Not all of them, but hey, you didn't really want to watch that movie preview, did you?
I call BS on this. My Gentoo supported absolutely everything I tried from day one in mplayer. I can use xine for DVDs, so I get menus, and mplayer for everything else -- and it does have a GUI, and a browser plugin.
Device support. Just try hooking up, say, a Canon scanner
Which one? I assume Sane is what deals with scanners, and a Google search for "canon sane" returns 610,000 results...
Yep, I know all about the Microsoft Core Fonts package. It is not installed by default.
Oh, boo frickin' hoo. Firefox isn't installed by default on Windows. Besides, you found a solution to those problems, why aren't you creating scripts to fix the problem for other people? Surely installing the OS, then running a single script to do all that law-breaking stuff isn't a problem?
Besides, I know I've got my mother trained to care whose fault it is when a website doesn't work on Firefox. She bitches at the website, not at the Firefox devs. If we all trained nontechnical girlfriends to do this, it would probably solve quite a lot of these problems -- if 500 or 1000 of Canon's users bitch at them to open their specs, there will be a Sane driver within a couple of weeks.
Regarding asian input methods, I thought you said she just needed to be able to send email back home? If so, isn't Thunderbird support enough?
Until ALL OF THE ABOVE are fixed he wouldn't touch Linux willingly in a million years.
Good riddance. More than half of what you've listed is really a problem with him. Let's go over this one at a time:
The MSN Messenger client is terrible. Still the best available (aMSN) but still terrible.
Sorry? I use Gaim. Not strictly an MSN client, but it works with way more protocols, and works just fine for chatting. What's terrible about aMSN, anyway?
It doesn't run any of his games or software (they need MIDI and so won't run through Wine, if under Linux at all).
Again, huh? I don't know about Wine, but Linux has perfectly good MIDI/tracker support. And what software (other than games) needs MIDI?
If these are old DOS games, he could probably get away with dosbox just fine. Otherwise, maybe invest in Cedega and some better games for him. I'm sure he'd love a good Quake 4...
Sound in webpages doesn't work for him (you might say "Good!" but come on, he's a teenager, it's what teenagers do.)
This can probably be fixed with mplayerplug-in, but as a teenager, I didn't care for sound in webpages either. If I wanted sound, I downloaded it.
Flash is a piece of shitty shitting shit on Linux and is completely unfit for purpose.
How many people need flash? I don't find myself missing it much when I use my Linux desktop, and my Powerbook gets incredibly sluggish when it's enabled.
My solution is simple: I make people choose between getting free support from me or having worthless features like these. Some choose free support, and after the first week or so, they never need it -- properly set up, their Linux just works, and continues to just work. The ones who don't, well, they pay $75/hour to the local MSCE cunts so they can run antispyware software.
What if I just want to be able to do something, and not have to deal with "configuration" or "installing packages" or " educate myself about my OS"? Can Linux do that?
To the extent that any other OS can, yes.
You're an OS X user. Ok, let's play. What can your Mac do that my Linux cannot, assuming neither of us want to educate ourselves?
In order to properly install OS X software, I have to learn about disk images. In order to properly install Linux software, I have to learn to use Synaptic. In order to uninstall OS X software, I have to buy and install one of several shareware/commercial products, and hope it does it right. In order to uninstall Linux software, I just uncheck the check box in Synaptic.
By the way, when I fix a problem on Linux, it stays fixed. On Windows, it's not likely I'll be able to fix it in the first place, much less have it stay fixed. On OS X, I have a couple of problems that I haven't yet been able to fix.
Right now, just as Intel's jumping ahead of ATI, too.
Maybe it's a sign. Maybe Intel jumped ahead of ATI because ATI sucks so much that just the anticipation of such a merger was enough to cause problems for AMD? Mabye Intel is so awesome because they already are talking to nvidia?
Of course, I've got a better combo in mind already: nVidia, period. They always talk about how they hate the x86 architecture, and wish you could just do everything on their hardware. Well, maybe they should try that... Wouldn't be the first time, after all, the nForce chipsets often required severe OS hacks to get anything working on them.
Java's design flaws are self-correcting because they actually get in the way of getting work done.
Except the entire time in college, they'll be learning the reasons for these design flaws that are really "features". For instance, always forcing that explicit "throws" keyword, or not supporting multiple inheritance, or operator overloading -- all kinds of things left out to protect you from yourself, and the manager types especially will appreciate that.
Teach people assembly language instead of C, and then teach them a decent high level language.
What, with nothing in the middle? But I'd teach them something like Ruby, and also teach them C and Assembly. The insanely widespread use of C means that even in a higher-level language, you'll still need an occasional syscall or something.
No, the point is to teach so many languages that no one language limits them, especially if you're using the Algol-derived ones. It wouldn't take much to go from C++ to Java, or from either of those to, say, Perl, Python, and Ruby. Especially Python should give people a compelling reason to not use C++. But even Ruby could be good -- there's a fairly usable Ruby-to-.NET compiler, meaning you get all the rapid development of Ruby, but all the speed of C#, for what that's worth.
great way to solve the 'must not kill good guys'-problem,
Except you could always step back and kill them anyway, when your talk to turns back into a crosshairs at enough distance. Then you get their PDA, and possibly some ammo (the security guard early on).
No, this was to solve the problem of never using any button except the left mouse button. Which was clever, really, but I wonder what id really has against the Use key...
Good points about roleplaying, though. A lot of the useless stuff suddenly becomes useful when the RPG is at all multiplayer, and you do start to miss them... especially when they're half-assed, as in UT2004. Ok, smacking my ass and pelvic thrusting was fun for the first 50 times, but sometimes you want to do subtler things. For example, none of that is at all feminine, even if you're a female character -- where's the "smile and blush" key?
i don't think a game like this would give much about physical realism, instead it would only care about making for interesting gameplay.
Well, Half-Life 2 had a Gravity Gun. This isn't much worse. Yet Half-Life 2 also had some very realistic gameplay, except where it was insanely unrealistic.
And if you don't think instant death is interesting, you should play with AdminMod. admin_slay, or bind admin_slap to a key -- pimpslap them up 20 feet, then let them splat...
Or stack tons of explosive barrels in a level editor, and see how far your corpse can fly...
Point is, it would still be lots of fun, and still be interesting gameplay. Remember the staircase? Probably be a lot easier if you could just jump down and not get hurt, compared with having to time and place your portals accurately enough to land softly enough to live.
It's a small step from a placeable two-way teleporter to a placeable two-way portal.
No, it's not. The placable two-way teleporter is still just a teleporter -- it just has to grab anything that touches it and flip it to the other side. If your engine is that, you can try to build a portal by catching absolutely EVERYTHING -- that is, you have a camera on the other side that maps to the portal's surface, maybe it's even some fancy shader that can somehow even look right as you change perspective, and of course any object that touches it gets flipped instantaneously to the other side.
But that's not the same as a portal. A portal means literally a doorway, as far as the game is concerned. EVERYTHING that you can do through an open doorway you can do through a portal, including being half in and half out, having explosions go through, etc. It looks like these portals have figured out how to do that sanely using gravity.
The first step towards understanding portals is to stop thinking of them as leading to another part of the same world, the way they do in that Portals demo video. See them as leading to a whole other world. It's a bad analogy, but think of them more as frames, and less like hyperlinks. Once you fully grok the concept of portals as occlusion culling, you'll start to get why it's so easy to move from that to fully functional portals from one room to another part of the level. And from there, it's probably relatively easy to make them work for two parts of the same room, where you can see both ends of the portal and something half in each end simultaneously, or see your own head with the infinite fall. Well, it's hard, but nowhere near as hard as providing the same behavior for a game that had only teleporters, and no portals.
But then, IANAGP (I Am Not A Graphics/Game Programmer) -- at least, not yet.
So my point still stands, it's been done before, but not nearly so polished.
But if I'm right, those "engine limitations" are what I'm talking about -- variations of the same thing have been done before, but that's like saying Doom was a 3D game. Quake was real 3D, Doom was not. These are likely real portals, Unreal ones probably are not, especially given what you said about shooting through them.
Because it's slow to start up, insecure, pathalogically retarded, causes nightmares for implementing a proper firewall, and you gain nothing over HTTP.
I personally prefer it over HTTP for downloading files, rather than being confined to how the web server and browser want to handle the directory listing
Last I checked, FTP is limited in the same way. The FTP server sending a directory listing is really it sending a chunk of text. It gives you permissions and such because that's the output of 'ls' and because it's convention, not because there's any requirement for it to.
HTTP, on the other hand, has support for something called WebDAV, which I think can actually be used as a filesystem -- it has a standard for directory listings and such, certainly allows uploading...
Besides, if I'm looking through a directory, rather than an HTML file, something's wrong with the service. Remember, we're talking about a movie service. I don't want to look at directory listings, I want to look at search results, graphics, and other such things.
and file transfer.
Why do you need more control over file transfer than wget gives you?
(Don't get me started on web servers that transfer.bz2 or even.gz in text mode...)
That's called a misconfigured server, and it's got nothing to do with the protocol. I'm fairly sure FTP servers can just as easily refuse to send.bz2 or.gz in anything but text mode -- or who would claim they're going to, but send it as something else instead. Yes, that would be a bug -- but so is a server implementation that does that.
As far as I can tell, there is really nothing left that FTP can do that HTTP can't do better. And I figure I've run into the problems you've described about.bz2 and.gz files maybe once in the past six or seven years.
Maybe you were using Gentoo for the wrong reasons?
I never got distcc working properly -- that and ccache, and every other solution I tried to speed up compilation, simply didn't work well, or didn't work at all. After my latest round of hardware purchases, I figured out that nothing was going to take too long to compile anymore. Longer than I'd like, but not too long.
Any speed boost you get is nullified by the amount of time you spend compiling the system. Not to mention, both of my main Linux boxes are amd64 now, and my laptop is ppc, so unlike with all the various x86 stuff, there's really no advantage to compiling by hand. If there's an amd64 version of a distro, you can bet it's compiled with every optimization you'd use by yourself anyway. If your computer is slow enough to really benefit a lot from any speed upgrade, you're going to spend WAY more time compiling than you'll save from that speed increase -- this matters for your electric bill, also. If your computer is fast enough (like mine) that this isn't true, you won't see much improvement anyway.
After all, hand-tuning gcc optimizations only make sense per-package, and packages do that themselves anyway. The only reason I liked Gentoo for speed before was the global -march, but as I said, that's not really relevant when it'd always just be -march=amd64 anyway.
Prelinking was a good idea, but broke too many things too often to really be useful.
USE flags were nice, but often pointless as well. Occasionally, you got a program so broken that there were major things you had to choose at compile time -- for instance, MySQL or Postgres? But so often, I've found that the reason this matters so much in Gentoo is that it's much harder to break a source package down into pieces -- only recently has X become modular, and before then, you had to compile the entire thing, even if you only needed a couple of libraries -- ludicrous for a server. Quite often, you'll see things like nvidia-kernel and nvidia-driver, which share the same source file. And it still can't match the degree to which Debian has always broken things down -- Debian has separate packages for the SSH client and daemon, which makes sense.
The reasons I like Gentoo are the unique init system (dependency-based, so easy to multithread, instead of a fixed order), the fact that ebuilds have got to be the easiest type of package to create/edit, CPAN integration (even though it's not quite perfect, it's pretty darned slick), the nice tools, documentation, and community -- one of those three has to be responsible for the ease with which I've picked up all kinds of admining tricks. It's also nice because Gentoo can easily steal binary packages from other distros, without requiring the use of "alien" or any other such foolishness -- just grab the RPM, unpack it with rpm2cpio or some such, run a script, and you're done.
Same with some things that are simply illegal on other distros -- I can "emerge quake4" or "emerge ut2004", type "yes" at the license, then copy some files off the DVD and I'm done. Sometimes it even notices the DVD automatically. Or the Sun JDK -- I still have to download the archive manually, but the ebuild handles everything else, and since it's true package management, that means there's an uninstall, not to mention automatic upgrade notices, even if each upgrade means manually going and getting the package. And if it's really a problem, there's always Blackdown, installed by default when a package needs Java.
Gentoo does often leave packages relatively untouched from upstream, but it's also pretty easy to see what they did, as ebuilds are design to be able to fetch the upstream source directly (though they try Gentoo mirrors first), then patch them locally. Trouble is, Gentoo does sandboxing -- packages don't get to touch anything on your system until they've successfully compiled and installed to a temporary location and all that's left is the equivalent of a cp -a. This, among other things, causes them to patch some poor
They'll have to do better than that to get me off Nvidia. Yes, Nvidia is proprietary, closed, and does have some problems. They also are rarely more than one minor version behind either kernel or X, and I haven't yet run into something that I can do on Windows that I can't do on Linux with these cards.
It is exciting, yes. I would buy Intel graphics if they were as good as or better than that generation of ATI or Nvidia -- especially if they were willing to work with the community, not just release specs and let someone else do all the work. I imagine they could release most of their Windows source, also. I would love to have all my hardware fully supported in the mainstream kernel, without having to choose inferior hardware.
The problem is, I have to pick one of the two: open solutions, or best possible hardware for my budget. Can I buy a $200 Intel card, and have it support all the things that my $200 Nvidia card does? Dual-headed DVI output (with very high resolution), comparable performance, with all the fun pixel, vertex, and gemoetry shaders and other features -- maybe even match the DirectX 10 cards, but using OpenGL 2.1?
The problem is, while I love open solutions, I'm sick of being ridiculed by the "My XP never crashes" people for choosing last year's tech simply because it's open.
Done. There may be configuration required later, but the point is, drivers which aren't part of the kernel, or which you want a newer version than the kernel supports, can be distributed as "packages" on Gentoo.
Only thing left is to make a script that rebuilds them all when you install a new kernel. That's simple enough, every time you find one of these packages, add it to a file, one line per package -- say,/etc/rebuild_on_new_kernel. Then you can rebuild them all with
emerge `cat/etc/rebuild_on_new_kernel`
I admit to having Ubuntu envy -- I really wish everything was just plug'n'play, instantly installed (or preinstalled) as Ubuntu/Debian does it. But I've never seen a binary distro be able to automatically handle things like that. Granted, it shouldn't be necessary, but it is handy, especially if you compile your own kernel, or if there's weird licensing (which Nvidia does have).
I really don't see the advantage to driver CDs over that, especially when the majority of my drivers (and software) can be stored in a file and automatically kept up to date, even reinstalled when I feel like reinstalling the whole OS (maybe moving to a new box, new arch, etc)...
Compare that to "pop the CD in, next-next-next, reboot, pop another CD in..." Maybe it's easier to figure out what to do, but it takes much more time even if you know what you're doing.
That's just your average teleportation device. Another example is the normal teleporters that are all over your average Quake/Doom/Unreal map. Basically, you activate it and it moves you.
Portals are much cooler because it's not like you're looking through a portal or a teleporter -- a portal really is just a hole in the wall that happens to lead to another part of the map. You've probably played plenty of games with Portal without realizing it, because it's usually used for occlusion culling for indoor geometry.
It basically means your game geometry is a linked list, only more complex... like hyperlinks...
Nevermind, let me try and translate. Say you have three rooms in an L shape. If you're in the first room, looking into the second, but you can't see the entrance to the third room, then the game can skip drawing the entire third room. It can break the second room down, also -- you could have a portal in the middle of the room, so that half the room can just be ignored if it knows you can't see the portal to that half of the room.
They also have the nifty ability to do crazy stuff like this, because the portal between two rooms is really only a pointer between them, in the literal, programming sense.
So, this implementation may be the most polished user-modifiable portals you've seen, but you've probably seen plenty of very polished portals that you never knew were there. That, and the UT thing you mentioned isn't really portals...
Linux development tools don't hold up to VC/DirectX yet.
So if it really matters that much (you aren't just making a completely new engine), how hard is it to just, say, mod Quake 4?
you'd have to ship with soooo many drivers for good performance (a boot disk that works well on all systems doesn't use the advanced 3d features of cards that games would need).
Oh noes! That would be soooo hard! In fact, no one's probably ever done it before!
Yes, I know that second project is closed. The reason has nothing to do with drivers. Booting an entire OS to play a single game takes too damned long, even if it boots right into the game. Even then, it's just entirely too easy to pirate a game distributed that way, unless they add some proprietary modules and make sure the game requires a dual-layer DVD. It's difficult or impossible to save, unless you have a way of saving online, which is why they used America's Army. And especially if you're doing that, or an MMO, you'll have to patch the game sooner or later, not to mention the rest of the OS -- this is where drivers matter -- unless you burn a whole new DVD.
It could be done, but it would be extremely difficult, both for you and for the end-user, unless you require a Windows partition on which to save the game (making the bootability pointless) or require the end-user to answer the same stupid questions every time they boot the CD. Only other thing I can think of is configuring the CD before you burn it to know where to look on your hard drive for savegames and patches, but that makes it too easy to pirate, if you let them burn their own CDs. But if you did that, you'd have something like the Xbox 360, where you can patch games that are running off the DVD with something like unionfs and a hard drive -- thus, files which exist on the hard drive are used instead, files which don't are pulled from the CD.
Another possibility would be to skip the CD altogether, and just install another OS to their hard drive. But you still have portability and annoyance issues -- if I already have Linux, why can't I just run it without rebooting? If I have Windows, why should I have to install Linux (even without partitioning) and reboot just to play a damned game?
But really, drivers are such a small problem for most people trying to run Linux that it's not worth mentioning. Development tools aren't the issue either. The real issue is, no one seems to care.
In other words, they broke my copy of HalfLife to try and force me to install their spyware.
No, they decided to stop offering the service you were used to getting for free, and replace it with a different service (also free).
I actually like Steam, because unlike other forms of spyware or DRM (both of which are evil), Steam actually stays 100% out of my way, without significantly changing the model for my owning a game.
Let's compare Steam to other copy protection models:
CD Keys. Don't work, easily broken by "borrowing" a friend's key and denying access to the game's authentication servers.
Requiring the CD to be inserted. This is either ludicrously easy to beat (create another virtual drive in Wine, change some registry values, or put a snigle file on a single Samba share in Windows) or insanely annoying, or both. In any case, it prevents backups, and it shortens the life of the original CD, assuming it works.
Making the game a service (MMO). Great, so I pay $50 or $60 for the game, then you want me to spend $15 a month to keep playing? Not usually worth it, and only works for MMOs.
Steam. Well, it may be a steaming pile of crap technologically (IE all over), but it means that once I pay for a game, I've paid for it. I can then play said game from any computer that I remember my Steam password on, and every time I play it, I get to download and install the software. It also automatically provides me updates in a fairly unobtrusive way (something I've never had another game do), and not only allows me to play the game without a CD, not only allows me to download any number of times, but actually provides me with a tool to back up a copy of any number of Steam games to a CD or DVD, in a way that's account neutral -- which means if my friend buys Half-Life 2, I can burn a CD of the game and give it to him, saving him from waiting for the download.
It's even been good about asking before it sends info in. A hardware survey, for instance. Whereas these other pieces of spyware tend to collect personal info, send it in, silently eat up resources in the background with no explanation as to why, and cannot be shut off effectively.
I mean, yes, by some definition, it's Spyware, but by the same definition, so is Windows. Your copy of Windows would be very, very broken if you didn't get your automatic updates.
Anyway, end of rant, but I really get sick of all the hatred against Steam every time it comes up. You want an argument that distinguishes Steam from these other things? Steam actually adds value. Most spyware generally does nothing for you, steals your resources, pops up messages, and sends spam. Steam does none of these things, but lets you do things (legally!) that no other game or game platform lets you do at all.
It could also help with the idea that an orbit is really a straight line. An infinite corrodor is a good start for that. You could even let people look off to one side and see the sun, and on the other side of the sun, see the very corrodor they're in.
Duke3D also did this, and had some secret levels that demonstrated it. They used it to allow things like elevators and stairs and multi-story buildings while still being 2.5D. Even some of the normal levels that make sense in full 3D have some amazing tricks for this, but it really gets fun when you start messing with the level editor. An elevator that looks and feels like it travels vertically, but you end up a mile away horizontally? Swim across town underwater and surface in the exact same spot? All possible, and very fun to play with.
Speaking of which, I wish the newer Duke3D source ports would work for me...
Simple. Fire off another portal to the side while you're falling through that loop. You'll fall through the portal one more time, then you'll pop out of the new one, hopefully away from the hole.
I don't think that will work, but if it were possible -- maybe right-click for portal A and left-click for portal B, make them different colors? -- then that would be an awesomely cheap way of doing insane things. For instance: I don't think the Source engine measures the speed with which you impact a wall, only the ground (while falling). Thus, you use your portal loop to store kinetic energy, then fire a portal at the wall and BOOM! You go flying across the room like you were shot out of a cannon! Or if the portal gun has limited range, and there's a clifside in front of you, just start a portal loop indoors, pick up speed, then drop a portal on the ground in front of you and you'll go flying straight up!
Fire a real portal over a fake one, run through. Remove the real portal. Watch your opponent bonk into the wall.
That's only fun if impact with walls can cause damage. Your opponent speeds up with a portal loop, then launches themself at your portal, only to smack into a wall.
But that may be taking it a bit too far. I don't really see fake portals as anything but a nuscience, kind of like making a Counter-Strike spray of a terrorist firing at you.
If portals work the way I think they do, you'll be accelerating if you're in that kind of a portal loop (floor to ceiling) just as if you were falling an indefinite amount of distance. Remove the portals and SPLAT! You have become a small crater.
Of course, it would help for a floor to floor fall, as in that case, you're constantly changing direction, so you never pick up any real speed. Still, I think the real solution is the same as the solution to not blowing yourself up with a rocket launcher: Don't be a dumbass.
The idea of portals has been around for ages. Anyone who knows anything about 3D programming should know about the differences between Portals, Octrees, BSP trees, and so on.
In fact, if I remember right, Duke Nukem 3D was played essentially as a portal system with all the limitations of Doom. For instance, I once made a fun level which had a long ramp/tunnel that sloped downwards, but otherwise went straight to an elevator, and you bring the elevator up and you're at the top of the ramp, even though the elevator was just taking you straight up.
Another example was a secret level which was shaped like this (warning, ASCII art):
_______ | ___ | | |_| | |_____|
Yeah, my ASCII art sucks. Anyway, like that -- square/donut shaped -- only bigger. The inner room was huge, the outer hallway was narrow, and in each of the four cardinal directions, there was an open doorway between them. Only the inner room was a completely different room depending on which door you were going through.
In other words, because of the way Duke Nukem fakes 3D, you can think of it as if the outer hallway was a spiral ramp going down, and the four versions of the inner room were actually stacked on top of each other. It functioned that way except for one thing: the hallway was not sloped, and the inner rooms actually took up the same physical space.
Hard to explain, really.
Then, just for fun, they added these tubes in the middle room. Each tube was an invisible teleporter (obvious if you were looking for it) that would make you appear at the top of another room -- so basically, each room had a tube that lead downwards to each of the other rooms. And it was certainly conceivable that you could have that feedback loop of falling into the same teleporter repeatedly.
Anyway, I realize this is new and very cool, especially to put it in the hands of the user. But portal technology is not actually that new -- in fact, it's quite old, almost as old as BSP itself. It usually doesn't work well except for wholly indoor environments, but it's certainly nice with a mix of other methods, so you can use the portals for things octrees simply can't do. If they're doing it right, though, the doorways in that game are possibly nothing but portals also, meaning it should be possible to walk through a doorway into a room and suddenly find yourself falling forwards...
There are three ways I know of making a normal audio CD impossible to pirate/play on a computer:
Mess with the Table of Contents. I believe this is an example of a ToC that has somehow been changed so that computers don't see it as an audio CD. Unfortunately, it would also probably affect mp3 cd players and other, similar devices which are not computers, cannot possibly enable piracy, but still read the ToC and the data areas so they can find mp3 files.
Mess with the audio data. There have been some clever attempts at changing the audio such that it sounds normal on a normal CD player, but it has annoying pops and hisses when played on a computer, or ripped to mp3. Unfortunately, this also has the same problems -- devices could always have the same problem reading the disc as computers.
Install a rootkit or other evilness in the autorun. This can be countered by one or more of the following:
Turning off autorun
Ripping on anything that isn't a Windows OS
Suing the shit out of Sony for abusing our computers
While the rootkit method will have the least false positives, it will also cause the most damage, and it's the easiest to circumvent.
I suspect that any method which allows you to burn your own DVD, even if it'll let us use single-layer media, is going to use one of the above retarded methods for attempting to prevent copy protection. They could try using Blu-Ray, except that Blu-Ray media isn't cheap enough yet.
The real question is, will the downloads be full DVD quality, and if not, will they be DRM'd before they get to the DVD? In other words, could I download these using their software (undoubtably they'll require software), then copy them over the network and play them on my Linux box?
If not, then this will likely be used to say that people will always pirate, no matter how cheap/convenient they make it. They could take a hint from the pirates, though. You can't make it much more convenient than an un-DRM'd BitTorrent download, and it's certainly cheaper to publish that way.
Here's my conditions for using this service or a service like it:
Saturate my connection, whether you use BitTorrent or HTTP.
Use a standard protocol -- BitTorrent or HTTP. Please don't use FTP.
Charge a reasonable amount (I think they're doing that now).
Let the files themselves be un-DRM'd and in a standard format -- I'd love h.264 in an avi, mkv, even mov. Note that h.264 != high def.
If you give me subtitles, let them be soft subtitles.
If I must download commentary and special features, they should be no more than 20% of the total download size.
I'd like high def with lots of extras, but that's not necessary. The above list is, though. Miss even one of those and I'll just rent them and rip them, the way I always do.
I'm sure there are web-IRC clients available too, but that's besides still the point, because Qunu gives us way more flexibility and control over the entire process.
I would think that Jabber would give you more flexibility, but IRC would give you more control.
All academic now, at least from our perspective. We've chosen Jabber, and it's serving us well so far.
I didn't think I would change your mind, honestly. I was just curious about why you'd chosen Jabber. I do think I have my answer, though. I've been a Qunu expert for a day or so, and I get it now. It's also alpha, and not currently working for me, but that's not the fault of Jabber.
Oh? Which of my two statements do you disagree with? That Java is awful, or that people are learning something other than C/C++ when they're learning Java?
Actually, it was this one:
Java itself is pretty awful, but at least people are getting used to programming in something other than C/C++.
Emphasis mine. You say that like it's a good thing. I don't really think it is.
It would be a good thing if they were learning both, but getting used to programming in nothing but Java is almost certainly worse than getting used to programming in nothing but C++.
And we use words like "Slashdotter" and "Digger". Even "Hacker" is a stretch.
I'm sure it's completely, totally, and horribly lame, and it would be just as lame if it was "Clothes for nerds. Your appearance matters." Admit it, we've got about as much right to call anyone else uncool as Charlie Manson has to call anyone else insane.
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I call BS on this. My Gentoo supported absolutely everything I tried from day one in mplayer. I can use xine for DVDs, so I get menus, and mplayer for everything else -- and it does have a GUI, and a browser plugin.
Which one? I assume Sane is what deals with scanners, and a Google search for "canon sane" returns 610,000 results...
Oh, boo frickin' hoo. Firefox isn't installed by default on Windows. Besides, you found a solution to those problems, why aren't you creating scripts to fix the problem for other people? Surely installing the OS, then running a single script to do all that law-breaking stuff isn't a problem?
Besides, I know I've got my mother trained to care whose fault it is when a website doesn't work on Firefox. She bitches at the website, not at the Firefox devs. If we all trained nontechnical girlfriends to do this, it would probably solve quite a lot of these problems -- if 500 or 1000 of Canon's users bitch at them to open their specs, there will be a Sane driver within a couple of weeks.
Regarding asian input methods, I thought you said she just needed to be able to send email back home? If so, isn't Thunderbird support enough?
Good riddance. More than half of what you've listed is really a problem with him. Let's go over this one at a time:
Sorry? I use Gaim. Not strictly an MSN client, but it works with way more protocols, and works just fine for chatting. What's terrible about aMSN, anyway?
Again, huh? I don't know about Wine, but Linux has perfectly good MIDI/tracker support. And what software (other than games) needs MIDI?
If these are old DOS games, he could probably get away with dosbox just fine. Otherwise, maybe invest in Cedega and some better games for him. I'm sure he'd love a good Quake 4...
This can probably be fixed with mplayerplug-in, but as a teenager, I didn't care for sound in webpages either. If I wanted sound, I downloaded it.
How many people need flash? I don't find myself missing it much when I use my Linux desktop, and my Powerbook gets incredibly sluggish when it's enabled.
My solution is simple: I make people choose between getting free support from me or having worthless features like these. Some choose free support, and after the first week or so, they never need it -- properly set up, their Linux just works, and continues to just work. The ones who don't, well, they pay $75/hour to the local MSCE cunts so they can run antispyware software.
To the extent that any other OS can, yes.
You're an OS X user. Ok, let's play. What can your Mac do that my Linux cannot, assuming neither of us want to educate ourselves?
In order to properly install OS X software, I have to learn about disk images. In order to properly install Linux software, I have to learn to use Synaptic. In order to uninstall OS X software, I have to buy and install one of several shareware/commercial products, and hope it does it right. In order to uninstall Linux software, I just uncheck the check box in Synaptic.
By the way, when I fix a problem on Linux, it stays fixed. On Windows, it's not likely I'll be able to fix it in the first place, much less have it stay fixed. On OS X, I have a couple of problems that I haven't yet been able to fix.
Right now, just as Intel's jumping ahead of ATI, too.
Maybe it's a sign. Maybe Intel jumped ahead of ATI because ATI sucks so much that just the anticipation of such a merger was enough to cause problems for AMD? Mabye Intel is so awesome because they already are talking to nvidia?
Of course, I've got a better combo in mind already: nVidia, period. They always talk about how they hate the x86 architecture, and wish you could just do everything on their hardware. Well, maybe they should try that... Wouldn't be the first time, after all, the nForce chipsets often required severe OS hacks to get anything working on them.
Except the entire time in college, they'll be learning the reasons for these design flaws that are really "features". For instance, always forcing that explicit "throws" keyword, or not supporting multiple inheritance, or operator overloading -- all kinds of things left out to protect you from yourself, and the manager types especially will appreciate that.
What, with nothing in the middle? But I'd teach them something like Ruby, and also teach them C and Assembly. The insanely widespread use of C means that even in a higher-level language, you'll still need an occasional syscall or something.
No, the point is to teach so many languages that no one language limits them, especially if you're using the Algol-derived ones. It wouldn't take much to go from C++ to Java, or from either of those to, say, Perl, Python, and Ruby. Especially Python should give people a compelling reason to not use C++. But even Ruby could be good -- there's a fairly usable Ruby-to-.NET compiler, meaning you get all the rapid development of Ruby, but all the speed of C#, for what that's worth.
Except you could always step back and kill them anyway, when your talk to turns back into a crosshairs at enough distance. Then you get their PDA, and possibly some ammo (the security guard early on).
No, this was to solve the problem of never using any button except the left mouse button. Which was clever, really, but I wonder what id really has against the Use key...
Good points about roleplaying, though. A lot of the useless stuff suddenly becomes useful when the RPG is at all multiplayer, and you do start to miss them... especially when they're half-assed, as in UT2004. Ok, smacking my ass and pelvic thrusting was fun for the first 50 times, but sometimes you want to do subtler things. For example, none of that is at all feminine, even if you're a female character -- where's the "smile and blush" key?
Well, Half-Life 2 had a Gravity Gun. This isn't much worse. Yet Half-Life 2 also had some very realistic gameplay, except where it was insanely unrealistic.
And if you don't think instant death is interesting, you should play with AdminMod. admin_slay, or bind admin_slap to a key -- pimpslap them up 20 feet, then let them splat...
Or stack tons of explosive barrels in a level editor, and see how far your corpse can fly...
Point is, it would still be lots of fun, and still be interesting gameplay. Remember the staircase? Probably be a lot easier if you could just jump down and not get hurt, compared with having to time and place your portals accurately enough to land softly enough to live.
No, it's not. The placable two-way teleporter is still just a teleporter -- it just has to grab anything that touches it and flip it to the other side. If your engine is that, you can try to build a portal by catching absolutely EVERYTHING -- that is, you have a camera on the other side that maps to the portal's surface, maybe it's even some fancy shader that can somehow even look right as you change perspective, and of course any object that touches it gets flipped instantaneously to the other side.
But that's not the same as a portal. A portal means literally a doorway, as far as the game is concerned. EVERYTHING that you can do through an open doorway you can do through a portal, including being half in and half out, having explosions go through, etc. It looks like these portals have figured out how to do that sanely using gravity.
The first step towards understanding portals is to stop thinking of them as leading to another part of the same world, the way they do in that Portals demo video. See them as leading to a whole other world. It's a bad analogy, but think of them more as frames, and less like hyperlinks. Once you fully grok the concept of portals as occlusion culling, you'll start to get why it's so easy to move from that to fully functional portals from one room to another part of the level. And from there, it's probably relatively easy to make them work for two parts of the same room, where you can see both ends of the portal and something half in each end simultaneously, or see your own head with the infinite fall. Well, it's hard, but nowhere near as hard as providing the same behavior for a game that had only teleporters, and no portals.
But then, IANAGP (I Am Not A Graphics/Game Programmer) -- at least, not yet.
But if I'm right, those "engine limitations" are what I'm talking about -- variations of the same thing have been done before, but that's like saying Doom was a 3D game. Quake was real 3D, Doom was not. These are likely real portals, Unreal ones probably are not, especially given what you said about shooting through them.
Because it's slow to start up, insecure, pathalogically retarded, causes nightmares for implementing a proper firewall, and you gain nothing over HTTP.
Last I checked, FTP is limited in the same way. The FTP server sending a directory listing is really it sending a chunk of text. It gives you permissions and such because that's the output of 'ls' and because it's convention, not because there's any requirement for it to.
HTTP, on the other hand, has support for something called WebDAV, which I think can actually be used as a filesystem -- it has a standard for directory listings and such, certainly allows uploading...
Besides, if I'm looking through a directory, rather than an HTML file, something's wrong with the service. Remember, we're talking about a movie service. I don't want to look at directory listings, I want to look at search results, graphics, and other such things.
Why do you need more control over file transfer than wget gives you?
That's called a misconfigured server, and it's got nothing to do with the protocol. I'm fairly sure FTP servers can just as easily refuse to send .bz2 or .gz in anything but text mode -- or who would claim they're going to, but send it as something else instead. Yes, that would be a bug -- but so is a server implementation that does that.
As far as I can tell, there is really nothing left that FTP can do that HTTP can't do better. And I figure I've run into the problems you've described about .bz2 and .gz files maybe once in the past six or seven years.
Maybe you were using Gentoo for the wrong reasons?
I never got distcc working properly -- that and ccache, and every other solution I tried to speed up compilation, simply didn't work well, or didn't work at all. After my latest round of hardware purchases, I figured out that nothing was going to take too long to compile anymore. Longer than I'd like, but not too long.
Any speed boost you get is nullified by the amount of time you spend compiling the system. Not to mention, both of my main Linux boxes are amd64 now, and my laptop is ppc, so unlike with all the various x86 stuff, there's really no advantage to compiling by hand. If there's an amd64 version of a distro, you can bet it's compiled with every optimization you'd use by yourself anyway. If your computer is slow enough to really benefit a lot from any speed upgrade, you're going to spend WAY more time compiling than you'll save from that speed increase -- this matters for your electric bill, also. If your computer is fast enough (like mine) that this isn't true, you won't see much improvement anyway.
After all, hand-tuning gcc optimizations only make sense per-package, and packages do that themselves anyway. The only reason I liked Gentoo for speed before was the global -march, but as I said, that's not really relevant when it'd always just be -march=amd64 anyway.
Prelinking was a good idea, but broke too many things too often to really be useful.
USE flags were nice, but often pointless as well. Occasionally, you got a program so broken that there were major things you had to choose at compile time -- for instance, MySQL or Postgres? But so often, I've found that the reason this matters so much in Gentoo is that it's much harder to break a source package down into pieces -- only recently has X become modular, and before then, you had to compile the entire thing, even if you only needed a couple of libraries -- ludicrous for a server. Quite often, you'll see things like nvidia-kernel and nvidia-driver, which share the same source file. And it still can't match the degree to which Debian has always broken things down -- Debian has separate packages for the SSH client and daemon, which makes sense.
The reasons I like Gentoo are the unique init system (dependency-based, so easy to multithread, instead of a fixed order), the fact that ebuilds have got to be the easiest type of package to create/edit, CPAN integration (even though it's not quite perfect, it's pretty darned slick), the nice tools, documentation, and community -- one of those three has to be responsible for the ease with which I've picked up all kinds of admining tricks. It's also nice because Gentoo can easily steal binary packages from other distros, without requiring the use of "alien" or any other such foolishness -- just grab the RPM, unpack it with rpm2cpio or some such, run a script, and you're done.
Same with some things that are simply illegal on other distros -- I can "emerge quake4" or "emerge ut2004", type "yes" at the license, then copy some files off the DVD and I'm done. Sometimes it even notices the DVD automatically. Or the Sun JDK -- I still have to download the archive manually, but the ebuild handles everything else, and since it's true package management, that means there's an uninstall, not to mention automatic upgrade notices, even if each upgrade means manually going and getting the package. And if it's really a problem, there's always Blackdown, installed by default when a package needs Java.
Gentoo does often leave packages relatively untouched from upstream, but it's also pretty easy to see what they did, as ebuilds are design to be able to fetch the upstream source directly (though they try Gentoo mirrors first), then patch them locally. Trouble is, Gentoo does sandboxing -- packages don't get to touch anything on your system until they've successfully compiled and installed to a temporary location and all that's left is the equivalent of a cp -a. This, among other things, causes them to patch some poor
Except that Nvidia is certainly the faster of the two, and tends to keep pace with development better than some open source projects.
I wouldn't be surprised to see this fixed in a week or so. Certainly not more than a month.
They'll have to do better than that to get me off Nvidia. Yes, Nvidia is proprietary, closed, and does have some problems. They also are rarely more than one minor version behind either kernel or X, and I haven't yet run into something that I can do on Windows that I can't do on Linux with these cards.
It is exciting, yes. I would buy Intel graphics if they were as good as or better than that generation of ATI or Nvidia -- especially if they were willing to work with the community, not just release specs and let someone else do all the work. I imagine they could release most of their Windows source, also. I would love to have all my hardware fully supported in the mainstream kernel, without having to choose inferior hardware.
The problem is, I have to pick one of the two: open solutions, or best possible hardware for my budget. Can I buy a $200 Intel card, and have it support all the things that my $200 Nvidia card does? Dual-headed DVI output (with very high resolution), comparable performance, with all the fun pixel, vertex, and gemoetry shaders and other features -- maybe even match the DirectX 10 cards, but using OpenGL 2.1?
The problem is, while I love open solutions, I'm sick of being ridiculed by the "My XP never crashes" people for choosing last year's tech simply because it's open.
One more reason to love Gentoo:
Done. There may be configuration required later, but the point is, drivers which aren't part of the kernel, or which you want a newer version than the kernel supports, can be distributed as "packages" on Gentoo.
Only thing left is to make a script that rebuilds them all when you install a new kernel. That's simple enough, every time you find one of these packages, add it to a file, one line per package -- say, /etc/rebuild_on_new_kernel. Then you can rebuild them all with
I admit to having Ubuntu envy -- I really wish everything was just plug'n'play, instantly installed (or preinstalled) as Ubuntu/Debian does it. But I've never seen a binary distro be able to automatically handle things like that. Granted, it shouldn't be necessary, but it is handy, especially if you compile your own kernel, or if there's weird licensing (which Nvidia does have).
I really don't see the advantage to driver CDs over that, especially when the majority of my drivers (and software) can be stored in a file and automatically kept up to date, even reinstalled when I feel like reinstalling the whole OS (maybe moving to a new box, new arch, etc)...
Compare that to "pop the CD in, next-next-next, reboot, pop another CD in..." Maybe it's easier to figure out what to do, but it takes much more time even if you know what you're doing.
That's just your average teleportation device. Another example is the normal teleporters that are all over your average Quake/Doom/Unreal map. Basically, you activate it and it moves you.
Portals are much cooler because it's not like you're looking through a portal or a teleporter -- a portal really is just a hole in the wall that happens to lead to another part of the map. You've probably played plenty of games with Portal without realizing it, because it's usually used for occlusion culling for indoor geometry.
It basically means your game geometry is a linked list, only more complex... like hyperlinks...
Nevermind, let me try and translate. Say you have three rooms in an L shape. If you're in the first room, looking into the second, but you can't see the entrance to the third room, then the game can skip drawing the entire third room. It can break the second room down, also -- you could have a portal in the middle of the room, so that half the room can just be ignored if it knows you can't see the portal to that half of the room.
They also have the nifty ability to do crazy stuff like this, because the portal between two rooms is really only a pointer between them, in the literal, programming sense.
So, this implementation may be the most polished user-modifiable portals you've seen, but you've probably seen plenty of very polished portals that you never knew were there. That, and the UT thing you mentioned isn't really portals...
So if it really matters that much (you aren't just making a completely new engine), how hard is it to just, say, mod Quake 4?
Oh noes! That would be soooo hard! In fact, no one's probably ever done it before!
Yes, I know that second project is closed. The reason has nothing to do with drivers. Booting an entire OS to play a single game takes too damned long, even if it boots right into the game. Even then, it's just entirely too easy to pirate a game distributed that way, unless they add some proprietary modules and make sure the game requires a dual-layer DVD. It's difficult or impossible to save, unless you have a way of saving online, which is why they used America's Army. And especially if you're doing that, or an MMO, you'll have to patch the game sooner or later, not to mention the rest of the OS -- this is where drivers matter -- unless you burn a whole new DVD.
It could be done, but it would be extremely difficult, both for you and for the end-user, unless you require a Windows partition on which to save the game (making the bootability pointless) or require the end-user to answer the same stupid questions every time they boot the CD. Only other thing I can think of is configuring the CD before you burn it to know where to look on your hard drive for savegames and patches, but that makes it too easy to pirate, if you let them burn their own CDs. But if you did that, you'd have something like the Xbox 360, where you can patch games that are running off the DVD with something like unionfs and a hard drive -- thus, files which exist on the hard drive are used instead, files which don't are pulled from the CD.
Another possibility would be to skip the CD altogether, and just install another OS to their hard drive. But you still have portability and annoyance issues -- if I already have Linux, why can't I just run it without rebooting? If I have Windows, why should I have to install Linux (even without partitioning) and reboot just to play a damned game?
But really, drivers are such a small problem for most people trying to run Linux that it's not worth mentioning. Development tools aren't the issue either. The real issue is, no one seems to care.
No, they decided to stop offering the service you were used to getting for free, and replace it with a different service (also free).
I actually like Steam, because unlike other forms of spyware or DRM (both of which are evil), Steam actually stays 100% out of my way, without significantly changing the model for my owning a game.
Let's compare Steam to other copy protection models:
CD Keys. Don't work, easily broken by "borrowing" a friend's key and denying access to the game's authentication servers.
Requiring the CD to be inserted. This is either ludicrously easy to beat (create another virtual drive in Wine, change some registry values, or put a snigle file on a single Samba share in Windows) or insanely annoying, or both. In any case, it prevents backups, and it shortens the life of the original CD, assuming it works.
Making the game a service (MMO). Great, so I pay $50 or $60 for the game, then you want me to spend $15 a month to keep playing? Not usually worth it, and only works for MMOs.
Steam. Well, it may be a steaming pile of crap technologically (IE all over), but it means that once I pay for a game, I've paid for it. I can then play said game from any computer that I remember my Steam password on, and every time I play it, I get to download and install the software. It also automatically provides me updates in a fairly unobtrusive way (something I've never had another game do), and not only allows me to play the game without a CD, not only allows me to download any number of times, but actually provides me with a tool to back up a copy of any number of Steam games to a CD or DVD, in a way that's account neutral -- which means if my friend buys Half-Life 2, I can burn a CD of the game and give it to him, saving him from waiting for the download.
It's even been good about asking before it sends info in. A hardware survey, for instance. Whereas these other pieces of spyware tend to collect personal info, send it in, silently eat up resources in the background with no explanation as to why, and cannot be shut off effectively.
I mean, yes, by some definition, it's Spyware, but by the same definition, so is Windows. Your copy of Windows would be very, very broken if you didn't get your automatic updates.
Anyway, end of rant, but I really get sick of all the hatred against Steam every time it comes up. You want an argument that distinguishes Steam from these other things? Steam actually adds value. Most spyware generally does nothing for you, steals your resources, pops up messages, and sends spam. Steam does none of these things, but lets you do things (legally!) that no other game or game platform lets you do at all.
It could also help with the idea that an orbit is really a straight line. An infinite corrodor is a good start for that. You could even let people look off to one side and see the sun, and on the other side of the sun, see the very corrodor they're in.
Duke3D also did this, and had some secret levels that demonstrated it. They used it to allow things like elevators and stairs and multi-story buildings while still being 2.5D. Even some of the normal levels that make sense in full 3D have some amazing tricks for this, but it really gets fun when you start messing with the level editor. An elevator that looks and feels like it travels vertically, but you end up a mile away horizontally? Swim across town underwater and surface in the exact same spot? All possible, and very fun to play with.
Speaking of which, I wish the newer Duke3D source ports would work for me...
I don't think that will work, but if it were possible -- maybe right-click for portal A and left-click for portal B, make them different colors? -- then that would be an awesomely cheap way of doing insane things. For instance: I don't think the Source engine measures the speed with which you impact a wall, only the ground (while falling). Thus, you use your portal loop to store kinetic energy, then fire a portal at the wall and BOOM! You go flying across the room like you were shot out of a cannon! Or if the portal gun has limited range, and there's a clifside in front of you, just start a portal loop indoors, pick up speed, then drop a portal on the ground in front of you and you'll go flying straight up!
That's only fun if impact with walls can cause damage. Your opponent speeds up with a portal loop, then launches themself at your portal, only to smack into a wall.
But that may be taking it a bit too far. I don't really see fake portals as anything but a nuscience, kind of like making a Counter-Strike spray of a terrorist firing at you.
If portals work the way I think they do, you'll be accelerating if you're in that kind of a portal loop (floor to ceiling) just as if you were falling an indefinite amount of distance. Remove the portals and SPLAT! You have become a small crater.
Of course, it would help for a floor to floor fall, as in that case, you're constantly changing direction, so you never pick up any real speed. Still, I think the real solution is the same as the solution to not blowing yourself up with a rocket launcher: Don't be a dumbass.
The idea of portals has been around for ages. Anyone who knows anything about 3D programming should know about the differences between Portals, Octrees, BSP trees, and so on.
In fact, if I remember right, Duke Nukem 3D was played essentially as a portal system with all the limitations of Doom. For instance, I once made a fun level which had a long ramp/tunnel that sloped downwards, but otherwise went straight to an elevator, and you bring the elevator up and you're at the top of the ramp, even though the elevator was just taking you straight up.
Another example was a secret level which was shaped like this (warning, ASCII art):
Yeah, my ASCII art sucks. Anyway, like that -- square/donut shaped -- only bigger. The inner room was huge, the outer hallway was narrow, and in each of the four cardinal directions, there was an open doorway between them. Only the inner room was a completely different room depending on which door you were going through.
In other words, because of the way Duke Nukem fakes 3D, you can think of it as if the outer hallway was a spiral ramp going down, and the four versions of the inner room were actually stacked on top of each other. It functioned that way except for one thing: the hallway was not sloped, and the inner rooms actually took up the same physical space.
Hard to explain, really.
Then, just for fun, they added these tubes in the middle room. Each tube was an invisible teleporter (obvious if you were looking for it) that would make you appear at the top of another room -- so basically, each room had a tube that lead downwards to each of the other rooms. And it was certainly conceivable that you could have that feedback loop of falling into the same teleporter repeatedly.
Anyway, I realize this is new and very cool, especially to put it in the hands of the user. But portal technology is not actually that new -- in fact, it's quite old, almost as old as BSP itself. It usually doesn't work well except for wholly indoor environments, but it's certainly nice with a mix of other methods, so you can use the portals for things octrees simply can't do. If they're doing it right, though, the doorways in that game are possibly nothing but portals also, meaning it should be possible to walk through a doorway into a room and suddenly find yourself falling forwards...
There are three ways I know of making a normal audio CD impossible to pirate/play on a computer:
- Turning off autorun
- Ripping on anything that isn't a Windows OS
- Suing the shit out of Sony for abusing our computers
While the rootkit method will have the least false positives, it will also cause the most damage, and it's the easiest to circumvent.I suspect that any method which allows you to burn your own DVD, even if it'll let us use single-layer media, is going to use one of the above retarded methods for attempting to prevent copy protection. They could try using Blu-Ray, except that Blu-Ray media isn't cheap enough yet.
The real question is, will the downloads be full DVD quality, and if not, will they be DRM'd before they get to the DVD? In other words, could I download these using their software (undoubtably they'll require software), then copy them over the network and play them on my Linux box?
If not, then this will likely be used to say that people will always pirate, no matter how cheap/convenient they make it. They could take a hint from the pirates, though. You can't make it much more convenient than an un-DRM'd BitTorrent download, and it's certainly cheaper to publish that way.
Here's my conditions for using this service or a service like it:
I'd like high def with lots of extras, but that's not necessary. The above list is, though. Miss even one of those and I'll just rent them and rip them, the way I always do.
I would think that Jabber would give you more flexibility, but IRC would give you more control.
I didn't think I would change your mind, honestly. I was just curious about why you'd chosen Jabber. I do think I have my answer, though. I've been a Qunu expert for a day or so, and I get it now. It's also alpha, and not currently working for me, but that's not the fault of Jabber.
Actually, it was this one:
Emphasis mine. You say that like it's a good thing. I don't really think it is.
It would be a good thing if they were learning both, but getting used to programming in nothing but Java is almost certainly worse than getting used to programming in nothing but C++.
And we use words like "Slashdotter" and "Digger". Even "Hacker" is a stretch.
I'm sure it's completely, totally, and horribly lame, and it would be just as lame if it was "Clothes for nerds. Your appearance matters." Admit it, we've got about as much right to call anyone else uncool as Charlie Manson has to call anyone else insane.