### So when you understand this, it is pretty easy to see that ID isn't science. The reason is that it invokes god,
From that little bit that I understand about ID it explicitly doesn't involve god. It involves some arbitrary creator, but that might as well be advanced space aliens and that very well might be testable. Maybe we will one day find into info in the DNA where they say 'hello', maybe we find a crashed UFO or whatever. However so far we haven't found proof for UFOs and neither any other hint that there once was a creator, which makes ID look rather weak and theoretical speculation. And last not least ID even if we would find a creator, ID might have trouble to explain where that came from.
All that said, give ID a few hundred years and they might have a point thanks to menkind playing around with advanced gen tech.
### What enforcement powers do these clowns really have?
They can give a game an AO rating or deny the rating completly, which results in the game being unpublishable on all consoles as well as being unsellable in many retail stores. So in effect the game would be banned with only online sales on PC being the last way out.
### that makes them censors
Thats basically what they have become. Its not really their fault, but instead the fault of Microsoft, Nintendo, Sony, Walmart and friends due to not allowing AO games. But they effectively do have the power to drive your company into bankruptcy if you have a game that gets near AO.
### Where's the social interaction in 1 player games?
Are there even people that are addicted to single player games? I mean really addicted for a long time, not just two weeks.
### reaching level X + 1 is still important to the addicted player.
Yeah, but what if he has reached level99? Single player games have, for most part, a well defined end. Most are also incredibly linear. So if you heard the same dialog lines for ten times, fought the same enemies a hundred of times, do you still want to do it again and again? I kind of doubt it, because there is nothing addicting in doing it twice.
With social games you always have something new, its a similar thing over and over again, but the social component always is good for some surprises. In a single player game on the other side its the exact same thing over and over and over again.
I wouldn't say that there is nobody out there that is addicted to a single player game, there always might be a few weird people, but comparing to online games I bet it are far far less people.
### Gaming can also drain someone's bank account. You talk about 'gaming addiction' as if it only applies to World of Warcraft, and the only costs are the $15/month.
Well, actually I would say 'real' gaming addiction only applies to WoW and similar online multiplayer games, since they are endless and have all those addictive elements build in (XP points and such). I have a hard time seeing how somebody can get addicted to a regular single player game, since after all, after 20-30 hours they are over and start to get boring. There are a few that are mostly endless like Civ or The Sims and such, but the majority isn't and after a while there simply won't be anything left to do in those games. With online games however you also get the whole social component, which might have quite a huge factor.
### You completely forget the entire gaming hardware race, and the cost of consoles and other games
That might steal you one month of pay, but not *every* months pay. Even an addict should have enough brain power left to see that he doesn't need a new HD-TV, Dual-Core, etc. every week. There is really no need to spend lots of money on gaming, when there are so many used/cheap games around and even when you buy every current console around, thats just $1250, once, and will last you for five or more years. Its kind of like saying that alcoholism can get expensive because Château Margaux costs so much.
### When I can manage to do -nothing- else but play a game, preferably a new exciting one, I'll do it.
Yeah, but when its over you go back to real life, since a game only stays exciting for so long.
### But what all of this has really made me wonder is... does Microsoft have an anti-AO game policy?
No idea about the rest of the world, but at least in Germany they have. Any game (Gears of War, Condemned, etc.) that didn't get a USK rating (aka Germans version of ESRBs AO) isn't allowed to be published by Microsoft, this includes third party titles.
### Conceivably, you'd be able to enter text as quickly as you can think it.
I wouldn't be so sure about that. The reason why we can type and speak quickly is because we *don't* have to think about it, all the little details are happening unconsciously, they are stored in muscle memory and such. This thing isn't looking like it is going to read your thoughts anytime soon, instead it forces you to think about something totally unrelated to your real thought to trigger an output, which sounds like an awful indirect and slow way of doing things and I really doubt that even with lots of training you would get anywhere near normal typing speed.
I simply don't think that looking from the outside at the brain will ever give enough information to do anything meaning full with it, sure it might work for a few special cases where you don't have any hands free, are paralyzed and whatever, but replacing your keyboard? I doubt it.
I think a real brain-manchine interface needs a more direct connection to the brain then just measuring changes in blood pressure.
No idea on the details, but AO is not just for sex. Right from the ESRB page:
"""Titles rated AO (Adults Only) have content that should only be played by persons 18 years and older. Titles in this category may include prolonged scenes of intense violence and/or graphic sexual content and nudity."""
### Where is the big outcry about all these people conspiring to be my 'morality police'?
There recently has been a movie about the issue, This Film is Not Yet Rated, so it is not like it doesn't bother any one, its just that people have gotten used to it.
### And the whole console makers doing the whole 'morality police' thing is really blowing it out of proportion.
Console makers not even allowing AO titles in the first place is a pretty big issue if you ask me. If it would be just Walmart blocking the sales, that would be a huge annoyance, but if the console makers are doing it, it means that it doesn't just get harder, but that its flat out impossible to make a game for that platform. There is still the PC, so its not yet the end of the world, but we are getting there, censorship imposed by big cooperations who have a monopoly in their area can be just as effective as a state driven one, except that you can fight the later one with your constitution, while you are pretty defenseless against the monopoly one.
And beside AO doesn't mean just porn or overuse of violence, just a little sex or nudity is enough, the same kind of sex that you get to see in every other random hollywood movie, but those don't get NC-17, games on the other side with the same content get AO, see Fahrenheit for a good example.
The real issue with all this rating stuff isn't so much if Manhunt2 gets released or not, the real issue are all those games that don't even get created in the first place due to the rating system making them impossible to sell.
### I would hope most would agree that a game/film/video glorifying child rape or pro racist views, etc should not be available for the public. It is not a freedom of speech issue.
Not a freedom of speech issue? Freedom of speech is about allowing those thing that you *don't* like. So as long as everything is virtual it is a freedom of speech issue, if it is not virtual then of course the developers should go right into jail, but that doesn't seem to be the case here.
I am all for having a rating system in place, but 'age 18' (or 'age 21' if you prefer) really should be the upper limit, anything beyond that is de facto censorship.
Then go watch it, the movie isn't contra guns, in fact it comes to the conclusions that guns are not the real problem and the real issues are lie elsewhere, i.e. "climate of fear". But yeah, its of course much easier to bash him for no good reason, then to actually take time and watch what he has to say...
### While interstellar travel and colonization are not impossible, FTL is required to make them practical.
You don't need FTL to get to the next star, thats a myth, nuclear fusion rocket will bring you there in around 50 years. Not good enough for StarTrek like travel, but quite speedy when all you want to do is colonization and aren't in a hurry.
### When they arrive at a new system the use the carbon there to reproduce. They can terreform the planet.
Somehow thats sounds a hell of a lot like "Gray Goo from Outer Space", I seriously hope that we will take a little bit more care and not just send self replicating nano bots out there to terraform planets.
### I feel the speed of light barrier is going to keep us from reaching Star Trek, ever.
Just because you can't travel to another star on a weekend, doesn't mean colonizing other planets is impossible. If things like Project Daedalus are actually doable I would say its quite the opposite, 50 years to the next star sounds like a quite fast ride, not something you want to do twice, but if all you need is to get a few humans to the other side, why not? And who knows what medical advancements we have in the next decades, maybe we will be able to stop or slowdown aging? Maybe we will able to make cryosleep work for 50 years.
### Resemblant of the great cries of betrayal and censure when Retro said that Metroid Prime was going to be a (largely) first-person game instead of 2d.
And yet I still hate MetroidPrime with passion, while I love the 2D ones. There definitively was a lot that got lost in translation, the however majority didn't seem to care.
I however wouldn't worry much about Fallout3, if it turns out ugly, one couldn't have done anything anyway and if it turns out good, then well, we have one more great game. So lets approach it with an open mind and blame it for its faults when its out, not when it isn't even half done.
### You say that, but why should we hold games to a higher standard than movies, which are also voluntary?
We in germany don't. Movie ratings have been mandatory long before we started having mandatory ratings on video games. Same seems to be true for UK as well.
### Most certainly not. The NeoGeo never saw a price cut and died a horrible death.
Yeah, right. Let me quote a little bit of Wikipedia:
"""The Neo Geo's 14-year official span of support from its manufacturer makes it the second longest-lived arcade or home console system ever produced."""
That doesn't exactly sounds like a horrible death. The point to keep in mind is that the NeoGeo was never ever build to bring them market dominance and compete with the SNES, Genesis and friends. It was arcade hardware for your home, that of course comes at a high price point, but SNK only started selling them because there was demand. It simply was niche hardware right from the start, nothing wrong with that.
### let you ctrl-click on a class name to jump to the class
Yes, if you generated etags/ebrowse files before.
### compile and highlight errors as you type
When you compile, you can click on the output to jump to the files with errors.
### respond with method names when you hit ctrl-space after a variable name ### show the parameters of a method as you fill them in ### show method documentation when you hover over a method name
Don't think so, but there might be some extension for that floating around.
### Or, are they mostly intended to be for ultra quick lightweight text editing?
Definitively not just lightweight text editing, but on the other side I don't think it can keep up with a full IDE, neither in terms of features nor ease of use. I think the main benefit of Emacs is that it isn't just a IDE, it can do plenty of IDE like stuff, but you can also use it to write your LaTeX documents, your HTML pages, your XML documents, read your email and all kinds of things. It might not be the perfect solution, but its a reasonably good one for many things.
I can be clueless at times, but every single time over the past 15 years that I've tried Emacs I've ended up killing it from another terminal window because I can't even figure out how to exit the fucking program.
Have you actually looked at it after you started it? Because it shows a nice little text right after you started that explains to you how to quit it, how to display the manual and all that stuff that you need to get started.
### So can RCS - without requiring a web server and all the other bullshit.
Subversion never required a webserver. It works perfectly fine with direct file access, access over ssh and all that stuff. Doing it via a webserver is just one of many possible ways to get access to a repository.
Re:There's a difference between GIT and SVN
on
Linus on GIT and SCM
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
### However, in smaller projects, which really *need* a very specific direction
Yes, but that isn't an argument why you should cripple your SCM. I absolutely agree that for a lot of projects there is little to no use for distributed repositories. However just because you don't need distributed repositories doesn't mean you can't take advantage of them, i.e. you get proper offline support and you get also a proper way to distribute changesets, which SVN still doesn't support (i.e. no "svn diff/patch" that actually track all your changes like file moves and such, not just a small subset).
That said, I don't really like the idea of forcing everybody to download the whole repository like you do with git. A lot of users just want to compile checkout and update it every now and then, but never work on it. Git seems to be a little to much a developer-only tool. That the documentation actively discourage gits central repository support also raises some doubts on how well it would work. However, I do think that in the end distributed repositories are they way to go, not because you need them, but because its simply the better design.
### For most projects this is simply an unbelievably stupid idea, waiting for a person to judge your patches one by one. Most open source software on a small to medium level don't work this way.
Yep, that is also the main reason, why I still keep a little bit of distance to git. In most small projects you have a group of people who have commit access and they just commit when they think they are done. If conflicts appear, they are the ones doing the cleanup, there is no need for anybody to manually merge patches. If you have to add a maintainer into the mix you slow everything down to crawl. However as far as I understand git you can replicate the central repository by storing it onto a server and given everybody ssh access to that that repository. So instead of having one maintainer, everybody becomes a maintainer and things are basically the same as with SVN or CVS again.
Another issue I have with git is that every checkout is a complete mirror of the repository, so you don't just get the latest version, but instead you get *all* versions. I do work a lot of times with repositories full of graphics and other binary data and I have some fear that if I use git I end up forcing everybody to download far larger amounts of data then they would be with SVN. I haven't actually tested how much an issue this would be, but it also one of those reasons why I still have some doubt that git would actually provide more benefit then annoyances.
Re:How about a more rational debate, Linus?
on
Linus on GIT and SCM
·
· Score: 1
### Anybody who gets up on a stage and tells you that "all centralized systems are garbage, decentralized is the one true way" isn't giving you the full picture.
Can a centralized system do anything that you couldn't replicate with a decentralized one? I agree that for many styles of development a central repository is fine, however, I think this should be a policy issue, not a feature of the SCM, since in the end you should be able to replicate all the features with a decentralized one.
### What do you mean exactly with "doesn't support changesets"? It does support atomic commits and branches. What else is need for "changesets" to be supported?
A user can't modify his local checkout, add files, move files, do stuff, then do a "svn diff" and mail the result to a maintainer who then would "svn patch" his repository and commit the changes, since what "svn diff" produces isn't a complete set of changes, but only a small subset of the changes and there isn't a "svn patch" to begin with. So working together with people who don't have write access becomes a total mess as soon as they need to do things beside what the classic diff and patch can track. Subversion simply doesn't have changesets at the user level, it only has them internally when it comes to committing to the central repository, but there is no way for a user to dump those changes and send them to a maintainer for approval.
The irony is that this wouldn't even be all that hard to implement, since it is not something that goes against the basic model of svn. It just happens to be still unimplemented after all those years, which is kind of a shame, since it would be a quite useful feature.
### why would you choose a license where vendors can close their deviations from the standard implementation.
Because you want them to use your standard in the first place.
### At least wth GPL, all the variations will be out in the open.
When you provide your implementation under GPL you have a very good chance that nobody is ever going to touch it, there would be no variations to begin with. People would continue to use MP3 instead of OGG. With BSD on the other side OGG is quite popular, not so much for iTunes and friends, but a lot of games use it instead of MP3.
### Or if you really believe BSD is better for this, then why not just public domain it?
Not sure, but I think public domain doesn't exist in some countries, so BSD might give a more solid legal stand.
### GAH! If you fix the "small mistakes,"* obviously it will become more realistic, thus getting out of the valley again. IT'S THE SAME THING!
Lets make this short, as I said you *CAN'T* cram something as complicated as computer graphics on a single "cartoon - realism" axis. There are not just real graphics done badly, there are also things like more simplistic graphics done well, you simply can't compare those when you ignore what makes one good and the other bad.
Slashdot Mirror
### So when you understand this, it is pretty easy to see that ID isn't science. The reason is that it invokes god,
From that little bit that I understand about ID it explicitly doesn't involve god. It involves some arbitrary creator, but that might as well be advanced space aliens and that very well might be testable. Maybe we will one day find into info in the DNA where they say 'hello', maybe we find a crashed UFO or whatever. However so far we haven't found proof for UFOs and neither any other hint that there once was a creator, which makes ID look rather weak and theoretical speculation. And last not least ID even if we would find a creator, ID might have trouble to explain where that came from.
All that said, give ID a few hundred years and they might have a point thanks to menkind playing around with advanced gen tech.
### What enforcement powers do these clowns really have?
They can give a game an AO rating or deny the rating completly, which results in the game being unpublishable on all consoles as well as being unsellable in many retail stores. So in effect the game would be banned with only online sales on PC being the last way out.
### that makes them censors
Thats basically what they have become. Its not really their fault, but instead the fault of Microsoft, Nintendo, Sony, Walmart and friends due to not allowing AO games. But they effectively do have the power to drive your company into bankruptcy if you have a game that gets near AO.
### Where's the social interaction in 1 player games?
Are there even people that are addicted to single player games? I mean really addicted for a long time, not just two weeks.
### reaching level X + 1 is still important to the addicted player.
Yeah, but what if he has reached level99? Single player games have, for most part, a well defined end. Most are also incredibly linear. So if you heard the same dialog lines for ten times, fought the same enemies a hundred of times, do you still want to do it again and again? I kind of doubt it, because there is nothing addicting in doing it twice.
With social games you always have something new, its a similar thing over and over again, but the social component always is good for some surprises. In a single player game on the other side its the exact same thing over and over and over again.
I wouldn't say that there is nobody out there that is addicted to a single player game, there always might be a few weird people, but comparing to online games I bet it are far far less people.
### Gaming can also drain someone's bank account. You talk about 'gaming addiction' as if it only applies to World of Warcraft, and the only costs are the $15/month.
Well, actually I would say 'real' gaming addiction only applies to WoW and similar online multiplayer games, since they are endless and have all those addictive elements build in (XP points and such). I have a hard time seeing how somebody can get addicted to a regular single player game, since after all, after 20-30 hours they are over and start to get boring. There are a few that are mostly endless like Civ or The Sims and such, but the majority isn't and after a while there simply won't be anything left to do in those games. With online games however you also get the whole social component, which might have quite a huge factor.
### You completely forget the entire gaming hardware race, and the cost of consoles and other games
That might steal you one month of pay, but not *every* months pay. Even an addict should have enough brain power left to see that he doesn't need a new HD-TV, Dual-Core, etc. every week. There is really no need to spend lots of money on gaming, when there are so many used/cheap games around and even when you buy every current console around, thats just $1250, once, and will last you for five or more years. Its kind of like saying that alcoholism can get expensive because Château Margaux costs so much.
### When I can manage to do -nothing- else but play a game, preferably a new exciting one, I'll do it.
Yeah, but when its over you go back to real life, since a game only stays exciting for so long.
### But what all of this has really made me wonder is... does Microsoft have an anti-AO game policy?
No idea about the rest of the world, but at least in Germany they have. Any game (Gears of War, Condemned, etc.) that didn't get a USK rating (aka Germans version of ESRBs AO) isn't allowed to be published by Microsoft, this includes third party titles.
### Conceivably, you'd be able to enter text as quickly as you can think it.
I wouldn't be so sure about that. The reason why we can type and speak quickly is because we *don't* have to think about it, all the little details are happening unconsciously, they are stored in muscle memory and such. This thing isn't looking like it is going to read your thoughts anytime soon, instead it forces you to think about something totally unrelated to your real thought to trigger an output, which sounds like an awful indirect and slow way of doing things and I really doubt that even with lots of training you would get anywhere near normal typing speed.
I simply don't think that looking from the outside at the brain will ever give enough information to do anything meaning full with it, sure it might work for a few special cases where you don't have any hands free, are paralyzed and whatever, but replacing your keyboard? I doubt it.
I think a real brain-manchine interface needs a more direct connection to the brain then just measuring changes in blood pressure.
### So why EXACTLY did MH2 get rated AO?
No idea on the details, but AO is not just for sex. Right from the ESRB page:
"""Titles rated AO (Adults Only) have content that should only be played by persons 18 years and older. Titles in this category may include prolonged scenes of intense violence and/or graphic sexual content and nudity."""
### Where is the big outcry about all these people conspiring to be my 'morality police'?
There recently has been a movie about the issue, This Film is Not Yet Rated, so it is not like it doesn't bother any one, its just that people have gotten used to it.
### And the whole console makers doing the whole 'morality police' thing is really blowing it out of proportion.
Console makers not even allowing AO titles in the first place is a pretty big issue if you ask me. If it would be just Walmart blocking the sales, that would be a huge annoyance, but if the console makers are doing it, it means that it doesn't just get harder, but that its flat out impossible to make a game for that platform. There is still the PC, so its not yet the end of the world, but we are getting there, censorship imposed by big cooperations who have a monopoly in their area can be just as effective as a state driven one, except that you can fight the later one with your constitution, while you are pretty defenseless against the monopoly one.
And beside AO doesn't mean just porn or overuse of violence, just a little sex or nudity is enough, the same kind of sex that you get to see in every other random hollywood movie, but those don't get NC-17, games on the other side with the same content get AO, see Fahrenheit for a good example.
The real issue with all this rating stuff isn't so much if Manhunt2 gets released or not, the real issue are all those games that don't even get created in the first place due to the rating system making them impossible to sell.
There have been plenty of screenshots released as well as a trailer:
s html1 141948624
http://www.planetduke.com/duke4/info/screenshots.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=642930419
### I would hope most would agree that a game/film/video glorifying child rape or pro racist views, etc should not be available for the public. It is not a freedom of speech issue.
Not a freedom of speech issue? Freedom of speech is about allowing those thing that you *don't* like. So as long as everything is virtual it is a freedom of speech issue, if it is not virtual then of course the developers should go right into jail, but that doesn't seem to be the case here.
I am all for having a rating system in place, but 'age 18' (or 'age 21' if you prefer) really should be the upper limit, anything beyond that is de facto censorship.
### I never watched "Bowling for Columbine,"
Then go watch it, the movie isn't contra guns, in fact it comes to the conclusions that guns are not the real problem and the real issues are lie elsewhere, i.e. "climate of fear". But yeah, its of course much easier to bash him for no good reason, then to actually take time and watch what he has to say...
### While interstellar travel and colonization are not impossible, FTL is required to make them practical.
You don't need FTL to get to the next star, thats a myth, nuclear fusion rocket will bring you there in around 50 years. Not good enough for StarTrek like travel, but quite speedy when all you want to do is colonization and aren't in a hurry.
### When they arrive at a new system the use the carbon there to reproduce. They can terreform the planet.
Somehow thats sounds a hell of a lot like "Gray Goo from Outer Space", I seriously hope that we will take a little bit more care and not just send self replicating nano bots out there to terraform planets.
### I feel the speed of light barrier is going to keep us from reaching Star Trek, ever.
Just because you can't travel to another star on a weekend, doesn't mean colonizing other planets is impossible. If things like Project Daedalus are actually doable I would say its quite the opposite, 50 years to the next star sounds like a quite fast ride, not something you want to do twice, but if all you need is to get a few humans to the other side, why not? And who knows what medical advancements we have in the next decades, maybe we will be able to stop or slowdown aging? Maybe we will able to make cryosleep work for 50 years.
### Resemblant of the great cries of betrayal and censure when Retro said that Metroid Prime was going to be a (largely) first-person game instead of 2d.
And yet I still hate MetroidPrime with passion, while I love the 2D ones. There definitively was a lot that got lost in translation, the however majority didn't seem to care.
I however wouldn't worry much about Fallout3, if it turns out ugly, one couldn't have done anything anyway and if it turns out good, then well, we have one more great game. So lets approach it with an open mind and blame it for its faults when its out, not when it isn't even half done.
### You say that, but why should we hold games to a higher standard than movies, which are also voluntary?
We in germany don't. Movie ratings have been mandatory long before we started having mandatory ratings on video games. Same seems to be true for UK as well.
### Most certainly not. The NeoGeo never saw a price cut and died a horrible death.
Yeah, right. Let me quote a little bit of Wikipedia:
"""The Neo Geo's 14-year official span of support from its manufacturer makes it the second longest-lived arcade or home console system ever produced."""
That doesn't exactly sounds like a horrible death. The point to keep in mind is that the NeoGeo was never ever build to bring them market dominance and compete with the SNES, Genesis and friends. It was arcade hardware for your home, that of course comes at a high price point, but SNK only started selling them because there was demand. It simply was niche hardware right from the start, nothing wrong with that.
### let you ctrl-click on a class name to jump to the class
Yes, if you generated etags/ebrowse files before.
### compile and highlight errors as you type
When you compile, you can click on the output to jump to the files with errors.
### respond with method names when you hit ctrl-space after a variable name
### show the parameters of a method as you fill them in
### show method documentation when you hover over a method name
Don't think so, but there might be some extension for that floating around.
### Or, are they mostly intended to be for ultra quick lightweight text editing?
Definitively not just lightweight text editing, but on the other side I don't think it can keep up with a full IDE, neither in terms of features nor ease of use. I think the main benefit of Emacs is that it isn't just a IDE, it can do plenty of IDE like stuff, but you can also use it to write your LaTeX documents, your HTML pages, your XML documents, read your email and all kinds of things. It might not be the perfect solution, but its a reasonably good one for many things.
Have you actually looked at it after you started it? Because it shows a nice little text right after you started that explains to you how to quit it, how to display the manual and all that stuff that you need to get started.
### So can RCS - without requiring a web server and all the other bullshit.
Subversion never required a webserver. It works perfectly fine with direct file access, access over ssh and all that stuff. Doing it via a webserver is just one of many possible ways to get access to a repository.
### However, in smaller projects, which really *need* a very specific direction
Yes, but that isn't an argument why you should cripple your SCM. I absolutely agree that for a lot of projects there is little to no use for distributed repositories. However just because you don't need distributed repositories doesn't mean you can't take advantage of them, i.e. you get proper offline support and you get also a proper way to distribute changesets, which SVN still doesn't support (i.e. no "svn diff/patch" that actually track all your changes like file moves and such, not just a small subset).
That said, I don't really like the idea of forcing everybody to download the whole repository like you do with git. A lot of users just want to compile checkout and update it every now and then, but never work on it. Git seems to be a little to much a developer-only tool. That the documentation actively discourage gits central repository support also raises some doubts on how well it would work. However, I do think that in the end distributed repositories are they way to go, not because you need them, but because its simply the better design.
### For most projects this is simply an unbelievably stupid idea, waiting for a person to judge your patches one by one. Most open source software on a small to medium level don't work this way.
Yep, that is also the main reason, why I still keep a little bit of distance to git. In most small projects you have a group of people who have commit access and they just commit when they think they are done. If conflicts appear, they are the ones doing the cleanup, there is no need for anybody to manually merge patches. If you have to add a maintainer into the mix you slow everything down to crawl. However as far as I understand git you can replicate the central repository by storing it onto a server and given everybody ssh access to that that repository. So instead of having one maintainer, everybody becomes a maintainer and things are basically the same as with SVN or CVS again.
Another issue I have with git is that every checkout is a complete mirror of the repository, so you don't just get the latest version, but instead you get *all* versions. I do work a lot of times with repositories full of graphics and other binary data and I have some fear that if I use git I end up forcing everybody to download far larger amounts of data then they would be with SVN. I haven't actually tested how much an issue this would be, but it also one of those reasons why I still have some doubt that git would actually provide more benefit then annoyances.
### Anybody who gets up on a stage and tells you that "all centralized systems are garbage, decentralized is the one true way" isn't giving you the full picture.
Can a centralized system do anything that you couldn't replicate with a decentralized one? I agree that for many styles of development a central repository is fine, however, I think this should be a policy issue, not a feature of the SCM, since in the end you should be able to replicate all the features with a decentralized one.
### What do you mean exactly with "doesn't support changesets"? It does support atomic commits and branches. What else is need for "changesets" to be supported?
A user can't modify his local checkout, add files, move files, do stuff, then do a "svn diff" and mail the result to a maintainer who then would "svn patch" his repository and commit the changes, since what "svn diff" produces isn't a complete set of changes, but only a small subset of the changes and there isn't a "svn patch" to begin with. So working together with people who don't have write access becomes a total mess as soon as they need to do things beside what the classic diff and patch can track. Subversion simply doesn't have changesets at the user level, it only has them internally when it comes to committing to the central repository, but there is no way for a user to dump those changes and send them to a maintainer for approval.
The irony is that this wouldn't even be all that hard to implement, since it is not something that goes against the basic model of svn. It just happens to be still unimplemented after all those years, which is kind of a shame, since it would be a quite useful feature.
### why would you choose a license where vendors can close their deviations from the standard implementation.
Because you want them to use your standard in the first place.
### At least wth GPL, all the variations will be out in the open.
When you provide your implementation under GPL you have a very good chance that nobody is ever going to touch it, there would be no variations to begin with. People would continue to use MP3 instead of OGG. With BSD on the other side OGG is quite popular, not so much for iTunes and friends, but a lot of games use it instead of MP3.
### Or if you really believe BSD is better for this, then why not just public domain it?
Not sure, but I think public domain doesn't exist in some countries, so BSD might give a more solid legal stand.
### GAH! If you fix the "small mistakes,"* obviously it will become more realistic, thus getting out of the valley again. IT'S THE SAME THING!
Lets make this short, as I said you *CAN'T* cram something as complicated as computer graphics on a single "cartoon - realism" axis. There are not just real graphics done badly, there are also things like more simplistic graphics done well, you simply can't compare those when you ignore what makes one good and the other bad.