the bottlenecks, characterizing them, and then designing the library so that the bottleneck vanishes or is substantially diminished. This is not easy or quick work. It requires four people (at most) to sit and think a lot. (I know; I'm in the middle of something like it right now.)
I also posted a Roadmap for Linux Gaming to Slashdot some days ago, which I think may be applicable here.
I'll read the article when my copy of Game Developer arrives.
Schwab
Think we could get Barbara Eden as a spokesperson?
Schwab
Just to clarify, what specific aspects of dealing with video stores do you find hateful?
Schwab
Stephenson's essay (nee novella :-) ) is long but well worth taking the time to read. I wish I wrote half as well as him.
Schwab
Because it destroys information you may need. By sticking just current position in a global, you lose the history of previous motions. You also don't know when the mouse arrived in that position; it could have been just a moment ago, it could have been last week. If the mouse is motionless, you may not need to recalculate the frame.
Basically, you want a high-speed event queue. This will let you handle the mouse motion anyway you want (including stuffing it in a global, if that best suits your app).
Schwab
Incidentally, I wrote up a longish comment on some general ideas I've had concerning improving gaming support under Linux. It might prove an interesting read.
Schwab
I don't have the time to critique the library in detail. While it has a couple of interesting utility routines (such as a LoadFile() function that will transparently handle compressed or archive files), the design of the library is rather primitive.
They use call-backs and sub-classed C++ object functions to implement their convenience functions. For example, every game frame, you have to call a particular function in the GameApp class so that keystrokes and mouse coordinates can be collected. This is extremely primitive. A better way to do this is to spawn a thread whose sole purpose in life is to collect input, process it, and enqueue it for use by the mainline thread. (As an aside, the current mouse coordinates are stored a globals; can you say, "Not thread-safe?")
So, I'm sorry, but after scanning the API documentation, I'm not very impressed. For people just learning how to write games, it's a marginally reasonable utility package. But it would have little use in a rich, commercial-quality, high-performance gaming environment.
Schwab
But the distortions in Groening's work are quite strong. I'm still floored that they were able to take 3D objects and make them look like Life in Hell.
Schwab
As someone with limited amateur-level experience in creating 3D art and animation, Futurama is simply incredible. They took "real" 3D objects and made it look like a forced-perspective 2D cartoon.
Simply amazing!
Schwab
Ignore DirectX
DirectX is pretty much an unmitigated disaster from an implementation standpoint. Direct3D is especially egregious.
If you look at DirectX, look at it only as a vague source of the kinds of features you'd like to implement in a well-designed API.
Schwab
Oh dear, you've gotten me started. As an occasional game author myself, I have some perspective on this (with lots of lessons learned the hard way from both sides), and it just happens that I've been thinking about this issue lately. Here are some things I believe Linux needs to improve its appeal to gamers and game developers.
Transparent Access to Full Screen Display Modes
SVGAlib has been an excellent tool for a long time, but it's starting to show its age, and it supports considerably fewer cards than the current release of XFree86. Further, it's silly to have to write a driver for the same card two or more times (once inside XFree86, once inside SVGAlib, etc.). I've read the work of The GGI Project, and I suggest interested techies do, too. There are no glaring flaws in the design (though it has odd warts here and there), and with work it could become an excellent foundation for high-performance graphics device control and configuration. SVGAlib and XFree86 could both be built on top of this structure. Thus, drivers would need to be written only once. I've love to see this move forward.
Unlike Windoze display modes (which all come out of a fixed table), Linux should be able to generate any resolution and scan rate the card can physically generate. Multi-monitor support would also be nice, but this is much harder (trust me on this one). Also, you should be able to launch a full-screen app from inside XFree86, and neither XFree nor the app should care (being able to switch back and forth would be nice, too). Ambitious souls may care to emulate BeOS's "Workspaces", where each virtual desktop can be a different resolution, scan rate, and pixel depth.
There also needs to be work done on supporting VESA DDC (Display Data Channel) which allows the system to identify the attached monitor and determine its scanning limits (thus alleviating the need for the dreaded mode table in XFree86config; just ask the monitor what it can do). We may also need to beat up on VESA to make its standards more readily available.
Expansion of OpenGL Efforts
OpenGL is the future of 3D gaming (just ask John Carmack). While Mesa is an excellent first step (and very complete), its performance is poor compared to OpenGL ICDs available for Windoze. Basically, we need to get the triangle counts up. Part of this can be done by optimizing Mesa. However, a significant portion of the rest has to be done by or in cooperation with the 3D card manufacturers.
A standard interface needs to be established between Mesa (or whatever OpenGL implementation ends up dominating) and the graphics cards. This will allow for Mesa and the hardware drivers to be evolved and optimized independently of each other. It also allows users to plug in any compliant card and expect it to work. This GL/hardware interface can be established at the driver level; the GGI people probably have suggestions on this.
Finally, everyone reading this article needs to beat up on the 3D card vendors to support Linux. Roughly half of all Quake servers are running on Linux. 3D card vendors live or die based on their Quake frame rates. Why should a server operator have to crash back into Windoze just to test out the latest RA/TF/CTF/LMCTF release? This alone is compelling enough reason for the 3D vendors to formally support Linux.
New Sound Architecture
OSS is functional (it works well for Quake and MikMod), but modern gaming requires much more. Sound has always been my weak point, so I don't have a lot of concrete ideas here. ALSA (Advanced Linux Sound Architecture) looks interesting, but I lack the knowledge to evaluate it properly.
Basically, the goals of the sound API need to include extremely low latency and low overhead. The system shouldn't be eaten alive just mixing and playing back sounds. Also, for applications that do buffer sounds ahead of time, there should be an event system built in such that the application can be informed when a particular sample or sample segment has started playing. This allows the client to synchonize other events (explosion visuals?) with the audio.
Networking
In my view, very little needs to be done here. Linux's socket API is one of the most reliable and complete implementations anywhere. There's no reason a game can't directly use network sockets.
Input Devices
Again, the keynote here is low latency and high sample rate. Most PS/2 mice will run at higher baud rates (if you're running Windoze at the moment, grab a copy of PS/2 Mouse Rate and see for yourself), so the mouse drivers should have the ability to tweak this.
I'm not as convinced that USB is important, but in order to get that to work, you better start beating up on Intel for the specs now. Intel's documentation department can be slow to respond (I'd use the term "glacial," but that conveys an unwarranted sense of haste). USB is a non-trivial beast. Getting all the device types, hubs, and hot-plugging issues down is going to take time.
Anyway, that's pretty much what's on my laundry list. I also have specific ideas on how some of this might get implemented. If I wasn't so darned employed, I'd probably be working on some aspect of this stuff.
Thanks for reading.
Schwab
Amazon almost never screens user-written reviews, unless their attention is drawn to them by an irate publisher.
Case in point: A lot of bogus (and hilarious) reviews of the Family Circus anthology Daddy's Cap is On Backwards stayed on Amazon for weeks, most of them written by the denizens of the Dysfunctional Family Circus. Keane's publisher finally got wind of it (after its existence was published in a newspaper), and they have since been pulled down.
So, yeah, you can write anything you want and get it posted on Amazon as a review. They do effectively no checking.
Schwab
If this is true, it may be what finally moves me away from Slackware and towards something else (leaning toward Debian at the moment, for no particular reason).
Schwab
The solution to your examples is not censorship, but more speech. I, too, would like to see hate groups and Scientology blasted off the face of the Earth, but the only way to do that is for people to become informed about what The Real Deal is. And the only way that can happen is through unfettered communication, which includes seeing the original "offensive" material.
Once the bright light of information is shone on them, exploitive cults and hate groups simply fall apart. OTOH, if you censor them, then you place yourself in a position that is considerably more difficult to defend: "What are you trying to hide?"
As for graphic violence, I think it could do TV-watching kids a world of good if they occasionally got a dose of just how horrifying real murders, gun fights, and car wrecks can be.
Schwab
Not to suggest that you are pro-censorship, but why is this the only example pro-censorship forces present as a defense for their views: Kids looking at sexually explicit material? Are there no other compelling arguments? And if there aren't, then how compelling can this sole argument really be?
Schwab