Nvidia's installer is what software installers SHOULD be like.
No. In an ideal world, installers would be a lot better. (The fault isn't entirely NVidia's, but also of the Linux distros)
The NVidia installer, with luck, can end up by compiling the "nvidia" kernel module and loading it into RAM. Then the user is left to locate and modify XFree86Config (or equivalent) by herself, and then can run "startx", "xdm", or "init 5".
At that point, she assumes everything's fine, and thus is suprised when she reboots and gets just a text console (or worse, a scrambled screen or invalid scan rate). That happens because the NVidia installer made no provision to load the kernel module into RAM on subquesent reboots- nor does the documentation hint that one may need to take steps to achieve this (such as editing/etc/rc.local).
I've observed users actually establish the workaround of re-running the NVidia installer after each reboot, as they know no other way to get a kernel module loaded (or even have heard of a module). (Naturally, they then work hard to keep a long uptime)
If somebody has gotten it working, and they specify how, then you can be reasonably sure to manage it too, with some work.
Funny. I wanted to run a game (2 years old), found multiple positive comments on transgaming.org, paid the $15 for WineX, and then discovered it didn't run at anywhere near a satisfactory level. Performance was bad in all cases, and multiplayer games didn't work at all. A support request to Transgaming told me that "Online play is unsupported".
Sortof like installing windows and spending hours at a time reinstalling it, and the correct versions of video drivers and direct X to get acceptable performance out of games you already paid for once, isnt it?
Even assuming what you said is true (worst case), reinstalling a Windows(tm) system is a straightforward affair. It may be time consuming, but that's only a problem if you can't find a book to read while the CD-ROM spins. There's no choices to make, no research needed, no hard work. You just cycle through 4 CD-ROMs, download 500 meg of patches, and away you go. If it doesn't work then, it'll never work until you buy new hardware, and you're not waiting for each month's new Transgaming release to fix an additional 1% of known bugs so you can test it again.
That wouldn't help. For many kinds of computer hardware, accurate specifications are all that's really needed to enable an amateur to write an open-source driver. But modern video-cards aren't like that. (neither are "WinModems")
Sure, having "the specs" would let you write a driver that's feature complete, but they won't help you make it fast. And as it turns out, a decent chunk of the engineering effort put in by NVidia and ATI is to write a good driver (just look at the serious improvements existing cards get with newer drivers).
it was really good and it's on massive discount (e.g. the $10 rack).
A smart plan, because the only way Cedega will give you reasonable performance is to play a game that came out 18 months before you bought your PC.
Do you want to live off the worldwide "average" salary? I don't know what that number is but I would bet it's south of $5,000.
Then it becomes a question of "Good vs Evil". A good person would want to help the poor of the world, even if it reduces his own income. Someone who harms others to benefit himself is what we call "evil".
but I think most of the time that will give the correct behavior.
No. It'll almost never give the desired result.
When a person middle-clicks on a link, she wants the target of that link to show up in a new tab. Frequently this doesn't work, such as when the link contains a javascript window.open() command. In that case, her new tab contains only an error message.
Your "solution" would avoid that error message, and give her a new tab containing the exact same page she had already been looking at, plus a popup window containing the content she'd wanted in the tab. This is somewhat better, in that error messages have been avoided...
The real correct solution is for the browser to set a flag indicating that all new windows should open as tabs, which is enabled when you middle click on a button, and lasts until all javascript called by that button has terminated.
AC: I've seen this word misspelt with striking regularity on slashdot as of late. It's an epidemic!
Uh, hello? Slashdot is a "web site". That means its part of the Internet, where Internet English is the default language. "Rediculous" is the correct spelling here. Same with "loose"...
I was cursing every taskbar system I ever had to interact with (Windows and Linux)
Make no mistake, the OS X Dock is a kind of taskbar. (It's a horizontal "bar", it lists the "tasks" you're running...)
The dock is just so much more condusive to having many windows open
Why do you think it's better? I find it a lot worse. The biggest part of the problem is that documents are only shown by a picture, not text (until you mouseover). So all icons for the same kind of file look identical (or nearly so, if they are squeezed thumbnails). At 128x128, all text documents look the same...
I can't see how an OS 9 user could stand to "upgrade" to X.
For instance, why is it that the protagonist's messages are only "found/decoded" in the future AFTER he makes them?
Repeat that to yourself slowly... It should be completely obvious that no message is ever read until AFTER it is written, which means in the FUTURE. Even without time-travel, that rule holds.
If you meant to ask "Why aren't his messages read until a point in the future shortly after he left on his time-trip?", that's a little harder. The most plausible explanation is that they actually WERE read many times before then, but were ignored by everyone else except the guys who knew of his mission. (Although the screenplay doesn't really depict it like that, out of dramatic considerations)
Thus, the information gained from the past by the future was used to put her there to,
Yes. And that's not a paradox, even if it seems weird. (Although it shouldn't seem weird, because people are continually acting on information from the past. Information flow from past -> present -> future is completely normal)
Another, more simplified situation that also isn't paradoxical is is the "uninvented invention", where you recieve plans for a time machine sent back by a future self, and then eventually send those same plans back to the earlier you.
It seems weird, but under the principle of firm predestination, it's not self-contradictory.
I wouldn't say it provided a clearly coherent view of time travel
Films sorted in terms of decreasing accuracy of time-travel mechanics:
Bobby Loves Mangos
Twelve Monkeys Star Trek (4, not First Contact, which was worse) Terminator Back to the Future The Sound of Thunder
Anyone who hasn't seen Bobby Loves Mangos should go watch it immediately, BEFORE you read reviews or anything else concerning it. It's only 10 minutes, do it!
the common European viewpoint that the US's participation was less significant compared to the US's point of view
Participation can mean things besides actually fighting. Those Europeans should remember what Charles de Gaulle said on the topic:
La France n'est pas seule ! Elle n'est pas seule ! Elle n'est pas seule ! Elle a un vaste Empire derrière elle. Elle peut faire bloc avec l'Empire britannique qui tient la mer et continue la lutte. Elle peut, comme l'Angleterre, utiliser sans limites l'immense industrie des Etats-Unis!
However, I don't believe Half-Life is at the top of the bestsellers lists, if I recall correctly that honor goes to The Sims, which did it in less then 5 years
Work on reading comprehension. The impressive part isn't getting to the top of the list (and in only 5 years???) but STAYING on the besteller list for five whole years.
Half-Life is a 1998 game still played heavily today. That kind of staying power is unprecedented, and it indicates a real maturity to video games. No longer were the technical improvements of each 12-18 months enough to push older games into the shadows- gameplay finally managed to overpower the allure of newer hardware/software optimizations.
Everquest has been blamed for more deaths, so its still all been done before
EA is free to ignore the problem and lose future business,
Nope. Ignoring this will INCREASE their future business, because Madden 2005 will advertise "New, accurate player fatigue gives you an even more realsitic football experience!"
Aren't you supposed to be as evil as possible in kicking the crap out of every aspect of the game before it's released?
Sounds like a good idea... but EA's testers seem to be focused more on basic software quality (driver compatibility, memory usage, and crashes) than on game balance.
They also had a high-profile mistake in their recent rollout of Battlefield Vietnam. It was supposed to be a team-based game of cooperative combat by players in different roles. But on the USA team, one of the 5 classes got both the best anti-personnel weapon (M-60) and best anti-vehicle weapon (LAW). There was literally no reason to choose any other character, and no way for the Vietnamese to compete. Even on paper, it's clearly a moronic idea.
There's no way a half-way competent tester could've overlooked that design flaw, unless he was completely forbidden from deviating from the test-script and trying to actually win the game.
Well, I live in israel and we don't have PBS here (well, duh),
It might come on if you wait a bit. PBS (and also the BBC) lease their programs internationally, often to other government-sponsored stations. I've heard of 2 PBS shows airing in Israel (no idea what channel)
hm...now that I think of it, is it even legal to do that?
Good. It should feel wrong. If the game helps USA voters think harder about sending an all-white paratroop to kill a few "bad guy" Africans in the middle of a large, heavily-armed African town, so much the better.
Considering the hundreds of thousands who were affected in horrible ways by the accident-
Those writing the press releases sound---intentionally or not, ironically or not---like military recruiters.
No they don't. No real US recruiter has ever tried to make combat sound fun (especially not in official publications). And they CERTAINLY never advertised "Join the Army, and meet exotic, inexpensive whores!" The Army is always careful to use euphemisms, and to cast themselves as reluctant warriors.
Yes it was. Not quite as bad as F-Troop, but still humiliating to watch today. "Combat in Color" and MASH were more respectful.
"ain't those Nazi's stupid
The 2 German characters, Klink and Schutz, were not Nazis. The show depicted Nazis as dangerous and intelligent compared to them. Indeed, some episodes had the Nazi SS threatening to take over Col. Klink's job, which would've ruined Hogan's spy plans.
I've never played Battlefield 1942, so I can't speak for it.
It's fairly evenhanded and non-glamorous, for an action game. It portrays soldiers on all sides equally, and unlike some games, doesn't make it seem like the USA singlehandedly saved the world. In various missions, players can control German, Japanese, Italian, Russian, British, USA, or even Gaullist French forces.
However, the follow on Battlefield-Vietnam product skipped an opportunity to do some education. Civilians wandering into infantry battles wasn't an important feature of WWII, but it was an important factor in Vietnam. They should've tried to add some non-aggressive characters inhabiting the maps, with a (minor?) penalty if you accidently attack them.
Actually the "12 monkeys" started with the premise that you could not change the past,
Yes, the scientists at the beginning said the past was immutable. But once on the mission, Bruce Willis got overcome by emotion and tried anyway. Of course, in the end they turned out to have been right, and he changed nothing.
Terminator was a perfect predestination paradox
The original "Terminator" was not a paradox, but Terminator 2 was. A temporal paradox only occurs if you go back in time and make changes that prevent you from going back in time (the typical suggestion is killing your own father).
In the first movie, the result of the time-travel was necessary so that the time-travel could happen. No paradox. In the 2nd movie, the result of the time-travel prevented the time-travel, which is paradoxical.
(In the 3rd movie, it was revealed that the victory of T2 was hollow, and no prevention had actually occured, although Sarah Connor had optimistically hoped otherwise)
My fingers haven't the stamina for that quantity of philosophical discourse. Very briefly, "non-free will" is a theist subset of predestination, where some intelligent agent planned the course of events (meaning this agent/deity has free will, but humanity does not). Non-theist predestination means that the universe is progressing on a randomly determined course, and each entity's will is equally as free as any other's.
If you like, reading a refutation of Serle's "Chinese Box" philosophy will have the same gist as my position. Or visit a Calvinist pastor...
the only way this can happen is for the result to be influenced by a metaphysical entity, i.e. a soul. This may violate conservation of information, but there it is.
"Souls" are irrelevant to predestination. Whether or not there is something non-physical controlling human behavior, the information still exists (even if it can never be learned). If souls exist, then they are a part of the universe; a non-physical part, but not without information (the influence they have on human action would have a measurable physical effect). (Souls, after all, are not supposed to be random-response generators, but are believed to contain personality traits guiding actions)
I think the conflict lies in the writer's desire to preserve free will at all costs so we can care about the actions of the protagonist.
I don't think their concern is really that deep. It's just an urge to simplify so that the possible outcomes of an action are managable. In a "real time travel" scenario, the results of your actions would be so chaotic as to be totally unpredictable. Without the ability to even partially guess what the result of a change will be, characters cannot illuminate their personality via their actions.
Slashdot Mirror
Nvidia's installer is what software installers SHOULD be like.
/etc/rc.local).
No. In an ideal world, installers would be a lot better. (The fault isn't entirely NVidia's, but also of the Linux distros)
The NVidia installer, with luck, can end up by compiling the "nvidia" kernel module and loading it into RAM. Then the user is left to locate and modify XFree86Config (or equivalent) by herself, and then can run "startx", "xdm", or "init 5".
At that point, she assumes everything's fine, and thus is suprised when she reboots and gets just a text console (or worse, a scrambled screen or invalid scan rate). That happens because the NVidia installer made no provision to load the kernel module into RAM on subquesent reboots- nor does the documentation hint that one may need to take steps to achieve this (such as editing
I've observed users actually establish the workaround of re-running the NVidia installer after each reboot, as they know no other way to get a kernel module loaded (or even have heard of a module). (Naturally, they then work hard to keep a long uptime)
There's nothing recent about it. People have been offloading work to the GPU for ages.
Care to quantify that? The earliest attempts I recall were in ~1997, and they didn't work practically for several more years.
It was only this year that the idea exploded in popularity (witness the large "general-purpose GPU processing" focus at SIGGRAPH)
(Note that "ages" in computer science is at least 5.72 real-world years)
If somebody has gotten it working, and they specify how, then you can be reasonably sure to manage it too, with some work.
Funny. I wanted to run a game (2 years old), found multiple positive comments on transgaming.org, paid the $15 for WineX, and then discovered it didn't run at anywhere near a satisfactory level. Performance was bad in all cases, and multiplayer games didn't work at all. A support request to Transgaming told me that "Online play is unsupported".
Sortof like installing windows and spending hours at a time reinstalling it, and the correct versions of video drivers and direct X to get acceptable performance out of games you already paid for once, isnt it?
Even assuming what you said is true (worst case), reinstalling a Windows(tm) system is a straightforward affair. It may be time consuming, but that's only a problem if you can't find a book to read while the CD-ROM spins. There's no choices to make, no research needed, no hard work. You just cycle through 4 CD-ROMs, download 500 meg of patches, and away you go. If it doesn't work then, it'll never work until you buy new hardware, and you're not waiting for each month's new Transgaming release to fix an additional 1% of known bugs so you can test it again.
or they released the specs
That wouldn't help. For many kinds of computer hardware, accurate specifications are all that's really needed to enable an amateur to write an open-source driver. But modern video-cards aren't like that. (neither are "WinModems")
Sure, having "the specs" would let you write a driver that's feature complete, but they won't help you make it fast. And as it turns out, a decent chunk of the engineering effort put in by NVidia and ATI is to write a good driver (just look at the serious improvements existing cards get with newer drivers).
it was really good and it's on massive discount (e.g. the $10 rack).
A smart plan, because the only way Cedega will give you reasonable performance is to play a game that came out 18 months before you bought your PC.
... to develop a "wrapper" (forgive my bad terminology if its wrong, I couldn't think of the name!)
I think "VMWare" is the name you're struggling for.
Do you want to live off the worldwide "average" salary? I don't know what that number is but I would bet it's south of $5,000.
Then it becomes a question of "Good vs Evil". A good person would want to help the poor of the world, even if it reduces his own income. Someone who harms others to benefit himself is what we call "evil".
but I think most of the time that will give the correct behavior.
No. It'll almost never give the desired result.
When a person middle-clicks on a link, she wants the target of that link to show up in a new tab. Frequently this doesn't work, such as when the link contains a javascript window.open() command. In that case, her new tab contains only an error message.
Your "solution" would avoid that error message, and give her a new tab containing the exact same page she had already been looking at, plus a popup window containing the content she'd wanted in the tab. This is somewhat better, in that error messages have been avoided...
The real correct solution is for the browser to set a flag indicating that all new windows should open as tabs, which is enabled when you middle click on a button, and lasts until all javascript called by that button has terminated.
AC: I've seen this word misspelt with striking regularity on slashdot as of late. It's an epidemic!
Uh, hello? Slashdot is a "web site". That means its part of the Internet, where Internet English is the default language. "Rediculous" is the correct spelling here. Same with "loose"...
I was cursing every taskbar system I ever had to interact with (Windows and Linux)
Make no mistake, the OS X Dock is a kind of taskbar. (It's a horizontal "bar", it lists the "tasks" you're running...)
The dock is just so much more condusive to having many windows open
Why do you think it's better? I find it a lot worse. The biggest part of the problem is that documents are only shown by a picture, not text (until you mouseover). So all icons for the same kind of file look identical (or nearly so, if they are squeezed thumbnails). At 128x128, all text documents look the same...
I can't see how an OS 9 user could stand to "upgrade" to X.
Repeat that to yourself slowly... It should be completely obvious that no message is ever read until AFTER it is written, which means in the FUTURE. Even without time-travel, that rule holds.
If you meant to ask "Why aren't his messages read until a point in the future shortly after he left on his time-trip?", that's a little harder. The most plausible explanation is that they actually WERE read many times before then, but were ignored by everyone else except the guys who knew of his mission. (Although the screenplay doesn't really depict it like that, out of dramatic considerations)
Thus, the information gained from the past by the future was used to put her there to,
Yes. And that's not a paradox, even if it seems weird. (Although it shouldn't seem weird, because people are continually acting on information from the past. Information flow from past -> present -> future is completely normal)
Another, more simplified situation that also isn't paradoxical is is the "uninvented invention", where you recieve plans for a time machine sent back by a future self, and then eventually send those same plans back to the earlier you.
It seems weird, but under the principle of firm predestination, it's not self-contradictory.
I wouldn't say it provided a clearly coherent view of time travel
Films sorted in terms of decreasing accuracy of time-travel mechanics:
Twelve Monkeys
Star Trek (4, not First Contact, which was worse)
Terminator
Back to the Future
The Sound of Thunder
Anyone who hasn't seen Bobby Loves Mangos should go watch it immediately, BEFORE you read reviews or anything else concerning it. It's only 10 minutes, do it!
Participation can mean things besides actually fighting. Those Europeans should remember what Charles de Gaulle said on the topic:
However, I don't believe Half-Life is at the top of the bestsellers lists, if I recall correctly that honor goes to The Sims, which did it in less then 5 years
Work on reading comprehension. The impressive part isn't getting to the top of the list (and in only 5 years???) but STAYING on the besteller list for five whole years.
Half-Life is a 1998 game still played heavily today. That kind of staying power is unprecedented, and it indicates a real maturity to video games. No longer were the technical improvements of each 12-18 months enough to push older games into the shadows- gameplay finally managed to overpower the allure of newer hardware/software optimizations.
Everquest has been blamed for more deaths, so its still all been done before
Everquest came out after Half-Life.
you can not release patches to XBox games
Wrong.
EA is free to ignore the problem and lose future business,
Nope. Ignoring this will INCREASE their future business, because Madden 2005 will advertise "New, accurate player fatigue gives you an even more realsitic football experience!"
they can't get away with not getting it right the first time
They can now. The X-Box (and probably all future game systems) has a hard-disk allowing patches.
Aren't you supposed to be as evil as possible in kicking the crap out of every aspect of the game before it's released?
Sounds like a good idea... but EA's testers seem to be focused more on basic software quality (driver compatibility, memory usage, and crashes) than on game balance.
They also had a high-profile mistake in their recent rollout of Battlefield Vietnam. It was supposed to be a team-based game of cooperative combat by players in different roles. But on the USA team, one of the 5 classes got both the best anti-personnel weapon (M-60) and best anti-vehicle weapon (LAW). There was literally no reason to choose any other character, and no way for the Vietnamese to compete. Even on paper, it's clearly a moronic idea.
There's no way a half-way competent tester could've overlooked that design flaw, unless he was completely forbidden from deviating from the test-script and trying to actually win the game.
Well, I live in israel and we don't have PBS here (well, duh),
It might come on if you wait a bit. PBS (and also the BBC) lease their programs internationally, often to other government-sponsored stations. I've heard of 2 PBS shows airing in Israel (no idea what channel)
hm...now that I think of it, is it even legal to do that?
No, but that never stops anyone.
but everything it did had been done before
Stay in the top 25 sales ranking for 5 straight years? Get users so addicted they fall down dead after 31 hours of nonstop play?
The KKK (or groups like it) have been around in the United States for about one hundred years,
No. 100 years ago was 1904. The KKK goes back to before 1840.
Fun fact: The KKK was founded in response to a group of abolitionist terrorists that went around in black robes with pointy hats.
It just feels... wrong.
Good. It should feel wrong. If the game helps USA voters think harder about sending an all-white paratroop to kill a few "bad guy" Africans in the middle of a large, heavily-armed African town, so much the better.
Considering the hundreds of thousands who were affected in horrible ways by the accident-
You're off by a factor of 50x there, if not 500x.
Those writing the press releases sound---intentionally or not, ironically or not---like military recruiters.
No they don't. No real US recruiter has ever tried to make combat sound fun (especially not in official publications). And they CERTAINLY never advertised "Join the Army, and meet exotic, inexpensive whores!" The Army is always careful to use euphemisms, and to cast themselves as reluctant warriors.
It wasn't making light of the war,
Yes it was. Not quite as bad as F-Troop, but still humiliating to watch today. "Combat in Color" and MASH were more respectful.
"ain't those Nazi's stupid
The 2 German characters, Klink and Schutz, were not Nazis. The show depicted Nazis as dangerous and intelligent compared to them. Indeed, some episodes had the Nazi SS threatening to take over Col. Klink's job, which would've ruined Hogan's spy plans.
I've never played Battlefield 1942, so I can't speak for it.
It's fairly evenhanded and non-glamorous, for an action game. It portrays soldiers on all sides equally, and unlike some games, doesn't make it seem like the USA singlehandedly saved the world. In various missions, players can control German, Japanese, Italian, Russian, British, USA, or even Gaullist French forces.
However, the follow on Battlefield-Vietnam product skipped an opportunity to do some education. Civilians wandering into infantry battles wasn't an important feature of WWII, but it was an important factor in Vietnam. They should've tried to add some non-aggressive characters inhabiting the maps, with a (minor?) penalty if you accidently attack them.
Well, I've met a few Americans who've said that WW II began at Pearl Harbor,
Oh really? What's the President like in person?
(This year he claimed that both WWII and the "War On Terror" started with an unprovoked airstrike against US soil. Wrong on both counts, actually...)
Actually the "12 monkeys" started with the premise that you could not change the past,
Yes, the scientists at the beginning said the past was immutable. But once on the mission, Bruce Willis got overcome by emotion and tried anyway. Of course, in the end they turned out to have been right, and he changed nothing.
Terminator was a perfect predestination paradox
The original "Terminator" was not a paradox, but Terminator 2 was. A temporal paradox only occurs if you go back in time and make changes that prevent you from going back in time (the typical suggestion is killing your own father).
In the first movie, the result of the time-travel was necessary so that the time-travel could happen. No paradox.
In the 2nd movie, the result of the time-travel prevented the time-travel, which is paradoxical.
(In the 3rd movie, it was revealed that the victory of T2 was hollow, and no prevention had actually occured, although Sarah Connor had optimistically hoped otherwise)
Please elaborate.
My fingers haven't the stamina for that quantity of philosophical discourse. Very briefly, "non-free will" is a theist subset of predestination, where some intelligent agent planned the course of events (meaning this agent/deity has free will, but humanity does not). Non-theist predestination means that the universe is progressing on a randomly determined course, and each entity's will is equally as free as any other's.
If you like, reading a refutation of Serle's "Chinese Box" philosophy will have the same gist as my position. Or visit a Calvinist pastor...
the only way this can happen is for the result to be influenced by a metaphysical entity, i.e. a soul. This may violate conservation of information, but there it is.
"Souls" are irrelevant to predestination. Whether or not there is something non-physical controlling human behavior, the information still exists (even if it can never be learned). If souls exist, then they are a part of the universe; a non-physical part, but not without information (the influence they have on human action would have a measurable physical effect). (Souls, after all, are not supposed to be random-response generators, but are believed to contain personality traits guiding actions)
I think the conflict lies in the writer's desire to preserve free will at all costs so we can care about the actions of the protagonist.
I don't think their concern is really that deep. It's just an urge to simplify so that the possible outcomes of an action are managable. In a "real time travel" scenario, the results of your actions would be so chaotic as to be totally unpredictable. Without the ability to even partially guess what the result of a change will be, characters cannot illuminate their personality via their actions.