I'm not saying this whole chimp thing is bad. It's just not where we should be focusing.
Kind of like how we should fix democracy at home before we try to spread it to the world. It's not that I don't want, say, a free Iraq -- not that it seems likely -- it's that at least one or two of those billions of dollars we pumped into that enterprise could've been used to, say, roll out some electronic voting that works, or fund better news sources... Or, yes, feed and clothe the hungry and naked. Or, hell, even armor our soldiers properly.
It's not so much that I am against Chimp rights, but that I am for Human rights. I would rather have both, but Human rights is more important to me because we know humans are sentient, but we don't know whether chimps are.
We still share over 60% of our DNA with that banana the chimp is eating. Percentage of DNA should never be used as a benchmark for what is and is not human.
Of course, people would probably be quite likely to skip the commercials while watching, but whether or not they skip them would probably depend on the product being advertised -- a commercial would probably have about 5 seconds to grab the viewer's attention, lest it be skipped.
This already happens with TiVo -- but they've moved on to the next thing already: Sliders. Audiovisual ads which invade a RUNNING show and take up a quarter of the screen WHILE YOU'RE TRYING TO WATCH THE SHOW.
I simply refuse to pay for cable TV anymore. My MythTV box sits idle, given up in favor of BitTorrent. At least if I get a DVD rip, there aren't going to be ads plastered all over the video.
One final thing, I wonder how much cheaper it would be to upload a TV show onto bittorrent than it would be to get it on a cable channel?
Not much, for the shows that I want to watch. Think about it -- most of the cost of Firefly probably did not go into getting it on the air. Most of it probably went into actually building the ship, 3D models, actors, etc.
Oh, it would be a lot, just not significant, especially considering they're giving up having the network promote them.
Now, for advertising, think about the Mac/PC commercials. Most geeks either love them or hate them, and the more vocal ones lately seem to hate them. But it goes to show you: Make an ad they actually want to watch, and they'll watch it. Seems to me advertisers could just cut out the middleman that way.
I don't want ad-supported TV, either. I don't want a lot of cheap, crappy shows stuffed to the gills with advertising. I want one or two really good shows -- something like Firefly, something I'll want to watch over and over again. I want to pay more for it, and I want it not to have ads, ever.
After all, I don't watch enough TV for too many shows to matter. Why pay for 300 channels 24/7, when I'm only going to watch 1 at a time, and only for an hour or two at night?
It's not enough to interrupt you every five minutes (I'm not joking) to show you ads. It's not enough to have product placement that's really only vaguely relevant (Bond's electric razor in "Die Another Day"). They now have to randomly cut into your show -- take over a fucking quarter of the screen, WITH SOUND, to show you an ad while your show is still playing.
This is not just virtualdub. There's no way to remove these without butchering the content, or resorting to DVDs. Which is what I have done. Fuck TV, I'll either pirate or buy/rent DVDs. If they ever do it to my DVDs, I'll just give up any TV at all.
And, conversely, if people are not too lazy to work out whether what they copy is correct, there's a good chance they have at least a basic understanding of the subject in question, and have the ability (but perhaps not the time or morals) to do it themselves.
She turned in something way beyond anything she had written before and received a 0/10 because it was completely obvious someone else wrote her paper.
Which, in another light, could mean you're punishing her for doing too well. I understand it probably seemed obvious, and you're probably right, but it might've been a good idea to pull her in and see if she knows what she's talking about.
One trick: Get them to read their own paper. If they are tripping over spelling and pronunciation -- and indeed, don't actually know what half of the words are -- then it's probably not their work. But again, be thorough -- maybe it's a stuttering problem?
Plagiarism is usually pretty blatant -- the more work the student spends polishing the plagiarized work, the more likely it is that going legit would be easier. So, I think you should be very careful not to have any false positives.
The average user walks into CompUSA, WalMart, Best Buy, Circuit City, etc. and doesn't even bother checking Linux download sites to see what the choices are.
And in this instance, I can fairly confidently say that the average user is WRONG. If making Linux viable for the desktop means turning all of our good, free, open source, downloaded, package-managed stuff into proprietary, bug-ridden, off-the-shelf CDs, then frankly, I'll keep it as a geek OS, thanks.
Learning to use Synaptic (or any other package manager or frontend) is a large part of learning why Linux is better in the first place, and why you would want to use it.
But, still for the UI change in Office and Vista, the one thing the user knows is that he's using some version of Office at work/school and that's what he's going to use at home.
Except that at school, some stupid admin got government funding to buy up all Vista, whereas at work, they've all standardized on Office 2000, and at home, he's got Windows 98 and Office 95.
True, but there are often reasons for not doing that.
I'm not convinced of that.
So, you're saying that there are NO reasons not to write a game in Python
No, I'm saying that there are reasons, but they don't often apply when people think they do. We could start by you telling me which reasons you endorse for using another language...
(And no, I'm not a drooling Python fanboy. In fact, I hate Python. Perl6 looks better, but there are things I hate about it, too, and it's not even out yet. I just am not enough of a masochist to use C/C++/C# if I can possibly avoid it.)
Not that it will be much of a SPOILER for anyone who has seen anything of the series/movie, but meeting River frozen in a box -- a box that appears to be contraband -- is a direct ripoff of Outlaw Star.
Which I will forgive because it's all executed so amazingly well. Trigun loses some of its realism with some (albeit interesting) stuff like robots, plants, and some of the weirder enemies (giants, the Bad Lads...) Outlaw Star is a bit weird, and just gets weirder at the end -- Serenity does some of the same weird stuff, but keeps a firm grip on reality, and you believe the weirdness (swords) when it happens.
Cowboy Bebop is the closest, I guess. But here, it's characters that make them each unique. Spike and Mal are at completely opposite ends of the spectrum, and they are both awesome.
yeah, I will travel half the galaxy and instead of destroying you with my shipd's weapons I will use my samurai sword. Give me a frigging break
The first person he killed with a sword was in a high-security facility, which presumably they wanted intact. At the range he had the guy, a gun would not have been any more effective.
Second person, he was already right next to the guy. No reason not to.
Third person he tried to, was already deep enough underground, and with a battle raging in space above, probably not many ships' weapons available, or could penetrate that deep anyway. And let's not forget, he almost tried to launch a massive attack against Serenity, but ended up having to fire on the Reavers.
I'm assuming you're talking about the Operative (not Mal, who has no problems shooting you), as Serenity has no weapons. The Operative has additional reasons for using a sword -- he is a psychotic fuck. Is that so incredibly implausible?
Regarding traveling halfway across the galaxy, in case you missed the intro, there is no faster than light travel, and the entire series (and the movie) takes place in one massive solar system.
And I'm fairly sure that's not even a samurai sword, but some other kind of sword. Is there even one thing about this picture that you got right?
I'm guessing you didn't get most of the plot because you didn't see the series. I'm guessing you won't see the series because you didn't get most of the plot. Sucks to be you.
Special effects: average.
And, finally, realistic. Seeing space travel where space is actually silent (and beautiful) is a rare thing in scifi.
They don't have to be spectacular. They were pretty damned good, but the whole point of special effects is that they are invisible -- that you don't think of it as an effect.
Memorable characters: ?
You didn't see the series.
Cultural significance: niche at most.
Perhaps. Or maybe people will eventually start to appreciate it. Lord of the Rings (the book) was not appreciated until after Tolkein's death, if I recall, but is now regarded culturally significant...
I started to notice when Orson Scott Card said something to the effect of "This movie is the only scifi one that comes close to being as good as I'd want an Ender's Game movie to be."
Filmographic achievements: none.
If you mean exciting new things, like the landspeeder in Star Wars, or the rotating ship in 2001: A Space Odessy... I honestly have to ask, so what?
At this point, it's all been done. It's like games -- at this point, the smart gamers aren't going to buy something just because it's a lets-count-the-polys-on-his-nosehairs "high-def" wankfest. We just want a good game, that's actually fun to play -- thus, the Wii, which has good games, despite having (if I recall) barely last-gen graphics.
And yet, there are unusual things done. Space is portrayed properly -- no up, no down, ships always at odd angles, silent (even with explosions). There are very nice sequences, like at the beginning, with the camera sweeping through the entire ship, showing you around. It's also a movie about real people, in a world that feels real and relevant -- yet is set in space, in the distant future -- and I'm sure I haven't seen this done before; closest thing might be Blade Runner.
All that aside, it's a beautiful movie, and a beautiful story, with beautiful music... It, and the series it goes with, are a piece of art. Firefly/Serenity stands alone, it's not redefining a genre, it's not pushing the limits of technology. It's just about telling a story, and doing it right.
All of what you mention is actually completely irrelevant, except for the fact that people believe it.
MS changes their UI quite a lot, so much so that it's not only possible but kind of likely, even inevitable that there is a Linux environment (Window Manager, file browser, etc) which looks much more like what people think of as Windows than Vista ever has. (See: KDE, IceWM, various Windows-like themes.)
What you see in a software store isn't representative. For that half a row for Linux, assuming it's even there, I could fill half the store with what's downloadable. Not with cryptic commandlines, or through some strange Google search, or recompiling your kernel, or any other stupid cliche, but through a nice, comfortable GUI (Synaptic). Add to that considerable support for stuff through Wine -- much of it may not work, but some of it is deliberately designed to work -- for instance, Blizzard goes out of its way to make sure WoW works on Cedega.
OS X has made the switch from PowerPC processors to x86, as you said yourself. But they didn't do it to run Windows, or to run all the software on Windows. They did it because x86 is cheaper for the performance that you get. And in so doing, they proved that processor architecture means exactly jack and shit when you have something that is better enough -- there are plenty of cases where people move from a PPC Mac to an x86 Mac and find their PPC apps actually run faster under Rosetta. Even when they don't, x86 ports don't take long at all, if the app is recent enough for the developers to care -- and if it isn't, it probably runs well enough anyway.
I doubt anyone will switch off of x86 (or x86_64) anytime soon, but if you could suddenly buy a quad-core processor for $25 and a dual-processor motherboard for $50 -- right now -- you can bet people would be scrambling to switch, writing efficient x86 emulators, porting software, etc.
I'm not saying none of this has to do with dominance. People do, indeed, use Windows because they think "Windows == Computer", or because they're dimly aware of Macs but fear the unknown. A far fewer number of people still use Windows because they have software which would be a pain to get working under other platforms, if it would work at all. The first group of people would actually be able to use Ubuntu or OS X with minimal training -- MySpace works, YouTube works, iPods work, none of them require Windows, all of them run better without spyware -- but the sheer dominance of Windows means that even if they know of the alternatives, they won't bother.
And, Apple did indeed switch to x86 because it was the dominant processor -- but not for application support. They switched for cheapness, availability, and speed. This is loosely related to app support -- Intel can afford to do the R&D needed to make these improvements, and has the capacity for the volume Apple wants, mainly because of Windows. But I don't doubt that the actual instruction set used was secondary to bang-for-the-buck -- if they still thought PPC had a better price/performance ratio, they wouldn't have moved to Intel.
I think it's ultimately momentum, more than legacy support. It's a snowballing effect. Which is not entirely the same thing -- "legacy support" is like learning FORTRAN so you can update old banking software, or writing and maintaining FreeDOS and DOSBox so some mission-critical app can still work, even though it won't work on any MS product that supports your new hardware. "Momentum" is using C to develop new programs, even sexy new languages (every part of Ruby not written in Ruby is written in C) because C/C++ compilers continue to be the best, most portable, most optimized, and the ones that processors are designed for.
True, but there are often reasons for not doing that.
I'm not convinced of that. Until very recently (until people started actually thinking about 64-bit gaming), Python looked like a very real possibility. Almost fast enough, can be extended with C (and thus Assembly) for the few cases where it's not, and I believe there are ways to compile it to an EXE.
Valve can replace the Internet Explorer control with the Mozilla control for a linux port. CS:Source is irrelevant as it won't run on Linux natively anyway.
This means they now have to test things against both IE and this Mozilla control. It's also likely a good deal less efficient.
Cedega has done this, but that doesn't mean it's easy.
Exactly, the Linux version could be distributed through the Linux port of Steam....
Right, assuming they ever do such a port. I'm mentioning IE not because Steam cannot go cross-platform, but because I strongly believe it will not. These are a bunch of former Microsoft devs who went and founded a game company, so they like MS -- and even if I'm wrong, I imagine they would have used something other than IE and DirectX if they had ever intended Steam or Source to go cross-platform.
And that brings up something else -- does Steam have any way of identifying which games can work on which platforms? Somehow, I doubt it -- Source has been portable to pretty much anything that can handle Steam, unless it's too slow. I wonder what they're going to do about Vista or 64-bit -- I imagine they'll ship both with the same copy of the game (like they do now with various optimized Linux server binaries).
However, if they do this properly, then it would make cross-platform a lot easier. You wouldn't want something stupid like Steam/Linux letting you download Half-Life 2, and then trying to run the.exe...
Personally, I'd like to re-implement Steam, but the way I want to do it is complete overkill, and not going to happen soon.
Care to detail that at all?
I would, but not right now. I'm thinking it's really time for me to type out something resembling a spec, so I can stop re-typing the same Slashdot comment over and over. I could also type something resembling a FAQ, so it won't get shot down the same way over and over.
Executive summary: It will be a Compile Once, Run Anywhere platform suitable to as many kinds of apps as possible -- you won't be able to write device drivers on this platform (yet), but pretty much anything else should work. It will be distributed as a web browser and package manager. Any game written for this platform will be cross-platform by default, and will be able to run pretty much instantly (streaming), with aggressive level of detail and prefetching. There will be no significant performance hit relative to any other modern platform (C/C++, etc), but the language will be as simple and powerful as any "scripting" language. A well-written app can be patched without restarting, or even significantly slowing down, depending on the nature of the patch and the app. License fees will only be required if you want my endorsement, or some sort of advertising (maybe on the default homepage/app), but there is not necessarily a single point of failure in the system.
I think that's everything. If not, anything I'm missing should be easy to build in. (A "friends list" would be a Jabber client which is allowed to know about other apps on the system, such as what game and server you're in.)
In order to accomplish this, I intend to overengineer the living hell out of it. Ultimately, I intend it to take over the world, possibly even as its own OS -- however, it should be able to function well even as a second-class citizen, much as Steam is on Windows.
The technical details of how I intend to do all of this would take quite a few pages, even considering that "technical details" can be as vague as "some sort of database" at this point. However, I'm convinced it's all very possible -- and most of it has various proof-of-concept implementations already, for instance, Erlang can replace any function at runtime, there are plenty of cross-platform libraries (wxwindows) and CORA languages (Java, python,.NET, parrot), Firefox proves that
The Source engine is DirectX only. Steam uses Internet Explorer -- I believe for large chunks of the interface, and also for the MOTD on CS:Source servers.
There are titles on there that do have native Linux binaries -- Darwinia, for instance, has a Steam release, but you can also buy it from their website, which gives you 3 downloads each, completely un-DRM'd, of the Windows and Linux versions (Mac version is published by a third-party shop that did the port).
Personally, I'd like to re-implement Steam, but the way I want to do it is complete overkill, and not going to happen soon.
Depending on the MMO, maybe yes, maybe no. If it does prohibit simultaneous logins, then as a developer, I wouldn't care (although I might limit you to a number of characters...) Multiple accounts means you have to pay for them, although more than one account per person can be used to evade bans, I suppose.
Now, if you're sharing a character, I'd call that cheating, because the two of you can tag team to level that char much faster than any one person. It's also annoying for others in the game, to not know who you are. It also opens up the possibility of betrayal, which happens entirely too much, but most games, accessing the account means you can access any char in the account.
There is a fundamental difference between games and music: I can play an mp3 on absolutely any device that decides to support it, on any software I feel like writing for it. There is no technological reason for me not to -- ultimately, music and video is just data, so there is no reasonable reason it shouldn't work anywhere. Same with text, for that matter -- no website should be Flash, because every website should work on any browser, and there's rarely a technical reason for them not to.
Games have yet to standardize on anything, even the few standards -- how many games use Direct3D instead of OpenGL? We're certainly a long way from having a standard engine, and most people I talk to think it's ludicrously impossible for such a thing to exist and cover all the possibilities. So, it's already an expected part of a game that you have to install custom software to run the game.
Installing software is annoying. It means I need a supported platform -- probably Windows. It means I have to patch it, and it could have bugs, or be incompatible... It means all the hassle that usually comes with installing software, especially proprietary software (read: not in package management). But no one ever considers another possibility for games.
Once that software's on your machine, the main inconvenience -- for me, anyway -- is gone. My computer's online all the time anyway, and I pay for most of my games. There might be problems with the game, but there might be bugs in any game anyway. 99% of my complaints about DRM already apply to most games, DRM'd or not. And I'd MUCH rather have a call-home feature, because that's less likely to fuck up my whole system than a check-the-CD feature.
Being able to impulse-buy a game and have it playable either in a few minutes or in a day or so is a huge deal. Also isn't bad getting periodic updates (HDR for Half-Life 2 and CS:S).
As for DRM biting you... I've lost, scratched, and otherwise killed game discs, and on a console, that's it, no more game for you. On Steam, just re-download and reinstall -- or burn a backup DVD, or whatever.
I don't like the DRM either, and I won't make excuses for that -- technologically, it sucks, too, as does anything that requires IE to play a game. But it is actually a good idea, and it works very well.
If they actually understand Linux, they'll understand how much information Linux logs. For instance, ~/.bash_history contains the last 500 commands you typed. This can easily be overridden, of course, but it's not convenient to manually set things like HISTFILE and HISTIGNORE every time, meaning you'll have to have a script somewhere which sets them for you. If you put the files under another user, you have login events in your syslog...
It's certainly possible to at least get it to where they won't be able to tell what you hid, only that you were hiding something.
I would simply encrypt the hard drive, and not give them the keys. Or put anything incriminating on a separate, encrypted hard drive, and degauss the whole thing before they get to it. Cryptonomicon had this great idea of a gigantic electromagnet embedded in the door frame... But then, the machines nuked by that in Cryptonomicon probably had stuff on it that would have much more severe consequences than "destruction of evidence".
Can you fit your Perl/Python/Ruby interpreter in 150 kilobytes?
Does it matter?
Here, let me fix this for you:
You use Lua for your in-game scripting of your computer games which are written in statically-compiled languages.
If the game had been written in Perl/Python/Ruby in the first place, no additional scripting language would be needed. Granted, Python is probably the only one of those that's reasonably fast enough, but still...
There were a few people saying what this person was saying: "Jobs claims to agree with us, so back him the hell up!"
I didn't believe him. That is why I didn't support him. I may have also said elsewhere: "If he does follow through, I'll support him."
It's not that I'm anti-Jobs, it's that I have a built-in BS detector when I hear stuff like this. Suppose MS announced that they would be working with the Mono and Wine projects to ensure that Windows apps work properly on Linux -- would you believe it? So yes, I was skeptical as hell.
And I'm still glad it's happened. I think it probably costs too much, and I wish I could get it off a website instead of through iTunes. But at least now we know we were all wrong, and Jobs was not just talking out his ass.
Unless AAC is patented, I really don't. I can already play AAC on an entirely open-source Linux player, on 64-bit.
The only thing I could want beyond that is FLAC, which only matters much to me if I can tell the difference -- and from what I'm hearing here, high-bitrate AAC can actually be better quality than CD. Only other reason for FLAC would be if I ever want to transcode it -- but I don't, as un-DRM'd AAC is playable anywhere I care to make it playable.
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I'm not saying this whole chimp thing is bad. It's just not where we should be focusing.
Kind of like how we should fix democracy at home before we try to spread it to the world. It's not that I don't want, say, a free Iraq -- not that it seems likely -- it's that at least one or two of those billions of dollars we pumped into that enterprise could've been used to, say, roll out some electronic voting that works, or fund better news sources... Or, yes, feed and clothe the hungry and naked. Or, hell, even armor our soldiers properly.
It's not so much that I am against Chimp rights, but that I am for Human rights. I would rather have both, but Human rights is more important to me because we know humans are sentient, but we don't know whether chimps are.
We still share over 60% of our DNA with that banana the chimp is eating. Percentage of DNA should never be used as a benchmark for what is and is not human.
This already happens with TiVo -- but they've moved on to the next thing already: Sliders. Audiovisual ads which invade a RUNNING show and take up a quarter of the screen WHILE YOU'RE TRYING TO WATCH THE SHOW.
I simply refuse to pay for cable TV anymore. My MythTV box sits idle, given up in favor of BitTorrent. At least if I get a DVD rip, there aren't going to be ads plastered all over the video.
Not much, for the shows that I want to watch. Think about it -- most of the cost of Firefly probably did not go into getting it on the air. Most of it probably went into actually building the ship, 3D models, actors, etc.
Oh, it would be a lot, just not significant, especially considering they're giving up having the network promote them.
Now, for advertising, think about the Mac/PC commercials. Most geeks either love them or hate them, and the more vocal ones lately seem to hate them. But it goes to show you: Make an ad they actually want to watch, and they'll watch it. Seems to me advertisers could just cut out the middleman that way.
I don't want ad-supported TV, either. I don't want a lot of cheap, crappy shows stuffed to the gills with advertising. I want one or two really good shows -- something like Firefly, something I'll want to watch over and over again. I want to pay more for it, and I want it not to have ads, ever.
After all, I don't watch enough TV for too many shows to matter. Why pay for 300 channels 24/7, when I'm only going to watch 1 at a time, and only for an hour or two at night?
Ever watch Cable TV? Satellite?
It's not enough to interrupt you every five minutes (I'm not joking) to show you ads. It's not enough to have product placement that's really only vaguely relevant (Bond's electric razor in "Die Another Day"). They now have to randomly cut into your show -- take over a fucking quarter of the screen, WITH SOUND, to show you an ad while your show is still playing.
This is not just virtualdub. There's no way to remove these without butchering the content, or resorting to DVDs. Which is what I have done. Fuck TV, I'll either pirate or buy/rent DVDs. If they ever do it to my DVDs, I'll just give up any TV at all.
I'm guessing this has something to do with MIT.
Although, of course, it hasn't gone very far -- but no other state has even considered this kind of thing.
And, conversely, if people are not too lazy to work out whether what they copy is correct, there's a good chance they have at least a basic understanding of the subject in question, and have the ability (but perhaps not the time or morals) to do it themselves.
Which, in another light, could mean you're punishing her for doing too well. I understand it probably seemed obvious, and you're probably right, but it might've been a good idea to pull her in and see if she knows what she's talking about.
One trick: Get them to read their own paper. If they are tripping over spelling and pronunciation -- and indeed, don't actually know what half of the words are -- then it's probably not their work. But again, be thorough -- maybe it's a stuttering problem?
Plagiarism is usually pretty blatant -- the more work the student spends polishing the plagiarized work, the more likely it is that going legit would be easier. So, I think you should be very careful not to have any false positives.
And in this instance, I can fairly confidently say that the average user is WRONG. If making Linux viable for the desktop means turning all of our good, free, open source, downloaded, package-managed stuff into proprietary, bug-ridden, off-the-shelf CDs, then frankly, I'll keep it as a geek OS, thanks.
Learning to use Synaptic (or any other package manager or frontend) is a large part of learning why Linux is better in the first place, and why you would want to use it.
Except that at school, some stupid admin got government funding to buy up all Vista, whereas at work, they've all standardized on Office 2000, and at home, he's got Windows 98 and Office 95.
No, I'm saying that there are reasons, but they don't often apply when people think they do. We could start by you telling me which reasons you endorse for using another language...
(And no, I'm not a drooling Python fanboy. In fact, I hate Python. Perl6 looks better, but there are things I hate about it, too, and it's not even out yet. I just am not enough of a masochist to use C/C++/C# if I can possibly avoid it.)
I wish, but the PS3 also doesn't run OpenGL code very well. It runs PS3 code, which directly uses the hardware, and can run OpenGL code.
Not that it will be much of a SPOILER for anyone who has seen anything of the series/movie, but meeting River frozen in a box -- a box that appears to be contraband -- is a direct ripoff of Outlaw Star.
Which I will forgive because it's all executed so amazingly well. Trigun loses some of its realism with some (albeit interesting) stuff like robots, plants, and some of the weirder enemies (giants, the Bad Lads...) Outlaw Star is a bit weird, and just gets weirder at the end -- Serenity does some of the same weird stuff, but keeps a firm grip on reality, and you believe the weirdness (swords) when it happens.
Cowboy Bebop is the closest, I guess. But here, it's characters that make them each unique. Spike and Mal are at completely opposite ends of the spectrum, and they are both awesome.
The first person he killed with a sword was in a high-security facility, which presumably they wanted intact. At the range he had the guy, a gun would not have been any more effective.
Second person, he was already right next to the guy. No reason not to.
Third person he tried to, was already deep enough underground, and with a battle raging in space above, probably not many ships' weapons available, or could penetrate that deep anyway. And let's not forget, he almost tried to launch a massive attack against Serenity, but ended up having to fire on the Reavers.
I'm assuming you're talking about the Operative (not Mal, who has no problems shooting you), as Serenity has no weapons. The Operative has additional reasons for using a sword -- he is a psychotic fuck. Is that so incredibly implausible?
Regarding traveling halfway across the galaxy, in case you missed the intro, there is no faster than light travel, and the entire series (and the movie) takes place in one massive solar system.
And I'm fairly sure that's not even a samurai sword, but some other kind of sword. Is there even one thing about this picture that you got right?
I'm guessing you didn't get most of the plot because you didn't see the series. I'm guessing you won't see the series because you didn't get most of the plot. Sucks to be you.
And, finally, realistic. Seeing space travel where space is actually silent (and beautiful) is a rare thing in scifi.
They don't have to be spectacular. They were pretty damned good, but the whole point of special effects is that they are invisible -- that you don't think of it as an effect.
You didn't see the series.
Perhaps. Or maybe people will eventually start to appreciate it. Lord of the Rings (the book) was not appreciated until after Tolkein's death, if I recall, but is now regarded culturally significant...
I started to notice when Orson Scott Card said something to the effect of "This movie is the only scifi one that comes close to being as good as I'd want an Ender's Game movie to be."
If you mean exciting new things, like the landspeeder in Star Wars, or the rotating ship in 2001: A Space Odessy... I honestly have to ask, so what?
At this point, it's all been done. It's like games -- at this point, the smart gamers aren't going to buy something just because it's a lets-count-the-polys-on-his-nosehairs "high-def" wankfest. We just want a good game, that's actually fun to play -- thus, the Wii, which has good games, despite having (if I recall) barely last-gen graphics.
And yet, there are unusual things done. Space is portrayed properly -- no up, no down, ships always at odd angles, silent (even with explosions). There are very nice sequences, like at the beginning, with the camera sweeping through the entire ship, showing you around. It's also a movie about real people, in a world that feels real and relevant -- yet is set in space, in the distant future -- and I'm sure I haven't seen this done before; closest thing might be Blade Runner.
All that aside, it's a beautiful movie, and a beautiful story, with beautiful music... It, and the series it goes with, are a piece of art. Firefly/Serenity stands alone, it's not redefining a genre, it's not pushing the limits of technology. It's just about telling a story, and doing it right.
Scary, actually, that I knew that off the top of my head. Unless I'm wrong and it was the pilot (Serenity).
All of what you mention is actually completely irrelevant, except for the fact that people believe it.
MS changes their UI quite a lot, so much so that it's not only possible but kind of likely, even inevitable that there is a Linux environment (Window Manager, file browser, etc) which looks much more like what people think of as Windows than Vista ever has. (See: KDE, IceWM, various Windows-like themes.)
What you see in a software store isn't representative. For that half a row for Linux, assuming it's even there, I could fill half the store with what's downloadable. Not with cryptic commandlines, or through some strange Google search, or recompiling your kernel, or any other stupid cliche, but through a nice, comfortable GUI (Synaptic). Add to that considerable support for stuff through Wine -- much of it may not work, but some of it is deliberately designed to work -- for instance, Blizzard goes out of its way to make sure WoW works on Cedega.
OS X has made the switch from PowerPC processors to x86, as you said yourself. But they didn't do it to run Windows, or to run all the software on Windows. They did it because x86 is cheaper for the performance that you get. And in so doing, they proved that processor architecture means exactly jack and shit when you have something that is better enough -- there are plenty of cases where people move from a PPC Mac to an x86 Mac and find their PPC apps actually run faster under Rosetta. Even when they don't, x86 ports don't take long at all, if the app is recent enough for the developers to care -- and if it isn't, it probably runs well enough anyway.
I doubt anyone will switch off of x86 (or x86_64) anytime soon, but if you could suddenly buy a quad-core processor for $25 and a dual-processor motherboard for $50 -- right now -- you can bet people would be scrambling to switch, writing efficient x86 emulators, porting software, etc.
I'm not saying none of this has to do with dominance. People do, indeed, use Windows because they think "Windows == Computer", or because they're dimly aware of Macs but fear the unknown. A far fewer number of people still use Windows because they have software which would be a pain to get working under other platforms, if it would work at all. The first group of people would actually be able to use Ubuntu or OS X with minimal training -- MySpace works, YouTube works, iPods work, none of them require Windows, all of them run better without spyware -- but the sheer dominance of Windows means that even if they know of the alternatives, they won't bother.
And, Apple did indeed switch to x86 because it was the dominant processor -- but not for application support. They switched for cheapness, availability, and speed. This is loosely related to app support -- Intel can afford to do the R&D needed to make these improvements, and has the capacity for the volume Apple wants, mainly because of Windows. But I don't doubt that the actual instruction set used was secondary to bang-for-the-buck -- if they still thought PPC had a better price/performance ratio, they wouldn't have moved to Intel.
I think it's ultimately momentum, more than legacy support. It's a snowballing effect. Which is not entirely the same thing -- "legacy support" is like learning FORTRAN so you can update old banking software, or writing and maintaining FreeDOS and DOSBox so some mission-critical app can still work, even though it won't work on any MS product that supports your new hardware. "Momentum" is using C to develop new programs, even sexy new languages (every part of Ruby not written in Ruby is written in C) because C/C++ compilers continue to be the best, most portable, most optimized, and the ones that processors are designed for.
I'm not convinced of that. Until very recently (until people started actually thinking about 64-bit gaming), Python looked like a very real possibility. Almost fast enough, can be extended with C (and thus Assembly) for the few cases where it's not, and I believe there are ways to compile it to an EXE.
This means they now have to test things against both IE and this Mozilla control. It's also likely a good deal less efficient.
Cedega has done this, but that doesn't mean it's easy.
Right, assuming they ever do such a port. I'm mentioning IE not because Steam cannot go cross-platform, but because I strongly believe it will not. These are a bunch of former Microsoft devs who went and founded a game company, so they like MS -- and even if I'm wrong, I imagine they would have used something other than IE and DirectX if they had ever intended Steam or Source to go cross-platform.
And that brings up something else -- does Steam have any way of identifying which games can work on which platforms? Somehow, I doubt it -- Source has been portable to pretty much anything that can handle Steam, unless it's too slow. I wonder what they're going to do about Vista or 64-bit -- I imagine they'll ship both with the same copy of the game (like they do now with various optimized Linux server binaries).
However, if they do this properly, then it would make cross-platform a lot easier. You wouldn't want something stupid like Steam/Linux letting you download Half-Life 2, and then trying to run the .exe...
I would, but not right now. I'm thinking it's really time for me to type out something resembling a spec, so I can stop re-typing the same Slashdot comment over and over. I could also type something resembling a FAQ, so it won't get shot down the same way over and over.
Executive summary: It will be a Compile Once, Run Anywhere platform suitable to as many kinds of apps as possible -- you won't be able to write device drivers on this platform (yet), but pretty much anything else should work. It will be distributed as a web browser and package manager. Any game written for this platform will be cross-platform by default, and will be able to run pretty much instantly (streaming), with aggressive level of detail and prefetching. There will be no significant performance hit relative to any other modern platform (C/C++, etc), but the language will be as simple and powerful as any "scripting" language. A well-written app can be patched without restarting, or even significantly slowing down, depending on the nature of the patch and the app. License fees will only be required if you want my endorsement, or some sort of advertising (maybe on the default homepage/app), but there is not necessarily a single point of failure in the system.
I think that's everything. If not, anything I'm missing should be easy to build in. (A "friends list" would be a Jabber client which is allowed to know about other apps on the system, such as what game and server you're in.)
In order to accomplish this, I intend to overengineer the living hell out of it. Ultimately, I intend it to take over the world, possibly even as its own OS -- however, it should be able to function well even as a second-class citizen, much as Steam is on Windows.
The technical details of how I intend to do all of this would take quite a few pages, even considering that "technical details" can be as vague as "some sort of database" at this point. However, I'm convinced it's all very possible -- and most of it has various proof-of-concept implementations already, for instance, Erlang can replace any function at runtime, there are plenty of cross-platform libraries (wxwindows) and CORA languages (Java, python, .NET, parrot), Firefox proves that
The Source engine is DirectX only. Steam uses Internet Explorer -- I believe for large chunks of the interface, and also for the MOTD on CS:Source servers.
There are titles on there that do have native Linux binaries -- Darwinia, for instance, has a Steam release, but you can also buy it from their website, which gives you 3 downloads each, completely un-DRM'd, of the Windows and Linux versions (Mac version is published by a third-party shop that did the port).
Personally, I'd like to re-implement Steam, but the way I want to do it is complete overkill, and not going to happen soon.
Depending on the MMO, maybe yes, maybe no. If it does prohibit simultaneous logins, then as a developer, I wouldn't care (although I might limit you to a number of characters...) Multiple accounts means you have to pay for them, although more than one account per person can be used to evade bans, I suppose.
Now, if you're sharing a character, I'd call that cheating, because the two of you can tag team to level that char much faster than any one person. It's also annoying for others in the game, to not know who you are. It also opens up the possibility of betrayal, which happens entirely too much, but most games, accessing the account means you can access any char in the account.
There is a fundamental difference between games and music: I can play an mp3 on absolutely any device that decides to support it, on any software I feel like writing for it. There is no technological reason for me not to -- ultimately, music and video is just data, so there is no reasonable reason it shouldn't work anywhere. Same with text, for that matter -- no website should be Flash, because every website should work on any browser, and there's rarely a technical reason for them not to.
Games have yet to standardize on anything, even the few standards -- how many games use Direct3D instead of OpenGL? We're certainly a long way from having a standard engine, and most people I talk to think it's ludicrously impossible for such a thing to exist and cover all the possibilities. So, it's already an expected part of a game that you have to install custom software to run the game.
Installing software is annoying. It means I need a supported platform -- probably Windows. It means I have to patch it, and it could have bugs, or be incompatible... It means all the hassle that usually comes with installing software, especially proprietary software (read: not in package management). But no one ever considers another possibility for games.
Once that software's on your machine, the main inconvenience -- for me, anyway -- is gone. My computer's online all the time anyway, and I pay for most of my games. There might be problems with the game, but there might be bugs in any game anyway. 99% of my complaints about DRM already apply to most games, DRM'd or not. And I'd MUCH rather have a call-home feature, because that's less likely to fuck up my whole system than a check-the-CD feature.
Being able to impulse-buy a game and have it playable either in a few minutes or in a day or so is a huge deal. Also isn't bad getting periodic updates (HDR for Half-Life 2 and CS:S).
As for DRM biting you... I've lost, scratched, and otherwise killed game discs, and on a console, that's it, no more game for you. On Steam, just re-download and reinstall -- or burn a backup DVD, or whatever.
I don't like the DRM either, and I won't make excuses for that -- technologically, it sucks, too, as does anything that requires IE to play a game. But it is actually a good idea, and it works very well.
If they actually understand Linux, they'll understand how much information Linux logs. For instance, ~/.bash_history contains the last 500 commands you typed. This can easily be overridden, of course, but it's not convenient to manually set things like HISTFILE and HISTIGNORE every time, meaning you'll have to have a script somewhere which sets them for you. If you put the files under another user, you have login events in your syslog...
It's certainly possible to at least get it to where they won't be able to tell what you hid, only that you were hiding something.
I would simply encrypt the hard drive, and not give them the keys. Or put anything incriminating on a separate, encrypted hard drive, and degauss the whole thing before they get to it. Cryptonomicon had this great idea of a gigantic electromagnet embedded in the door frame... But then, the machines nuked by that in Cryptonomicon probably had stuff on it that would have much more severe consequences than "destruction of evidence".
It's embedded. Thus, any features you want to add, you'd add to your main app and call them from within Lua.
Does it matter?
Here, let me fix this for you:
If the game had been written in Perl/Python/Ruby in the first place, no additional scripting language would be needed. Granted, Python is probably the only one of those that's reasonably fast enough, but still...
I'll refer you to what was said back then.
There were a few people saying what this person was saying: "Jobs claims to agree with us, so back him the hell up!"
I didn't believe him. That is why I didn't support him. I may have also said elsewhere: "If he does follow through, I'll support him."
It's not that I'm anti-Jobs, it's that I have a built-in BS detector when I hear stuff like this. Suppose MS announced that they would be working with the Mono and Wine projects to ensure that Windows apps work properly on Linux -- would you believe it? So yes, I was skeptical as hell.
And I'm still glad it's happened. I think it probably costs too much, and I wish I could get it off a website instead of through iTunes. But at least now we know we were all wrong, and Jobs was not just talking out his ass.
Unless AAC is patented, I really don't. I can already play AAC on an entirely open-source Linux player, on 64-bit.
The only thing I could want beyond that is FLAC, which only matters much to me if I can tell the difference -- and from what I'm hearing here, high-bitrate AAC can actually be better quality than CD. Only other reason for FLAC would be if I ever want to transcode it -- but I don't, as un-DRM'd AAC is playable anywhere I care to make it playable.