As a former sysadmin for an Army brigade, I can tell you that we would have failed an audit horribly as well, considering we simply installed Windows or Office or whatever on any machine whenever we needed to. In fact, probably the only machines that we could guarantee had licensed software, were the ones that came pre-installed with it from Dell.
Then, IIRC, round about mid '03 the Army made a deal with MS where they forked over ~$400 million for unlimited installations of a long list of MS software on Army computers for a number of years. This was no doubt partly to cover the widespread unlicensed copies.
We use XFS quite successfully on our production servers and also more notably on our compute cluster. Due to some bad hardware from a defunct vendor, these nodes reboot pretty often and users always want to recover their data or restart their jobs, and most of our stuff uses rather volatile text-based file formats. So, if data were getting corrupted even occasionally with XFS losing power, I think we would have noticed by now. Perhaps power loss issues have been fixed?
As this entire article seems to have been hijacked by complaining about the interface, I thought I would comment on a game that I have been enjoying for a couple years now, Mount & Blade. Now while it was only recently 'released', it has been in a perpetual open beta for maybe up to three years now. So I have seen it come a long way. As (most of) the reviewers in TFA point out, the game really shines in the combat and it has been this way since nearly the beginning. Only a few things like AI and the addition and improvement of the few tactical commands available (for maneuvering your army) have changed. Thus the game has long been the closest gaming experience to participating in a massive medieval battle fighting for your life.
Now I did not read any of the reviews, but I am quite perplexed by some of the things that the reviewers had to complain about. No, this game is not perfect, but somehow the reviewers and I see totally different imperfections. First of all, two of them complained about the combat system and how some kind of "lock on" feature would make the system better. What is the matter with you people? Would you like some auto-aim with your dumbed-downness (a fine neologism). Seriously, if you have ever played any FPSes you will have no trouble with this game.
Secondly, another reoccurring complaint about the game was the lack of a main story or any kind of instruction after the tutorial. Well, you start out on the world map and I figure it is not too hard to discover that clicking on said map will move your party to the location of that click. There are a whole bunch of city-looking structures on this map with names on them, perhaps clicking on one of those would take you somewhere interesting? Then once in a town it is pretty much standard RPG-fare to talk to everyone that you encounter. Now honestly, the townspeople and vendors don't have anything interesting to say, however talk to the right characters and pretty soon you have a quest. Rinse and repeat.
Now while the game plays as an open ended RPG and you can pretty well do whatever you like in the game, there really is only one worthwhile goal and that is to amass as many fiefs, castles, and towns in your holdings as possible. Usually this means signing up with one of the kings of the five factions and fighting to further that faction's cause. Early on you will have a smaller war band, so it is best to tag along with others and try to participate in their battles and sieges, and if your contribution really counts, it will improve your relations with the lords with whom you campaign. Once you have good relations, you can ask these lords in the field to follow you and they will join battles and sieges which you start. Later in the game, you will have amassed enough renown and good relations that your faction will elect you as their marshall. The marshall has the ability to give orders to any of the other lords, including the king(!) and they will follow them. Now you can really do some damage as you can lead around several lords totaling an army of several hundred, assign others to protect strategic areas, or send lords to ravage your enemy's countryside. This is where the most fun is to be had, I think.
Lastly, the most glaring thing ignored in the review are the numerous and diverse mods there are for Mount & Blade. The game has a module set written in Python available which generates input files for the game, so it is quite easy to tweak things and this has led to a number of total conversions. A few notable ones include the Pirate mod, LOTR mod, even an old western mod. Though I have played mostly the vanilla version, I have a feeling that the best gameplay is to be found with one of these mods.
I could go on, but this is long enough as it is. If any of this sounds remotely interesting, I would recommend trying the demo which lets you play up until your character reaches level 5. It is available at Taleworlds.com but also on Steam.
If you are looking to build a portfolio to show off to prospective employers, I think there is no better way to build one than participating in one of many open source gaming projects out there. Obviously others have suggested mods and successful mods that have gained commercial interest, but this is a very tiny percent of all the mods made, and a fractional one of mods started. At least with an open source project posted on SourceForge or something else there is no chance of the project which you have invested a good deal of time and work into disappearing overnight as happens with many mod 'teams'. Not to mention the usual advantages of FOSS development.
So, you might take a look around at what sorts of projects are available and prove to the gaming industry that you have what it takes to write for a game project. I happen to work on a TES: Daggerfall inspired project called DungeonHack and we are always 'hiring'.;)
Celtic runes? Now you are just making stuff up. Also any so called 'runes' would constitute a script, thus you would transliterate them, not translate them. Let us assume that you also have to translate something into English (not the Latin alphabet?), so what did you write with these runes of yours, your key in proto-Celtic? In which case you probably meant to say Ogham script and not runes. Right.
Heh, that one certainly brings back memories. When I was in the Army I used sleep in all sorts of places. It didn't really matter where. Now I have been out for four years and naps are out of the question, even though I am constantly staying up late and depriving myself of sleep. Maybe it has something to do with sleep deprivation + PT in the morning?;)
Forgive my ignorance, but what parts of the DMCA are you referencing? Does it have something to do with the reverse engineering portion?
I just moved into an apartment building with shared internet, and the company providing the service reserves the right to snoop on all traffic. While I have nothing to worry about, I prefer to show them that my traffic is none of their business by running basically everything over ssh and ssh tunnels. I have been considering looking into Tor, or something similar so knowing any issues beforehand would be nice. Honestly, I don't really fancy getting cease-and-desist letters on account of traffic going through my co-located server.;)
Even failing that, it is not too hard to reverse engineer file formats given tools, time, and enough interest. People are doing it all the time today even. With computer systems of the future (tens or even hundreds of years) it will be even easier to smash through encryption and encodings, analyze files for patterns which make up some sort of data, mine the data for something actually useful, and so on.
I think you are gravely undervaluing the worth of things from antiquity. Though I have no evidence on hand, I would wager that to say "nothing from archeology has ever helped to advance current technology" would be a falsehood. Now, I do agree with you concerning things from the late 20th century. There is already a glut of this. So much in fact that no one in their right mind 2000 years from now would want to go through all of it. Not by hand anyway.
Besides, I would rather no one saw the website that I put up in '96 ever again.
It is a pretty typical way to distribute installers on Linux. Open up your favorite terminal and run: sh install-crossover-games-7.1.2.sh
Or simply make it executable and run it that way. To install system wide you will need to be root of course, or use sudo, or even the commonly overlooked su -c 'cmd' syntax. Personally, I would install it as a local user if possible, because I don't appreciate junk outside of package management all over my system.
This is how I run all my games. And it is even simpler than you say, e.g.:
xinit `which quake4` --:1
Not only is the task switching nice and efficient, but you also avoid hanging your main X session with a crashed game, screwing up your resolution and thus jumbling all your windows (though I run a tiling WM), and so on.
True, the selection of games suffers compared to Windows, but honestly there are enough worthy cross-platform and FOSS games to keep one entertained if you are willing to forego drooling over the latest AAA games out there.
Despite the obvious humor here, you make a good point in displaying the output of what is clearly a pattern matching system with perhaps a bit of sophistication beyond that. Not only are we lacking in our ability to create real "intelligence", as the parent poster's parent pointed out, but the NLP (Natural Language Processing) is also not there yet in the sense that machines cannot consistently produce natural speech/text. A number of things ALICE said here are borderline grammatical, and uncomfortable at best.
Where in the world do you live? Vatican City? I have not heard of any such thing, and I know of numerous bands across the world with far more inflammatory names than the hardly eyebrow raising one you have stated.
Try some choice ones such as: Impaled Nazarene, Bastard Christ, Christian Epidemic, Dead Christ Cult, and so on. Many more to be found on this list. And these are just names, nevermind song titles and lyrics.
Slashdot Mirror
It is only sexy if you have pommes frites and hot grits.
As a former sysadmin for an Army brigade, I can tell you that we would have failed an audit horribly as well, considering we simply installed Windows or Office or whatever on any machine whenever we needed to. In fact, probably the only machines that we could guarantee had licensed software, were the ones that came pre-installed with it from Dell.
Then, IIRC, round about mid '03 the Army made a deal with MS where they forked over ~$400 million for unlimited installations of a long list of MS software on Army computers for a number of years. This was no doubt partly to cover the widespread unlicensed copies.
If you are sitting through a disk check on every reboot, you might want to consider a journaling file system..
..Unless you are complaining about the time it takes to replay the journal, in which case you have bigger problems.
..failure is never a question of IT, only a question of when.
There, fixed it for you.
Clearly what you need is redundant hung-over techies.
If you don't already have them, that is.
We use XFS quite successfully on our production servers and also more notably on our compute cluster. Due to some bad hardware from a defunct vendor, these nodes reboot pretty often and users always want to recover their data or restart their jobs, and most of our stuff uses rather volatile text-based file formats. So, if data were getting corrupted even occasionally with XFS losing power, I think we would have noticed by now. Perhaps power loss issues have been fixed?
As this entire article seems to have been hijacked by complaining about the interface, I thought I would comment on a game that I have been enjoying for a couple years now, Mount & Blade. Now while it was only recently 'released', it has been in a perpetual open beta for maybe up to three years now. So I have seen it come a long way. As (most of) the reviewers in TFA point out, the game really shines in the combat and it has been this way since nearly the beginning. Only a few things like AI and the addition and improvement of the few tactical commands available (for maneuvering your army) have changed. Thus the game has long been the closest gaming experience to participating in a massive medieval battle fighting for your life.
Now I did not read any of the reviews, but I am quite perplexed by some of the things that the reviewers had to complain about. No, this game is not perfect, but somehow the reviewers and I see totally different imperfections. First of all, two of them complained about the combat system and how some kind of "lock on" feature would make the system better. What is the matter with you people? Would you like some auto-aim with your dumbed-downness (a fine neologism). Seriously, if you have ever played any FPSes you will have no trouble with this game.
Secondly, another reoccurring complaint about the game was the lack of a main story or any kind of instruction after the tutorial. Well, you start out on the world map and I figure it is not too hard to discover that clicking on said map will move your party to the location of that click. There are a whole bunch of city-looking structures on this map with names on them, perhaps clicking on one of those would take you somewhere interesting? Then once in a town it is pretty much standard RPG-fare to talk to everyone that you encounter. Now honestly, the townspeople and vendors don't have anything interesting to say, however talk to the right characters and pretty soon you have a quest. Rinse and repeat.
Now while the game plays as an open ended RPG and you can pretty well do whatever you like in the game, there really is only one worthwhile goal and that is to amass as many fiefs, castles, and towns in your holdings as possible. Usually this means signing up with one of the kings of the five factions and fighting to further that faction's cause. Early on you will have a smaller war band, so it is best to tag along with others and try to participate in their battles and sieges, and if your contribution really counts, it will improve your relations with the lords with whom you campaign. Once you have good relations, you can ask these lords in the field to follow you and they will join battles and sieges which you start. Later in the game, you will have amassed enough renown and good relations that your faction will elect you as their marshall. The marshall has the ability to give orders to any of the other lords, including the king(!) and they will follow them. Now you can really do some damage as you can lead around several lords totaling an army of several hundred, assign others to protect strategic areas, or send lords to ravage your enemy's countryside. This is where the most fun is to be had, I think.
Lastly, the most glaring thing ignored in the review are the numerous and diverse mods there are for Mount & Blade. The game has a module set written in Python available which generates input files for the game, so it is quite easy to tweak things and this has led to a number of total conversions. A few notable ones include the Pirate mod, LOTR mod, even an old western mod. Though I have played mostly the vanilla version, I have a feeling that the best gameplay is to be found with one of these mods.
I could go on, but this is long enough as it is. If any of this sounds remotely interesting, I would recommend trying the demo which lets you play up until your character reaches level 5. It is available at Taleworlds.com but also on Steam.
If you are looking to build a portfolio to show off to prospective employers, I think there is no better way to build one than participating in one of many open source gaming projects out there. Obviously others have suggested mods and successful mods that have gained commercial interest, but this is a very tiny percent of all the mods made, and a fractional one of mods started. At least with an open source project posted on SourceForge or something else there is no chance of the project which you have invested a good deal of time and work into disappearing overnight as happens with many mod 'teams'. Not to mention the usual advantages of FOSS development.
;)
So, you might take a look around at what sorts of projects are available and prove to the gaming industry that you have what it takes to write for a game project. I happen to work on a TES: Daggerfall inspired project called DungeonHack and we are always 'hiring'.
Oh, that cracks me up. Where have my mod points gone when I need them?
I hope you didn't say anything about the dirty knife.
Celtic runes? Now you are just making stuff up. Also any so called 'runes' would constitute a script, thus you would transliterate them, not translate them. Let us assume that you also have to translate something into English (not the Latin alphabet?), so what did you write with these runes of yours, your key in proto-Celtic? In which case you probably meant to say Ogham script and not runes. Right.
"You have been such great customers, this latest shipment comes with a free carwash!"
Heh, that one certainly brings back memories. When I was in the Army I used sleep in all sorts of places. It didn't really matter where. Now I have been out for four years and naps are out of the question, even though I am constantly staying up late and depriving myself of sleep. Maybe it has something to do with sleep deprivation + PT in the morning? ;)
Forgive my ignorance, but what parts of the DMCA are you referencing? Does it have something to do with the reverse engineering portion?
I just moved into an apartment building with shared internet, and the company providing the service reserves the right to snoop on all traffic. While I have nothing to worry about, I prefer to show them that my traffic is none of their business by running basically everything over ssh and ssh tunnels. I have been considering looking into Tor, or something similar so knowing any issues beforehand would be nice. Honestly, I don't really fancy getting cease-and-desist letters on account of traffic going through my co-located server. ;)
No kidding.
Even failing that, it is not too hard to reverse engineer file formats given tools, time, and enough interest. People are doing it all the time today even. With computer systems of the future (tens or even hundreds of years) it will be even easier to smash through encryption and encodings, analyze files for patterns which make up some sort of data, mine the data for something actually useful, and so on.
I think you are gravely undervaluing the worth of things from antiquity. Though I have no evidence on hand, I would wager that to say "nothing from archeology has ever helped to advance current technology" would be a falsehood. Now, I do agree with you concerning things from the late 20th century. There is already a glut of this. So much in fact that no one in their right mind 2000 years from now would want to go through all of it. Not by hand anyway.
Besides, I would rather no one saw the website that I put up in '96 ever again.
"Free Software" has been in a lot of Slashdot titles and it has had little to do with Codeweavers' actions today.
It is a pretty typical way to distribute installers on Linux. Open up your favorite terminal and run:
sh install-crossover-games-7.1.2.sh
Or simply make it executable and run it that way. To install system wide you will need to be root of course, or use sudo, or even the commonly overlooked su -c 'cmd' syntax. Personally, I would install it as a local user if possible, because I don't appreciate junk outside of package management all over my system.
Cygwin + urxvt = problem solved. Yeah, running an X server on top of Windows is more bloat, but hey, it is already bloated anyway!
This is how I run all my games. And it is even simpler than you say, e.g.:
:1
xinit `which quake4` --
Not only is the task switching nice and efficient, but you also avoid hanging your main X session with a crashed game, screwing up your resolution and thus jumbling all your windows (though I run a tiling WM), and so on.
True, the selection of games suffers compared to Windows, but honestly there are enough worthy cross-platform and FOSS games to keep one entertained if you are willing to forego drooling over the latest AAA games out there.
When I am using vi(m), I press ctrl+[ which produces the same key code as escape. =)
Despite the obvious humor here, you make a good point in displaying the output of what is clearly a pattern matching system with perhaps a bit of sophistication beyond that. Not only are we lacking in our ability to create real "intelligence", as the parent poster's parent pointed out, but the NLP (Natural Language Processing) is also not there yet in the sense that machines cannot consistently produce natural speech/text. A number of things ALICE said here are borderline grammatical, and uncomfortable at best.
The federal government is all about bloat, and now being part of it, clearly he favors emacs.
Why in the world would you reboot for that?
Where in the world do you live? Vatican City? I have not heard of any such thing, and I know of numerous bands across the world with far more inflammatory names than the hardly eyebrow raising one you have stated.
Try some choice ones such as: Impaled Nazarene, Bastard Christ, Christian Epidemic, Dead Christ Cult, and so on. Many more to be found on this list. And these are just names, nevermind song titles and lyrics.