While Valve has always liked people developing closed source mods for their messy, buggy, and poorly organized SDKs, they've been downright evil with mod-independent development for Half-Life 2. (Note: I'm talking about engine plugins, not entire mods).
With Half-Life 1, the engine was very "open" in terms of API and functionality, and because of this, tons and tons of mini-mods sprung up for popular games like Counter-Strike. In fact, you could attribute the massive success and continuing livlihood of Half-Life 1 to this.
However, Valve's new stance with HL2 is that mods shouldn't be, well, moddable. They've threatened developers and locked out hugely potential functionality. The level of PR Valve does to ease this over makes my blood boil. They've been uncooperative, rarely listen to the community, and let _known bugs_ go unfixed for months and months, even after numerous release cycles. Read the hlcoders mailing list sometime. You'll hear Valve employees like Alfred Reynolds say that mod developers are "hackers holding Valve hostages", with regards to trivial things like printing to the screen. I'm not kidding.
It's not fun. Before Half-Life 2, I was a Valve fanboy. Now I can't stand them. I've had Doom 3 mod developers brag to me about the level of control they have with the Doom 3 SDK. Maybe I'm programming for the wrong game.
Also, with regards to the expansion... they've released one screenshot, and an onlooker realized it was actually a screenshot from HL2 Single Player. Oops. I guess we can file the expansion with VAC2 and DoD:S, which will be released on the Tweltfh of Never.
My name is Bail, and I'm a distressed Half-Life modder. *sits back down*
Re:from the oxymoron dept...
on
Effective C#
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I know you were trying to be funny, but from a C# programmer's perspective, you're just being ignorant.
C# is an advanced, well thought-out OOP language. When coupled with the.NET platform, it's easy, flexible, and powerful. Academia was pretty quick to gobble up Java but I've seen more and more schools replacing VB/Java courses with C# lately.
It's an open standard, despite what people may think, and as Windows.Forms becomes implemented on other operating systems, adoption will spread. Microsoft even released the source code to a FreeBSD CLR implementation called "Rotor".
Remember, just because it's from Microsoft doesn't automatically negate it;)
Pft, that's nothing. I accidentally used the letters "A", "M", and "D" in a sentence. FOUR guys from Intel came to my apartment, beat me within an inch of my life with a PVC pipe, shot my refridgerator, ate my dog, and said they'd install Microsoft Bob on my computer if I didn't buy Intel. Then they burned my city down.
Charter is the worst ISP, ever. I was a COX customer until I had to move. Charter gives you 3mbps/256kbps for the same price that COX gives you 5mbps/768mbps. On top of this, their service sucks. I signed up on-line through customer chat which took a week because they refused to even schedule an appointment until the previous tenants cancelled their account. They restrict your connection to only one mac address, so I couldn't even use their old connection.
Finally, the previous tenants called in to disconnect, and Charter scheduled an installation appointment for a week later (a long time on the Internet), but activated my cable modem's mac address for me in the interim. My connection worked for two days, until a mysterious chain of Charter vans circled around the neighborhood. One came to my apartment, fiddled around, and my cable signal to noise ratio dropped from 34db to 15db (minimum of 30 is needed for cable connection).
So, I called Charter, only to get an incredibly evil phone menu system which forces you through a voice-activated self-help system. So, after social engineering the computerized tech support, I got to a human, who scheduled a repair guy for the next day. He never showed up. The installation guy never showed up either.
I called back, and the rep said "no one was home or answered the phone". I asked him what number they had, and the person from the online chat had some how entered it into the system wrong (I guess copy and paste was above him). They scheduled another appointment for nine days later, and promised me a $20 discount.
The guy actually came on time, but with no discount. He fixed the cable problem, but said "I don't know what was wrong". And the actual Charter service, ironically, was down while he came. So, after three weeks, I finally have my 3mbps connection with a whopping 256kbps upload. Thanks, Charter.
Note: I don't actually believe what I'm saying below. I just wanted to show that the parent is a troll. Just switch "Windows" and "Linux" and edit a few things! Don't mod-up irrational anti-Windows ranting, as you wouldn't do it for Linux either.
Have you tried Linux? It sucks. Maybe your new poorly supported printer worked on Linux easier but overall installing hardware on Linux is a pain. I added a supported video card to Linux and it took more than an hour, several downloads, and many kernel recompile reboots to install. Windows on the other hand simply detected it at boot and adjusted with automatic updates. As long as you verify support before buying your newest gadget then it'll almost always be easier to install in Windows.
And then it doesn't constantly crash and it's desktop interface isn't totally laughable. Oh.. and with Windows, at least there is one company who integrates many features. Wait until your favorite distro totally screws you with some package change, and then try to figure out why so many people hate them. I've certainly seen more than one person reduced to tears after trying to do something like rpm -ivh or dealing with circular package dependencies.
Windows certainly has it's problems but it's really a whole different universe than Linux for putting users through torment. Windows is usually a case of a seamless environment. Linux is a case of no you can't do that or you can (maybe) but you'll suffer for trying with unreadable documentation. The only really good thing about Linux is that nearly all hardware and software works with it once you write your own patches and drivers.
I read many Keenspot comics (maybe around 10) religiously; it's a nice central place to read a bunch of stories on a regular basis. A long time ago it was slow and unstable, but lately it's been great, and has a few comics that are very professionally done.
My big gripe is that a few of the comics that moved off are the ones I read. Now they're not in one area anymore, I probably won't read them regularly. That is of course selfish -- but I imagine other readers don't like the move for the same reason. I'd expect an initial loss of readership for these authors, except for very dedicated fans.
On the other hand, it's a logical move for the cartoonists. Keenspace and Keenspot are great ways to jumpstart a budding talent or hobby and watch it grow. From what I can tell, the Blank Label starters quite liked Keenspot and regretted leaving it -- but now that their work has matured, they'd like to take it in a direction they can't do under Keenspot. So good for them:)
My father works at the Holy Cross math department, where they have their own internal network setup separate from the rest of the school. All of the math professors use Solaris, and they have been for years.
Over time this has slowly changed though -- Sun upgrades their hardware and takes back the old machines on a cyclical basis, and recently all of the desktops were replaced with thin clients (about as big as a cabel modem!). And I'm pretty sure the main server was migrated to Linux.
Since all the professors have been using Solaris for probably around a decade, it's doubtful they'll change the clients anytime soon... but from what I can tell, they're slowly testing out Linux as a replacement.
I'm not gonna speculate why, I'm just answering the question:)
Unix permissions _do suck, they're too simplistic and ACLs solve a lot of the problems inherent to it. For example, if I want to define a class of groups where each group defines a set of people allowed certain permissions to a directory, recursively, there's simply no way unless you use a filesystem that has an ACL extension (or something like XFS which has ACLs built in).
The article poster's saying "Unix Permissions" was being misinformative; Windows will never use the setuid-user-group-world style permissions, it has an ACL-like system. I think what's really meant is that this system will actually be USED in the future, it's pretty much ignored right now for most Windows desktops. As I read this, Microsoft will just be actually enforcing and organizing their own system -- which is a good idea.
Ultimately, the people who like Debian will continue to use it; likewise Debian's goal should be keeping its customers satisfied rather than trying to sway people away from other distros.
I don't really care that it's not updated because apt is flexible enough to work around that. And if a package is _insanely outdated, usually a newer one is in Testing or Unstable. And as a last resource, it's not like Debian precludes you from compiling it myself.
While more frequent releases would be nice, I like it just the way it is. I feel as if I'm guaranteed that the packages will work together without problems (something I haven't encountered in certain other package management systems). And for the select few programs where the version is unacceptably old (like gaim), I just compile from source code.
I used to know someone who worked for EDS, and they hated it. They were very Microsoft centric and known for highly abusing government contracts by attaching random fees and then never delivering any finished product.
She eventually left because she and a few other co-workers couldn't stand the internal corruption.
(also, I'm not saying Microsoft centric is a bad thing - but this company is just abusive and manipulative from what I've heard)
Often people like you don't realize that Microsoft does provides a huge, extensive, and powerful set of interconnected development tools. Ever pick up a single MSDN binder?
If you don't care about anything non-Microsoft, it makes sense to just use the tools in front of you. Despite your anti-Microsoft frothing, those tools usually work and get the job done, and their use is intended for use on Microsoft's platform.
I don't see anything wrong with that -- if the customer has different needs and the developer cannot provide them, the developer/provider has lost a customer.
The real thing you should be complaining about is when IE breaks or adds things to HTML standards that won't work on Firefox. That's just bad, because it's a web standard, not Microsoft's own platform.
I wasn't trying to argue that VLIW was better, I was saying it was something different and innovative. And that AMD64 could have at least made some effort at creating an architecture that wasn't x86 all over again.
And I disagree; with a better opcode set, clearly defined register usage, and sensible calling convention, compilers become easier to write and more efficient. Assembly is still (and always will be) used.
Innovation? I don't think on AMD's part there was a TON of innovation behind the AMD64.
Read some of the technical documentation behind the two 64bit processors each put out. Intel's IA64/VLIW architecture is much more technologically impressive than AMD64's.
What made AMD64 so great was the fact that it stayed so true to the x86, it's almost like a souped up version. It's backward compatible and if you do any assembly/hardware stuff, it tends to be very similar. So much in fact that you still get many x86 annoyances while dealing with it.
So, I'd say Intel was more innovative... they just didn't have the right idea when making a 64-bit chip anyone could actually use. AMD64 is nice and all, but it makes me think that in 10 years, we'll be saying "x86-64 needs to die like x86". It wasn't innovative enough.
" very well could buy it, but refuse to since they won't let me play it on my platform of choice."
It's not that they are "not letting you play" on your platform of choice. It's that your choice of platform isn't compatible with their product. This is your problem, not theirs.
Also, since WineX will be able to run it on Linux, that invalidates the entirety of what you're saying, because you WILL be able to play it on your platform of choice.
Were you tryin' to make some sense?
Indeed, it was fun! Valve has this nasty habit of just dropping support for anything that isn't really popular. TFC and HLDM are barely upkept now that CS is so popular.
I find this really disappointing because I was looking forward to HL2DM, although it should come as no surprise - since CS is popular, why should Valve bother enhancing anything else?
Honestly, not only has this been done before with other chat clients (didn't Microsoft have a failed attempt), but what's the point? Who would actually use this?
When I use AIM I specifically disable smilies and such because they're annoying... why would I now want disembodied aliens on my intarweb screen? AIM having those "themed" IM windows in 5.0 was a terrible idea. They just keep adding more crap into their client, kind of how they ruined ICQ.
An open source program I distribute uses a Just-In-Time compiler which modifies its own.data section in memory. grsecurity/pax don't like this and cause it to bail out. It's rather annoying as people then come to me that our software is broken.
I guess my point is that people should know the effects of the security enhancements they choose before blindly saying "hey, this is a secure system, so I'll just install it." Or at the least they should how to administrate around it.
Security doesn't mean anything if you're not qualified for it.
I really don't like Valve's choice of the word "Source" for their engine. I mean, obviously it has source code, but it almost seems like it's trying to trump the definition of "source". It's even more annoying when you have a GPL'd Mod for Half-Life (and in the future for HL2). "It's open source for Source which you don't have the source for." what
Going off-topic, Valve supplied an excellent SDK for HL1 but as of Steam that community policy seems to have disintegrated. We modders have no SDK for Steam or VGUI2. The updated engine interface headers to Steam is buried in the mailing list, and it has typos. They also don't have a reputation for giving clear/good answers in response to questions about working with their new stuff (forget about actual support also).
Either Valve's really, really too busy with HL2/CS2 to interact with community coders or they're just getting arrogant. I'm that CS2/HL2 continue with Valve's original "awesome SDK"-ness, especially with the underground rumor that it will have Metamod (or multi-mod sub modding) functionality built in.
Slashdot Mirror
... state of current Half-Life development?
While Valve has always liked people developing closed source mods for their messy, buggy, and poorly organized SDKs, they've been downright evil with mod-independent development for Half-Life 2. (Note: I'm talking about engine plugins, not entire mods).
With Half-Life 1, the engine was very "open" in terms of API and functionality, and because of this, tons and tons of mini-mods sprung up for popular games like Counter-Strike. In fact, you could attribute the massive success and continuing livlihood of Half-Life 1 to this.
However, Valve's new stance with HL2 is that mods shouldn't be, well, moddable. They've threatened developers and locked out hugely potential functionality. The level of PR Valve does to ease this over makes my blood boil. They've been uncooperative, rarely listen to the community, and let _known bugs_ go unfixed for months and months, even after numerous release cycles. Read the hlcoders mailing list sometime. You'll hear Valve employees like Alfred Reynolds say that mod developers are "hackers holding Valve hostages", with regards to trivial things like printing to the screen. I'm not kidding.
It's not fun. Before Half-Life 2, I was a Valve fanboy. Now I can't stand them. I've had Doom 3 mod developers brag to me about the level of control they have with the Doom 3 SDK. Maybe I'm programming for the wrong game.
Also, with regards to the expansion... they've released one screenshot, and an onlooker realized it was actually a screenshot from HL2 Single Player. Oops. I guess we can file the expansion with VAC2 and DoD:S, which will be released on the Tweltfh of Never.
My name is Bail, and I'm a distressed Half-Life modder. *sits back down*
I know you were trying to be funny, but from a C# programmer's perspective, you're just being ignorant.
.NET platform, it's easy, flexible, and powerful. Academia was pretty quick to gobble up Java but I've seen more and more schools replacing VB/Java courses with C# lately.
;)
C# is an advanced, well thought-out OOP language. When coupled with the
It's an open standard, despite what people may think, and as Windows.Forms becomes implemented on other operating systems, adoption will spread. Microsoft even released the source code to a FreeBSD CLR implementation called "Rotor".
Remember, just because it's from Microsoft doesn't automatically negate it
Pft, that's nothing. I accidentally used the letters "A", "M", and "D" in a sentence. FOUR guys from Intel came to my apartment, beat me within an inch of my life with a PVC pipe, shot my refridgerator, ate my dog, and said they'd install Microsoft Bob on my computer if I didn't buy Intel. Then they burned my city down.
Now I use Intel. I love Intel!
Charter is the worst ISP, ever. I was a COX customer until I had to move. Charter gives you 3mbps/256kbps for the same price that COX gives you 5mbps/768mbps. On top of this, their service sucks. I signed up on-line through customer chat which took a week because they refused to even schedule an appointment until the previous tenants cancelled their account. They restrict your connection to only one mac address, so I couldn't even use their old connection.
Finally, the previous tenants called in to disconnect, and Charter scheduled an installation appointment for a week later (a long time on the Internet), but activated my cable modem's mac address for me in the interim. My connection worked for two days, until a mysterious chain of Charter vans circled around the neighborhood. One came to my apartment, fiddled around, and my cable signal to noise ratio dropped from 34db to 15db (minimum of 30 is needed for cable connection).
So, I called Charter, only to get an incredibly evil phone menu system which forces you through a voice-activated self-help system. So, after social engineering the computerized tech support, I got to a human, who scheduled a repair guy for the next day. He never showed up. The installation guy never showed up either.
I called back, and the rep said "no one was home or answered the phone". I asked him what number they had, and the person from the online chat had some how entered it into the system wrong (I guess copy and paste was above him). They scheduled another appointment for nine days later, and promised me a $20 discount.
The guy actually came on time, but with no discount. He fixed the cable problem, but said "I don't know what was wrong". And the actual Charter service, ironically, was down while he came. So, after three weeks, I finally have my 3mbps connection with a whopping 256kbps upload. Thanks, Charter.
Note: I don't actually believe what I'm saying below. I just wanted to show that the parent is a troll. Just switch "Windows" and "Linux" and edit a few things! Don't mod-up irrational anti-Windows ranting, as you wouldn't do it for Linux either.
Have you tried Linux? It sucks. Maybe your new poorly supported printer worked on Linux easier but overall installing hardware on Linux is a pain. I added a supported video card to Linux and it took more than an hour, several downloads, and many kernel recompile reboots to install. Windows on the other hand simply detected it at boot and adjusted with automatic updates. As long as you verify support before buying your newest gadget then it'll almost always be easier to install in Windows.
And then it doesn't constantly crash and it's desktop interface isn't totally laughable. Oh.. and with Windows, at least there is one company who integrates many features. Wait until your favorite distro totally screws you with some package change, and then try to figure out why so many people hate them. I've certainly seen more than one person reduced to tears after trying to do something like rpm -ivh or dealing with circular package dependencies.
Windows certainly has it's problems but it's really a whole different universe than Linux for putting users through torment. Windows is usually a case of a seamless environment. Linux is a case of no you can't do that or you can (maybe) but you'll suffer for trying with unreadable documentation. The only really good thing about Linux is that nearly all hardware and software works with it once you write your own patches and drivers.
I read many Keenspot comics (maybe around 10) religiously; it's a nice central place to read a bunch of stories on a regular basis. A long time ago it was slow and unstable, but lately it's been great, and has a few comics that are very professionally done.
:)
My big gripe is that a few of the comics that moved off are the ones I read. Now they're not in one area anymore, I probably won't read them regularly. That is of course selfish -- but I imagine other readers don't like the move for the same reason. I'd expect an initial loss of readership for these authors, except for very dedicated fans.
On the other hand, it's a logical move for the cartoonists. Keenspace and Keenspot are great ways to jumpstart a budding talent or hobby and watch it grow. From what I can tell, the Blank Label starters quite liked Keenspot and regretted leaving it -- but now that their work has matured, they'd like to take it in a direction they can't do under Keenspot. So good for them
My father works at the Holy Cross math department, where they have their own internal network setup separate from the rest of the school. All of the math professors use Solaris, and they have been for years.
:)
Over time this has slowly changed though -- Sun upgrades their hardware and takes back the old machines on a cyclical basis, and recently all of the desktops were replaced with thin clients (about as big as a cabel modem!). And I'm pretty sure the main server was migrated to Linux.
Since all the professors have been using Solaris for probably around a decade, it's doubtful they'll change the clients anytime soon... but from what I can tell, they're slowly testing out Linux as a replacement.
I'm not gonna speculate why, I'm just answering the question
Unix permissions _do suck, they're too simplistic and ACLs solve a lot of the problems inherent to it. For example, if I want to define a class of groups where each group defines a set of people allowed certain permissions to a directory, recursively, there's simply no way unless you use a filesystem that has an ACL extension (or something like XFS which has ACLs built in).
The article poster's saying "Unix Permissions" was being misinformative; Windows will never use the setuid-user-group-world style permissions, it has an ACL-like system. I think what's really meant is that this system will actually be USED in the future, it's pretty much ignored right now for most Windows desktops. As I read this, Microsoft will just be actually enforcing and organizing their own system -- which is a good idea.
intentionally left blank!
It's not magic, Raymond Chen debunks some of those assumptions in his article. He specifically notes many people view this as undocumented APIs.
Yes, sorry, that was a poor word choice on my part :)
Ultimately, the people who like Debian will continue to use it; likewise Debian's goal should be keeping its customers satisfied rather than trying to sway people away from other distros.
I don't really care that it's not updated because apt is flexible enough to work around that. And if a package is _insanely outdated, usually a newer one is in Testing or Unstable. And as a last resource, it's not like Debian precludes you from compiling it myself.
While more frequent releases would be nice, I like it just the way it is. I feel as if I'm guaranteed that the packages will work together without problems (something I haven't encountered in certain other package management systems). And for the select few programs where the version is unacceptably old (like gaim), I just compile from source code.
I used to know someone who worked for EDS, and they hated it. They were very Microsoft centric and known for highly abusing government contracts by attaching random fees and then never delivering any finished product.
She eventually left because she and a few other co-workers couldn't stand the internal corruption.
(also, I'm not saying Microsoft centric is a bad thing - but this company is just abusive and manipulative from what I've heard)
Often people like you don't realize that Microsoft does provides a huge, extensive, and powerful set of interconnected development tools. Ever pick up a single MSDN binder?
If you don't care about anything non-Microsoft, it makes sense to just use the tools in front of you. Despite your anti-Microsoft frothing, those tools usually work and get the job done, and their use is intended for use on Microsoft's platform.
I don't see anything wrong with that -- if the customer has different needs and the developer cannot provide them, the developer/provider has lost a customer.
The real thing you should be complaining about is when IE breaks or adds things to HTML standards that won't work on Firefox. That's just bad, because it's a web standard, not Microsoft's own platform.
That's all very well and fine, but irrelevant.
I wasn't trying to argue that VLIW was better, I was saying it was something different and innovative. And that AMD64 could have at least made some effort at creating an architecture that wasn't x86 all over again.
And I disagree; with a better opcode set, clearly defined register usage, and sensible calling convention, compilers become easier to write and more efficient. Assembly is still (and always will be) used.
Innovation? I don't think on AMD's part there was a TON of innovation behind the AMD64.
Read some of the technical documentation behind the two 64bit processors each put out. Intel's IA64/VLIW architecture is much more technologically impressive than AMD64's.
What made AMD64 so great was the fact that it stayed so true to the x86, it's almost like a souped up version. It's backward compatible and if you do any assembly/hardware stuff, it tends to be very similar. So much in fact that you still get many x86 annoyances while dealing with it.
So, I'd say Intel was more innovative... they just didn't have the right idea when making a 64-bit chip anyone could actually use. AMD64 is nice and all, but it makes me think that in 10 years, we'll be saying "x86-64 needs to die like x86". It wasn't innovative enough.
" very well could buy it, but refuse to since they won't let me play it on my platform of choice." It's not that they are "not letting you play" on your platform of choice. It's that your choice of platform isn't compatible with their product. This is your problem, not theirs. Also, since WineX will be able to run it on Linux, that invalidates the entirety of what you're saying, because you WILL be able to play it on your platform of choice. Were you tryin' to make some sense?
How do you refuse to support a company whose product you can't use, anyway? Not buy their product more vigorously?
Indeed, it was fun! Valve has this nasty habit of just dropping support for anything that isn't really popular. TFC and HLDM are barely upkept now that CS is so popular.
I find this really disappointing because I was looking forward to HL2DM, although it should come as no surprise - since CS is popular, why should Valve bother enhancing anything else?
Honestly, not only has this been done before with other chat clients (didn't Microsoft have a failed attempt), but what's the point? Who would actually use this? When I use AIM I specifically disable smilies and such because they're annoying... why would I now want disembodied aliens on my intarweb screen? AIM having those "themed" IM windows in 5.0 was a terrible idea. They just keep adding more crap into their client, kind of how they ruined ICQ.
An open source program I distribute uses a Just-In-Time compiler which modifies its own .data section in memory. grsecurity/pax don't like this and cause it to bail out. It's rather annoying as people then come to me that our software is broken.
I guess my point is that people should know the effects of the security enhancements they choose before blindly saying "hey, this is a secure system, so I'll just install it." Or at the least they should how to administrate around it.
Security doesn't mean anything if you're not qualified for it.
I really don't like Valve's choice of the word "Source" for their engine. I mean, obviously it has source code, but it almost seems like it's trying to trump the definition of "source". It's even more annoying when you have a GPL'd Mod for Half-Life (and in the future for HL2). "It's open source for Source which you don't have the source for." what
Going off-topic, Valve supplied an excellent SDK for HL1 but as of Steam that community policy seems to have disintegrated. We modders have no SDK for Steam or VGUI2. The updated engine interface headers to Steam is buried in the mailing list, and it has typos. They also don't have a reputation for giving clear/good answers in response to questions about working with their new stuff (forget about actual support also).
Either Valve's really, really too busy with HL2/CS2 to interact with community coders or they're just getting arrogant. I'm that CS2/HL2 continue with Valve's original "awesome SDK"-ness, especially with the underground rumor that it will have Metamod (or multi-mod sub modding) functionality built in.