Here's the thing (and all of this is per my recollection -- my memory's bad, and it's been a while): If you kill yourself, the clues are embedded in the death messages. So yes, you die -- but you do get clues, just not up-front; and it's only a limited amount of trial-and-error necessary until you've figured out how everything works.
Now, if you like to be given your clues in time to avoid dying in the first case, that's bad. If you don't mind a little bit of trial-and-error (which I wouldn't necessarily classify as painful in this case), it's not so bad.
The beginning of Spider and Web is the worst excercise in "there are no clues, so you'll just have to try every verb" I've seen - worse than the babelfish (at least the babelfish was *supposed* to be a pythonesque excercise in comical frustration). At least you can die in 4 moves.
Oh, come on. It's all soft deaths up 'till around the very end: A single UNDO and you're fine. An unforgiving game is where you can get trapped by mistake and your single UNDO won't pull you out; Spider and Web isn't one of those by any means. Getting through the door at the beginning is a bit of a trick, but if you think to look at your inventory it's not so very hard (or undiscoverable) at all.
Spider and Web (to a substantial extent) and Photopia (in its entirety) are more focused around story than puzzles. Blue Chairs (which I'm only partway through right now) gets quite far before one runs into any puzzles which even start to approach moderate difficulty -- but the story and the quality of the writing are excellent.
If puzzles are what make your day, I suppose you ought to stick with Varicella. I care more about the story than the challenge, though, so Spider and Web, Photopia and Blue Chairs are right up my alley.
Ahh. Austin is something of a UNIX town -- IBM had and has quite a bit of AIX development located herebouts, and generally UNIXy jobs aren't hard to find.
I still consider it a Good Thing -- in terms of reflecting both the state of the economy and the level of awareness of SCO's business antics -- that they find it necessary to take this kind of action. As to whether their intent is entirely what they make it out to be, that's admittedly a separate question.
And if they are having problems todays job market where there are still coders unemployed from the dot bomb crash
Huh? Where? I'm in Austin, and the competent coders have been long since reemployed.
We've gotten a few good hires lately, but it's much harder than it used to be -- and there've been far more poaching attempts (some successful) on our existing staff.
You have to lower your expectations (and deal with broken functionality), put in man hours to fix it yourself, or pay CodeWeavers for their suppored version to use WINE.
With Windows, your only option is to pay; there's no cheap-but-broken version or option to fix it yourself. Having options is good.
WINE may be the answer but in my experience it's still too unreliable for many organisations to take the plunge
If you're a sufficiently well-funded organization, you can pay CodeWeavers to get WINE to a state where they'll guarantee its reliability with regard to an application. Expecting WINE to do what you need out-of-the-box, without putting any work into it... sure, that's hit or miss. For cases where you're looking at making serious commercial use of it, though, getting CodeWeavers involved makes sense.
CodeWeavers has been paid real money to add Photoshop support to their commercial, supported WINE branch. If you have the fundage to work with Photoshop, buying a subscription to Crossover Office shouldn't hurt at all.
No clue about Illustrator. I use Inkscape, myself -- but if your needs are more serious than mine, it may not be adequate.
As for the others -- yep, that's a problem: Toon Boom Studio reportedly doesn't even install under WINE; Ableton Live is able to install but not all of it works (and MIDI wasn't even tested); Macromedia Flex isn't even in the wine application database. There are other solutions for running Windows programs under Linux: some of these are actually quite reliable and performant, but require a Windows license (Win4Lin comes to mind) -- and by then, what's the point?
Personally, I've gone the pragmatic (read: lazy) route: I use coLinux to run Linux in the background on my Windows box, and use that for development work while sticking with Windows for the desktop-ish stuff. Running a pure Linux desktop was certainly more interesting (in a "let's figure out how to get this new revision of software suspend to work" sort of way), but running the wife's software out-of-the-box makes things less painful. (At home. If they took away my Linux box at work, I'd have to kill).
Those "no trespassing" signs don't mean shit either, unless your property is completely encircled with fence and you have a gate which is locked.
Not here in Texas, at least. At our last Neighborhood Watch meeting, the officer who was speaking said that those signs count as a command from the homeowner to leave, and allow him the ability to arrest folks who are acting suspicious on someone else's property (whereas otherwise, the best he could do would be asking them to leave).
Now, in terms of shooting folks who are trespassing, the sign may not be sufficient alone (I haven't taken the concealed-carry class yet, and so am quite unfamiliar with the applicable law) -- but in terms of making trespassing into an arrestable offense, it is indeed.
Did you actually read my posts? I don't disagree with anything you say -- yes, Microsoft is acting only in response to consumer demand; however, since adding such support to a monopoly product would be extending one product which arguably has a monopoly within its field (Office) into a field in which Microsoft does not have a monopoly (PDF authoring software), it would arguably be illegal for them to do so. This is true whether or not any of the assertions you make are valid.
The US has laws explicitly addressing "contributory infringement", where one assists others engaging in copyright infringement but doesn't do so themselves. Sweden doesn't. EOM.
I didn't think that MS Office was part of the monopoly thing
Just because a court has found that they hold a monopoly power in the operating system market doesn't mean that one won't find that they also hold one in the market for office software.
Well, yes; and if it OOo were the only competitor involved, then it would be completely clear-cut that Microsoft would be in the right to implement PDF export functionality. The problem, however, is Adobe Acrobat Pro -- which is not in the same market space. If MS added very-high-quality PDF export functionality to Word, most of the market for Acrobat Pro would evaporate.
So it's fuzzy. Is it fair that Microsoft can't add a feature that OOo can? Not really. Is it reasonable to allow a company to take actions that would leverage themselves into a new market based on a preexisting monopoly just because a smaller company without a preexisting monopoly took those same actions? That would open a barn-door-sized hole in antitrust law, and so isn't really an acceptable outcome either.
I'm not claiming that the reasoning in question is good, or proper, or right. It's just what flows from a strict interpretation of antitrust law. That said...
If the reasoning you put forward proves successful in a court of law, it means MS cannot really add any feature to their Office platform unless either it has been implemented elsewhere in a direct competitor in the exact same market, or it is a totally new feature that hasnt been implemented anywhere at all.
Not true. If they implement a feature like pie menus, that doesn't mean that they're bullying their way into a market previously held by Maya and The Sims. It's only if they implement functionality that makes them a competitor in a market they weren't previously in that there's trouble. Implementing pie menus wouldn't make Microsoft Office a 3D rendering tool or a game, and there's no market for "applications that use pie menus" -- you don't go to a store and ask where they keep their pie-menu-based software, and you don't buy only one pie-menu-based program because having more than one would be redundant.
PDF "creation tools" were just apps that created PDF documents as their output. We could just as easily dub OpenOffice an ODF "creation tool" and claim Microsoft is entering the "ODF creation tools" market if they implement it.
Okay, here's the thing.
There is historically a market for PDF creation tools that aren't office suites. That market actually exists, and there are companies that are in it. There is historically a market for office suites. There is no historical separate market for ODF creation tools, because nobody makes standalone ODF creation tools. OpenOffice is plainly already in the same market as Microsoft Office, there's plenty of available evidence to that effect, and any attempt to claim otherwise would be taken less-than-kindly by a judge. Likewise, Adobe Acrobad plainly isn't in the same market as Microsoft Office -- you don't see anyone claiming that folks should buy Acrobat Pro as a substitute for MS Word.
Finally, all the folks who are making ODF-based office suites would love Microsoft to get into that market! If Microsoft implemented ODF, that would level the playing field that's been so broken by MS having control of the dominant file format. Microsoft isn't going to get sued for implementing ODF because there exists no potential plantiff.
The problem with that potential claim is that MS is giving their customers the choice of what formats to output to
Yes, but that's not their legal basis to have an antitrust argument; their basis for having a legal leg to stand on is that a pre-existing monopoly is being leveraged into a different market area. Can that argument be made with regard to PDF support? Yes, but badly: PDF creation tools have historically been in different market space than office suites. Could it be made with regard to ODF support? No, because ODF creation tools are not only in the same market space as office suites -- they are office suites.
To the extent that there's a legal argument to use antitrust law here, it doesn't apply to writing formats where there isn't a market for products which are not office suites that write those formats.
(Again, I am not a lawyer, this isn't legal advice, and to the extent that I have formal legal training it's completely inapplicable to this discussion).
...it's *antitrust* (read: monopoly-busting) law they're potentially going to be using, not anything regarding copyright or patents -- so yes, it's an open standard; and no, the Ghostscript team isn't vulnerable to the same argument.
The potential claim is that Microsoft is leveraging their monopoly into a different product space, ie. that PDF creation tools are a different product space than office suites. Traditionally this has been the case, even if it isn't so much anymore. If that claim were to hold up in court (and it well may not), that wouldn't have all that much leverage on whether ODF-writing tools are a different product space from office suites; they obviously are not.
(IANAL, and the bits of law I've formally studied have nothing to do with this. Take with a grain of salt, etc).
The argument isn't that Microsoft doesn't have a license -- it's that Microsoft is leveraging a monopoly. The dichotomy isn't whether something is open or licensed; Adobe isn't arguing that PDF isn't open, or that Microsoft needs a license. What it's being speculated that Adobe may argue is that Microsoft, by taking advantage of that open format, is illegally extending their monopoly.
Slashdot Mirror
You're right -- I was, indeed, misremembering.
Even so, I think the very thing you're classifying as a fault is also the reason why the game won "Best Use of the Medium".
Here's the thing (and all of this is per my recollection -- my memory's bad, and it's been a while): If you kill yourself, the clues are embedded in the death messages. So yes, you die -- but you do get clues, just not up-front; and it's only a limited amount of trial-and-error necessary until you've figured out how everything works.
Now, if you like to be given your clues in time to avoid dying in the first case, that's bad. If you don't mind a little bit of trial-and-error (which I wouldn't necessarily classify as painful in this case), it's not so bad.
Spider and Web (to a substantial extent) and Photopia (in its entirety) are more focused around story than puzzles. Blue Chairs (which I'm only partway through right now) gets quite far before one runs into any puzzles which even start to approach moderate difficulty -- but the story and the quality of the writing are excellent.
If puzzles are what make your day, I suppose you ought to stick with Varicella. I care more about the story than the challenge, though, so Spider and Web, Photopia and Blue Chairs are right up my alley.
Thank you! Spider and Web and Photopia are among my favorites, but I hadn't heard of Blue Chairs before. Already, though, the story's beautiful.
Ahh. Austin is something of a UNIX town -- IBM had and has quite a bit of AIX development located herebouts, and generally UNIXy jobs aren't hard to find.
I still consider it a Good Thing -- in terms of reflecting both the state of the economy and the level of awareness of SCO's business antics -- that they find it necessary to take this kind of action. As to whether their intent is entirely what they make it out to be, that's admittedly a separate question.
And if they are having problems todays job market where there are still coders unemployed from the dot bomb crash
Huh? Where? I'm in Austin, and the competent coders have been long since reemployed.
We've gotten a few good hires lately, but it's much harder than it used to be -- and there've been far more poaching attempts (some successful) on our existing staff.
You have to lower your expectations (and deal with broken functionality), put in man hours to fix it yourself, or pay CodeWeavers for their suppored version to use WINE.
With Windows, your only option is to pay; there's no cheap-but-broken version or option to fix it yourself. Having options is good.
WINE may be the answer but in my experience it's still too unreliable for many organisations to take the plunge
If you're a sufficiently well-funded organization, you can pay CodeWeavers to get WINE to a state where they'll guarantee its reliability with regard to an application. Expecting WINE to do what you need out-of-the-box, without putting any work into it... sure, that's hit or miss. For cases where you're looking at making serious commercial use of it, though, getting CodeWeavers involved makes sense.
CodeWeavers has been paid real money to add Photoshop support to their commercial, supported WINE branch. If you have the fundage to work with Photoshop, buying a subscription to Crossover Office shouldn't hurt at all.
No clue about Illustrator. I use Inkscape, myself -- but if your needs are more serious than mine, it may not be adequate.
As for the others -- yep, that's a problem: Toon Boom Studio reportedly doesn't even install under WINE; Ableton Live is able to install but not all of it works (and MIDI wasn't even tested); Macromedia Flex isn't even in the wine application database. There are other solutions for running Windows programs under Linux: some of these are actually quite reliable and performant, but require a Windows license (Win4Lin comes to mind) -- and by then, what's the point?
Personally, I've gone the pragmatic (read: lazy) route: I use coLinux to run Linux in the background on my Windows box, and use that for development work while sticking with Windows for the desktop-ish stuff. Running a pure Linux desktop was certainly more interesting (in a "let's figure out how to get this new revision of software suspend to work" sort of way), but running the wife's software out-of-the-box makes things less painful. (At home. If they took away my Linux box at work, I'd have to kill).
Not here in Texas, at least. At our last Neighborhood Watch meeting, the officer who was speaking said that those signs count as a command from the homeowner to leave, and allow him the ability to arrest folks who are acting suspicious on someone else's property (whereas otherwise, the best he could do would be asking them to leave).
Now, in terms of shooting folks who are trespassing, the sign may not be sufficient alone (I haven't taken the concealed-carry class yet, and so am quite unfamiliar with the applicable law) -- but in terms of making trespassing into an arrestable offense, it is indeed.
Did you actually read my posts? I don't disagree with anything you say -- yes, Microsoft is acting only in response to consumer demand; however, since adding such support to a monopoly product would be extending one product which arguably has a monopoly within its field (Office) into a field in which Microsoft does not have a monopoly (PDF authoring software), it would arguably be illegal for them to do so. This is true whether or not any of the assertions you make are valid.
Are you sure they would be found not to have a monopoly on Office, if that question were asked of the court?
The US has laws explicitly addressing "contributory infringement", where one assists others engaging in copyright infringement but doesn't do so themselves. Sweden doesn't. EOM.
Well, yes; and if it OOo were the only competitor involved, then it would be completely clear-cut that Microsoft would be in the right to implement PDF export functionality. The problem, however, is Adobe Acrobat Pro -- which is not in the same market space. If MS added very-high-quality PDF export functionality to Word, most of the market for Acrobat Pro would evaporate.
So it's fuzzy. Is it fair that Microsoft can't add a feature that OOo can? Not really. Is it reasonable to allow a company to take actions that would leverage themselves into a new market based on a preexisting monopoly just because a smaller company without a preexisting monopoly took those same actions? That would open a barn-door-sized hole in antitrust law, and so isn't really an acceptable outcome either.
PDF "creation tools" were just apps that created PDF documents as their output. We could just as easily dub OpenOffice an ODF "creation tool" and claim Microsoft is entering the "ODF creation tools" market if they implement it.
Okay, here's the thing.
There is historically a market for PDF creation tools that aren't office suites. That market actually exists, and there are companies that are in it. There is historically a market for office suites. There is no historical separate market for ODF creation tools, because nobody makes standalone ODF creation tools. OpenOffice is plainly already in the same market as Microsoft Office, there's plenty of available evidence to that effect, and any attempt to claim otherwise would be taken less-than-kindly by a judge. Likewise, Adobe Acrobad plainly isn't in the same market as Microsoft Office -- you don't see anyone claiming that folks should buy Acrobat Pro as a substitute for MS Word.
Finally, all the folks who are making ODF-based office suites would love Microsoft to get into that market! If Microsoft implemented ODF, that would level the playing field that's been so broken by MS having control of the dominant file format. Microsoft isn't going to get sued for implementing ODF because there exists no potential plantiff.
The problem with that potential claim is that MS is giving their customers the choice of what formats to output to
Yes, but that's not their legal basis to have an antitrust argument; their basis for having a legal leg to stand on is that a pre-existing monopoly is being leveraged into a different market area. Can that argument be made with regard to PDF support? Yes, but badly: PDF creation tools have historically been in different market space than office suites. Could it be made with regard to ODF support? No, because ODF creation tools are not only in the same market space as office suites -- they are office suites.
To the extent that there's a legal argument to use antitrust law here, it doesn't apply to writing formats where there isn't a market for products which are not office suites that write those formats.
(Again, I am not a lawyer, this isn't legal advice, and to the extent that I have formal legal training it's completely inapplicable to this discussion).
...it's *antitrust* (read: monopoly-busting) law they're potentially going to be using, not anything regarding copyright or patents -- so yes, it's an open standard; and no, the Ghostscript team isn't vulnerable to the same argument.
The potential claim is that Microsoft is leveraging their monopoly into a different product space, ie. that PDF creation tools are a different product space than office suites. Traditionally this has been the case, even if it isn't so much anymore. If that claim were to hold up in court (and it well may not), that wouldn't have all that much leverage on whether ODF-writing tools are a different product space from office suites; they obviously are not.
(IANAL, and the bits of law I've formally studied have nothing to do with this. Take with a grain of salt, etc).
This "big stick" is anti-monopoly laws. OOo isn't a monopoly in any way, shape or form.
The argument isn't that Microsoft doesn't have a license -- it's that Microsoft is leveraging a monopoly. The dichotomy isn't whether something is open or licensed; Adobe isn't arguing that PDF isn't open, or that Microsoft needs a license. What it's being speculated that Adobe may argue is that Microsoft, by taking advantage of that open format, is illegally extending their monopoly.