there is the danger, when providing this capacity, for websites to begin to demand it
There is also the source code, freely available and modifiable, which means you could easily tell such websites that your current location is Fuckoff, in the fine state of NoneOfYourDamnedBusiness.
a number of sites don't work at all unless I tell NoScript to allow JS on them.
Hey, it could always be worse. You could always stumble on a site that doesn't work unless you allow Flash on it.
I also think it's a blatant violation of the Bill of Rights.
I realize said Bill of Rights is often trashed by our government. Is there something else I don't know about the rationale for treating me as anything other than a citizen at the border?
To draw a completely inappropriate analogy, it's like Spore's DRM. Sure, five activations is better than three. I still say any game telling me how many times I can install it on my own computer should not be allowed, and I'm quite offended at the attempt to throw me a bone.
You don't get it, do you? Potential fucking sales.
You don't read very well. Pretty much my whole post was about exactly that.
Regardless of how easy you think it is, it's not as simple as flicking a switch, putting one guy on the project, etc.
Well, actually, they were rumored to have a native port, which was dropped. So at least at one point, it may have been exactly as easy as flicking a switch.
A game like Wow requires constant fucking support and attention.
Most of which is platform-neutral.
Or do you think they have to balance mobs specifically for Windows? Or that there's Mac-only gear?
You think you would get 7% increased subscriptions? That is a fucking joke
And, for the game I linked to, an actual fact.
Every fucking retard in the world knows this.
Now who's getting emotional?
I hope they answer your question, because I'll laugh in your face when the answer is a polite version of "That wouldn't get us more sales or subscribers. It's just not worth our time."
Which would be fine.
Because you know what they have that you don't? That's right -- facts.
They will have actually done the market research. They'll know exactly how much they're making on OSX. They'll have considered things neither of us have mentioned, like netbooks and cellphones.
In short: They know what they're talking about. I've made some educated guesses.
Because when the Wine people screw up, you get blamed.
Haha, no.
Care to explain your position? Or would you rather just troll?
Being featured on Slashdot won't get you added sales, sorry.
This guy got almost 400,000 hits -- for some christmas lights. Keep in mind, that's actual hits, as in actual click-throughs from Slashdot.
According to this page, cost per click is between 5 cents and $1. At 400,000 clicks, that's between $20k and $400k in free advertising -- from a demographic already predisposed to gaming and technology in general.
And that's ignoring any additional sales.
Put another way, why do you think Blizzard is letting Slashdot interview them? Out of the goodness of their heart?
Quake Wars is irrelevant in the grand scheme of the industry.
However, Id tech is not. Nor, for that matter, is Epic.
Popularity isn't a measure of technical difficulty, I never said it was.
Yet you continue to ignore how technically difficult it isn't to port to Linux, particularly a game.
What was the point of mentioning popularity, anyway? It has nothing to do with the technical difficulty, as you've just admitted, and the feasibility of any port is based on percentages, not popularity.
Putting something on Linux will get you about 17 extra sales.
Pulling a number out of your ass will get you nowhere.
The math is very simple: If it takes less than 7% of their time to develop and maintain a Linux port, Linux is a profit.
Given how much effort goes into Warcraft, particularly the content, it would take significantly less time to develop a Linux port than goes into, well, any aspect of the game today. And I forget, but what's 7% of 10 million customers?
The only remaining question is support -- and Linux users would tend to be more self-sufficient, on average, meaning the support costs would be proportionately lower.
It is NOT worth the effort by any convoluted, exaggerated, emotionally charged measure.
Let's be blunt -- you've given me a single number, which you pulled out of your ass. I've given you actual statistics. If we are playing facts versus subjectivity and emotion, I think I win by default -- you haven't contributed a single fact.
So you admit the "biggest advantage to open sourcing" is pointless
For Blizzard, yes.
Most of the other advantages, they've either already got by allowing user scripting of the UI, or they're advantages for the user, and not Blizzard.
you, 1 person, are more likely to buy a decent game if it's on Linux than if it's on Windows.
I don't imagine I'm the only one who feels that way.
It's also easier to speak in the first person than to attempt vagaries like "Linux gamers are more likely to buy a decent game if it's on Linux than Windows".
It's not about happy customers, it's about paying customers.
The two are not so unrelated as you're suggesting, especially for something like an MMO.
If people aren't happy with a game, they'll stop playing it. If that game is an MMO,
I know that most people using Linux are not gamers because my calendar says it's still not the year of the Linux desktop.
That implies the reverse -- that most people who are gamers are not using Linux.
If they run flawlessly on WINE, why not let the WINE people continue to do what they do, for free?
Because when the Wine people screw up, you get blamed.
And why not?
It may not be "hard" to port to Linux, but it takes development time, marketing, and support.
The marketing writes itself -- it'd be on the front page of Slashdot three seconds after being announced.
Development time is likely very small -- as I said.
The only item left is support, and even without support, it'd still likely be used. After all, under Wine (which doesn't _always_ work flawlessly, for everyone), there's not likely to be support either.
Id? When was the last time they were relevant?
Last year, with Quake Wars.
When was the last time they had a game as popular as WoW?
I didn't realize popularity was the sole measure of technical difficulty. Solitaire must have been the hardest game to write, ever.
When was the last time they had a game that constant updates and additions?
Not a game, but an engine. When was the last time Blizzard had to support some 14 or 15 games licensing their engine? I'd say porting it to an entirely different game is somewhat more of a challenge than porting it to another platform.
If you think you're going to handle a slashdotting you are mistaken, you can't handle oneoff events this way. You would have to go from 1 to 100 servers and connections in 5 seconds.
A slashdotting lasts a fair bit longer than that. An Amazon EC2 instance can boot in maybe a few minutes, and that's the same whether you're booting 1 or 100. The same probably goes for any other "cloud" cluster.
In fact, I'm a bit surprised this (or just virtualization in general) wasn't mentioned. Rather than keeping a backup server powered up, or on standby/hibernate, or even sitting around off, unused, I can simply rent one from a service like EC2. When I'm done with it, it's not as though it's wasting power -- it gets reclaimed, and assigned to someone else who needs it.
if I do wind up with an everyday linux desktop, it's probably going to have some species of both Windows and real DOS running fulltime in VMs.
I doubt I would, mostly because Wine is much better when it's working. The advantage of Parallels, for me, is mostly anything that doesn't work in Wine, and doesn't require a great video card -- if I remember, Parallels actually borrows some Wine code in order to make the DirectX -> OpenGL layer necessary to have decent Windows game performance on Linux.
There are a few old DOS apps I can't live without either, including one I need for business that I've never found a wholly-suitable replacement for.
For DOS, there's already a very good, independent program called DOSBox. I imagine that's going to be a lot more efficient than booting an entire VM. But you may not need either...
If someone would compile Vern Buerg's LIST (source for v6 is public domain, but is in assembly) for linux, that would get me further than anything else
Couldn't find it in a quick Google, but if it's got anything to do with LISP, there are all kinds of LISP dialects for Linux.
I think it's perfectly normal to peer at a binary's innards or to read a document in hex mode.
The few times I've wanted to do that, there are hex editors.
along with a certain lack of patience when it comes to long strings of esoteric switches and CL arguments...
I haven't often found that to be the case. Most commands have tons of switches, but there are only a few you need to memorize, and manpages help a lot.
And once you know it, well, I'm never going back from anything Unix-like to anything DOS-like, without very good reason.
Nowadays... me and most middle-aged people, even advanced users elsewise, just don't have youth's time and patience for slogging through and absorbing new material.
Neither do I, really. I make time.
Never stop learning. And that's not just about Linux. I suppose I could get a job programming COBOL and not have to learn anything else, but at my current job, most weeks, I learn something incidentally. Most months, there's at least one thing I am forced to learn.
What I'd really like is a linux config interface that works like some HTML editors: a nice GUI where you're shown the available choices, and a second panel where the actual changes are being made in realtime (where you could also edit, if you felt brave).
I think that would be marginally useful in a few really confusing places (like xorg.conf, fstab, and cron), but not much everywhere else.
Really, it's not that hard to edit the text. And it's also not that hard to edit text. Start with a good sample config file, and it'll be littered with comments explaining what does what.
I'd also recommend KDE if you want GUI configurability. It's mostly better at configuring itself -- still not quite what you want -- but at least in KDE 3.5, if I want my panel to be tiny, transparent, at the top of a particular monitor, and possible to maximize over, I can.
It's also got a nice textual config file layout -- check out ~/.kde/share/config -- nice and consistent, for all KDE apps.
Since most (all?) linux config stuff reputedly lives in textfiles, and since such a dual interface has been in some HTML editors for at least 12 years, ISTM it wouldn't be that hard to implement.
For things which already have GUI and textual tools, that might be easy. And maybe not.
But they are fundamentally different animals.
See, an HTML editor can just pull in any rendering engine it wants -- Webkit, Gecko, even Trident. I wouldn't go so far as to call i
Which isn't very helpful if you don't have $600 to spend on an HDTV.
I got a Dell monitor -- 24 inch, 1080p -- for $300 or so. It has all kinds of ports, including HDMI.
It also has DVI, but I prefer the HDMI, mostly because there's no thumbscrews. Picture quality would be exactly the same, though.
You don't think they should, yet all do. Why does this continue to be the case?
I don't really know, but I sincerely doubt that they all come to me for advice.
Are the console makers afraid of the indie game dev scene?
That and piracy.
See, right now, the platform is so absurdly restricted that the barrier to piracy is prohibitively high. On Windows, you just need to know how to use BitTorrent and Daemontools -- on a console, you often also need to know how to use a soldering iron.
And no, it's not really about the indie dev scene -- more about the ability to circumvent the licensing. Consider that most consoles, especially early on, are sold at a loss. They then try to make their money back on licenses -- basically, if you want a game on the 360, you'll be paying Microsoft to do so.
In fact, Microsoft, in particular, has made Xbox Live Arcade accessible enough to indie developers.
There's a bit more to it, but nothing particularly difficult for a geek. There are really only two things to do:
A diet. Doesn't really matter which, as long as you can stick to it, mostly -- so pick something delicious and relatively cheap. Preferably high-protein...
Excercise. Worth mentioning that this guy is a geek. And I agree with the philosophy that it's far more important to just do it, than how much you do.
There are all kinds of tricks to this -- for example, I rarely drink coffee (tea instead), and when I do, it's black. I've almost completely given up my Mountain Dew habit. And, as you said, park farther away, or just walk/bike if you can.
I almost wouldn't call it a skill. It's just a habit.
Also: I have an agreeable stomach, and I imagine plenty of games play action games, which means we've got fast nerves.
No, I'm much more of a geek than GP -- I don't want to go back to that time, because they didn't have the Internet or laptops.
But if it's not open source, your Linux install is tainted!
Oh, BS. Anyone who wants to get decent performance out of Linux gaming is going to be using the proprietary (for now) video drivers from nVidia or ATI. A game is a lot less dangerous -- not only is it not in the kernel, it doesn't even have to run as root -- if I was paranoid, I could make a wow user.
Probably the biggest advantage to open sourcing it would be to get it ported quickly, and to support exotic hardware architectures. But they aren't going to, and everyone seems to be x86 now anyway.
The increase in people who could run the game would be very small.
Granted. But if I see a decent game for Linux, I'll buy it -- more often than if it was for Windows.
It's not that I couldn't play your game otherwise -- it's that you'd make me a happier customer.
Add in the fact the most people using Linux are not gamers,
And you know this, how?
what is NOT a very small increase in effort.
They've already ported between Windows and OS X, which means they've already got a GL version of their renderer. They already run pretty flawlessly on Wine. If their architecture doesn't completely suck, it shouldn't be too hard to port that to Linux.
Consider: There's basically a single person who's responsible for Id's Linux ports.
those Apple laptop owners have already proven that they are willing to pay for things, as opposed to a lot of Linux users who simply want everything for free.
I may be the exception, but I can't stand OS X anymore. I just bought a new Dell laptop, preloaded with Ubuntu, for more than I've ever spent on a Mac.
Consider, also, that there are a lot of Linux users who use Windows for games -- that skews the statistics. Granted, it's not necessarily additional revenue -- they'd probably have bought your game anyway -- but I know, for instance, that I won't subscribe to an MMO that doesn't work on Linux in some form, because I know I'll probably be running it in a window, with other things up (IM, etc) on the same screen.
I don't know. My Powerbook didn't -- it had svideo out, and an adapter cable to turn it into RCA.
Now I've got a Dell notebook, which has an HDMI port. Again, nothing to prevent me from showing whatever I want on it.
But think about the context here -- I don't think hardware restricting me is a good thing. I don't think DVRs or game consoles should prevent people from hacking on them.
Now if I can find a copy of Corel Photopaint v8 for linux (it exists, retail box no less!), or be assured the WinVersion will run reliably in WINE
None of the free tools work for you?
Not a problem, really -- I mean, I'm probably about to buy Parallels, even though there are many open source virtualization options. I'm just curious -- usually when Gimp isn't enough, people want Photoshop.
there's a real need for some middle-ground system tools, that neither hide everything from the Stupid User nor assume everyone is a kernel-geek.
I would say, a lot of these tools exist, but are unfortunately commandline, and not incredibly well documented. I don't know if that puts them out of your league...
I think the assumption is that every user who's as far in as you is willing to learn more, and eventually become a kernelgeek:P
And none of it has anything to do with this particular problem (of an update bringing down servers), other than that Blu-Ray also has restrictive DRM.
It's a bit like claiming that Windows Update exists because of DRM. Sure, Windows updates. And sure, there is DRM in Windows. You'd even have a stronger argument than with Blu-Ray -- Microsoft does deliver updated DRM (in the form of WGA) through Windows Update.
But that would be a foolish claim -- Windows update exists because there are bugs in Windows. And not all bugs in Windows are intentional.
No, not everything is vulnerable to the free porn attack. My own statistical filter isn't, for example.
My point is that if we want a real solution, we have to approach it from a different angle.
I don't have a solution, but neither do you. I'm not sure any one person is going to figure this out -- but we've got no chance unless we've correctly identified the problem.
And the problem actually is not directly related to robots. The problem is how to stop people from abusing your system, especially your free system -- or at least to make it not worthwhile to do so.
Oh please, can we bury this hubris-overloaded programmer notion of "my code will save the world"?
I'm sorry, did I say that?
No, I said "net positive impact". That's all.
Having more people spending more time programming and getting less done means that they are wasting time, instead of doing something valuable. That is a net negative impact.
Put very, very simple, more productivity means we get more done, as a species. Programming is not special in this regard.
You are free to like or dislike any language, it doesn't tell me anything about it's usefulness.
It doesn't really have to.
Don't forget, this conversation started with me saying that I would much sooner learn Smalltalk than attempt to do something useful in Java, in a reasonable amount of time.
We both know that it's rare when 100% of the program is being tested.
Not really -- and there are tools which will show you exactly how much of the program is being tested.
Static typing guarantees you that 100% of function signatures and variable assignments are tested for correct typing.
Nope, it still requires on your own good behavior not to do stupid typecasts.
Look, I *know* what are the benefits of unit tests. I just don't like writing them when I could get it done by the compiler.
You've missed my point, then.
The compiler only checks that you're getting the right type. That's all. And in nearly a year of using Ruby and Javascript, I can count on one hand the number of bugs I've seen that were at all type-related.
In other words, type checking is about the least useful form of test the compiler could generate for me. Even so, if I'm already writing a test that verifies that a function does what it's supposed to do,
Because I might be awfully surprised when this integer turns into a float.
I can't remember the last time I cared that something was an integer instead of a float, but it's trivial to cast it back when I need it -- and some_integer.to_i is still quite a lot less verbose than a single method declaration in Java.
The interesting thing is that most often, you don't really care. If my hypothetical method attempted to count the factorial of its argument, the algorithm used to do so would pretty much implicitly round up or down. If my hypothetical method was intended to, say, square its argument, or add some integer to it, well, unless I do something stupid in the method, I've just got a "generic" for free.
if you did, you would appreciate the benefits of private values and methods, of having a clean interface and knowing that you can reorganize the inner workings of a class without breaking the code of this guy two floors above you.
I do.
I don't see the point of the language enforcing these to the point where I can never access a private value or method.
It's also worth mentioning that Java may well be the reason you need so much code, and so many people working on it. If Java really did have the advantage that you could more effectively manage hundreds of people working on a project, it would still have the disadvantage that similar projects could be written with tens of people in another language.
I happen to think that Ruby can be just as effective at large scale projects as Java, which is why Java seems entirely useless to me.
Without private variables and methods, you risk creating A Giant Ball Of Mud, where everything depends on everything and it gets the point where you are afraid to change *anything* because it might break things in ten places.
Funny thing about that -- large amounts of test coverage means I'm not really afraid to change anything, because if it does break things in ten places, I know exactly what those ten places are.
Fair point. It works the other way, too -- the banned list can contain a player, too, which means various ways of bricking the player and/or its drive.
However, I'm not sure there were any plans to do this over the Internet, certainly not with an update for a specific disc.
From the software developer's POV, Java is a tool while antivirus program is a product. The fact that I make lots of money selling some product does not have to correlate with the product's usefulness, but if I make lots of money using a tool, it means that this tool is indeed USEFUL TO MAKE MONEY WITH.
And my point is, "useful to make money with" does not correlate to "actually useful", or "net positive impact on humanity".
COBOL is still widely used, and COBOL programmers are highly paid. I really wouldn't want to work with COBOL, though.
Companies also make money by USING software written in Java.
As long as I don't have to edit the source, I really don't care much what language a program is written in. Sure, I'll lean towards things written in languages I like, just as I'll lean towards open source software -- I'd rather have it be easy to modify, if I have to.
Which, again, doesn't say anything about the usefulness of the language itself, for developing software in. That useful programs have been written in a language does not validate the language as anything more than Turing-complete.
Oh, you say that I should unit test module A and module B together, to make sure that cooperate correctly -- but what happened to "unit" in "unit tests"?
You're right -- that kind of test is called an "integration test". Or, in BDD-lingo, "stories".
We will end up with one giant blob of a test, which checks whether the types are correct.
No, it will check that the program is correct. Types are a laughably small part of that.
I love such impractical analogies. You miss out a crucial point that with static typing, you get these "unit tests" FOR FREE, generated by the compiler without ANY EFFORT ON YOUR PART and without creating any testing code to debug and maintain.
Firstly: Debugging tests is a price well worth paying. Generally tests do not break in the same way that the program itself breaks, which means that in either case, you've got a noisy error, and a good clue where it's coming from. And tests save me from enough bugs in the actual program that they more than pay for themselves in sheer hours spent (or saved).
Second: You're going to need those tests anyway. On a smaller program, you might get away with no tests -- but you probably don't really need the types there, either. On a lager program, it's not enough to know that "public int foo()" returns an integer -- you need to know that it actually does what it's supposed to do.
Once you know that, why do you care whether it returns an integer?
I've never need "eval" there.
I may have needed it once, I'm not sure. Certainly not often, or at least, not string-eval.
However, knowing that it's there is a bit like knowing I have the source code. It means that if there's a reflection I don't have, I can implement it.
It also means it's possible to implement things like irb (Interactive Ruby). Technically, you can probably pull that off in any language that allows dynamically-linked libraries. Practically, the simplest and best-performing way involves an eval loop.
Should it tell me something about Java, or about you?
In typing alone, it would say something about Java.
Maybe it is me, though -- it's entirely possible that I'm just not skilled at Java. But as the other poster said, it's possible to look at good Java code, and think of at least one or two ways it could be written less verbose, and clearer, in any language but Java.
And every time I look at it, it seems like the only thing Java has that Ruby doesn't (language-wise) is more restrictions -- static type checking, actually-private values and methods, the works. With JRuby, the advantages of the VM and the support libraries completely goes away. Given the choice, I'd much rather go with a less restrictive language that does exactly the same thing.
Slashdot Mirror
Looks like crap when your browser doesn't support transparency, though.
I don't think so:
known as the open-Apple key (as well as just "Apple") in documentation prior to the Apple Macintosh family of computers
However, you get pedantry points for trying.
Ah.
So, in other words, anyone can make a dock, and it won't infringe, so long as it doesn't zoom in exactly the same way?
If so, not really much of a concern.
there is the danger, when providing this capacity, for websites to begin to demand it
There is also the source code, freely available and modifiable, which means you could easily tell such websites that your current location is Fuckoff, in the fine state of NoneOfYourDamnedBusiness.
a number of sites don't work at all unless I tell NoScript to allow JS on them.
Hey, it could always be worse. You could always stumble on a site that doesn't work unless you allow Flash on it.
I realize this.
I also think it's a blatant violation of the Bill of Rights.
I realize said Bill of Rights is often trashed by our government. Is there something else I don't know about the rationale for treating me as anything other than a citizen at the border?
To draw a completely inappropriate analogy, it's like Spore's DRM. Sure, five activations is better than three. I still say any game telling me how many times I can install it on my own computer should not be allowed, and I'm quite offended at the attempt to throw me a bone.
You don't get it, do you?
Potential fucking sales.
You don't read very well. Pretty much my whole post was about exactly that.
Regardless of how easy you think it is, it's not as simple as flicking a switch, putting one guy on the project, etc.
Well, actually, they were rumored to have a native port, which was dropped. So at least at one point, it may have been exactly as easy as flicking a switch.
A game like Wow requires constant fucking support and attention.
Most of which is platform-neutral.
Or do you think they have to balance mobs specifically for Windows? Or that there's Mac-only gear?
You think you would get 7% increased subscriptions? That is a fucking joke
And, for the game I linked to, an actual fact.
Every fucking retard in the world knows this.
Now who's getting emotional?
I hope they answer your question, because I'll laugh in your face when the answer is a polite version of "That wouldn't get us more sales or subscribers. It's just not worth our time."
Which would be fine.
Because you know what they have that you don't? That's right -- facts.
They will have actually done the market research. They'll know exactly how much they're making on OSX. They'll have considered things neither of us have mentioned, like netbooks and cellphones.
In short: They know what they're talking about. I've made some educated guesses.
You've got neither.
It's a bit like saying the police can break down my door and search my apartment for 24 hours before I can complain.
I think I speak for all of us when I say: FUCK NO.
Because when the Wine people screw up, you get blamed.
Haha, no.
Care to explain your position? Or would you rather just troll?
Being featured on Slashdot won't get you added sales, sorry.
This guy got almost 400,000 hits -- for some christmas lights. Keep in mind, that's actual hits, as in actual click-throughs from Slashdot.
According to this page, cost per click is between 5 cents and $1. At 400,000 clicks, that's between $20k and $400k in free advertising -- from a demographic already predisposed to gaming and technology in general.
And that's ignoring any additional sales.
Put another way, why do you think Blizzard is letting Slashdot interview them? Out of the goodness of their heart?
Quake Wars is irrelevant in the grand scheme of the industry.
However, Id tech is not. Nor, for that matter, is Epic.
Popularity isn't a measure of technical difficulty, I never said it was.
Yet you continue to ignore how technically difficult it isn't to port to Linux, particularly a game.
What was the point of mentioning popularity, anyway? It has nothing to do with the technical difficulty, as you've just admitted, and the feasibility of any port is based on percentages, not popularity.
Putting something on Linux will get you about 17 extra sales.
Pulling a number out of your ass will get you nowhere.
Let's try some real numbers from a tiny indie game. Turns out the number is actually 333 -- out of 3635.
The breakdown was:
73% Windows
20% OSX
7% Linux
The math is very simple: If it takes less than 7% of their time to develop and maintain a Linux port, Linux is a profit.
Given how much effort goes into Warcraft, particularly the content, it would take significantly less time to develop a Linux port than goes into, well, any aspect of the game today. And I forget, but what's 7% of 10 million customers?
The only remaining question is support -- and Linux users would tend to be more self-sufficient, on average, meaning the support costs would be proportionately lower.
It is NOT worth the effort by any convoluted, exaggerated, emotionally charged measure.
Let's be blunt -- you've given me a single number, which you pulled out of your ass. I've given you actual statistics. If we are playing facts versus subjectivity and emotion, I think I win by default -- you haven't contributed a single fact.
So you admit the "biggest advantage to open sourcing" is pointless
For Blizzard, yes.
Most of the other advantages, they've either already got by allowing user scripting of the UI, or they're advantages for the user, and not Blizzard.
you, 1 person, are more likely to buy a decent game if it's on Linux than if it's on Windows.
I don't imagine I'm the only one who feels that way.
It's also easier to speak in the first person than to attempt vagaries like "Linux gamers are more likely to buy a decent game if it's on Linux than Windows".
It's not about happy customers, it's about paying customers.
The two are not so unrelated as you're suggesting, especially for something like an MMO.
If people aren't happy with a game, they'll stop playing it. If that game is an MMO,
I know that most people using Linux are not gamers because my calendar says it's still not the year of the Linux desktop.
That implies the reverse -- that most people who are gamers are not using Linux.
If they run flawlessly on WINE, why not let the WINE people continue to do what they do, for free?
Because when the Wine people screw up, you get blamed.
And why not?
It may not be "hard" to port to Linux, but it takes development time, marketing, and support.
The marketing writes itself -- it'd be on the front page of Slashdot three seconds after being announced.
Development time is likely very small -- as I said.
The only item left is support, and even without support, it'd still likely be used. After all, under Wine (which doesn't _always_ work flawlessly, for everyone), there's not likely to be support either.
Id? When was the last time they were relevant?
Last year, with Quake Wars.
When was the last time they had a game as popular as WoW?
I didn't realize popularity was the sole measure of technical difficulty. Solitaire must have been the hardest game to write, ever.
When was the last time they had a game that constant updates and additions?
Not a game, but an engine. When was the last time Blizzard had to support some 14 or 15 games licensing their engine? I'd say porting it to an entirely different game is somewhat more of a challenge than porting it to another platform.
If you think you're going to handle a slashdotting you are mistaken, you can't handle oneoff events this way. You would have to go from 1 to 100 servers and connections in 5 seconds.
A slashdotting lasts a fair bit longer than that. An Amazon EC2 instance can boot in maybe a few minutes, and that's the same whether you're booting 1 or 100. The same probably goes for any other "cloud" cluster.
In fact, I'm a bit surprised this (or just virtualization in general) wasn't mentioned. Rather than keeping a backup server powered up, or on standby/hibernate, or even sitting around off, unused, I can simply rent one from a service like EC2. When I'm done with it, it's not as though it's wasting power -- it gets reclaimed, and assigned to someone else who needs it.
if I do wind up with an everyday linux desktop, it's probably going to have some species of both Windows and real DOS running fulltime in VMs.
I doubt I would, mostly because Wine is much better when it's working. The advantage of Parallels, for me, is mostly anything that doesn't work in Wine, and doesn't require a great video card -- if I remember, Parallels actually borrows some Wine code in order to make the DirectX -> OpenGL layer necessary to have decent Windows game performance on Linux.
There are a few old DOS apps I can't live without either, including one I need for business that I've never found a wholly-suitable replacement for.
For DOS, there's already a very good, independent program called DOSBox. I imagine that's going to be a lot more efficient than booting an entire VM. But you may not need either...
I do have source, but it's in Pascal.
Does it compile with this?
If someone would compile Vern Buerg's LIST (source for v6 is public domain, but is in assembly) for linux, that would get me further than anything else
Couldn't find it in a quick Google, but if it's got anything to do with LISP, there are all kinds of LISP dialects for Linux.
I think it's perfectly normal to peer at a binary's innards or to read a document in hex mode.
The few times I've wanted to do that, there are hex editors.
along with a certain lack of patience when it comes to long strings of esoteric switches and CL arguments...
I haven't often found that to be the case. Most commands have tons of switches, but there are only a few you need to memorize, and manpages help a lot.
And once you know it, well, I'm never going back from anything Unix-like to anything DOS-like, without very good reason.
Nowadays ... me and most middle-aged people, even advanced users elsewise, just don't have youth's time and patience for slogging through and absorbing new material.
Neither do I, really. I make time.
Never stop learning. And that's not just about Linux. I suppose I could get a job programming COBOL and not have to learn anything else, but at my current job, most weeks, I learn something incidentally. Most months, there's at least one thing I am forced to learn.
What I'd really like is a linux config interface that works like some HTML editors: a nice GUI where you're shown the available choices, and a second panel where the actual changes are being made in realtime (where you could also edit, if you felt brave).
I think that would be marginally useful in a few really confusing places (like xorg.conf, fstab, and cron), but not much everywhere else.
Really, it's not that hard to edit the text. And it's also not that hard to edit text. Start with a good sample config file, and it'll be littered with comments explaining what does what.
I'd also recommend KDE if you want GUI configurability. It's mostly better at configuring itself -- still not quite what you want -- but at least in KDE 3.5, if I want my panel to be tiny, transparent, at the top of a particular monitor, and possible to maximize over, I can.
It's also got a nice textual config file layout -- check out ~/.kde/share/config -- nice and consistent, for all KDE apps.
Since most (all?) linux config stuff reputedly lives in textfiles, and since such a dual interface has been in some HTML editors for at least 12 years, ISTM it wouldn't be that hard to implement.
For things which already have GUI and textual tools, that might be easy. And maybe not.
But they are fundamentally different animals.
See, an HTML editor can just pull in any rendering engine it wants -- Webkit, Gecko, even Trident. I wouldn't go so far as to call i
Which isn't very helpful if you don't have $600 to spend on an HDTV.
I got a Dell monitor -- 24 inch, 1080p -- for $300 or so. It has all kinds of ports, including HDMI.
It also has DVI, but I prefer the HDMI, mostly because there's no thumbscrews. Picture quality would be exactly the same, though.
You don't think they should, yet all do. Why does this continue to be the case?
I don't really know, but I sincerely doubt that they all come to me for advice.
Are the console makers afraid of the indie game dev scene?
That and piracy.
See, right now, the platform is so absurdly restricted that the barrier to piracy is prohibitively high. On Windows, you just need to know how to use BitTorrent and Daemontools -- on a console, you often also need to know how to use a soldering iron.
And no, it's not really about the indie dev scene -- more about the ability to circumvent the licensing. Consider that most consoles, especially early on, are sold at a loss. They then try to make their money back on licenses -- basically, if you want a game on the 360, you'll be paying Microsoft to do so.
In fact, Microsoft, in particular, has made Xbox Live Arcade accessible enough to indie developers.
There's a bit more to it, but nothing particularly difficult for a geek. There are really only two things to do:
A diet. Doesn't really matter which, as long as you can stick to it, mostly -- so pick something delicious and relatively cheap. Preferably high-protein...
Excercise. Worth mentioning that this guy is a geek. And I agree with the philosophy that it's far more important to just do it, than how much you do.
There are all kinds of tricks to this -- for example, I rarely drink coffee (tea instead), and when I do, it's black. I've almost completely given up my Mountain Dew habit. And, as you said, park farther away, or just walk/bike if you can.
I almost wouldn't call it a skill. It's just a habit.
Also: I have an agreeable stomach, and I imagine plenty of games play action games, which means we've got fast nerves.
No, I'm much more of a geek than GP -- I don't want to go back to that time, because they didn't have the Internet or laptops.
But if it's not open source, your Linux install is tainted!
Oh, BS. Anyone who wants to get decent performance out of Linux gaming is going to be using the proprietary (for now) video drivers from nVidia or ATI. A game is a lot less dangerous -- not only is it not in the kernel, it doesn't even have to run as root -- if I was paranoid, I could make a wow user.
Probably the biggest advantage to open sourcing it would be to get it ported quickly, and to support exotic hardware architectures. But they aren't going to, and everyone seems to be x86 now anyway.
The increase in people who could run the game would be very small.
Granted. But if I see a decent game for Linux, I'll buy it -- more often than if it was for Windows.
It's not that I couldn't play your game otherwise -- it's that you'd make me a happier customer.
Add in the fact the most people using Linux are not gamers,
And you know this, how?
what is NOT a very small increase in effort.
They've already ported between Windows and OS X, which means they've already got a GL version of their renderer. They already run pretty flawlessly on Wine. If their architecture doesn't completely suck, it shouldn't be too hard to port that to Linux.
Consider: There's basically a single person who's responsible for Id's Linux ports.
Trollish, but there's a real question hidden in there:
Do you play other MMOs, looking for ideas? What looks interesting?
those Apple laptop owners have already proven that they are willing to pay for things, as opposed to a lot of Linux users who simply want everything for free.
I may be the exception, but I can't stand OS X anymore. I just bought a new Dell laptop, preloaded with Ubuntu, for more than I've ever spent on a Mac.
Consider, also, that there are a lot of Linux users who use Windows for games -- that skews the statistics. Granted, it's not necessarily additional revenue -- they'd probably have bought your game anyway -- but I know, for instance, that I won't subscribe to an MMO that doesn't work on Linux in some form, because I know I'll probably be running it in a window, with other things up (IM, etc) on the same screen.
I don't know if they did, but it's always possible they might start.
They also are enough of a leader that they could pretty easily take a stand here.
I don't know. My Powerbook didn't -- it had svideo out, and an adapter cable to turn it into RCA.
Now I've got a Dell notebook, which has an HDMI port. Again, nothing to prevent me from showing whatever I want on it.
But think about the context here -- I don't think hardware restricting me is a good thing. I don't think DVRs or game consoles should prevent people from hacking on them.
Now if I can find a copy of Corel Photopaint v8 for linux (it exists, retail box no less!), or be assured the WinVersion will run reliably in WINE
None of the free tools work for you?
Not a problem, really -- I mean, I'm probably about to buy Parallels, even though there are many open source virtualization options. I'm just curious -- usually when Gimp isn't enough, people want Photoshop.
there's a real need for some middle-ground system tools, that neither hide everything from the Stupid User nor assume everyone is a kernel-geek.
I would say, a lot of these tools exist, but are unfortunately commandline, and not incredibly well documented. I don't know if that puts them out of your league...
I think the assumption is that every user who's as far in as you is willing to learn more, and eventually become a kernelgeek :P
I agree with everything you just said.
And none of it has anything to do with this particular problem (of an update bringing down servers), other than that Blu-Ray also has restrictive DRM.
It's a bit like claiming that Windows Update exists because of DRM. Sure, Windows updates. And sure, there is DRM in Windows. You'd even have a stronger argument than with Blu-Ray -- Microsoft does deliver updated DRM (in the form of WGA) through Windows Update.
But that would be a foolish claim -- Windows update exists because there are bugs in Windows. And not all bugs in Windows are intentional.
No, not everything is vulnerable to the free porn attack. My own statistical filter isn't, for example.
My point is that if we want a real solution, we have to approach it from a different angle.
I don't have a solution, but neither do you. I'm not sure any one person is going to figure this out -- but we've got no chance unless we've correctly identified the problem.
And the problem actually is not directly related to robots. The problem is how to stop people from abusing your system, especially your free system -- or at least to make it not worthwhile to do so.
Oh please, can we bury this hubris-overloaded programmer notion of "my code will save the world"?
I'm sorry, did I say that?
No, I said "net positive impact". That's all.
Having more people spending more time programming and getting less done means that they are wasting time, instead of doing something valuable. That is a net negative impact.
Put very, very simple, more productivity means we get more done, as a species. Programming is not special in this regard.
You are free to like or dislike any language, it doesn't tell me anything about it's usefulness.
It doesn't really have to.
Don't forget, this conversation started with me saying that I would much sooner learn Smalltalk than attempt to do something useful in Java, in a reasonable amount of time.
We both know that it's rare when 100% of the program is being tested.
Not really -- and there are tools which will show you exactly how much of the program is being tested.
Static typing guarantees you that 100% of function signatures and variable assignments are tested for correct typing.
Nope, it still requires on your own good behavior not to do stupid typecasts.
Look, I *know* what are the benefits of unit tests. I just don't like writing them when I could get it done by the compiler.
You've missed my point, then.
The compiler only checks that you're getting the right type. That's all. And in nearly a year of using Ruby and Javascript, I can count on one hand the number of bugs I've seen that were at all type-related.
In other words, type checking is about the least useful form of test the compiler could generate for me. Even so, if I'm already writing a test that verifies that a function does what it's supposed to do,
Because I might be awfully surprised when this integer turns into a float.
I can't remember the last time I cared that something was an integer instead of a float, but it's trivial to cast it back when I need it -- and some_integer.to_i is still quite a lot less verbose than a single method declaration in Java.
The interesting thing is that most often, you don't really care. If my hypothetical method attempted to count the factorial of its argument, the algorithm used to do so would pretty much implicitly round up or down. If my hypothetical method was intended to, say, square its argument, or add some integer to it, well, unless I do something stupid in the method, I've just got a "generic" for free.
if you did, you would appreciate the benefits of private values and methods, of having a clean interface and knowing that you can reorganize the inner workings of a class without breaking the code of this guy two floors above you.
I do.
I don't see the point of the language enforcing these to the point where I can never access a private value or method.
It's also worth mentioning that Java may well be the reason you need so much code, and so many people working on it. If Java really did have the advantage that you could more effectively manage hundreds of people working on a project, it would still have the disadvantage that similar projects could be written with tens of people in another language.
I happen to think that Ruby can be just as effective at large scale projects as Java, which is why Java seems entirely useless to me.
Without private variables and methods, you risk creating A Giant Ball Of Mud, where everything depends on everything and it gets the point where you are afraid to change *anything* because it might break things in ten places.
Funny thing about that -- large amounts of test coverage means I'm not really afraid to change anything, because if it does break things in ten places, I know exactly what those ten places are.
If your Ru
Fair point. It works the other way, too -- the banned list can contain a player, too, which means various ways of bricking the player and/or its drive.
However, I'm not sure there were any plans to do this over the Internet, certainly not with an update for a specific disc.
Java is actually playing catch-up with Smalltalk in a lot of ways, so I wouldn't call it "more modern".
The summary tells us that the program is slow and buggy. Smalltalk really isn't.
I suppose it would matter if, say, they wanted it to be 64-bit, and work with more than 2 gigs of RAM.
From the software developer's POV, Java is a tool while antivirus program is a product. The fact that I make lots of money selling some product does not have to correlate with the product's usefulness, but if I make lots of money using a tool, it means that this tool is indeed USEFUL TO MAKE MONEY WITH.
And my point is, "useful to make money with" does not correlate to "actually useful", or "net positive impact on humanity".
COBOL is still widely used, and COBOL programmers are highly paid. I really wouldn't want to work with COBOL, though.
Companies also make money by USING software written in Java.
As long as I don't have to edit the source, I really don't care much what language a program is written in. Sure, I'll lean towards things written in languages I like, just as I'll lean towards open source software -- I'd rather have it be easy to modify, if I have to.
Which, again, doesn't say anything about the usefulness of the language itself, for developing software in. That useful programs have been written in a language does not validate the language as anything more than Turing-complete.
Oh, you say that I should unit test module A and module B together, to make sure that cooperate correctly -- but what happened to "unit" in "unit tests"?
You're right -- that kind of test is called an "integration test". Or, in BDD-lingo, "stories".
We will end up with one giant blob of a test, which checks whether the types are correct.
No, it will check that the program is correct. Types are a laughably small part of that.
I love such impractical analogies. You miss out a crucial point that with static typing, you get these "unit tests" FOR FREE, generated by the compiler without ANY EFFORT ON YOUR PART and without creating any testing code to debug and maintain.
Firstly: Debugging tests is a price well worth paying. Generally tests do not break in the same way that the program itself breaks, which means that in either case, you've got a noisy error, and a good clue where it's coming from. And tests save me from enough bugs in the actual program that they more than pay for themselves in sheer hours spent (or saved).
Second: You're going to need those tests anyway. On a smaller program, you might get away with no tests -- but you probably don't really need the types there, either. On a lager program, it's not enough to know that "public int foo()" returns an integer -- you need to know that it actually does what it's supposed to do.
Once you know that, why do you care whether it returns an integer?
I've never need "eval" there.
I may have needed it once, I'm not sure. Certainly not often, or at least, not string-eval.
However, knowing that it's there is a bit like knowing I have the source code. It means that if there's a reflection I don't have, I can implement it.
It also means it's possible to implement things like irb (Interactive Ruby). Technically, you can probably pull that off in any language that allows dynamically-linked libraries. Practically, the simplest and best-performing way involves an eval loop.
Should it tell me something about Java, or about you?
In typing alone, it would say something about Java.
Maybe it is me, though -- it's entirely possible that I'm just not skilled at Java. But as the other poster said, it's possible to look at good Java code, and think of at least one or two ways it could be written less verbose, and clearer, in any language but Java.
And every time I look at it, it seems like the only thing Java has that Ruby doesn't (language-wise) is more restrictions -- static type checking, actually-private values and methods, the works. With JRuby, the advantages of the VM and the support libraries completely goes away. Given the choice, I'd much rather go with a less restrictive language that does exactly the same thing.