Pfft. These things are not important. The ideal setup would go "hey, I found a boot block and active partition already here! Oh teh nos! Another OS in a different partition! Better add that to my bootloader list before I wipe the original bootloader into hell!".
Another great idea would be to make LILO stop saying "LI" and locking up your machine if you ever choose to delete a Linux partition some time in the distant future.
Bootloaders are the most annoying thing to configure and Windows just does this automatically. OK, so it puts a bootloader that just boots windows on there, a minimal one, so what? All I want from a bootloader is for it to boot my damn OS, I certainly don't want it to be several hundred K big and support stupid options I'm never going to use. Just boot the damn thing, cheers. Take lessons from Ranish. That's quality shit there.
who knows, friend, who knows. I'm still waiting for a printer that actually knows accurately when it's cart is empty. Epsons dont, and then they blink red lights at you when they're full of ink. Dumb buggers. Do you know how much stress and angst a red flashing light can cause. "IT WANTS SOMETHING IT CAN'T HAVE".
You're gonna get a ton of replies to that along the lines of "Haha, have you seen most women try to operate hardware, lol!". Watch what you start, this could get nasty.
Of this article http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/03/04/133725 9&mode=thread&tid=126 - an all-female designed Volvo. It was only a few days ago. Why doesnt the article reference this?
No I'm not new here. Open Source drivers are often hacked together by programmers doing reverse engineering and consulting various RFCs and documentations. They are rarely endorsed by the company that manufactures the hardware, and projects like this do not get terribly much support from the hardware manufacturers (like, no links to the open source driver from their website, no hosting of it, no mention of it). Normally if a driver is needed for something it has to be figured out by some poor sod or is made by an employee of the company that manufactured the hardware in their spare time.
When you look at an OS that has done things well, you'll note that all the libraries are in one standard place, and when your application needs to load a library:
1. The application's working directory is searched first
2. Then the system library directory is searched
This means that:
If an application requires a SPECIFIC OLD VERSION of a library, just put that in the application's working directory.
If an application will work with any library version, it goes in the system's library repository. Now anything else that needs it can find it.
A lot of common libraries (libpng, libjpeg, zlib, etc.) should come as standard. The -devel packages for these libraries should also be installed as standard, for god's sake. Since you need to compile EVERYTHING on Linux and often even if you DONT need to compile something it still needs tools from the -devel package for library xyz.
Package managers suck. All of them. Because they all rely on package databases that tell them what stuff is installed. If you use RPM to install a binary of one thing and compile another, RPM doesn't know you've installed the other because it's package db wasn't updated by the makefile. Similar things happen if you use two different package managers.
An operating system that makes the user jump through half an hour's worth of hoops just to install one sodding application is not ready for the big-time. Who else has also had the age old affair of:
RPM: "Library A requires Library B!"
User: "ok... I'll get library B..."
RPM: "Library B requires Library A!"
User: "what the fuck?! Ok... compile time..."
configureA: "Library B not found!"
User: "Aaaargh!"
configureB: "Library A not found!"
User: "rpm --force --install LibraryA"
configureB: "Library A not found!"
User: "rpm --force --install LibraryA-devel"
configureB: "Looks good!"
User: "WAHAY!"
gccB: "1,000 crazy motherhubbard errors and die"
User: "Linux is So Cool."
This is good news for all those PHP kids out there. It is nice to see some licenses being made specifically more lenient, and I don't doubt this has had something to do with the recent change in the XFree86 license and how people reacted to that. Well done MySQL, your domination is secured:)
Not so. The sims was simply an improvement on the Amiga/C64 game (and it's MANY clones and forerunners) known as "Little Computer People" or "House on a Disk". Also the sims was nothing but a capital-oriented twist on a Tamagochi and the various Home Design programs around at the time. Even Sim Town seemed like a cut-down version of The Sims.
While I primarily agree with this article I don't see it as a problem. I realise that there are a lot of FPS games out there that seem pretty much the same except you're blowing up different stuff. What has to come to the fore is plot and story. I would forward games such as the original No One Lives Forever as excellent examples of how this genre can be improved. I remember when Duke Nukem 3D came out, it had personality compared to all the other 3D-blaster games out there. It's personality that wins in games. It's personality that makes a game different from it's peers.
I think the attraction of games like GTA is not that you get to carjack people and complete missions, but more that you're free. You're free to explore the city and just drive around at high speed, which is what people who've been frustrated by racing games with "forcefields" around the track have been wanting to do for years. After completing the game, you do want to drive irresponsibly all over the grassy area in the middle of the track or smash into the grandstands, this is why people who've completed or got frustrated with racing games often derive so much pleasure from driving backwards around the track smashing into stuff. GTA gave you complete freedom to be an irresponsible fuckwit around a whole city, with no need to bother to complete the next mission. You could just explore, ride the monorail, do whatever, it was almost sightseeing.
So for a good game, not only do you need some personality, some good plotline, but also some serious freedom / exploratory element. Then you're onto a winner. I admit that most games I've played recently have not satisfied me and I tend to turn towards a bygone age of originality where the focus was not on graphics (everyone knew they could do fuckall graphically with a ZX Spectrum or a VIC-20) but on concept. The games of yesteryear ranged from "game where you serve drinks in a bar" to "game where you try to defy gravity in your little spaceship and get crystal balls off planets before a reactor explodes". I think we're actually heading back towards that. I know everyone cites Uplink as a fantastic move and bla bla, but I see that as the dawn of renaissance in gaming, where there are less graphical improvements to make and the big companies either die or have to seek games that actually engage interest. Novelty is coming back, and in a big way. Just be ready for it when it hits.
Wow now this is interesting. Intel have decided that they're going to call on the massive contingent of Open Source developers for their Linux driver. This benefits them because they don't have to hire programmers or support the drivers and can outsource it to the community at large who will maintain it. Under license, they still own the drivers, but the public who want the drivers are developing them effectively for Intel.
Has there been an instance of this before? OEMs don't usually endorse open source dev projects for their hardware, but if more OEMs did do this then we'd see a huge amount of support for devices that are currently not compatible with various operating systems, and an extended development life for drivers for aging hardware. Obviously this method applies to not only "classic" open source OS's such as Linux, but Windows as well. After all, the OEM isn't selling the drivers, it's selling the hardware and firmware.
I'd love to see more manufacturers posting the source to their drivers and the developer documentation to allow their drivers to be improved and worked on by the willing open source community at large, while the OEM maintains endorsement and ownership of the developed software. It seems to me this method harms nobody and benefits all.
I agree, but then you can't stop the flood of Linux zealots on Slashdot. Those who've been using KDE and Gnome for ages should understand the frustration of slow, often unaccellerated, ugly and unresponsive GUIs designed by people who know what looks pretty but don't know how to make something intuitive and ergonomic, as Gnome and KDE are both fantastic examples of this.
So Longhorn uses a ton of RAM? A few points:
1. Good. I'm glad my memory is being used instead of going to waste. I'm guessing the amount of RAM used is dependent on the total system RAM available and that the VMM attempts to keep as much stuff in physical RAM as possible. This was sorely missing from earlier versions of Win NT which would swap out all my apps overnight.
2. It's no good complaining that the leaked version uses an apparently large amount of memory. Of course it does, it would be compiled in debug mode without optimizations. Also the article points to a memory leak that is constantly eating memory. I guess there will be other buggy apps that are doing this as well (it is an alpha) and that would also add to the memory usage.
3. Who knows whether the drives use DMA mode in this release, or if drivers are even available. Slowness could be down to PIO.
4. While I don't like an overly graphic GUI and use win2k, I think longhorn looks pretty stylish and I'm glad that they're ripping off apple. OS X's interface looks damn swish and I want that on my box without having to buy some crazy apple nonsense that looks like a couple of old shopping trollies welded together and costs $3000. I'm sure you will be able to turn off the themes or change them to a standard look if you wish.
5. Enough with the Linux zealots please. I've just found my Linux box will kill tons of daemons seemingly at random if several web users run buggy CGI scripts that eat all the virtual memory. At least windows has a swapfile that can be changed in size. Linux is great and all that, but it's god damn awful for desktop use, always has been and always will be. If I want sleek and responsive I'd be crazy to choose Linux or X windows on any unix platform. Gimme Panther or Longhorn for design, web browsing, and general gui tasks. Gimme bash for everything else.
Heaven forbid a Linux user bashes Linux, but you're all so god damn intollerant on/. i feel its almost a calling to fight back.
Well I've taken the advice of the AdventureGamers editorial and mailed LEC and PCG about this in a typical kind of "grr I'm a bit cut up about that" letter, lambasting endless bloody Star Wars titles and generally being polite but hey, anyway here's what I sent them (btw, it's long and I doubt they'll really read it all.)
to: pr@lucasarts.com
After advertising the fact that Sam & Max: Freelance Police is in production, getting so much
press coverage and generating an incredible amount of anticipation and
gratitude from LucasArts fans the world over, you suddenly destroy your
reputation and yet again damage your fanbase by suddenly deciding to cancel
production of Sam & Max: Freelance Police for *no discernable reason*. What
the hell do you guys think you're doing?
A long time ago LucasArts led the industry in innovative and enjoyable
adventure titles. Now you seem to becomming Just Another Software Company
making endless tired repeats and cash-ins on Star Wars, so much so that you
must be close to running out of names for the things now.
I have been a loyal LucasArts fan for many years, I always purchase
LucasArts games because I can be assured of quality, enjoyment and
replayability. However, in recent years your contribution to the gaming
scene has been lacklustre, your reputation is based on the fact that you
once were the ultimate developer of adventure games with style and class,
not that you make a lot of Star Wars titles that let people fly in an X-Wing
and shoot stuff, or run around with a lightsabre and slice stuff. This has
all been done countless times before and you seem to churn out games every
other month that don't have the depth or plotline of any of your earlier
titles.
It seems to me that you are now pandering to the console market, thinking
that console gamers want action and can't handle the slow pace of adventure.
The amount of work that went into both the Full Throttle sequel AND Sam &
Max: Freelance Police by your developers, artists and musicians must have
been colossal, and by throwing all that out in favour of cheap nonsense with
gratifying explosions you're not only harming the gaming community but also
yourselves. What incentive is there for employees of LucasArts to continue
to work for your reputable company when their work on a project is so
swiftly dismissed? I earnestly hope that a good deal of your developers
decide that LucasArts is no longer providing them with the support that they
had come to expect and leave your company in favour of one that respects
their talents. I believe I am speaking for a good share of LucasArts fans
and the developers themselves when I say this.
One day I hope that LucasArts will steer away from it's current course of
"Price of everything, Value of nothing", where you seem to be attempting to
earn a swift buck rather than concentrate on your reputation. In the gaming
industry reputation is extremely important, probably more important than
sales, especially in this age of increased piracy. Reputation brings you
loyal customers who believe that your software is worth paying for. If you
lose that, you lose to piracy and people will just rip off your games for a
quick blast and you won't see a cent.
LucasArts needs to release another adventure title to uphold itself as a
leader in this genre. Your press release says that it does not seem like the
right time to release an adventure title, perhaps because there are few profilic
adventure titles out there right now (except for things like Syberia and Broken Sword). Perhaps you should consider that the reason there
are few adventure titles out there, is
that the well known companies such as LucasArts just aren't interested in
publishing them. This leaves a huge proportion of your potential market
disappointed and disillusioned with LucasArts, after all, there are plenty
of people out there that do not play any other game but adventures (usually
the older segment of the market) and enjoy a plot, comedy, and an easygoing
game pace.
Release it, and get $50 from me and the whole of the rest of the community.
Don't release it, and lose thousands of dollars in development costs, all
for nothing. The choice is yours.
Thanks for clearing that one up. I did read that part of the article, but I was actually wondering where the results were coming from (whatever algorithm you use, you need to use it on a data set). Now I know.
I use Teoma a lot these days, it's very much like Google was about 6 years ago. Fresh, relevant and speedy. Plus their twist on pagerank is a pretty sweet idea that's worth a look.
What I've learned to day is that 75% of 4- or 5-rated Linux advocates cannot spell "competetive", put dollar signs in the wrong place, make retarded and deliberate misinterpretations of bad fast food analogies, and regard what "platform strategists" say as gospel. Wake up, perhaps stop being so reactionist and understand that while Linux is fantastic for developers who know what they're doing, it's entirely unsuitable for the average PC or Mac user who just wants a computer that's there when they turn it on, is responsive, has a good range of easilly available software that they can pop down the shops and buy, doesn't crash too often and lets them generally do things in the way that they've been doing them for the past 10 years. That is what Windows gives. "*wail* but it doesn't do it for freeeee and I can't rip off their source code to make my life easier:(:(" - there is no such thing as a free lunch. Even at McDonalds.
Anyone running Linux and reading/. is already biased towards Linux and is undoubtedly also a nerd/geek/whatever who knows how Linux works, what pitfalls lie in wait, how to compile stuff, and all that general administration crazyness (tech terms). They have no base understanding that Linux is much too confusing for the typical man in the street to use, has no phone number you can call when it explodes (how does one post on newsgroups in search of snide and patronising "support" comments about how much of a dork one is for not fscking one's/dev/hda1 when the computer just blew up?), and does not at all help users to migrate from Windows to Linux. Windows used to have help for Mac users new to Windows. If Linux wanted to do this then certain little problems would start peeping out like "where the hell are all the shortcut keys and why are they not standardized?" and "why is this GUI so damn slow on a P400 with 128mb ram?". Linux is great, it's just a shame that all the software written to run on the Linux kernel is either a port of some handy old *BSD console app or a GTK+ based project that is still pre-bloody-1.0.0 and only really 80% complete. This is the general apathy of open source. Work hard on project, hurl it out to some other guys, sit back and watch as they fix it, get bored, and leave it to rot. No deadlines. Even sourceforge.net doesnt appear to have a deployment timeline function.
MS know their shit, know it well, have been in the biz since before a lot of Linux coders were even born, get themselves into trouble now and then but still bounce back, and have a lot of lovely money to show for it. I wish I had a fucking huge company turning over billions of dollars, and I sure as hell arent going to get that by peddling cheap tat that frequently falls apart or does unexpected things. I hate KDE and Gnome with a passion. Win2k gui, Unix cmd prompt, nice, thanks I'll have fries with that.
on the other hand, a few funny files:
win2k/private/inet/xml/xml/tokenizer/dll/words of wisdom from dennis.eml
win2k/private/inet/xml/xml/dso/letter to children - 2.eml
These look like a virus infection to me. They're spread all over the tree and they're all 0 bytes in size (just from looking at this listing). Seems as though whatever machine this code was ripped from has Nimda or something. I'm now uncertain as to whether this stuff is genuine. Looks like some guy burned it onto CD, then took it home to work on where he got infected with Nimda and didnt bother to scan for and delete the random.eml files it spreads. I can't believe any virus would be able to actually penetrate into Microsofts development tree without being killed off.
http://heim.ifi.uio.no/~mortehu/files.txt seems to show signs of a Nimda (or similar) virus infection. Look at the number of 0-byte sized email messages distributed in inappropriate places throughout the tree. If whatever machine this source was ripped from did indeed have a virus then no wonder it was leaked.
Pretty much most people who make Automated Teller Machines these days. I frequently see win2k error dialogs on the ones around where I work. That doesnt mean that windows is shit, it just means that the software written for it to run on ATMs is shit, and people should realise that the NT kernel is actually an extremely sensibly structured and well written system, it's just most of the peripheral junk like IE that's bundled on top that leaves something to be desired.
I've been using my machine for 4 years with Win2k, and never got a virus and never got exploited. This is because I know how to use a computer and am not a fucking retard. If people who run porn sites had any interest in exploiting Linux they would have researched it and done it long ago, plus unix has had its fair share of serious breaches (read SSH, OpenBSD holes) just recently, but because the media doesn't care everyone thinks its super-secure.
If Windows has Security through Obscurity, then unix is Security through Lack of Publicity.
Like it or not, Windows is the most popular home OS, so if you're writing malicious code, hit Windows and sod the rest. You'll get the most exposure and pldages from your spotty cracker buddies that way.
Yeah yeah and the rest. "My OS is open source! Isn't that great!" grow up. If you think MS should open source the whole of windows you're crazy. Too late now, will never happen, and how would they make any capital out of a move like that.
You must admit that it does raise some suspicions. Not only does the MyDoom virus DDoS microsoft, but also SCO. The article basically voiced my personal suspicions concerning the origin of this virus, but I'm also willing to believe that SCO was added as an afterthought to "pin the blame" on linux users.
the linux people just havent had time to copy it properly yet. New, useful ideas first appear in easy-to-use form on Windows and are either sanitations of byzantine unix apps, or are quickly ported into an insanely byzantine linux app with no docs and little support. It's nice to see that this guy eventually bit the bullet and did it the easy way. Yes I run linux, but I don't try to do dumb stuff that it wasn't designed for with it.
Slashdot Mirror
Pfft. These things are not important. The ideal setup would go "hey, I found a boot block and active partition already here! Oh teh nos! Another OS in a different partition! Better add that to my bootloader list before I wipe the original bootloader into hell!".
Another great idea would be to make LILO stop saying "LI" and locking up your machine if you ever choose to delete a Linux partition some time in the distant future.
Bootloaders are the most annoying thing to configure and Windows just does this automatically. OK, so it puts a bootloader that just boots windows on there, a minimal one, so what? All I want from a bootloader is for it to boot my damn OS, I certainly don't want it to be several hundred K big and support stupid options I'm never going to use. Just boot the damn thing, cheers. Take lessons from Ranish. That's quality shit there.
who knows, friend, who knows. I'm still waiting for a printer that actually knows accurately when it's cart is empty. Epsons dont, and then they blink red lights at you when they're full of ink. Dumb buggers. Do you know how much stress and angst a red flashing light can cause. "IT WANTS SOMETHING IT CAN'T HAVE".
You're gonna get a ton of replies to that along the lines of "Haha, have you seen most women try to operate hardware, lol!". Watch what you start, this could get nasty.
Of this article http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/03/04/133725 9&mode=thread&tid=126 - an all-female designed Volvo. It was only a few days ago. Why doesnt the article reference this?
No I'm not new here. Open Source drivers are often hacked together by programmers doing reverse engineering and consulting various RFCs and documentations. They are rarely endorsed by the company that manufactures the hardware, and projects like this do not get terribly much support from the hardware manufacturers (like, no links to the open source driver from their website, no hosting of it, no mention of it). Normally if a driver is needed for something it has to be figured out by some poor sod or is made by an employee of the company that manufactured the hardware in their spare time.
When you look at an OS that has done things well, you'll note that all the libraries are in one standard place, and when your application needs to load a library:
1. The application's working directory is searched first
2. Then the system library directory is searched
This means that:
If an application requires a SPECIFIC OLD VERSION of a library, just put that in the application's working directory.
If an application will work with any library version, it goes in the system's library repository. Now anything else that needs it can find it.
A lot of common libraries (libpng, libjpeg, zlib, etc.) should come as standard. The -devel packages for these libraries should also be installed as standard, for god's sake. Since you need to compile EVERYTHING on Linux and often even if you DONT need to compile something it still needs tools from the -devel package for library xyz.
Package managers suck. All of them. Because they all rely on package databases that tell them what stuff is installed. If you use RPM to install a binary of one thing and compile another, RPM doesn't know you've installed the other because it's package db wasn't updated by the makefile. Similar things happen if you use two different package managers.
An operating system that makes the user jump through half an hour's worth of hoops just to install one sodding application is not ready for the big-time. Who else has also had the age old affair of:
RPM: "Library A requires Library B!"
User: "ok... I'll get library B..."
RPM: "Library B requires Library A!"
User: "what the fuck?! Ok... compile time..."
configureA: "Library B not found!"
User: "Aaaargh!"
configureB: "Library A not found!"
User: "rpm --force --install LibraryA"
configureB: "Library A not found!"
User: "rpm --force --install LibraryA-devel"
configureB: "Looks good!"
User: "WAHAY!"
gccB: "1,000 crazy motherhubbard errors and die"
User: "Linux is So Cool."
This is good news for all those PHP kids out there. It is nice to see some licenses being made specifically more lenient, and I don't doubt this has had something to do with the recent change in the XFree86 license and how people reacted to that. Well done MySQL, your domination is secured :)
Not so. The sims was simply an improvement on the Amiga/C64 game (and it's MANY clones and forerunners) known as "Little Computer People" or "House on a Disk". Also the sims was nothing but a capital-oriented twist on a Tamagochi and the various Home Design programs around at the time. Even Sim Town seemed like a cut-down version of The Sims.
While I primarily agree with this article I don't see it as a problem. I realise that there are a lot of FPS games out there that seem pretty much the same except you're blowing up different stuff. What has to come to the fore is plot and story. I would forward games such as the original No One Lives Forever as excellent examples of how this genre can be improved. I remember when Duke Nukem 3D came out, it had personality compared to all the other 3D-blaster games out there. It's personality that wins in games. It's personality that makes a game different from it's peers.
I think the attraction of games like GTA is not that you get to carjack people and complete missions, but more that you're free. You're free to explore the city and just drive around at high speed, which is what people who've been frustrated by racing games with "forcefields" around the track have been wanting to do for years. After completing the game, you do want to drive irresponsibly all over the grassy area in the middle of the track or smash into the grandstands, this is why people who've completed or got frustrated with racing games often derive so much pleasure from driving backwards around the track smashing into stuff. GTA gave you complete freedom to be an irresponsible fuckwit around a whole city, with no need to bother to complete the next mission. You could just explore, ride the monorail, do whatever, it was almost sightseeing.
So for a good game, not only do you need some personality, some good plotline, but also some serious freedom / exploratory element. Then you're onto a winner. I admit that most games I've played recently have not satisfied me and I tend to turn towards a bygone age of originality where the focus was not on graphics (everyone knew they could do fuckall graphically with a ZX Spectrum or a VIC-20) but on concept. The games of yesteryear ranged from "game where you serve drinks in a bar" to "game where you try to defy gravity in your little spaceship and get crystal balls off planets before a reactor explodes". I think we're actually heading back towards that. I know everyone cites Uplink as a fantastic move and bla bla, but I see that as the dawn of renaissance in gaming, where there are less graphical improvements to make and the big companies either die or have to seek games that actually engage interest. Novelty is coming back, and in a big way. Just be ready for it when it hits.
Wow now this is interesting. Intel have decided that they're going to call on the massive contingent of Open Source developers for their Linux driver. This benefits them because they don't have to hire programmers or support the drivers and can outsource it to the community at large who will maintain it. Under license, they still own the drivers, but the public who want the drivers are developing them effectively for Intel.
Has there been an instance of this before? OEMs don't usually endorse open source dev projects for their hardware, but if more OEMs did do this then we'd see a huge amount of support for devices that are currently not compatible with various operating systems, and an extended development life for drivers for aging hardware. Obviously this method applies to not only "classic" open source OS's such as Linux, but Windows as well. After all, the OEM isn't selling the drivers, it's selling the hardware and firmware.
I'd love to see more manufacturers posting the source to their drivers and the developer documentation to allow their drivers to be improved and worked on by the willing open source community at large, while the OEM maintains endorsement and ownership of the developed software. It seems to me this method harms nobody and benefits all.
I agree, but then you can't stop the flood of Linux zealots on Slashdot. Those who've been using KDE and Gnome for ages should understand the frustration of slow, often unaccellerated, ugly and unresponsive GUIs designed by people who know what looks pretty but don't know how to make something intuitive and ergonomic, as Gnome and KDE are both fantastic examples of this.
/. i feel its almost a calling to fight back.
So Longhorn uses a ton of RAM? A few points:
1. Good. I'm glad my memory is being used instead of going to waste. I'm guessing the amount of RAM used is dependent on the total system RAM available and that the VMM attempts to keep as much stuff in physical RAM as possible. This was sorely missing from earlier versions of Win NT which would swap out all my apps overnight.
2. It's no good complaining that the leaked version uses an apparently large amount of memory. Of course it does, it would be compiled in debug mode without optimizations. Also the article points to a memory leak that is constantly eating memory. I guess there will be other buggy apps that are doing this as well (it is an alpha) and that would also add to the memory usage.
3. Who knows whether the drives use DMA mode in this release, or if drivers are even available. Slowness could be down to PIO.
4. While I don't like an overly graphic GUI and use win2k, I think longhorn looks pretty stylish and I'm glad that they're ripping off apple. OS X's interface looks damn swish and I want that on my box without having to buy some crazy apple nonsense that looks like a couple of old shopping trollies welded together and costs $3000. I'm sure you will be able to turn off the themes or change them to a standard look if you wish.
5. Enough with the Linux zealots please. I've just found my Linux box will kill tons of daemons seemingly at random if several web users run buggy CGI scripts that eat all the virtual memory. At least windows has a swapfile that can be changed in size. Linux is great and all that, but it's god damn awful for desktop use, always has been and always will be. If I want sleek and responsive I'd be crazy to choose Linux or X windows on any unix platform. Gimme Panther or Longhorn for design, web browsing, and general gui tasks. Gimme bash for everything else.
Heaven forbid a Linux user bashes Linux, but you're all so god damn intollerant on
Well I've taken the advice of the AdventureGamers editorial and mailed LEC and PCG about this in a typical kind of "grr I'm a bit cut up about that" letter, lambasting endless bloody Star Wars titles and generally being polite but hey, anyway here's what I sent them (btw, it's long and I doubt they'll really read it all.)
to: pr@lucasarts.com
After advertising the fact that Sam & Max: Freelance Police is in production, getting so much press coverage and generating an incredible amount of anticipation and gratitude from LucasArts fans the world over, you suddenly destroy your reputation and yet again damage your fanbase by suddenly deciding to cancel production of Sam & Max: Freelance Police for *no discernable reason*. What the hell do you guys think you're doing?
A long time ago LucasArts led the industry in innovative and enjoyable adventure titles. Now you seem to becomming Just Another Software Company making endless tired repeats and cash-ins on Star Wars, so much so that you must be close to running out of names for the things now.
I have been a loyal LucasArts fan for many years, I always purchase LucasArts games because I can be assured of quality, enjoyment and replayability. However, in recent years your contribution to the gaming scene has been lacklustre, your reputation is based on the fact that you once were the ultimate developer of adventure games with style and class, not that you make a lot of Star Wars titles that let people fly in an X-Wing and shoot stuff, or run around with a lightsabre and slice stuff. This has all been done countless times before and you seem to churn out games every other month that don't have the depth or plotline of any of your earlier titles.
It seems to me that you are now pandering to the console market, thinking that console gamers want action and can't handle the slow pace of adventure. The amount of work that went into both the Full Throttle sequel AND Sam & Max: Freelance Police by your developers, artists and musicians must have been colossal, and by throwing all that out in favour of cheap nonsense with gratifying explosions you're not only harming the gaming community but also yourselves. What incentive is there for employees of LucasArts to continue to work for your reputable company when their work on a project is so swiftly dismissed? I earnestly hope that a good deal of your developers decide that LucasArts is no longer providing them with the support that they had come to expect and leave your company in favour of one that respects their talents. I believe I am speaking for a good share of LucasArts fans and the developers themselves when I say this.
One day I hope that LucasArts will steer away from it's current course of "Price of everything, Value of nothing", where you seem to be attempting to earn a swift buck rather than concentrate on your reputation. In the gaming industry reputation is extremely important, probably more important than sales, especially in this age of increased piracy. Reputation brings you loyal customers who believe that your software is worth paying for. If you lose that, you lose to piracy and people will just rip off your games for a quick blast and you won't see a cent.
LucasArts needs to release another adventure title to uphold itself as a leader in this genre. Your press release says that it does not seem like the right time to release an adventure title, perhaps because there are few profilic adventure titles out there right now (except for things like Syberia and Broken Sword). Perhaps you should consider that the reason there are few adventure titles out there, is that the well known companies such as LucasArts just aren't interested in publishing them. This leaves a huge proportion of your potential market disappointed and disillusioned with LucasArts, after all, there are plenty of people out there that do not play any other game but adventures (usually the older segment of the market) and enjoy a plot, comedy, and an easygoing game pace.
Release it, and get $50 from me and the whole of the rest of the community. Don't release it, and lose thousands of dollars in development costs, all for nothing. The choice is yours.
[end of mail]
Heh, there was a fairground-style shooter on the end-credits of Sam & Max Hit The Road.
Windows XP?
Or, let's not bother.
Thanks for clearing that one up. I did read that part of the article, but I was actually wondering where the results were coming from (whatever algorithm you use, you need to use it on a data set). Now I know.
I use Teoma a lot these days, it's very much like Google was about 6 years ago. Fresh, relevant and speedy. Plus their twist on pagerank is a pretty sweet idea that's worth a look.
I thought Yahoo was using Google to do searches? Am I way out of touch here since I havent checked Yahoo for ages, or what?
What I've learned to day is that 75% of 4- or 5-rated Linux advocates cannot spell "competetive", put dollar signs in the wrong place, make retarded and deliberate misinterpretations of bad fast food analogies, and regard what "platform strategists" say as gospel. Wake up, perhaps stop being so reactionist and understand that while Linux is fantastic for developers who know what they're doing, it's entirely unsuitable for the average PC or Mac user who just wants a computer that's there when they turn it on, is responsive, has a good range of easilly available software that they can pop down the shops and buy, doesn't crash too often and lets them generally do things in the way that they've been doing them for the past 10 years. That is what Windows gives. "*wail* but it doesn't do it for freeeee and I can't rip off their source code to make my life easier :( :(" - there is no such thing as a free lunch. Even at McDonalds.
/. is already biased towards Linux and is undoubtedly also a nerd/geek/whatever who knows how Linux works, what pitfalls lie in wait, how to compile stuff, and all that general administration crazyness (tech terms). They have no base understanding that Linux is much too confusing for the typical man in the street to use, has no phone number you can call when it explodes (how does one post on newsgroups in search of snide and patronising "support" comments about how much of a dork one is for not fscking one's /dev/hda1 when the computer just blew up?), and does not at all help users to migrate from Windows to Linux. Windows used to have help for Mac users new to Windows. If Linux wanted to do this then certain little problems would start peeping out like "where the hell are all the shortcut keys and why are they not standardized?" and "why is this GUI so damn slow on a P400 with 128mb ram?". Linux is great, it's just a shame that all the software written to run on the Linux kernel is either a port of some handy old *BSD console app or a GTK+ based project that is still pre-bloody-1.0.0 and only really 80% complete. This is the general apathy of open source. Work hard on project, hurl it out to some other guys, sit back and watch as they fix it, get bored, and leave it to rot. No deadlines. Even sourceforge.net doesnt appear to have a deployment timeline function.
Anyone running Linux and reading
MS know their shit, know it well, have been in the biz since before a lot of Linux coders were even born, get themselves into trouble now and then but still bounce back, and have a lot of lovely money to show for it. I wish I had a fucking huge company turning over billions of dollars, and I sure as hell arent going to get that by peddling cheap tat that frequently falls apart or does unexpected things. I hate KDE and Gnome with a passion. Win2k gui, Unix cmd prompt, nice, thanks I'll have fries with that.
on the other hand, a few funny files:
.eml files it spreads. I can't believe any virus would be able to actually penetrate into Microsofts development tree without being killed off.
win2k/private/inet/xml/xml/tokenizer/dll/words of wisdom from dennis.eml
win2k/private/inet/xml/xml/dso/letter to children - 2.eml
These look like a virus infection to me. They're spread all over the tree and they're all 0 bytes in size (just from looking at this listing). Seems as though whatever machine this code was ripped from has Nimda or something. I'm now uncertain as to whether this stuff is genuine. Looks like some guy burned it onto CD, then took it home to work on where he got infected with Nimda and didnt bother to scan for and delete the random
http://heim.ifi.uio.no/~mortehu/files.txt seems to show signs of a Nimda (or similar) virus infection. Look at the number of 0-byte sized email messages distributed in inappropriate places throughout the tree. If whatever machine this source was ripped from did indeed have a virus then no wonder it was leaked.
Do you know what NT stands for? Maybe look that one up!
Pretty much most people who make Automated Teller Machines these days. I frequently see win2k error dialogs on the ones around where I work. That doesnt mean that windows is shit, it just means that the software written for it to run on ATMs is shit, and people should realise that the NT kernel is actually an extremely sensibly structured and well written system, it's just most of the peripheral junk like IE that's bundled on top that leaves something to be desired.
I've been using my machine for 4 years with Win2k, and never got a virus and never got exploited. This is because I know how to use a computer and am not a fucking retard. If people who run porn sites had any interest in exploiting Linux they would have researched it and done it long ago, plus unix has had its fair share of serious breaches (read SSH, OpenBSD holes) just recently, but because the media doesn't care everyone thinks its super-secure.
If Windows has Security through Obscurity, then unix is Security through Lack of Publicity.
Like it or not, Windows is the most popular home OS, so if you're writing malicious code, hit Windows and sod the rest. You'll get the most exposure and pldages from your spotty cracker buddies that way.
Yeah yeah and the rest. "My OS is open source! Isn't that great!" grow up. If you think MS should open source the whole of windows you're crazy. Too late now, will never happen, and how would they make any capital out of a move like that.
You must admit that it does raise some suspicions. Not only does the MyDoom virus DDoS microsoft, but also SCO. The article basically voiced my personal suspicions concerning the origin of this virus, but I'm also willing to believe that SCO was added as an afterthought to "pin the blame" on linux users.
the linux people just havent had time to copy it properly yet. New, useful ideas first appear in easy-to-use form on Windows and are either sanitations of byzantine unix apps, or are quickly ported into an insanely byzantine linux app with no docs and little support. It's nice to see that this guy eventually bit the bullet and did it the easy way. Yes I run linux, but I don't try to do dumb stuff that it wasn't designed for with it.
The "Ape Xtreme"? A console named after a primate? How appropriate! Where the hell do I sign up?!