This may be california dreaming, but what if we had Battlefront 3 on the Wii? Lightsaber noises and much slashing when in Jedi mode, much aiming and B-button smashing in "normal troop" mode, and (!) tilt-control with A-targeting, B-primary fire, and Z-secondary fire in "space battle mode" with some C-button/stick use for position changing, or nunchuk-flicking...
Same with the KOTOR franchise.
Of course, the game length would be limited by the size constraints of the DVD9 format, but the X360 proved there is some pretty awesome compression that can be implemented (possibly a wii firmware upgrade)
*drools at 300+-hour games using Wii-style controls*
Actually, it *is* capable of sensing its position in 3d space.
Proof:
Put an SD card with 1 or more photos on it in the SD slot. Now, go to the "fun" tool in the Photo Channel, and select the scissors. Pick the oval you want to copy, and hit A.
Now, move closer to the screen, and further away from the screen.
The author mentioned his incredulity that Final Fantasy is on XII. While this is *technically* true, I feel it necessary to point out that A: the very nature of Final Fantasy does not lend itself to sequels the way that games such as Halo, Half-Life, or Elder Scrolls, or even Fable do. Well, you can have "sequels" (FFVII: Dirge of Cerberus, FFX-2) but they really don't turn out very well (I've not played DoS, or FFVII even, but FFX2 sucked so hard it made Albuquerque windy for a couple days when I bought it). Final Fantasy "major-version" releases are usually independent games with NO ties to the previous version whatsoever.
This has its upsides and its downsides. All the fanboys will immediately go buy the next Final Fantasy game pretty much without even renting it, just because it's Final Fantasy, which actually demotivates Square for the next game of the series. Not that I'm saying any of the FF games have sucked, other than FFX2. Just that this is the problem with most franchise style games, which is why Okami, Katamari Damacy, and LocoRoco are so awesome: New concept, *extremely trippy concept*, and they're BLOODY FUN TO PLAY! I've played demos of Okami and LocoRoco and the full version of Katamari (even though I'm not THAT good at it).
In other news, the story of Fable: The Lost Chapters and Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind (Game of the Year edition) is extremely good (emphasis on Fable) and capable of engrossing people who enjoy decent RPGs, or people who can't afford a bunch of games.
And I *definitely* wouldn't be talking about myself in that last semi-paragraph. No, not at all. Never!
noone's mentioned the Motorla V330. Waay more reliable than the V300, a decent camera, if it does take a long time to register the picture saves. I had no dropped calls, awesome reception everywhere but on the local mountain (cingular phones had reception up there, not my T-Mobile) and decent media features. I wouldn't recommend using the AIM client on it, it has some issues with 100+-member buddy lists.
But I lost that phone and upgraded to a T-Mobile (HTC) SDA (Hurricane) smartphone. Aside from the fact that it runs Windows Mobile instead of everyone's favorite operating system, and that the keys are incredibly close together and small, it's the best phone I've ever had occasion to handle. Relatively inexpensive, too.
Unfortunately, thanks to my credit rating, I am on SmartAccess for another 4 months, before I can get the data plan, so I can't really report on its GPRS/EDGE speeds or quality, but it does have decent WiFi support.
It doesn't use a standard mini-USB cable to connect to the computer, although it does charge with the same USB cable as I use to connect my PSP up.
actually, sudo -s kind of destroys the need for sudo su. And my vote is... I always use sudo, since it Just Works (tm)... Even if it is a bit annoying when I make 30 lines of changes to/etc/network/interfaces, and then go to save and vim says "read-only file" because idiot me forgot 4 letters.;x
If you'd actually, god forbid, read my reply, you'd see that I essentially said that beta implementations of a proven-stable protocol are quite useless, and in fact, I wasn't disagreeing with you.
In Linux, there's a small modification I can make to the initialization script on my OpenWRT-firmware WRT54G router. It enables my IPv6 tunnel to he.net. After that, it's a simple matter of turning on radvd on the router, and presto! All my Linux machines, and assumably any *BSD machines I don't know about having, are using IPv6.
I'm curious to know if MacOS X supports radvd broadcasting as well.
Actually, Wind'ohs can be had with IPv6 support. Windows eXtra Problems has an MS-sanctioned IPv6 implementation, even though it is "intended for development use and trial network deployments" (http://www.ipv6.org/impl/windows.html)
Windows 2000BC can have IPv6... with a MS-sanctioned add-on designed by Microsoft Research... Which in itself rings a big warning light, because if Microsoft considers something beta software, it must be even more unstable than their OSes.
Users of Windows 95-98 and assumably ME and NT4.0 can use Trumpet Software's Winsock v5.0 to connect, using IPv6-aware applications, via IPv6. This is not a very neat way of doing it however, and I do not recommend it, as Winsock is primarily a modem dialer (I personally used it back in the Windows 3.1 days to connect to my ISP via a 14.4 modem)
However, when the US *does* act when the UN is disinterested, the people who are asked to act are the next generation of Americans. The "plight" of the rest of the country seems to have no importance to our current administration.
The US has a military budget at least 3 times that of Russia, is smaller than Russia, and is less populated than Russia. If some of that good olde Amerikan money were diverted from feeding Our Bush's warmongering to feeding Our Poor, this country wouldn't be the war-mongering cesspool it is now.
Conversely, the gene pool is being slowly cleansed of the warrior types that are useless outside of wartime, but invaluable when truly needed. So we can thank Dubya for that at least... Too bad he's a chicken hawk draft dodger.
Alteration can be done with software like the GIMP (afaik it has a PDF import filter), OOo, Koffice, and others. Also, alteration can be done by using software like pdf2ps and opening the ps file in an editor or something.
Won't work. The point of purging the 90+ day old messages is so that noone has to meta-check them for importance. Unless you want to hire a cadre of Trained Monkeys to look at the positives. It'd be a 1-banana job, and would have to pay bargain-basement peanuts.
Your statement about drivers is essentially ass-speak. The drivers for the Windows box that are included on the CD are if the generic ones don't work. In contrast, the Linux distro (barring the user being smart enough to recompile a kernel successfully) with most distros' default kernels, is quite sufficient for the ABC corp, XYZ-68 printer bought at wal-mart for $50. On Windows, there might be drivers included with Windows, the generic might work... and it might not. The same is true for Linux. It's also true, to a lesser extent, on MacOS.
As I said in a previous post, "Backwards compatibility is for those people who can't write new software." If you're using *really* old software, there's probably a reason, and I respect your choice to run said *really* old sotware. However, on the same token, you can't expect to upgrade your OS and keep compatibility with that *really* old software. If you're running programs dating to the 1970s, written in some obsolete language like FORTRAN IV, you deserve to have your chain pulled, and move to something more recent. If you're so dependent on old versions of shared libraries, mightn't it be a good idea to find a similar program in a more recent version of those shared libraries, but still compatible? Or find a way to make the old software work on the new OS with all the new software? Example: When KDE 3.2-beta1 came out, XMMS was (and is) using GTK+-1.x, and glib1. The artsd 1.2.0 and its betas used glib2. Glib1 and Glib2 can't communicate with each other without breaking each other. Hence, XMMS was unable to use artsd as the output mechanism. The most obvious (to Joe Luser) solution, moving XMMS to gtk2, was not the simplest, or the most elegant. The eventual solution was to write a helper program that could communicate with artsd somehow (IANAP, so I don't know how this was done, I just know it was done) that XMMS could talk to.
So you see, the solution to backwards compatibility is not black and white. Nor is it even really grey. You can "innovate" without being "different" but then you turn out Microsoft products. "innovation" only happens when someone is not afraid to be different, be ahead of the flock, become the ruler. For this, I applaud the developers of the Y window system, because they're taking the plunge and breaking some compatibility to truly innovate.
(break out your buzzword bingo cards as you read that)
This is a good idea, in principle, but the execution could use a little work.
It could be done very simply with a Linux/KDE-3.2.0 box, implementing the KiosK framework to repeat a presentation upon pressing a predefined key on the keyboard, with a screensaver that indicates what key to press. The presentation would describe the benifits of OSS, the options available, and the use of a prebuilt interface (you could create a simple interface like the project selection option in k3b 0.11.1, by default in the lower left corner of the window on startup) to select the OSS software they wanted to burn. They either bring their own blank CD-Rs or buy one (at a cost) from the library, and bring a case or buy a sleeve at the desk, and insert case into the CD-RW drive's slot, and have complimentary (or cheap) coffee/donuts for their use of the OSSKIOSK.
This software would be comparatively simple to write (compared to a new GUI that wouldn't use the kiosk framework, which is quite decently documented) and would accomplish the purpose.
My concern is people abusing the system to subvert it. http://www.suprnova.org/ It wouldn't have to have network connectivity, let alone be a blazingly speedy box. The LUG could sponsor the CD-Rs at a significantly dropped cost compared to normal.
It could work. I should talk to my library about this. Thanks for the suggestion.
1) Old people don't normally use Linux. 2) If they do, they're in the IT field. 3) Your argument about automatically working on plug-in fits MacOS x.y like a glove. 4) Old software working: You have a mainly valid point here. 5) As many OSS beacons would say: "Backwards compatibility is for people who can't write new software." (well, okay, that was a paraphrasing of Linus, but it applies IMHO)
You can't write good software if you're trying to keep compatibility with version x.y.z-abcd of libblah-x.yz, when libblah was deprecated aeons ago. It's like writing CD-RW programs that need SCSI-emulation, when we have 2.6 with successful ATAPI burning support.
As a computer security professor I talked to once said: "If you don't start out with security as a Job 0 process, and instead work on making the old stuff good by patching it together, you eventually come out with a Microsoft product."
While Linux isn't really written with security as job 0, its use of the GPL makes it very subject to peer-review and this makes security very prominent in the development cycle.
Distros like Debian, with its Security Team, also contribute scads of security stuff, as well as reviewing non-kernel code for security holes.
In summary, breaking software support is not necessarily a bad thing. Backwards compatibility is taken far too seriously in the PC world. Example: the outburst back in the mid '90s when the executive decision to move the Amiga community to PowerPC-based stuff, away from the 680x0 processor. This change was almost certainly a good thing, but the outburst from the Amiga zealot community was equivalent to that of a bunch of Mandrake users being told that they're moving over to *BSD or Gentoo and they don't have to configure it themselves.
You don't see Linux users complaining when libblahfoo.xy doesn't work with kernel 2.6.5 but did with 2.6.4. You see them rewrite their badly-written programs to use libblah-AB instead of libblah-xy because AB is better anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
Too many syllables per line, mate. It's not a haiku.
And too many lines.
Unfortunate that
you must persist in these bad
non-haiku hotness
Which is ironic, because that was a haiku.
Ha.
This may be california dreaming, but what if we had Battlefront 3 on the Wii? Lightsaber noises and much slashing when in Jedi mode, much aiming and B-button smashing in "normal troop" mode, and (!) tilt-control with A-targeting, B-primary fire, and Z-secondary fire in "space battle mode" with some C-button/stick use for position changing, or nunchuk-flicking...
Same with the KOTOR franchise.
Of course, the game length would be limited by the size constraints of the DVD9 format, but the X360 proved there is some pretty awesome compression that can be implemented (possibly a wii firmware upgrade)
*drools at 300+-hour games using Wii-style controls*
Actually, it *is* capable of sensing its position in 3d space.
Proof:
Put an SD card with 1 or more photos on it in the SD slot. Now, go to the "fun" tool in the Photo Channel, and select the scissors. Pick the oval you want to copy, and hit A.
Now, move closer to the screen, and further away from the screen.
Step 4:???
Step 5: PROFIT!
Provided they don't EXPLODE.
/., I'll be all like "hmm. My Wiimote hasn't exploded yet. Huh.
First exploding controller story I see on
Let's make batteries that Just Work (TM) shall we? And by Work I mean "not explode" and "not kill people".
Here's to the rabid Sony fanboys.
The MSX was also missing. Definitely a milestone, even if it did flop.
As is the NeoGeo/NGCD/Pocket Color.
The author mentioned his incredulity that Final Fantasy is on XII. While this is *technically* true, I feel it necessary to point out that A: the very nature of Final Fantasy does not lend itself to sequels the way that games such as Halo, Half-Life, or Elder Scrolls, or even Fable do. Well, you can have "sequels" (FFVII: Dirge of Cerberus, FFX-2) but they really don't turn out very well (I've not played DoS, or FFVII even, but FFX2 sucked so hard it made Albuquerque windy for a couple days when I bought it). Final Fantasy "major-version" releases are usually independent games with NO ties to the previous version whatsoever.
This has its upsides and its downsides. All the fanboys will immediately go buy the next Final Fantasy game pretty much without even renting it, just because it's Final Fantasy, which actually demotivates Square for the next game of the series. Not that I'm saying any of the FF games have sucked, other than FFX2. Just that this is the problem with most franchise style games, which is why Okami, Katamari Damacy, and LocoRoco are so awesome: New concept, *extremely trippy concept*, and they're BLOODY FUN TO PLAY! I've played demos of Okami and LocoRoco and the full version of Katamari (even though I'm not THAT good at it).
In other news, the story of Fable: The Lost Chapters and Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind (Game of the Year edition) is extremely good (emphasis on Fable) and capable of engrossing people who enjoy decent RPGs, or people who can't afford a bunch of games.
And I *definitely* wouldn't be talking about myself in that last semi-paragraph. No, not at all. Never!
noone's mentioned the Motorla V330. Waay more reliable than the V300, a decent camera, if it does take a long time to register the picture saves. I had no dropped calls, awesome reception everywhere but on the local mountain (cingular phones had reception up there, not my T-Mobile) and decent media features. I wouldn't recommend using the AIM client on it, it has some issues with 100+-member buddy lists.
But I lost that phone and upgraded to a T-Mobile (HTC) SDA (Hurricane) smartphone. Aside from the fact that it runs Windows Mobile instead of everyone's favorite operating system, and that the keys are incredibly close together and small, it's the best phone I've ever had occasion to handle. Relatively inexpensive, too.
Unfortunately, thanks to my credit rating, I am on SmartAccess for another 4 months, before I can get the data plan, so I can't really report on its GPRS/EDGE speeds or quality, but it does have decent WiFi support.
It doesn't use a standard mini-USB cable to connect to the computer, although it does charge with the same USB cable as I use to connect my PSP up.
actually, sudo -s kind of destroys the need for sudo su. And my vote is... I always use sudo, since it Just Works (tm)... Even if it is a bit annoying when I make 30 lines of changes to /etc/network/interfaces, and then go to save and vim says "read-only file" because idiot me forgot 4 letters. ;x
Also, OK Computer sounds completely different from, say, Hail to the Thief.
I see some striking similarities between our badly-misnamed Patriot act and this request by the UK police force.
If you'd actually, god forbid, read my reply, you'd see that I essentially said that beta implementations of a proven-stable protocol are quite useless, and in fact, I wasn't disagreeing with you.
In Linux, there's a small modification I can make to the initialization script on my OpenWRT-firmware WRT54G router. It enables my IPv6 tunnel to he.net. After that, it's a simple matter of turning on radvd on the router, and presto! All my Linux machines, and assumably any *BSD machines I don't know about having, are using IPv6.
I'm curious to know if MacOS X supports radvd broadcasting as well.
Actually, Wind'ohs can be had with IPv6 support. Windows eXtra Problems has an MS-sanctioned IPv6 implementation, even though it is "intended for development use and trial network deployments" (http://www.ipv6.org/impl/windows.html)
Windows 2000BC can have IPv6... with a MS-sanctioned add-on designed by Microsoft Research... Which in itself rings a big warning light, because if Microsoft considers something beta software, it must be even more unstable than their OSes.
Users of Windows 95-98 and assumably ME and NT4.0 can use Trumpet Software's Winsock v5.0 to connect, using IPv6-aware applications, via IPv6. This is not a very neat way of doing it however, and I do not recommend it, as Winsock is primarily a modem dialer (I personally used it back in the Windows 3.1 days to connect to my ISP via a 14.4 modem)
However, when the US *does* act when the UN is disinterested, the people who are asked to act are the next generation of Americans. The "plight" of the rest of the country seems to have no importance to our current administration.
The US has a military budget at least 3 times that of Russia, is smaller than Russia, and is less populated than Russia. If some of that good olde Amerikan money were diverted from feeding Our Bush's warmongering to feeding Our Poor, this country wouldn't be the war-mongering cesspool it is now.
Conversely, the gene pool is being slowly cleansed of the warrior types that are useless outside of wartime, but invaluable when truly needed. So we can thank Dubya for that at least... Too bad he's a chicken hawk draft dodger.
My OpenWRT box also has the added bonus of keeping my IPv6 tunnel up, and running radvd to alert the other Linux boxes to its presence.
And it's rock-solid stable, and not maintained by a company that doesn't respect the GPL (Sveasoft).
" opponent Nancy Zerg"
OMG, ZERGRUSH!
Yeah, it says something when the major thread in a bash release notification is about another shell, and how much bash ass it kicks.
Alteration can be done with software like the GIMP (afaik it has a PDF import filter), OOo, Koffice, and others. Also, alteration can be done by using software like pdf2ps and opening the ps file in an editor or something.
It also follows M$'s paradigm to use a binary file format for fucking text data, and a little formatting. Those dumbasses.
It's about time some major organization, even a non-profit, started using StarOffice, or OOo.
Won't work. The point of purging the 90+ day old messages is so that noone has to meta-check them for importance. Unless you want to hire a cadre of Trained Monkeys to look at the positives. It'd be a 1-banana job, and would have to pay bargain-basement peanuts.
Amp's made by Mountain Dew, and thus Pepsi. Strangely enough, so is Rockstar.
I have no clue how that suprnova statement made it in there. No clue whatsoever.
Your statement about drivers is essentially ass-speak. The drivers for the Windows box that are included on the CD are if the generic ones don't work. In contrast, the Linux distro (barring the user being smart enough to recompile a kernel successfully) with most distros' default kernels, is quite sufficient for the ABC corp, XYZ-68 printer bought at wal-mart for $50. On Windows, there might be drivers included with Windows, the generic might work... and it might not. The same is true for Linux. It's also true, to a lesser extent, on MacOS.
As I said in a previous post, "Backwards compatibility is for those people who can't write new software." If you're using *really* old software, there's probably a reason, and I respect your choice to run said *really* old sotware. However, on the same token, you can't expect to upgrade your OS and keep compatibility with that *really* old software. If you're running programs dating to the 1970s, written in some obsolete language like FORTRAN IV, you deserve to have your chain pulled, and move to something more recent. If you're so dependent on old versions of shared libraries, mightn't it be a good idea to find a similar program in a more recent version of those shared libraries, but still compatible? Or find a way to make the old software work on the new OS with all the new software? Example: When KDE 3.2-beta1 came out, XMMS was (and is) using GTK+-1.x, and glib1. The artsd 1.2.0 and its betas used glib2. Glib1 and Glib2 can't communicate with each other without breaking each other. Hence, XMMS was unable to use artsd as the output mechanism. The most obvious (to Joe Luser) solution, moving XMMS to gtk2, was not the simplest, or the most elegant. The eventual solution was to write a helper program that could communicate with artsd somehow (IANAP, so I don't know how this was done, I just know it was done) that XMMS could talk to.
So you see, the solution to backwards compatibility is not black and white. Nor is it even really grey. You can "innovate" without being "different" but then you turn out Microsoft products. "innovation" only happens when someone is not afraid to be different, be ahead of the flock, become the ruler. For this, I applaud the developers of the Y window system, because they're taking the plunge and breaking some compatibility to truly innovate.
(break out your buzzword bingo cards as you read that)
This is a good idea, in principle, but the execution could use a little work.
It could be done very simply with a Linux/KDE-3.2.0 box, implementing the KiosK framework to repeat a presentation upon pressing a predefined key on the keyboard, with a screensaver that indicates what key to press. The presentation would describe the benifits of OSS, the options available, and the use of a prebuilt interface (you could create a simple interface like the project selection option in k3b 0.11.1, by default in the lower left corner of the window on startup) to select the OSS software they wanted to burn. They either bring their own blank CD-Rs or buy one (at a cost) from the library, and bring a case or buy a sleeve at the desk, and insert case into the CD-RW drive's slot, and have complimentary (or cheap) coffee/donuts for their use of the OSSKIOSK.
This software would be comparatively simple to write (compared to a new GUI that wouldn't use the kiosk framework, which is quite decently documented) and would accomplish the purpose.
My concern is people abusing the system to subvert it.
http://www.suprnova.org/
It wouldn't have to have network connectivity, let alone be a blazingly speedy box. The LUG could sponsor the CD-Rs at a significantly dropped cost compared to normal.
It could work. I should talk to my library about this. Thanks for the suggestion.
He's not being a zealot.
1) Old people don't normally use Linux.
2) If they do, they're in the IT field.
3) Your argument about automatically working on plug-in fits MacOS x.y like a glove.
4) Old software working: You have a mainly valid point here.
5) As many OSS beacons would say: "Backwards compatibility is for people who can't write new software." (well, okay, that was a paraphrasing of Linus, but it applies IMHO)
You can't write good software if you're trying to keep compatibility with version x.y.z-abcd of libblah-x.yz, when libblah was deprecated aeons ago. It's like writing CD-RW programs that need SCSI-emulation, when we have 2.6 with successful ATAPI burning support.
As a computer security professor I talked to once said: "If you don't start out with security as a Job 0 process, and instead work on making the old stuff good by patching it together, you eventually come out with a Microsoft product."
While Linux isn't really written with security as job 0, its use of the GPL makes it very subject to peer-review and this makes security very prominent in the development cycle.
Distros like Debian, with its Security Team, also contribute scads of security stuff, as well as reviewing non-kernel code for security holes.
In summary, breaking software support is not necessarily a bad thing. Backwards compatibility is taken far too seriously in the PC world. Example: the outburst back in the mid '90s when the executive decision to move the Amiga community to PowerPC-based stuff, away from the 680x0 processor. This change was almost certainly a good thing, but the outburst from the Amiga zealot community was equivalent to that of a bunch of Mandrake users being told that they're moving over to *BSD or Gentoo and they don't have to configure it themselves.
You don't see Linux users complaining when libblahfoo.xy doesn't work with kernel 2.6.5 but did with 2.6.4. You see them rewrite their badly-written programs to use libblah-AB instead of libblah-xy because AB is better anyway.