"On 18 December 2003, Ellison married Melanie Craft, a romance novelist, at his Woodside estate. His friend Steve Jobs, Apple, Inc's CEO, was the official wedding photographer."
So, no, Larry's company becoming ZFS owner ain't the reason Steve's company would drop it.
Half-Life 2 was revealing the story gradually through naturally occurring dialogues and events throughout the gameplay. It's one of best storytellings (no external narrative at all, actually, all naturally interwoven into the gameplay) I've ever encountered in a game. Portal gets a close second.
I'm playing Bioshock now and honestly, the recorded diaries feel forced for a storytelling device.
Also, if DRM-Free and awesome are your criteria for purchasing games, I suggest you look into Crayon Physics Deluxe.
Thanks for the suggestion; it's on my radar already; I saw the videos on their website and it looks *awesome*:-) Looks like a perfect thing for me, as well as for my son and daughter (who also enjoy WoGoo). It looks like it's most enjoyable with a graphics tablet though, so that might become an additional cost.
This trend of DRM-Free gaming is actually leading to me spending more money on games:P
I believe "cliffski" was using Democracy 2 as an illustration example because he's its developer.
But yeah, no DRM is incentive to buy for me too. I gave my money to 2D Boy for World of Goo even though everyone I know was using it pirated. Worth every cent of it.
To get back on topic, iWork has no DRM either, and $79 is not expensive considering the functionality, so if someone gets shafted by malware because they used a pirated copy, I have no sympathy for them. If you want a $0 office suite on a Mac, there's always NeoOffice.
I'm buying this game. The demo was tremendous fun for both me and my kids. And the best part for which I can give these folks a lot of respect:
The game has a Mac version. Not only that, it's not a lame-ass "we really wrote it for Win32 API and made the Mac version linking it with WINE/Cider so it only works on Intel Macs only, sorta" that seems to be the trend in the game industry who try to go the Mac route.
Nossir. This game specs its requirements as an "Intel or PPC G4 CPU", meaning they really did write it as cross platform code (Linux version coming soon), which is exactly a beautiful display of the spirit whose lack of in the industry I've been lamenting before here: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1021097&cid=25674759
So, double kudos to them (and they get my money, as this game will run on the iMac G5 I'll pass down to my kids this Christmas).
What thoroughly pisses me off is Mac software that doesn't ship as a universal binary, but is compiled only for Intel Macs. UNIX-targeting Open Source software should be CPU architecture independent, or have a damn good reason not to be. I can't fathom why would an Open Source music player software targeting (among others) Linux be bound to Intel CPU architecture.
I have a mixture of PowerPC and Intel Macs in my household. The iMac G5 my wife uses is less than 3 years old and has plenty of horsepower. I just hate it when software publishers artificially obsolete this CPU platform because they're lazy to add that single additional gcc command line flag to emit both ppc and x86 code in a single executable.
Yes, you might actually end up having to update your code in few places because it was not architecture independent, but if you're proud enough of your work on the code, that actually benefits you, and you should do it.
If you're an open source provider wanting to compete for users on Mac OS X, you'll need every user. Cutting off everyone who bought their last Mac more than two and a half years ago doesn't strike me as wise.
There was more than the lack of ammo that freaked me out in Ravenholm. But you can do many kills using creative methods. I.e. just remember to carry those circular saw blades with you and you can spare quite some ammo, especially if you happen on a band of zombies all lined up in a straight line, i.e. in a staircase. Crashing them underneath hanging cars is another technique. Luring them near gas pipes and lighting them up also works nicely, although seeing them thrashing and listening to their cries (muffled by the headcrabs on their faces) as they're getting fried is admittedly a bit disturbing, even for a zombie.
That said, certain parts of Half-Life 2 (Ravenholm, and "Lowlife" in Episode One) are the best horror I've seen in a game, well, ever (and I've played few games: Doom I, Quake I, Duke Nukem 3D, and Far Cry (Far Cry is *also* very good)).
This said by a person who doesn't in general enjoy playing horror themes (my first reaction when I realize a chapter in HL2 is going to have a horror theme is annoyance. Ravenholm though turned out to be a hoot not in the least because of the Father Grigory character)
At first, I was thinking you could maybe get away with it as long as your app can't accept code to interpret as external input.
I.e. a generic NES emulator wouldn't be possible, but bundling the interpreter with a single game in it as one app, incapable of downloading further apps might be okay. Theoretically.
Why it still wouldn't be accepted in practice is that even if you submitted all the code to them, you couldn't expect the Apple employees evaluating your app for approval to actually understand the behaviour of the code shipped in NES format, so they'd reject it 'cause they can't sift through it to make sure you didn't include some hot coffee.
What you'd need would be an automatic NES to Objective-C converter, and then submit the games one at a time for approval.
Yeah, it stinks. I mean, define interpreter, right? Even decoding a JPEG image might be considered interpretation of a limited language that renders a graphic. How about PostScript? The damn thing is used nominally for describing graphic, but it happens to be Turing complete! So is it Turing complete language interpreters that are prohibited by T&C, or some weaker ones would be, too? Where to draw the line? What to call an "interpreter"?
I waited for SDK to become public. I downloaded it, evaluated it, I was thinking of seriously jumping on a new career developing for this amazing platform. Because, from a technical point of view, it *is* amazing. But the terms of use really kill it for me, as I don't want to write yet another game or to-do app and can't risk wasting my time on developing something that'd get rejected.
How do you expect him to figure out what language was used in mails he did not receive?
I know, he could compare the relative ratio of languages in spam messages before the drop and after the drop (if he had too much time on his hands), but your question formulation was still funny:-)
Well, I'm then certainly denser than usual these days, because even re-reading it now I'd still assume he wasn't aware Duplo comes from Lego.
Whatever.
Completely unrelated: to this day I use four Duplo bricks I stole from my kids to elevate my laptop from the desk surface so it gets more airflow on the bottom:-) (it's attached to external keyboard and display, so no, I'm not ruining my wrists). Other creative household/office uses are also possible:-)
Duplo is actually a Lego product line - larger bricks targeting kids under age of 3 (so they can't swallow the little pieces, because they're, well, larger).
The only problem with this is that you get a non-bootable backup. Actually, you need to restore all of your system from backup to a new drive (booting from the CD) in order to get back to work in case your primary drive got borked.
Tough if you don't have time for a full HD copy (but arguably still better than losing all your data). I kinda hoped that this'll be configurable though...
Folks likening this to Harry Seldon's psychohistory in Isaac Asimov's books are missing the point. Psychohistory was predicting the movements of a society as a whole. What DARPA is striving to do is predict the behaviour of individuals faster than those individuals can act.
An "obvious" method for doing this is to somehow capture the individual's state vector and that of its surrounding environment, and simulate it in faster than realtime. Stuff of science fiction for now, and it is usually referred to as possessing one's theory of mind (Charles Stross likes to use the phrase a lot). For combat environments, I can't fathom how this'd work. At best, it looks like it'd be feasible for strategy planning, but not in a tactical situation in physical operations.
I have an IBM ThinkPad i1200 that's considered "old" (from 2001) used for few odd tasks (like, printing invoices on a parallel-port dot-matrix printer, also my son plays Civilization III on it). It was sold to me with OEM Windows ME back in the day. As bad as Windows ME is, it's more or less adequate for the machine, as it's a 700MHz P-III with 192MB of RAM. Windows 2000 performs nicely on it.
I tried installing Windows XP on it, but with 192MB RAM, it swaps awfully lot with even the smallest workloads.
So, I have a piece of hardware here that can run normally only versions of Windows that Microsoft decided to no longer support (ME, 2000). Connect it to any sort of network at your own risk, right? Bummer.
(Oh, before you'd suggest Linux let me tell you I've done experiments with that too. The latest Ubuntu booted from a Live CD on this machine positively *crawls*. It takes an evening to get it to start the installer. True, Ubuntu says the system requirements are 256MB RAM, and it only has 192... Fedora Core says it's okay with 192, I might try that sometime...)
As for Iain M. Banks, I must say that I just recently bought and read the first Culture novel, "Consider Phlebas", and am sort-of disappointed. Yes, I know it came out in 1986, and I would probably enjoyed reading it around that time as a 12 year old kid (I read a lot of SF even back then), but it feels too retro today. I mean, there's a predictably boring enemy alien race (descended from lizards, very original), mortal humans without means of transcending or uploading, drones as sentient beings in metallic enclosures. Right. I was thoroughly bored through the book, especially since whole chapters didn't add anything to the plot, the little there was of it - the chapter on Eaters, the description of a Damage game, to name just the two most boring ones. It was a prime example of when a writer can't weave the world description in the story organically, but explicitly shoves it down your throat. I doubt I'll be buying the other books from the series. (I have a policy of only buying a single book from an author I haven't yet read, and if it works out, I'll order more.)
The same vacation to which I brought "Consider Phlebas" with me (and which - vacation that is - unfortunately ends this sunday) I also brought Charles Stross' "Accelerando" and Schroeder's "Sun of Suns", and both of them very incredibly original, packed with original and daring ideas, and great plot. I stayed up until 3AM one night to finish Accelerando, whereas earlier I had to force myself to pick up Consider Phlebas and continue reading it.
If you look at the photos of the keyboard available at http://www.apple.com/imac/design.html, you'll see that the F-keys have been remapped. F3 has what looks like an Expose "All Windows" icon (normally, F9) on it, and F4 definitely has a Dashboard icon (normally F12) on it. Volume controls have been moved to F10-F12 from their "old" location above the numeric keypad, and in their place are now F16-F19. Also, F7-F9 are now rew/play+pause/ff buttons, presumably for iTunes.
That's all nice and dandy, but I wonder how does it interoperates with factory settings in Mac OS X. I mean, if I install Mac OS X from scratch and look at System Preferences, Expose All Windows will be F9 and Dashboard will be F12 by default. Of course, it's perfectly possible that there are "secret" key codes for those somewhere, and this new keyboard emits those...
At least few folks that invested in G5 XServes will be feeling really fuzzy about this:-) They were the top-notch Apple server hardware until January 2006, that's not exactly very far ago. Of course, most people can't really give a damn about whether Mac OS X is a UNIX or not, myself included, as long as we can compile and run the usual bunch of unixy ecosystem software on it.
Apple Inc.: Mac OS X Version 10.5 Leopard on Intel-based Macintosh computers Um... So, does this mean the PowerPC version of Leopard doesn't get the certification? If so, why?
Slashdot Mirror
It's widely known that Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison are good friends, see this from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Ellison
"On 18 December 2003, Ellison married Melanie Craft, a romance novelist, at his Woodside estate. His friend Steve Jobs, Apple, Inc's CEO, was the official wedding photographer."
So, no, Larry's company becoming ZFS owner ain't the reason Steve's company would drop it.
Half-Life 2 was revealing the story gradually through naturally occurring dialogues and events throughout the gameplay. It's one of best storytellings (no external narrative at all, actually, all naturally interwoven into the gameplay) I've ever encountered in a game. Portal gets a close second.
I'm playing Bioshock now and honestly, the recorded diaries feel forced for a storytelling device.
... the very concept of a commercial prison to me seems...something out of a really bad science fiction movie....
Or a really good satirical novel, like Vonnegut's "Hocus Pocus".
MOD PARENT UP!
Also, if DRM-Free and awesome are your criteria for purchasing games, I suggest you look into Crayon Physics Deluxe.
Thanks for the suggestion; it's on my radar already; I saw the videos on their website and it looks *awesome* :-) Looks like a perfect thing for me, as well as for my son and daughter (who also enjoy WoGoo). It looks like it's most enjoyable with a graphics tablet though, so that might become an additional cost.
This trend of DRM-Free gaming is actually leading to me spending more money on games :P
Ditto :-)
I believe "cliffski" was using Democracy 2 as an illustration example because he's its developer.
But yeah, no DRM is incentive to buy for me too. I gave my money to 2D Boy for World of Goo even though everyone I know was using it pirated. Worth every cent of it.
To get back on topic, iWork has no DRM either, and $79 is not expensive considering the functionality, so if someone gets shafted by malware because they used a pirated copy, I have no sympathy for them. If you want a $0 office suite on a Mac, there's always NeoOffice.
I'm buying this game. The demo was tremendous fun for both me and my kids. And the best part for which I can give these folks a lot of respect:
The game has a Mac version. Not only that, it's not a lame-ass "we really wrote it for Win32 API and made the Mac version linking it with WINE/Cider so it only works on Intel Macs only, sorta" that seems to be the trend in the game industry who try to go the Mac route.
Nossir. This game specs its requirements as an "Intel or PPC G4 CPU", meaning they really did write it as cross platform code (Linux version coming soon), which is exactly a beautiful display of the spirit whose lack of in the industry I've been lamenting before here: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1021097&cid=25674759
So, double kudos to them (and they get my money, as this game will run on the iMac G5 I'll pass down to my kids this Christmas).
Songbird doesn't run on PowerPC Macs.
What thoroughly pisses me off is Mac software that doesn't ship as a universal binary, but is compiled only for Intel Macs. UNIX-targeting Open Source software should be CPU architecture independent, or have a damn good reason not to be. I can't fathom why would an Open Source music player software targeting (among others) Linux be bound to Intel CPU architecture.
I have a mixture of PowerPC and Intel Macs in my household. The iMac G5 my wife uses is less than 3 years old and has plenty of horsepower. I just hate it when software publishers artificially obsolete this CPU platform because they're lazy to add that single additional gcc command line flag to emit both ppc and x86 code in a single executable.
Yes, you might actually end up having to update your code in few places because it was not architecture independent, but if you're proud enough of your work on the code, that actually benefits you, and you should do it.
If you're an open source provider wanting to compete for users on Mac OS X, you'll need every user. Cutting off everyone who bought their last Mac more than two and a half years ago doesn't strike me as wise.
There was more than the lack of ammo that freaked me out in Ravenholm. But you can do many kills using creative methods. I.e. just remember to carry those circular saw blades with you and you can spare quite some ammo, especially if you happen on a band of zombies all lined up in a straight line, i.e. in a staircase. Crashing them underneath hanging cars is another technique. Luring them near gas pipes and lighting them up also works nicely, although seeing them thrashing and listening to their cries (muffled by the headcrabs on their faces) as they're getting fried is admittedly a bit disturbing, even for a zombie.
That said, certain parts of Half-Life 2 (Ravenholm, and "Lowlife" in Episode One) are the best horror I've seen in a game, well, ever (and I've played few games: Doom I, Quake I, Duke Nukem 3D, and Far Cry (Far Cry is *also* very good)).
This said by a person who doesn't in general enjoy playing horror themes (my first reaction when I realize a chapter in HL2 is going to have a horror theme is annoyance. Ravenholm though turned out to be a hoot not in the least because of the Father Grigory character)
At first, I was thinking you could maybe get away with it as long as your app can't accept code to interpret as external input.
I.e. a generic NES emulator wouldn't be possible, but bundling the interpreter with a single game in it as one app, incapable of downloading further apps might be okay. Theoretically.
Why it still wouldn't be accepted in practice is that even if you submitted all the code to them, you couldn't expect the Apple employees evaluating your app for approval to actually understand the behaviour of the code shipped in NES format, so they'd reject it 'cause they can't sift through it to make sure you didn't include some hot coffee.
What you'd need would be an automatic NES to Objective-C converter, and then submit the games one at a time for approval.
Yeah, it stinks. I mean, define interpreter, right? Even decoding a JPEG image might be considered interpretation of a limited language that renders a graphic. How about PostScript? The damn thing is used nominally for describing graphic, but it happens to be Turing complete! So is it Turing complete language interpreters that are prohibited by T&C, or some weaker ones would be, too? Where to draw the line? What to call an "interpreter"?
I waited for SDK to become public. I downloaded it, evaluated it, I was thinking of seriously jumping on a new career developing for this amazing platform. Because, from a technical point of view, it *is* amazing. But the terms of use really kill it for me, as I don't want to write yet another game or to-do app and can't risk wasting my time on developing something that'd get rejected.
I love this post in the thread: http://www.ussg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0104.3/0107.html that says "And UNIX on a phone is pure overkill." We sure have come a long way in this regard since 2001 :-)
How do you expect him to figure out what language was used in mails he did not receive?
I know, he could compare the relative ratio of languages in spam messages before the drop and after the drop (if he had too much time on his hands), but your question formulation was still funny :-)
Perhaps you just need a bit more practice with this new "Google" thing. I'm sure you would have found it on your next search.
Where can I search for this "Google" you speak of?
Well, I'm then certainly denser than usual these days, because even re-reading it now I'd still assume he wasn't aware Duplo comes from Lego.
Whatever.
Completely unrelated: to this day I use four Duplo bricks I stole from my kids to elevate my laptop from the desk surface so it gets more airflow on the bottom :-) (it's attached to external keyboard and display, so no, I'm not ruining my wrists). Other creative household/office uses are also possible :-)
Duplo is actually a Lego product line - larger bricks targeting kids under age of 3 (so they can't swallow the little pieces, because they're, well, larger).
Just borrow some artwork from already successful titles as witnessed in this post: http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/06/18/1938223
What could possibly go wrong?
The only problem with this is that you get a non-bootable backup. Actually, you need to restore all of your system from backup to a new drive (booting from the CD) in order to get back to work in case your primary drive got borked.
Tough if you don't have time for a full HD copy (but arguably still better than losing all your data).
I kinda hoped that this'll be configurable though...
Obligatory Diesel Sweeties comic:
http://dieselsweeties.com/archive.php?s=1731
Folks likening this to Harry Seldon's psychohistory in Isaac Asimov's books are missing the point. Psychohistory was predicting the movements of a society as a whole. What DARPA is striving to do is predict the behaviour of individuals faster than those individuals can act.
An "obvious" method for doing this is to somehow capture the individual's state vector and that of its surrounding environment, and simulate it in faster than realtime. Stuff of science fiction for now, and it is usually referred to as possessing one's theory of mind (Charles Stross likes to use the phrase a lot). For combat environments, I can't fathom how this'd work. At best, it looks like it'd be feasible for strategy planning, but not in a tactical situation in physical operations.
Damn right.
I have an IBM ThinkPad i1200 that's considered "old" (from 2001) used for few odd tasks (like, printing invoices on a parallel-port dot-matrix printer, also my son plays Civilization III on it). It was sold to me with OEM Windows ME back in the day. As bad as Windows ME is, it's more or less adequate for the machine, as it's a 700MHz P-III with 192MB of RAM. Windows 2000 performs nicely on it.
I tried installing Windows XP on it, but with 192MB RAM, it swaps awfully lot with even the smallest workloads.
So, I have a piece of hardware here that can run normally only versions of Windows that Microsoft decided to no longer support (ME, 2000). Connect it to any sort of network at your own risk, right? Bummer.
(Oh, before you'd suggest Linux let me tell you I've done experiments with that too. The latest Ubuntu booted from a Live CD on this machine positively *crawls*. It takes an evening to get it to start the installer. True, Ubuntu says the system requirements are 256MB RAM, and it only has 192... Fedora Core says it's okay with 192, I might try that sometime...)
Also, let's not forget Karl Schroeder, who's Canadian. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Schroeder
As for Iain M. Banks, I must say that I just recently bought and read the first Culture novel, "Consider Phlebas", and am sort-of disappointed. Yes, I know it came out in 1986, and I would probably enjoyed reading it around that time as a 12 year old kid (I read a lot of SF even back then), but it feels too retro today. I mean, there's a predictably boring enemy alien race (descended from lizards, very original), mortal humans without means of transcending or uploading, drones as sentient beings in metallic enclosures. Right. I was thoroughly bored through the book, especially since whole chapters didn't add anything to the plot, the little there was of it - the chapter on Eaters, the description of a Damage game, to name just the two most boring ones. It was a prime example of when a writer can't weave the world description in the story organically, but explicitly shoves it down your throat. I doubt I'll be buying the other books from the series. (I have a policy of only buying a single book from an author I haven't yet read, and if it works out, I'll order more.)
The same vacation to which I brought "Consider Phlebas" with me (and which - vacation that is - unfortunately ends this sunday) I also brought Charles Stross' "Accelerando" and Schroeder's "Sun of Suns", and both of them very incredibly original, packed with original and daring ideas, and great plot. I stayed up until 3AM one night to finish Accelerando, whereas earlier I had to force myself to pick up Consider Phlebas and continue reading it.
If you look at the photos of the keyboard available at http://www.apple.com/imac/design.html, you'll see that the F-keys have been remapped. F3 has what looks like an Expose "All Windows" icon (normally, F9) on it, and F4 definitely has a Dashboard icon (normally F12) on it. Volume controls have been moved to F10-F12 from their "old" location above the numeric keypad, and in their place are now F16-F19. Also, F7-F9 are now rew/play+pause/ff buttons, presumably for iTunes.
That's all nice and dandy, but I wonder how does it interoperates with factory settings in Mac OS X. I mean, if I install Mac OS X from scratch and look at System Preferences, Expose All Windows will be F9 and Dashboard will be F12 by default. Of course, it's perfectly possible that there are "secret" key codes for those somewhere, and this new keyboard emits those...
Apple's industry what?
At least few folks that invested in G5 XServes will be feeling really fuzzy about this :-) They were the top-notch Apple server hardware until January 2006, that's not exactly very far ago. Of course, most people can't really give a damn about whether Mac OS X is a UNIX or not, myself included, as long as we can compile and run the usual bunch of unixy ecosystem software on it.