Just sit right back and you'll hear a tale, a tale about a fateful trip That started from Sundsvall's port, aboard a flying ship. The mate was a mighty Cleric man, the Admiral Brave and sure. 100 crew set sail that day on a 3 year tour, a 3 year tour.
The magic started getting weak, the flying ship was tossed if not for the courage of the fearless crew the Princess would be lost, the princess would be lost.
The ship went aground on the shore of this uncharted Hollow World With Talasar....Haldemar too. Ramissur and Ashari. Abovombe Xerdon and Raman, Here in the Hollow World.
Or:
We come on the Princess Ark Prince Haldemar and Me. Around Mystara now we do roam Flying all night, we get into fights. Oh I feel so broke up I wanna go home.
So hoist up the princess's sails, sae how the mains'le sets Send an away team ashore, let me go home. let me go home, I wanna go home Oh I feel so broke up I wanna go home.
Well Ramissur he got drunk, and broke in Haldemar's bunk Xerdon had to come and take him away. Leo the Gnome, why don't you leave me alone Oh I feel so broke up I wanna go home.
By that I mean the 83-87 Mentzer revisions of the D&D Basic and Expert sets (and Companion, Master and Immortal sets) or better yet the Rules Cyclopedia, and the Gazetteer series, Wrath of the Immortals, Dawn of the Emperors, Champions of Mystara and Hollow World sets. Had a bunch lost em in a flood.
The resurgence of PC gaming started a couple of years ago and has only been picking up steam (see what I did there?). 2012 brought us some PC-centric games that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago, when we believed PC gaming was dying.
Oh it's not dying, but it's just being the niche it's always been. The current PC game market is like the late Amiga market. Ports/cross platform games, games from developers too small or too cheap (Like all those Euro-devs) or too PC partisan (Blizzard) to do a console title.
Take a look at PC Gamer's games of the year list, the Game of the Year, Single Player FPS of the Year and even the Strategy game of the year are all cross platform titles. and last year...the MMO of the year was also a cross-platform title (DCUO) Even PC gaming was as vital and thriving as in the past, NONE of those would have been cross-platform titles.
Fedora likes big/boot. I had a preupgrade fail on me once because apparently I didn't have enough space in/boot for it to do "something" in it, still not for sure what. Think it was the F15>F16 transition. Anyway it left my system unusable....but I always burn a DVD beforehand, just in case, so used that to install and told it to leave my "/home" alone.
The F16>F17 and F17>F18 transitions via preupgrade/fedup were fine, well except for not having the nvidia driver installedlike it should have been (I use rpmfusion) so I had to manually install that in single user mode to get GDM to show up, and they changed pulse (actually fixed it) so a change I made in/etc/pulse/default.pa to get HDMI audio working in previous versions wasn't needed (and made pulse malfunction)
And the new XFCE version didn't get along with my f17 XFCE panel configuration, had to fix it a little.
Yeah, I like to remind some of the "Fedora is a bleeding edge distro not for user luser, they should be using Ubuntu." crowd that shows up now and then that at one time... Red Hat was the "distro for the masses"
full "normal" words are easier to remember for "normal" people.
"Is it rc.d or foo.rc.d or is it foo2.rc.d, or is it rc.d/rc.d.foo/rc.d"
Yes it's essentially an abstraction, but it's a good abstraction, no need to remember the exact paths to the various scripts (which might be inconsistent)...just know the name of the service and you can do what you need to do.
Fpr example suppose you write an IM program, and suppose you' have vocal and writing patterns like Sheldon on Big Bang Theory so you call the function to log in and out of specific accounts enable/disable.
Suppose some user comes along and says:
Hey, only guys like Sheldon call that sort of thing enable/disable, login/logout is actually more descriptive and is the terminalogy people actually use day to day.
That is feedback, it tells you how actual users, who outnumber you, "think".
Or suppose a user is colorblind and says the standard color theme isn't very usable because they can't tell the logged in and logged out icons apart by color. He then suggests a "color-blind them/mode" option to use either color blind friendly colors or icons that you can tell apart without reference to color.
Clause 15 is a cop-out so GNU (and eventually other FOSS) could avoid having to work on proper usability.
Even now, there is plenty of GNU/FOSS software has usability issues for anyone who isn't a neckbeard squatting at MIT. And it's all because of that:
"I made it to scratch an itch, who cares about anyone else" which is directly contrary to the GNU Projects stated goals of providing "Free" software to "everyone"
If that's how you feel, then don't release your code into the wild in the first place. Then you don't have to worry about those loser users or their feedback that they took time to give you.
You know, maybe you should buy the users tacos when they give you feedback....there are companies out there that actually PAY people to test out software with user testing.
But your point about AAA games wasn't entirely clear. While as you said, steam discounts AAA games faster, but AAA games on the consoles do get discounted eventually But I don't think Steam heavily discounting AAA games agressively is a good thing. Why do you think some devs think PC gamers are cheapskates not worth spending much time to focus on.
Hww many times have we seen this on Slashdot: "I only buy games discounted or at Steam Sales" That is part of my point. It's the console gamers paying the development costs, which is why PC gamers are an afterthought.
Games cost money to make, PC gamers can't hold up "Cheap Steam Games and quickly discounted AAA titles on Steam"as the greatest thing in the world for PC gaming and say how that makes PC gaming better...and then lament how developers don't pay much attention to PC ports.
Unlike PC gamers I don't have that entitlement mindset where I expect to pay 20 bucks for a game that came out a month ago.
Assuming a 30 percent retailer margin, the same that Apple currently takes in its App Store, a game might have sold for $26.95, or $61.82 in 2011 dollars. That's release-day AAA pricing, and I can understand how people would react to having bought absolute crap for that much money.
I was alive then you know, the minimum price of 2600 games before the crash was 29.95, most games at 39.95 with some being 49.95. So yes, games cost MORE back then and had less content and gameplay.
I imagine that gamers feel far less burned by a free trial than by what Atari 2600 games cost.
That's why demo discs and eventually demo downloads via PSN became commonplace.
That's why I contend that the entry barrier familiar from PlayStation and Nintendo consoles is no longer necessary to avoid another 1984.
You're wrong. They simply don't want every basement dweller who thinks he's the next Shigeru Miyamoto putting his unimaginative crap without a graphics person or music composer on their system. They want pro-level stuff. Sure in some cases these days it's small low budget phone games ported from phones by pro phone devs but it aint one guy in a basement. Sure IOS/Androidand XBLIG have lower barriers but have you SEEN the games....most of them aren't even up to PSone or PSP standards. It's a haven for two guys in a garage to release a ton of derivative me-too crap. And piracy is rampant!
Frankly I don't want you developing for Nintendo and Sony, unless you're part of a team, you're not ready. You may never be ready. You're too literalist, and you're stuck in the past.
While I want you to acheive your dream the barriers are there for a reason. that I mostly agree with.
What exactly caused the NES to beat the C64? Was it the price of the 1541 floppy disk drive?
Not specifically. When the crash of 84 hit, those who could afford it jumped ot the C64 (and other computers) but there were plenty who couldn't. (Remember, a full c64 system cost the dquivalent of a few thousand dollars) Those who couldn't either stopped playing or kept playing their what games they had.
Then the NES hit and it was cheaper than the C64, was easy to use, had controls with more than one button, and had sound and graphics either equal to or better than the C64. It also didn't have 2 minute and 45 second load times. NES cartridges could hold FAR more data than a 1541 disk and access it quicker.
That meant a bunch of C64 owners jumped back to consoles, leaving only those gamers who liked games that didn't exist on consoles at that time (mostly RPG's and strategy games. Those gamers eventually jumped to DOS because devlopers stopped doing C64 (and later on Amiga) ports of their games because of the EXTREMELY high piracy rate among C64 owners (especially in Europe where most of the big C64 pirate groups were based), who having spent a LOT of money for those days, didn't have much for games.
SSI, Origin, Micropose and others stopped doing C64 games because of piracy. DOS gamers, obviously having more money than 2600 gamers turned C64 gamers, didn't pirate so much back then. They were willing to pay $50 bucks for whatever flight sim or lets-fight-stalingrad/gettysburg-on-a-hex-map-again-for-the-bajillionth-time game came out. Course the PC gamer market isn't just bearded jane's book owning engineers playing flightsims and hex-wargames anymore, so there's more piracy from the more casual doom-boys and those that followed them
You can't have it both ways. You can't lambast consoles and say how steam is awesome and better for having cheap games and that you don't have to pay 59.99....and then when it's pointed out that PSN has cheap games, say you would pay full price on games you're interested in.
Nope, it was consumers getting burned by 2600 shovelware and rushed arcade ports
Course it didn't help the 5200 never took off so the 2600 was getting long in the tooth in 84, compared to cheap true "home computers" like the C64, which itself was killed by the NES.
That's why the Nintendo "Seal of Quality" was created.
Skype Just Works. Sure it's not open source and it's not an open protocol...but it works without fiddling even on Linux, which is why it became so popular. Fairly good sound quality too.
As much as I'd rather everyone use Gtalk, they don't, they use Skype.
And console like controllers are now available for PCs (but the more general purpose keyboard and mouse aren't on consoles...),
1999 called, it wants it's argument back. You do know that the PS2 and PS3 have USB ports for a reason. People have been hooking mice and keyboards up to consoles for a decade, not even taking into account the dedicated mice for the PSone, Genesis and SNES.
Slashdot Mirror
You'd be better off with the PSone version which has Psone mouse support.
Oh I most certainly agree on that.
Yeah, the Gazetters, I wants them. And the Creature Crucibles (I only had The Fair folk one...Sidhe are badasses)
Just sit right back and you'll hear a tale, a tale about a fateful trip
That started from Sundsvall's port, aboard a flying ship.
The mate was a mighty Cleric man, the Admiral Brave and sure.
100 crew set sail that day on a 3 year tour, a 3 year tour.
The magic started getting weak, the flying ship was tossed
if not for the courage of the fearless crew the Princess would be lost, the princess would be lost.
The ship went aground on the shore of this uncharted Hollow World
With Talasar....Haldemar too.
Ramissur and Ashari.
Abovombe
Xerdon and Raman,
Here in the Hollow World.
Or:
We come on the Princess Ark
Prince Haldemar and Me.
Around Mystara now we do roam
Flying all night, we get into fights.
Oh I feel so broke up I wanna go home.
So hoist up the princess's sails, sae how the mains'le sets
Send an away team ashore, let me go home.
let me go home, I wanna go home
Oh I feel so broke up I wanna go home.
Well Ramissur he got drunk, and broke in Haldemar's bunk
Xerdon had to come and take him away.
Leo the Gnome, why don't you leave me alone
Oh I feel so broke up I wanna go home.
By that I mean the 83-87 Mentzer revisions of the D&D Basic and Expert sets (and Companion, Master and Immortal sets) or better yet the Rules Cyclopedia, and the Gazetteer series, Wrath of the Immortals, Dawn of the Emperors, Champions of Mystara and Hollow World sets. Had a bunch lost em in a flood.
The resurgence of PC gaming started a couple of years ago and has only been picking up steam (see what I did there?). 2012 brought us some PC-centric games that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago, when we believed PC gaming was dying.
Oh it's not dying, but it's just being the niche it's always been. The current PC game market is like the late Amiga market. Ports/cross platform games, games from developers too small or too cheap (Like all those Euro-devs) or too PC partisan (Blizzard) to do a console title.
Take a look at PC Gamer's games of the year list, the Game of the Year, Single Player FPS of the Year and even the Strategy game of the year are all cross platform titles. and last year...the MMO of the year was also a cross-platform title (DCUO) Even PC gaming was as vital and thriving as in the past, NONE of those would have been cross-platform titles.
That cange came with F17, not F18.
Nvidia driver just won't work on F18 - I had to go to nouveau - I simply can't find a way to make this driver work
[CronoCloud@wutai ~]$ cat
Fedora release 18 (Spherical Cow)
[CronoCloud@wutai ~]$ glxinfo | grep -i nvidia
server glx vendor string: NVIDIA Corporation
client glx vendor string: NVIDIA Corporation
OpenGL vendor string: NVIDIA Corporation
OpenGL version string: 3.3.0 NVIDIA 304.64
OpenGL shading language version string: 3.30 NVIDIA via Cg compiler
Install RPMfusion repo
sudo yum install akmod-nvidia kmod-nvidia
that should do the trick, double check to make sure nouveau is blacklisted in the kernel boot line.
Fedora likes big /boot. I had a preupgrade fail on me once because apparently I didn't have enough space in /boot for it to do "something" in it, still not for sure what. Think it was the F15>F16 transition. Anyway it left my system unusable....but I always burn a DVD beforehand, just in case, so used that to install and told it to leave my "/home" alone.
The F16>F17 and F17>F18 transitions via preupgrade/fedup were fine, well except for not having the nvidia driver installedlike it should have been (I use rpmfusion) so I had to manually install that in single user mode to get GDM to show up, and they changed pulse (actually fixed it) so a change I made in /etc/pulse/default.pa to get HDMI audio working in previous versions wasn't needed (and made pulse malfunction)
And the new XFCE version didn't get along with my f17 XFCE panel configuration, had to fix it a little.
That was pretty much it.
fedup basically works the same way "preupgrade" did in previous versions.
I know Anaconda was in RH6, my first Linux was a RH6 based distro and the screens mentioned anaconda.
There used to be a city/timezone drop down list as well, besides the little map.
I was just about to upgrade to F18 but had considered either cent os/scientific linux to avoid re-installs every six months.
What is this "re-install" thing you speak of, why would one not just:
sudo yum preupgrade
or now:
sudo fedup --network 18
(Yes, I enable sudo on my Fedora install...so "su" me.)
Yeah, I like to remind some of the "Fedora is a bleeding edge distro not for user luser, they should be using Ubuntu." crowd that shows up now and then that at one time... Red Hat was the "distro for the masses"
full "normal" words are easier to remember for "normal" people.
"Is it rc.d or foo.rc.d or is it foo2.rc.d, or is it rc.d/rc.d.foo/rc.d"
Yes it's essentially an abstraction, but it's a good abstraction, no need to remember the exact paths to the various scripts (which might be inconsistent)...just know the name of the service and you can do what you need to do.
Feedback is also a contribution:
Fpr example suppose you write an IM program, and suppose you' have vocal and writing patterns like Sheldon on Big Bang Theory so you call the function to log in and out of specific accounts enable/disable.
Suppose some user comes along and says:
Hey, only guys like Sheldon call that sort of thing enable/disable, login/logout is actually more descriptive and is the terminalogy people actually use day to day.
That is feedback, it tells you how actual users, who outnumber you, "think".
Or suppose a user is colorblind and says the standard color theme isn't very usable because they can't tell the logged in and logged out icons apart by color. He then suggests a "color-blind them/mode" option to use either color blind friendly colors or icons that you can tell apart without reference to color.
That is also good feedback.
Clause 15 is a cop-out so GNU (and eventually other FOSS) could avoid having to work on proper usability.
Even now, there is plenty of GNU/FOSS software has usability issues for anyone who isn't a neckbeard squatting at MIT. And it's all because of that:
"I made it to scratch an itch, who cares about anyone else" which is directly contrary to the GNU Projects stated goals of providing "Free" software to "everyone"
If that's how you feel, then don't release your code into the wild in the first place. Then you don't have to worry about those loser users or their feedback that they took time to give you.
You know, maybe you should buy the users tacos when they give you feedback....there are companies out there that actually PAY people to test out software with user testing.
"Time is running out!,,,,,, Better luck next time."
But your point about AAA games wasn't entirely clear. While as you said, steam discounts AAA games faster, but AAA games on the consoles do get discounted eventually But I don't think Steam heavily discounting AAA games agressively is a good thing. Why do you think some devs think PC gamers are cheapskates not worth spending much time to focus on.
Hww many times have we seen this on Slashdot: "I only buy games discounted or at Steam Sales" That is part of my point. It's the console gamers paying the development costs, which is why PC gamers are an afterthought.
Games cost money to make, PC gamers can't hold up "Cheap Steam Games and quickly discounted AAA titles on Steam"as the greatest thing in the world for PC gaming and say how that makes PC gaming better...and then lament how developers don't pay much attention to PC ports.
Unlike PC gamers I don't have that entitlement mindset where I expect to pay 20 bucks for a game that came out a month ago.
Assuming a 30 percent retailer margin, the same that Apple currently takes in its App Store, a game might have sold for $26.95, or $61.82 in 2011 dollars. That's release-day AAA pricing, and I can understand how people would react to having bought absolute crap for that much money.
I was alive then you know, the minimum price of 2600 games before the crash was 29.95, most games at 39.95 with some being 49.95. So yes, games cost MORE back then and had less content and gameplay.
I imagine that gamers feel far less burned by a free trial than by what Atari 2600 games cost.
That's why demo discs and eventually demo downloads via PSN became commonplace.
That's why I contend that the entry barrier familiar from PlayStation and Nintendo consoles is no longer necessary to avoid another 1984.
You're wrong. They simply don't want every basement dweller who thinks he's the next Shigeru Miyamoto putting his unimaginative crap without a graphics person or music composer on their system. They want pro-level stuff. Sure in some cases these days it's small low budget phone games ported from phones by pro phone devs but it aint one guy in a basement. Sure IOS/Androidand XBLIG have lower barriers but have you SEEN the games....most of them aren't even up to PSone or PSP standards. It's a haven for two guys in a garage to release a ton of derivative me-too crap. And piracy is rampant!
Frankly I don't want you developing for Nintendo and Sony, unless you're part of a team, you're not ready. You may never be ready. You're too literalist, and you're stuck in the past.
While I want you to acheive your dream the barriers are there for a reason. that I mostly agree with.
What exactly caused the NES to beat the C64? Was it the price of the 1541 floppy disk drive?
Not specifically. When the crash of 84 hit, those who could afford it jumped ot the C64 (and other computers) but there were plenty who couldn't. (Remember, a full c64 system cost the dquivalent of a few thousand dollars) Those who couldn't either stopped playing or kept playing their what games they had.
Then the NES hit and it was cheaper than the C64, was easy to use, had controls with more than one button, and had sound and graphics either equal to or better than the C64. It also didn't have 2 minute and 45 second load times. NES cartridges could hold FAR more data than a 1541 disk and access it quicker.
That meant a bunch of C64 owners jumped back to consoles, leaving only those gamers who liked games that didn't exist on consoles at that time (mostly RPG's and strategy games. Those gamers eventually jumped to DOS because devlopers stopped doing C64 (and later on Amiga) ports of their games because of the EXTREMELY high piracy rate among C64 owners (especially in Europe where most of the big C64 pirate groups were based), who having spent a LOT of money for those days, didn't have much for games.
SSI, Origin, Micropose and others stopped doing C64 games because of piracy. DOS gamers, obviously having more money than 2600 gamers turned C64 gamers, didn't pirate so much back then. They were willing to pay $50 bucks for whatever flight sim or lets-fight-stalingrad/gettysburg-on-a-hex-map-again-for-the-bajillionth-time game came out. Course the PC gamer market isn't just bearded jane's book owning engineers playing flightsims and hex-wargames anymore, so there's more piracy from the more casual doom-boys and those that followed them
You can't have it both ways. You can't lambast consoles and say how steam is awesome and better for having cheap games and that you don't have to pay 59.99....and then when it's pointed out that PSN has cheap games, say you would pay full price on games you're interested in.
Nope, it was consumers getting burned by 2600 shovelware and rushed arcade ports
Course it didn't help the 5200 never took off so the 2600 was getting long in the tooth in 84, compared to cheap true "home computers" like the C64, which itself was killed by the NES.
That's why the Nintendo "Seal of Quality" was created.
This!
Skype Just Works. Sure it's not open source and it's not an open protocol...but it works without fiddling even on Linux, which is why it became so popular. Fairly good sound quality too.
As much as I'd rather everyone use Gtalk, they don't, they use Skype.
And console like controllers are now available for PCs (but the more general purpose keyboard and mouse aren't on consoles...),
1999 called, it wants it's argument back. You do know that the PS2 and PS3 have USB ports for a reason. People have been hooking mice and keyboards up to consoles for a decade, not even taking into account the dedicated mice for the PSone, Genesis and SNES.