If you were CEO of a corporation , would you be willing to take out a license from SCO now?
With a strict confidentiality clause, why not? I'm not advocating that, but it at least seems possible.
Because SCO's licensing is illegal. Or at least it should be. They're claim that their Unix source code exists in Linux is heavily disputed and until they prove their argument in the court of law, nothing in Linux belongs to them and people shouldn't have to pay them to use fucking GPL'd code.
and the result [of Bluecurve] pleased no one that I have asked.
I adore Bluecurve. It's the biggest reason I am so interested in Fedora. But to be quite honest, imho if it doesn't use apt-get, it's not a distro worth using. Bluecurve in Debian/Knoppix would be a fantastic accomplishment, and I hope Bruce Perens uses Bluecurve or another unified theme with UserLinux.
Only because ISPs choose to make it expensive. When you've got a monopoly or an oligopoly on a market, you can charge whatever you want. Bandwidth "cost" is entirely arbitrary. ISPs will continue to reduce custerom bandwidth while the demand continues to go up until one day, finally, there will be legislation similar to minimal wage which will regulate how the "cost" of bandwidth fairly.
Legislation demand fueled by the rise in popularity of such revolutionary P2P platforms such as bit torrent, which is gaining great inroads in legal P2P everywhere; not just games.
While your complaint is technically valid, we're supposed to pretend that there is indeed a delay long enough for the message to be repeated to the reciever. If they made it truly realistic every time the comm system was used, there would be too much time being wasted in each episode. In eposodic television, corners have to be cut everywhere to make sure there's time and money for more important parts of the show.
Besides, the comm system is just another one of those little technical inconsistancies that have plagued trek for years. Like the Klingon forhead problem, the Trill spots problem, the numerous time travel paradoxes, and episodes like TOS:Miri or Voy:Threshold that make absolutely no sense whatsoever. It's TV. Cut it some slack.:)
Besides, even if it were there, there's a big difference between "access denied" and "please enter a password". Not to mentio windows has no sudo or su or even a terminal worth a damn without cygwin.
You kidding? Longhorn defaults, from screenshots I've seen, look way better than "i am 5 teach mee teh primary colorz plz" defaults of XP. In fact it almost looks like they're trying to rip off the OSX metalic style.
But I'm not thinking of upgrading to "Foghorn" (hehe) for looks. I'd only upgrade if it included the gpu accel stuff that OSX has, and only if the security improvements / new file system are worth the upgrade like they were with the NT based operating flavors.
Not a troll, the truth. When Slashdot posts virus articles, I laugh. But not (just) because I use Mac OS 10 and Linux, but because I also happen to have a Windows box, with a net connection, with Kazaa that's been running for weeks and weeks continuously, and I haven't had a virus on it in a very long time. And I've never had a virus in my entire history of using Windows (since Win95) that's required me to do drastic things, such as format. I've only had to do that because of Microsoft related issues, such as their drivers from WinUpdate messing up the system.;)
I always get asked by people I know, "Did that new virus hit you?" I say, "What new virus?" They say, "I got it a few days ago, totally messed up my computer. CNN reports millions of computers infected." I say, "Never got it. Never even heard of it until now." They say, "You must be lucky then."
But in reality, I'm not a moron like they are. I don't blindly double click foreign exe files. I don't read my spam and say WOW LOOK AT THIS FREE SAMPLE!!!!111oneone
I don't succumb to "I_am_a_virus_dont_click_me_or_I_will_fuck_up_your _computer.exe"
And the sad reality is, this is the root of the majority of virus infections.
Running WinNT, 2000, XP at user level is too restrictive. in *nix, if you need to install something it goes "hey feed me a password." In Windows it says "screw you, not enough privs." Then you have to logoff, logon admin, and do it.
Furthermore, in Windows, there's a GREAT DEAL of things you can do in userland that should only be available in rootland. So because of these issues, I've ran every Windows computer I've ever owned at administrator level, as most people do.
My biggiest issue is I have to "connect to server" then type cifs://netbiosname/sharename
It works, but if you just browse the samba network with finder, then try to connect to a server by selecting it and hitting "connect" it doesn't work right.
Human readable would be nice (cough, darwin, cough), but I'll settle for standardized. Currently each distro likes to store different dependencies in all kinds of different spots. You can't write a binary that'll work in every distro (easily) like you can in other operating systems.
Sort of. All I'm saying is that both goals present equally high difficulty. I think it'd be easier to just create a do-all distro and watch the others fall in line than it would be to try and get every distro to standardize their base.
I chose Fedora because of Bluecurve. No other distro unites the toolkits as nicely as Redhat distros. A standardized desktop Linux distro would either use Redhat's Bluecurve theme or create their own toolkit unifying theme.
I'm not saying Fedora doesn't have problems. I really don't like it's package management just to name one. But let's face it. The future of desktop Linux is in unifying the look and feel of the toolkits and a successful desktop Linux distro needs to do what Redhat's Bluecurve did.
And when the game needs a dependency? Where does it look? What if the dependency doesn't exist? Does the installer interact with one of several different package managers to apt-get it, emerge it, rpm it, or yum it?
Or does it just come with every single dependency that it could ever possibly need and "dump" it all into a single directory? Suddenly a 500mb game becomes a 1000mb game and we run into issues of bloatware that plague other operating systems.
Either way you look at it, you're either going to run into dependency hell or bloatware until you create a standardized distro.
Creating a standard base would mean restructuring 90% of every distro. Asking all the distros to do that would be just as difficult as getting everyone to agree to a single distro, package manager, or toolkit.
I was going to moderate this discussion, but somone has to say this:
A standardized Linux distro is needed. Not another obscure niched one except built just for games. Because a standardized distro would be inherrently best for games.
Imagine if Bruce Perens' UserLinux came with nvidia and ati's binary drivers and automatically installed them during the distro installation. Currently no distro that I know of does this, the drivers must be manually installed.
One could argue that in most cases you have to do the same thing in Windows, but in Windows all that requires is double clicking an install file. In Linux you have to usually exit X, check dependencies, and all kinds of other cryptic stuff.
Finally, the one thing that we most need that a standardized distro can provide, is a standardized directory layout. None of this/usr/bin or/bin or/var/usr/bin confusion. If one distro took over by having all the features that desktop Linux needed, which in my view is basically Fedora to unify toolkit look across gtk, gtk2, and qt, but with better hardware detection (ala binary non OSS drivers) and better package management (ala automatically installed apt-get), the standardized directory layout would encourage more Linux ports of games.
As a software author, most authors only release their software as source when dealing with Linux, because it's the only way to ensure that it will work in every distro. But if there was a standardized directory layout and package management system, every dependency could always be found in the same spot and there'd be no need for third party package management and binary compilation.
This may seem like nitpicking, but many companies don't port their games to Linux on the sole basis that they 1. don't want to release source and 2. don't want to take the time to write an installer which can accomodate every distro's different package management, directory layout, and dependency tree.
So that, my friends, is what Linux needs. Create that and gaming will follow.
Emulator authors are just now starting to properly emulate the PSX and N64, both of which are what, 10 years old or close to it?
I've beem emulating PSX and N64 for years. Yes it is true that recent years are finally perfecting the emulation, but that never stopped me from using it with more or less success when it first started up.
That's going to take awhile since it's current system.... Don't forget the fact that ripping GameCube games is currently very hard or impossible. In short, don't hold your breath. GameCube emulation will come, but it's not likely to be any time soon.
Yes, I do realize GC emu is a long way off. I am willing to wait, as I have plenty of perfectly entertaining games already, and not enough time to play them.:)
As for GC disk ripping, it is not impossible, nor difficult, but it is annoying. It has been successfully done two ways. One way is to exploit the phantasy star online upgrade system, which can somehow lead to the ripping of a GC disk. Because I don't own a GC, I haven't read much about this. But I know it's been used with some success. The other method involves tweaking a regular old x86 dvd rom. The authors of the Dolphin GC emulator have done this, but have not shared their method.
you're cheap?
If you had bothered to read the entire thread before commenting, or perhaps get some facts regarding emulation, you'd know this is not the case. Allow me to quote my rebuttals to two previous similar accusations in this thread.
I don't emulate to save money. On the contrary. I lose money and time doing it all legally. But once it's all set up, I see it as a superior gaming experience [snip].
The reason I don't want to buy a gamecube isn't because I'm cheap, it's because I can't remap my controls, or make infinite saves, or save in spots I'm not "supposed to", and many other reasons. All a console is anyway is a computer. I already have three of those. No need to buy another. And besides. Like any other, sometimes emulation can be a challenge. And challenge is fun.
I don't expect the entire world to accept my quirky philosophy of platform unification; it's a hobby, like any other. But next time you want to take a cheap shot against emulation, learn more about it.
and
It's not [cheap]. It costs money for adapters for the controllers, and the controllers themselves. It costs money to buy the games and dump their data. Yes, BUY the games. Besides, post cartridge gaming world, you can't just go downloading 700mb psx images all day much less 4.7gb ps2 images.
In closing, I realize that many people use emulation as a way to play console games cheaper, but as an emu enthusiast, I am not one of those people, and I'll thank you to take your stereotypes elsewhere.
Okay, but that doesn't mean modern gaming sucks in comparison to the old stuff.
Consider the fact that I'm a Star Trek fan, been one for many years. Every time a new Enterprise episode airs, it's pretty much the same thing as every other episode of the series, and even much the same as Voyager's, DS9's, etc. 30 years of Trek all the way from The Cage to the most recent enterprise episode Azati Prime are all basically the same thing. Starships, alien conflicts, characters and captains in trouble.
Surely in 30 years some people have gotten bored of the fact that they're "all the same thing." But that doesn't stop millions of people from tuning in every week.
But not enough to get you pay the measly $99 for the system to play them on? Or for you to actually buy the games and reward said innovation?
Modern gaming doesn't need people like you. Clearly, it's you who should find another hobby.
Uh wow. That's quite an attitude you've got there. Go jump off a skyscraper or something. As my original post said, I've somewhat outgrown gaming. I don't buy a GameCube because I wouldn't have much time for it. My post also said I enjoy emulation, which is a hobby in and of itself.
Oh, and if you think I emulate because it's "cheaper", think again. It's not. It costs money for adapters for the controllers, and the controllers themselves. It costs money to buy the games and dump their data. Yes, BUY the games. Besides, post cartridge gaming world, you can't just go downloading 700mb psx images all day much less 4.7gb ps2 images. For me, gaming is a challenge, and getting emulators to work is part of that challenge.
Now if you'll kindly take your generalizations and elitism elsewhere, I will thank you.
The principle to play games without paying the people who made them?
First off, I legally own (most of) my roms and playstation cd images.
The principle to play on a 21" monitor instead of a 36" tv?
Second, my PC setup, and as a result my emu setup is ported to a TV via S-Video out.
The principle to play without the controller that the game is designed to be played with?
Third, I own gravis gamepad pros and real n64 controllers linked to the usb ports via adaptoids. Since I only emulate NES, SNES, N64, and Playstation, my controllers are all accurate. I LOVE the fact that I can remap my controls when I emulate. Or use a different controller. Or save whenever I want. Or make infinite saves. Or etc.
The principle to play by yourself instead of with friends
Finally, as I said above, the reason I own so many controllers is so I CAN play with friends. Games of Smash Brothers are not uncommon here.
Oh, and before you go bitching about how much I might have saved by just getting the console, I don't emulate to save money. On the contrary. I lose money and time doing it all legally. But once it's all set up, I see it as a superior gaming experience for the above said reasons.
The reason I don't want to buy a gamecube isn't because I'm cheap, it's because I can't remap my controls, or make infinite saves, or save in spots I'm not "supposed to", and many other reasons. All a console is anyway is a computer. I already have three of those. No need to buy another. And besides. Like any other, sometimes emulation can be a challenge. And challenge is fun.
I don't expect the entire world to accept my quirky philosophy of platform unification; it's a hobby, like any other. But next time you want to take a cheap shot against emulation, learn more about it.
Slashdot Mirror
Only because ISPs choose to make it expensive. When you've got a monopoly or an oligopoly on a market, you can charge whatever you want. Bandwidth "cost" is entirely arbitrary. ISPs will continue to reduce custerom bandwidth while the demand continues to go up until one day, finally, there will be legislation similar to minimal wage which will regulate how the "cost" of bandwidth fairly.
Legislation demand fueled by the rise in popularity of such revolutionary P2P platforms such as bit torrent, which is gaining great inroads in legal P2P everywhere; not just games.
Wow, thanks. :) Here's a clickable link.
I never got a chance to contribute in yesterday's (or was it the day before's?) article about bit torrent suddenly becoming sanctioned in games.
But I predicted this would happen in the early days of Bit Torrent (god I wish I could find my +5 on the subject from last year or so.)
Anyway, this saves companies TONS of bandwidth and if has already been proven with Linux distros. The Fedora torrent is massively successful.
It may also urge crappy ISPs to up the amount of bandwidth they give to customers when they realize that high bandwidth != piracy always.
Ah yes. That must be why USB floppy drives sell so well then eh?
While your complaint is technically valid, we're supposed to pretend that there is indeed a delay long enough for the message to be repeated to the reciever. If they made it truly realistic every time the comm system was used, there would be too much time being wasted in each episode. In eposodic television, corners have to be cut everywhere to make sure there's time and money for more important parts of the show.
:)
Besides, the comm system is just another one of those little technical inconsistancies that have plagued trek for years. Like the Klingon forhead problem, the Trill spots problem, the numerous time travel paradoxes, and episodes like TOS:Miri or Voy:Threshold that make absolutely no sense whatsoever. It's TV. Cut it some slack.
Besides, even if it were there, there's a big difference between "access denied" and "please enter a password". Not to mentio windows has no sudo or su or even a terminal worth a damn without cygwin.
You kidding? Longhorn defaults, from screenshots I've seen, look way better than "i am 5 teach mee teh primary colorz plz" defaults of XP. In fact it almost looks like they're trying to rip off the OSX metalic style.
But I'm not thinking of upgrading to "Foghorn" (hehe) for looks. I'd only upgrade if it included the gpu accel stuff that OSX has, and only if the security improvements / new file system are worth the upgrade like they were with the NT based operating flavors.
Shame I don't use Win Fisher Price... er I mean XP ;)
I won't be touching my Win2k installation until MAYBE Longhorn is released. Even that's iffy.
Not a troll, the truth. When Slashdot posts virus articles, I laugh. But not (just) because I use Mac OS 10 and Linux, but because I also happen to have a Windows box, with a net connection, with Kazaa that's been running for weeks and weeks continuously, and I haven't had a virus on it in a very long time. And I've never had a virus in my entire history of using Windows (since Win95) that's required me to do drastic things, such as format. I've only had to do that because of Microsoft related issues, such as their drivers from WinUpdate messing up the system. ;)
r _computer.exe"
I always get asked by people I know, "Did that new virus hit you?"
I say, "What new virus?"
They say, "I got it a few days ago, totally messed up my computer. CNN reports millions of computers infected."
I say, "Never got it. Never even heard of it until now."
They say, "You must be lucky then."
But in reality, I'm not a moron like they are. I don't blindly double click foreign exe files. I don't read my spam and say WOW LOOK AT THIS FREE SAMPLE!!!!111oneone
I don't succumb to "I_am_a_virus_dont_click_me_or_I_will_fuck_up_you
And the sad reality is, this is the root of the majority of virus infections.
Running WinNT, 2000, XP at user level is too restrictive. in *nix, if you need to install something it goes "hey feed me a password." In Windows it says "screw you, not enough privs." Then you have to logoff, logon admin, and do it.
Furthermore, in Windows, there's a GREAT DEAL of things you can do in userland that should only be available in rootland. So because of these issues, I've ran every Windows computer I've ever owned at administrator level, as most people do.
Yes, quite informative, albeit a bit obvious seeing as how I've been doing that since my first day with OSX. :)
;)
Btw, Finder > View > Connect to server is a lot less typing than command K.
My biggiest issue is I have to "connect to server" then type cifs://netbiosname/sharename
It works, but if you just browse the samba network with finder, then try to connect to a server by selecting it and hitting "connect" it doesn't work right.
Funny. I was downloading the update only a few minutes before this article was posted.
:(
I sure do hope the improvements to the SMB protocol are substantial. I've had no end of problems using it to access SMB shares on Windows and Unix.
Human readable would be nice (cough, darwin, cough), but I'll settle for standardized. Currently each distro likes to store different dependencies in all kinds of different spots. You can't write a binary that'll work in every distro (easily) like you can in other operating systems.
Sort of.
All I'm saying is that both goals present equally high difficulty. I think it'd be easier to just create a do-all distro and watch the others fall in line than it would be to try and get every distro to standardize their base.
I chose Fedora because of Bluecurve. No other distro unites the toolkits as nicely as Redhat distros. A standardized desktop Linux distro would either use Redhat's Bluecurve theme or create their own toolkit unifying theme.
I'm not saying Fedora doesn't have problems. I really don't like it's package management just to name one. But let's face it. The future of desktop Linux is in unifying the look and feel of the toolkits and a successful desktop Linux distro needs to do what Redhat's Bluecurve did.
And when the game needs a dependency? Where does it look? What if the dependency doesn't exist? Does the installer interact with one of several different package managers to apt-get it, emerge it, rpm it, or yum it?
Or does it just come with every single dependency that it could ever possibly need and "dump" it all into a single directory? Suddenly a 500mb game becomes a 1000mb game and we run into issues of bloatware that plague other operating systems.
Either way you look at it, you're either going to run into dependency hell or bloatware until you create a standardized distro.
Creating a standard base would mean restructuring 90% of every distro. Asking all the distros to do that would be just as difficult as getting everyone to agree to a single distro, package manager, or toolkit.
I was going to moderate this discussion, but somone has to say this:
/usr/bin or /bin or /var/usr/bin confusion. If one distro took over by having all the features that desktop Linux needed, which in my view is basically Fedora to unify toolkit look across gtk, gtk2, and qt, but with better hardware detection (ala binary non OSS drivers) and better package management (ala automatically installed apt-get), the standardized directory layout would encourage more Linux ports of games.
A standardized Linux distro is needed. Not another obscure niched one except built just for games. Because a standardized distro would be inherrently best for games.
Imagine if Bruce Perens' UserLinux came with nvidia and ati's binary drivers and automatically installed them during the distro installation. Currently no distro that I know of does this, the drivers must be manually installed.
One could argue that in most cases you have to do the same thing in Windows, but in Windows all that requires is double clicking an install file. In Linux you have to usually exit X, check dependencies, and all kinds of other cryptic stuff.
Finally, the one thing that we most need that a standardized distro can provide, is a standardized directory layout. None of this
As a software author, most authors only release their software as source when dealing with Linux, because it's the only way to ensure that it will work in every distro. But if there was a standardized directory layout and package management system, every dependency could always be found in the same spot and there'd be no need for third party package management and binary compilation.
This may seem like nitpicking, but many companies don't port their games to Linux on the sole basis that they 1. don't want to release source and 2. don't want to take the time to write an installer which can accomodate every distro's different package management, directory layout, and dependency tree.
So that, my friends, is what Linux needs. Create that and gaming will follow.
Yes, I do realize GC emu is a long way off. I am willing to wait, as I have plenty of perfectly entertaining games already, and not enough time to play them.
As for GC disk ripping, it is not impossible, nor difficult, but it is annoying. It has been successfully done two ways. One way is to exploit the phantasy star online upgrade system, which can somehow lead to the ripping of a GC disk. Because I don't own a GC, I haven't read much about this. But I know it's been used with some success. The other method involves tweaking a regular old x86 dvd rom. The authors of the Dolphin GC emulator have done this, but have not shared their method.
If you had bothered to read the entire thread before commenting, or perhaps get some facts regarding emulation, you'd know this is not the case. Allow me to quote my rebuttals to two previous similar accusations in this thread.and
In closing, I realize that many people use emulation as a way to play console games cheaper, but as an emu enthusiast, I am not one of those people, and I'll thank you to take your stereotypes elsewhere.
Okay, but that doesn't mean modern gaming sucks in comparison to the old stuff.
Consider the fact that I'm a Star Trek fan, been one for many years. Every time a new Enterprise episode airs, it's pretty much the same thing as every other episode of the series, and even much the same as Voyager's, DS9's, etc. 30 years of Trek all the way from The Cage to the most recent enterprise episode Azati Prime are all basically the same thing. Starships, alien conflicts, characters and captains in trouble.
Surely in 30 years some people have gotten bored of the fact that they're "all the same thing." But that doesn't stop millions of people from tuning in every week.
Oh, and if you think I emulate because it's "cheaper", think again. It's not. It costs money for adapters for the controllers, and the controllers themselves. It costs money to buy the games and dump their data. Yes, BUY the games. Besides, post cartridge gaming world, you can't just go downloading 700mb psx images all day much less 4.7gb ps2 images. For me, gaming is a challenge, and getting emulators to work is part of that challenge.
Now if you'll kindly take your generalizations and elitism elsewhere, I will thank you.
Second, my PC setup, and as a result my emu setup is ported to a TV via S-Video out.
Third, I own gravis gamepad pros and real n64 controllers linked to the usb ports via adaptoids. Since I only emulate NES, SNES, N64, and Playstation, my controllers are all accurate. I LOVE the fact that I can remap my controls when I emulate. Or use a different controller. Or save whenever I want. Or make infinite saves. Or etc.
Finally, as I said above, the reason I own so many controllers is so I CAN play with friends. Games of Smash Brothers are not uncommon here.
Oh, and before you go bitching about how much I might have saved by just getting the console, I don't emulate to save money. On the contrary. I lose money and time doing it all legally. But once it's all set up, I see it as a superior gaming experience for the above said reasons.
The reason I don't want to buy a gamecube isn't because I'm cheap, it's because I can't remap my controls, or make infinite saves, or save in spots I'm not "supposed to", and many other reasons. All a console is anyway is a computer. I already have three of those. No need to buy another. And besides. Like any other, sometimes emulation can be a challenge. And challenge is fun.
I don't expect the entire world to accept my quirky philosophy of platform unification; it's a hobby, like any other. But next time you want to take a cheap shot against emulation, learn more about it.