NEVER use compression on a backup unless you have PAR files you can use to recover the lost data if a bad sector on a CD, DVD, or bad block on a tape is discovered on restoration.
You're far too free with that NEVER statement. There's many many variables involved -- `backup' is an incredibly large brush, and in many many cases, using compression (another incredibly broad brush) makes perfect sense.
There's lots of variables that we're not touching here, but be assured that using compression along with backups often makes lots of sense --
-- it sometimes speeds up the backup process
-- it usually allows you to fit more onto a single piece of media
-- it usually lets you know, upon restoring, if anything was corrupted or not. (Yes, keeping md5 or crc32 hashes will also do this, but most archivers/compressors add this by default.) Without compression or hashes, you often don't know if there was some data corruption or not (depends on the backup system -- remember, there's lots of variables.)
-- sometimes the compressor/archiver will preserve metadata that the backup system will not. For example, tar will save *nix metadata where your backup may ignore it. (To be fair, tar is an archiver, but not a compressor. So consider tar.bz2 files instead.)
-- it's true that a single bit error in a gzip file will make everything after the error unreadable, and this is one reason that gzip is often a poor choice for compressing a very large file. But gzip is only one compressor -- bzip2 doesn't have this limitation, for example. (And gzip's stream could be periodically restarted to get past that.)
Also consider that in many cases, even a single bit error will make something totally unusable, compression or not. It depends on the circumstances.
But I do agree that par2 files (or the equivilent) are nice. I personally do my backups at home to DVD-Rs, with a program that creates tar.bz2 files of a certain range of sizes and then 5-10%.par2 files, and I also include md5sums and crc32s onto the DVD-R of all files on the disk so I can easily tell if anything is corrupt without even decompressing anything.
No, not really. First, you're right -- the amount of power generated would be tiny, unless the magnets and such were huge. Second, people won't want the magnets on their car -- and why would they? They're dead weight, don't help the car at all, and will probably pick up (magnetic) trash and stuff from the ground.
That, and every bit of power generated by anything like this will be power removed from your car, so ultimately you'll pay for it at the gas pump.
Ultimately, the whole idea of car powered lights and such only makes sense if 1) it's in a rural location where power is hard to come by and/or 2) you want to slow the cars down anyways, like a speed bump (and others have already mentioned it.) Beyond that, implementing this sort of thing would not be cost effective.
I don't know how it is in Canada, but here in the USA, taping a phone call without informing the other party is very much against the law, unless you have a specific wire-tap court order.
Though I thought that the recorded conversation was in person, not over the phone, which might change things even more. (And finally, it's in Canada, so US law shouldn't apply at all, as you've already mentioned.)
I disagree with you that getting commercial Linux games to work is somewhat tricky. At least, it is no more tricky than getting commercial Windows games to work. I recently decided to stop dual-booting Windows just for the games and installed a lot of Linux games, both commercial and free, on my computer. The only problems I encountered were with Myth 2: Soulblighter: the cutscenes cause the game to segfault and the OpenGL acceleration does not work.
Did you even read your own web-log after you wrote it? Looking at your commercial games section (since that's what you're talking about) --
Doom 3 -- no installer.
UT2004 -- Trying to run these games exposed a problem with my NVidia driver installation.
Myth 2 -- whole list of problems
NWN -- a few problems
Compare this to my experience with the same games under Windows :
Doom 3 -- installed with a few clicks, worked fine.
UT2004 -- never tried this one. But the original installed with a few clicks and worked fine.
Myth 2 -- it's been a while, but I think it worked fine. (I think it was Myth 1 that required 3dfx hardware if I wanted acceleration. Which I had at the time.) I also tried Myth 2 under Linux and finally gave up on it, as I never got it working properly.
NWN -- installed with a few clicks, worked fine. Actually, I also tried NWN under Linux. It worked OK after I jumped through a few of the same hoops that you had to jump through, but ultimately I went back to playing it under Windows because I wanted to actually be able to see the cut-scenes.
Granted, `no installer' isn't such a big deal if they give you reasonable instructions about what goes where. That's fine for me, and I assume you, but for somebody who's new to *nix, it can be a big problem.
I'm not sure why you're needing to create a custom kernel for your NVIDIA drivers -- I don't have to. The NVIDIA installer builds a kernel module that matches whatever kernel you've got, and you don't even need the kernel source to be installed, just the headers.
So, in summary, Windows isn't necessarily a better/platform/ for gaming. It just has more games available for it. Again, two very different things.
And I categorically disagree. If you're going to be gaming, i.e. playing games, you'll want the platform where the games work, and if you're using a PC, that platform is currently... Windows.
Now sure, there are a few games for other OSs, and you may very well find some fine Linux games or games that work under Linux that you like, but ultimately, if you watch TV and see commercials for computer games and go `ooh, I want to play that!'... it's quite likely that game is not going to work on Linux.
*cheers* I fully agree w/ you except for one point, OpenGL support is a PITA in Linux.
They used to be. Not anymore.
wget http://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86/1.0-8 174/NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-8174-pkg1.run sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-8174-pkg1.run { answer the questions, mostly just hitting OK a lot } vi/etc/X11/xorg.conf { change Driver "nv" to Driver "nvidia" and comment out Load "dri" if it's set. } start X and enjoy your OpenGL goodness.
I believe that the very latest version of the NVIDIA drivers even include a small program to edit xorg.conf for you (which makes sense, since it's so simple.)
Perhaps it's harder if you have an ATI card or something else -- I don't know. I used to buy 3dfx exclusively because Linux had the best support for it, and when they went under I switched to Nvidia. (Translation: Nvidia is making money off of me because they support Linux well and have for a long time. If they didn't, I might be buying ATI cards now instead.)
However, this is only a small part of the hassle involved in getting many games running under Linux. Some games require certain libraries and packages that probably aren't already installed, or permissions must be adjusted or new users created, for example. It's easy to fault Windows for many things, but `ease of getting stuff installed' is rarely one of them.
It's also a hassle having to rebuild the NVIDIA kernel module when you upgrade your kernel, but I've come up with this code that I've put into my/etc/rc.d/rc.local and now it's all automatic --
# check the NVIDIA version, rebuild if needed. BIN=/usr/local/stow/src/NVIDIA-Linux-x86- 1.0-7174-pkg1.run MODDIR=/lib/modules/`uname -r`
if [ ! -f ${MODDIR}/kernel/drivers/video/nvidia.ko ]; then echo "" echo "Looks like we need to rebuild the NVIDIA module." echo "" sh $BIN --accept-license --no-questions --kernel-module-only \ --no-network --silent fi
of course, the only thing I really use the OpenGL stuff on on my Linux box is for xscreensaver, but I have played with a few of the games that support Linux. But when I really want to play games, I have a Windows PC for that (and that's really all I do on that box.) If Linux gaming gets way better in the future, I may retire the concept of a seperate gaming computer, but for now, it's what I do.
(bah!/. is messing up my sh shell code snippit. There's no space in the BIN= line.)
Please note that this is *very* different from Windows actually being the better platform.
Let me be a little more specific, so you don't misunderstand what I'm trying to say.
From the end-user's perspective, Windows is a better platform for gaming (I put it in italics and bold so you don't miss it again) than Linux (or MacOS.) And this is mostly because most of the games out there are available for Windows and not Linux or MacOS. (Yes, there are exceptions, and there are games available for Linux or MacOS and not Windows, but those are rare.)
Also note that I said for gaming (as in actually playing games), not game development or game publishing, as those are different issues that I'm not discussing here.
If the developers have actually developed cross-platform in mind, the world would be a different place.
If. My comments were about the world that we live in, not some alternate reality. I was even careful to qualify them with a specific date, because things may change in the future.
In this reality that we live in, right now, if you want to play games on your PC, you're going to find a lot more variety in games to play (and generally higher quality games, though that's more debatable) if you chose Windows as your OS rather than Linux.
So, it isn't a platform problem, it a *developer* problem.
My point was never that Linux (or Windows, or MacOS, or BeOS) was a better overall platform, or that it was better to develop on. It was just that if you just want to play games, you're likely to be happier with Windows than Linux.
Of course, it may be that you'd be even happier with a PS2 or an Xbox or a Gamecube than a Windows box for games, but that's another issue entirely, another issue that I'm not covering here.
If that's what you really think, then don't get down on someone who's demanding Linux support in their games!
I wasn't exactly `down on him'. I was disagreeing with him. There's a difference.
And really, if you want to `demand Linux support', you don't do it at the beta test when you're asking for a free download. (And you don't do it on/., for that matter.) You do it when the finished product is out -- you let the company know that `if you had a Linux version out, I'd buy it. But you don't, so I won't!' There needs to be a dollar figure next to your demand, or they'll totally ignore it. Few commercial companies are going to make a Linux version of something just so you can download it for free. (Though having it be a value-add to a product for Windows that you paid for, that's another matter.)
Not to be pedantic, but I think Playstation has Windows beat on both these counts for games.
It's pretty pedantic.:)
But really, I was talking about PC gamers. I touched consoles a tiny bit later in the post, but I could have been more clear in the beginning. Thanks for bringing it up.
But really, are there more people playing games on Playstations than on PCs? I have my doubts. After all, even if you just play Minesweeper or Solitaire on your PC occasionally, you're still a `gamer', are you not?
(Fortunately, both of these games are available for Linux, so obviously Linux already has the games needed to attact a large percentage of the gamers out there!)
But ultimately, as things stand at the end of 2005, Windows is a better platform for gaming than Linux or MacOS -- the support is there, the games are there, and things generally work with little pain
This doesn't really make sense except for the fact that Windows happens to have a greater userbase, which itself does not make the platform any better or worse for gaming than any other platform.
And I completely disagree. What good is a platform for gaming if there's no games that work on it? Like it or not, most of the games out there work on Windows rather than Linux, so if you want to play one of those games, you'll need Windows rather than Linux.
And for the few games that do work on Linux, in many cases they're much harder to install and lack certain features of the Windows versions. And like it or not, Windows does offer better support for things like gaming hardware than Linux does, and the graphics and sound APIs are generally more appropriate/efficient/faster for games than those in Linux.
Fair or not, right now, if you want to play games, Windows is probably a better platform than Linux.
It is just as easy or difficult to develop a game for other platforms, as Blizzard, id, Aspyr, Ambrosia, Shrapnel, etc. have demonstrated, as it is to develop for Windows.
Well, all right. When you start your game company, you be sure to make your games just for Linux, and we'll see how long you stay in business. Why make a game that only 100,000 people can use, when you can make a game that 10,000,000 people can use (note: numbers are totally made up) with the same effort?
While I understand the sentiment, did you expect something else? Even NWN was supposed to support Windows, MacOS and Linux equally (and wasn't BeOS in there too?) but when it came out the reality was somewhat... different. Even now, Linux is supported by NWN, but there's some issues, like no Bink video (of course, that's not really Bioware's fault, but either way, it's a limitation if you're actually playing the standard game.)
Like it or not, Windows is what the vast majority of the gamers use, so that's who the developers develop for. How do we fix that? Well, we get more gamers to use Linux and to demand Linux support in their games. And these people need to be willing to pay for these Linux games -- wanting free versions won't cut it. So far, we're not doing very well in that front at all.
And seriously, getting most of the commercial games that are available for Linux working in Linux is somewhat tricky. Getting OpenGL hardware support isn't difficult, but there's often other dependancies and such that have to be done before a certain game will work, and even when it does work it often doesn't work as well as the Windows version.
Every time I have to defend Windows or explain why somebody chose Windows rather than Linux I feel like I'm in some sort of bizarro-world, since I'm a pretty serious Windows detractor. But ultimately, as things stand at the end of 2005, Windows is a better platform for gaming than Linux or MacOS -- the support is there, the games are there, and things generally work with little pain. The only platforms that can rival it are the various consoles (and in many ways, they do have it beat, and in many ways, Windows beats them.)
Does no one understand that this stuff is mainly a ploy to get users to sign up for the forums and buy subscriptions?
Sure, lots of people understand that. What's your point?
Get me an actual freely available download and a Mac or Linux version, otherwise I think I'll pass on this one.
OK, but lots of people will jump through their hoops, and a few actually will sign up for their forums and buy subscriptions, so I doubt that the creators of D&D Online and the IGN/Fileplanet people will really miss you that much.
and when I'm in shape, I can pedal hard enough to light at least 4 60 watt bulbs
Unless you're a serious athlete, I doubt you could put out 240 watts for long -- that's a lot of work. Even Lance Armstrong can only sustain around 500 watts, and he's probably as good as it gets.
Though to be fair, a small computer generally uses a good deal less than 240 watts. Even though you may have a 450 watt power supply, that's just a peak rating -- the average should be closer to 200 watts for most computers (though of course the very fastest cpus use a lot more, as do the latest video cards, and if you do SLI or SMP the power consumption goes through the roof.)
These things aren't very expensive, but they're very useful in determining just how much power various things use.
Of course, the PPC chips are a lot more efficient. You could just get a Mac -- I'll bet that Mac Mini uses much less power, and the Mac cube used so little power that it got by without even having a cooling fan.
Physicist? I guess I might be, as I did get a degree in physics, though I don't use it much:)
they were exactly the same phenomenon
Yes, I know. But even so, acceleration due to attaction between two masses (which I will call gravity here) and acceleration due to being accelerated in a circle (which is often called centrifigul/centripetal force) are going to be different, different in ways that a smart person could probably detect without special equipment. Sure, they may be the same phenomena in theory (and reality), but practice the overall field will be rather different.
If you were rotating something huge, like Niven's Ringworld, then the differences between that and the Earth's gravity would be hard to detect by a person without any special gear, but in a rotating space ship of a size that we could reasonably create today, the differences would be rather obvious, things that I've already mentioned.
You could also create gravity on a space ship by including a floor or some other object below you that's SO massive that it creates enough gravity and attracts you down that way, but then your ship would have a mass of a small moon or so and that's not very practial (we're talking sci-fi stuff here.) And if the mass were really dense (I'm talking neutron star dense here, which would be needed to make the ship a reasonable size), the tidal forces might be noticible to a person, or how the gravity always points towards the center of the ship. Maybe -- I'd have to pull out a calculator and start working on some real numbers.
In any event, the sort of people who believe that you do experience almost full gravity in LEO and who don't doubt the existence of `gravity generators' aren't likely to notice that absense of any of the differences in gravity that one might expect in a spaceship that generates gravity (or the illusion of gravity, depending on how you see it) in any way.
It also makes me wonder what they're going to do with the people they vote out. Eject them from the airlock? (So far, every reality show I've ever seen has ejected somebody each week or so, a convention that Survivor started that has stayed around.)
That would be great fun, to put somebody in the airlock, letting them think they're about to die, and then opening the door and they walk out into the sun:)
Though technically that's not gravity, though it's a reasonable approximation.
But there's some differences too. For example, the `gravity' at your head would be less than the gravity at your head, which is true on the Earth too, but the effect would be much much larger -- large enough that you might notice it. And if you were to jump straight up off the floor, your path up would not appear to be a straight line. Apparantly people's inner ears can tell the difference too, which I guess might explain how spinning things at the circus make you puke:)
But sure, if people think there's gravity because they're in `low Earth orbit' (when in fact as long as you're in orbit, you feel practically no gravity, no matter how low your orbit is) then I guess they won't be looking for those subtle effects. The ISS is only 200 miles up -- it's hard to get in a lower altitude than that above the Earth and actually stay there for any length of time -- and the astronauts float around just fine:)
Still, the whole thing sounds like a stunt, like the people MUST know they're not actually in space. Could they just be actors? Is this the new Joe Schmoe? If not, I really feel sorry for them when they `land' -- the whole world will know just how naive they are.
Re:They're getting paid how much?
on
The Future of Emacs
·
· Score: 1, Interesting
RMS invented GNU.
Odd statement. What is GNU? Sure, `GNU is not Unix', but that doesn't tell much. Ultimately, I guess that `GNU' must mean `the suite of programs and applications intended to replace/supplement Unix (or *nix)' but I doubt that even RMS calls it simply `GNU'.
Ultimately, I'm not sure that invented is the correct term. Created, wrote, initiated, started -- maybe. But not invented.
And certainly, RMS did not write all the GNU software, though he's certainly written a lot of it.
When the father of GPL / FSF can complain, it just invalidates your argument.
As I understand it, the argument that you're referring to is that `if RMS wants bugs fixed faster, he should fix them himself', right? If so, I don't see how it invalidates anything. Sure, RMS started the FSF and wrote much of the GNU software (including emacs) and he probably is still be the leader (I haven't watched the FSF politics in a while), but I'm not sure how that can invalidate anything.
RMS should be familiar with the GPL and it's `no warranty' clauses. Even RMS isn't entitled to any sort of warranty with his GPL covered software, and he should know full well that if he wants something done with it, the only sure-fire way to do it is to do it himself. The grandparent post seems right-on to me.
Though really, if you read his actual post, it doesn't sound so unreasonable. And really, he only seems to be talking about a two week period, and it is December -- lots of people take vacations around this time, and may not actually be cranking away at emacs. He's simply asking for help, which lots of maintainers of projects do from time to time.
In any event, the/. summary talks about lots of new things in emacs -- cygwin support, MacOS X support, mouse wheel support. Obviously the work involved in all of these was completed long ago, because I already have emacs 21 on my cygwin installs, I recall having emacs on my MacOS X box, and if I fire up emacs on my Linux box right now, the mouse wheel works just fine.
As everybody has said, this is quite common, and there's not much you can do about it beyond picking jobs where they actually trust you (which usually happens in the smaller outfits.)
The next time you resign from an IT job, there are things you should do before you resign if you want them to be done --
-- take your personal computer hardware, books, papers, etc. home. Before you resign. If you wait to do it after, you may not even get the chance (as they show you the door), and you'll have to argue with them about it. And if you do get the chance, they may be watching you like a hawk and you'll have to justify it.
-- same goes for your personal files and stuff you want to save. Save it off the network and computers BEFORE you resign. Some companys are cool about this sort of thing, some aren't. Don't take the risk. This is also a good thing to do if you get wind of layoffs coming up that you might be involved in.
-- If there are any projects you want to see completed before you leave, complete them before you resign.
Not really. Sony and Phillips had ATRAC in their minidisc and Phillips had PASC in the DCC back in 1992
Well, the patents don't cover all forms of lossy audio encoding. But more importantly, the patents related to mp3 encoding mostly predate 1992. They start at 1986 or so, with a few being applied for in 1995 and 1997, but only a few.
If the patent system in the late 80's was as screwed up as it is today
It was. It's just that it wasn't being taken advantage of back then quite as actively as it is now.
As it was, they had to patent an implementation of it, not the idea of it.
As it should be. If you can't build it now, you shouldn't be able to build it now! Hear that, people who patented the faster than light communication system?:)
Let's face it. The system is broken, everybody knows it, the big companies just like it because it lets them lock down huge portions of the technical universe and not have any competition. Its essentially locking the world into keritsu's where only huge companies have the resources to play, because they've been smart enough to get the patent laws tilted in their favor.
If you're looking for an argument, you've come to the wrong place. However, these big companies have a lot of resources involved in patents, and they won't give up without a fight. Any changes that are likely to be made in the short term are going to be very minor.
I wonder what it will take to finally get it an overhaul.
If we could somehow blame the 9/11 disaster on the patent system, that might do it. Or at least it might get the current administration to send the military to invade the patent system offices. Let's put `regime change' to work for Good!
But no, an editorial in a big newspaper isn't going to do it. Most people don't care, and there's a lot of powerful people (big companies, lawyers, etc.) who are very interested in making sure that the current system stays in place. But perhaps if people can start attributing the massive increases in costs in healthcare to patent abuse, or how AIDS drugs can't even be afforded by poor countries to help their people, that might be a good start. (And yet pharmacuticals are exactly the sort of things where patents make a lot of sense -- they're not obvious and cost lots of money to research. They're not good examples as/. readers often see them, but they're what the masses will understand.)
You don't think mp3 encoding and LZW compression qualifies as innovation?
Dunno about you, but around here, that stuff still isn't obvious to the layperson. Really, the problems with those two specific things isn't that the patents shouldn't have been granted, but that the companies first said they wouldn't actually enforce the patents, then changed their minds.
Now, the laser pointer/cat patent, I can't argue with that. And in fact, I certainly do think that the patent system needs a lot of overhauls -- reduce patent terms, get rid of or seriously limit software and business method patents, actually enforce the `not obvious to the layperson' and `not covered by previous art' restrictions... but if you're looking for examples of patents that should have never been granted, mp3 and lzw are not good examples.
To make things a little more complicated, you'll also find a large number of Intelligent Design proponents
who do not support creation in 6 days.
Of course, to make things less complicated again, I don't think there's anything that indicates that each of these six days had to be approximately 86400 seconds long (with a second being the time needed for a cesium-133 atom to perform 9,192,631,770 complete oscillations.)
Really, all you have to do is say that `days were longer back then.' That's the great thing about dogma... you (if you're the church or ruling body) you can always make more.
My right index finger (aka `slash 'em with a sword' finger) still aches from when I was playing a Barbarian in Diablo II. Years ago.
I'm not sure more of that would be a good thing.
My right index finger much preferred games like Dungeon Siege, where I didn't have to click the left mouse button at least once for every monster to kill:)
I'd use 20 times the extra power, and that would be about $30/year.
Looking at my electric bill, I pay $0.106/kWh for electricity once I get past 500 kWh per month (and I always do) so let's use that figure. 100 watts * 24 hours * 365 days/year = $93 per year.
Now, I'm assuming that the computer is left on 24/7 (which may not be what you calculated), is otherwise idle, and the power difference between idle and busy is 100 watts. I'm neglecting any additional cooling required due to the extra 100 watts of heat put into your house (during the summer), and I'm also neglecting any less heating required due to that extra 100 watts (during the winter.) As I understand it, the extra cooling can be quite expensive, perhaps even more expensive than the extra electricity used by the computer in the first place, though I'd love to see a more quantitative figure given if somebody can provide one.
Either way, $93/year isn't a lot, but it's not insignifigant either. And what does running SETI really gain you? You get a spiffy screensaver (but we're assuming that the monitor is left turned off. If it's left on so you can see that spiffy screensaver, the power consumption goes up considerably) and you get your name in some statistics somewhere, and maybe you'll be the lucky one to find Elvis's signal (assuming that you pick SETI and not something else), but ultimately you're paying $93/year for very little tangible benefit.
Slashdot Mirror
There's lots of variables that we're not touching here, but be assured that using compression along with backups often makes lots of sense -- -- it sometimes speeds up the backup process
-- it usually allows you to fit more onto a single piece of media
-- it usually lets you know, upon restoring, if anything was corrupted or not. (Yes, keeping md5 or crc32 hashes will also do this, but most archivers/compressors add this by default.) Without compression or hashes, you often don't know if there was some data corruption or not (depends on the backup system -- remember, there's lots of variables.)
-- sometimes the compressor/archiver will preserve metadata that the backup system will not. For example, tar will save *nix metadata where your backup may ignore it. (To be fair, tar is an archiver, but not a compressor. So consider tar.bz2 files instead.)
-- it's true that a single bit error in a gzip file will make everything after the error unreadable, and this is one reason that gzip is often a poor choice for compressing a very large file. But gzip is only one compressor -- bzip2 doesn't have this limitation, for example. (And gzip's stream could be periodically restarted to get past that.)
Also consider that in many cases, even a single bit error will make something totally unusable, compression or not. It depends on the circumstances.
But I do agree that par2 files (or the equivilent) are nice. I personally do my backups at home to DVD-Rs, with a program that creates tar.bz2 files of a certain range of sizes and then 5-10% .par2 files, and I also include md5sums and crc32s onto the DVD-R of all files on the disk so I can easily tell if anything is corrupt without even decompressing anything.
When I got my degree in astronomy, the graduating class was six ... all guys.
That, and every bit of power generated by anything like this will be power removed from your car, so ultimately you'll pay for it at the gas pump.
Ultimately, the whole idea of car powered lights and such only makes sense if 1) it's in a rural location where power is hard to come by and/or 2) you want to slow the cars down anyways, like a speed bump (and others have already mentioned it.) Beyond that, implementing this sort of thing would not be cost effective.
Though I thought that the recorded conversation was in person, not over the phone, which might change things even more. (And finally, it's in Canada, so US law shouldn't apply at all, as you've already mentioned.)
Doom 3 -- no installer.
UT2004 -- Trying to run these games exposed a problem with my NVidia driver installation.
Myth 2 -- whole list of problems
NWN -- a few problems
Compare this to my experience with the same games under Windows :
Doom 3 -- installed with a few clicks, worked fine.
UT2004 -- never tried this one. But the original installed with a few clicks and worked fine.
Myth 2 -- it's been a while, but I think it worked fine. (I think it was Myth 1 that required 3dfx hardware if I wanted acceleration. Which I had at the time.) I also tried Myth 2 under Linux and finally gave up on it, as I never got it working properly.
NWN -- installed with a few clicks, worked fine. Actually, I also tried NWN under Linux. It worked OK after I jumped through a few of the same hoops that you had to jump through, but ultimately I went back to playing it under Windows because I wanted to actually be able to see the cut-scenes.
Granted, `no installer' isn't such a big deal if they give you reasonable instructions about what goes where. That's fine for me, and I assume you, but for somebody who's new to *nix, it can be a big problem.
I'm not sure why you're needing to create a custom kernel for your NVIDIA drivers -- I don't have to. The NVIDIA installer builds a kernel module that matches whatever kernel you've got, and you don't even need the kernel source to be installed, just the headers.
Now sure, there are a few games for other OSs, and you may very well find some fine Linux games or games that work under Linux that you like, but ultimately, if you watch TV and see commercials for computer games and go `ooh, I want to play that!' ... it's quite likely that game is not going to work on Linux.
Perhaps it's harder if you have an ATI card or something else -- I don't know. I used to buy 3dfx exclusively because Linux had the best support for it, and when they went under I switched to Nvidia. (Translation: Nvidia is making money off of me because they support Linux well and have for a long time. If they didn't, I might be buying ATI cards now instead.)
However, this is only a small part of the hassle involved in getting many games running under Linux. Some games require certain libraries and packages that probably aren't already installed, or permissions must be adjusted or new users created, for example. It's easy to fault Windows for many things, but `ease of getting stuff installed' is rarely one of them.
It's also a hassle having to rebuild the NVIDIA kernel module when you upgrade your kernel, but I've come up with this code that I've put into my /etc/rc.d/rc.local and now it's all automatic --
of course, the only thing I really use the OpenGL stuff on on my Linux box is for xscreensaver, but I have played with a few of the games that support Linux. But when I really want to play games, I have a Windows PC for that (and that's really all I do on that box.) If Linux gaming gets way better in the future, I may retire the concept of a seperate gaming computer, but for now, it's what I do.(bah! /. is messing up my sh shell code snippit. There's no space in the BIN= line.)
From the end-user's perspective, Windows is a better platform for gaming (I put it in italics and bold so you don't miss it again) than Linux (or MacOS.) And this is mostly because most of the games out there are available for Windows and not Linux or MacOS. (Yes, there are exceptions, and there are games available for Linux or MacOS and not Windows, but those are rare.)
Also note that I said for gaming (as in actually playing games), not game development or game publishing, as those are different issues that I'm not discussing here.
If. My comments were about the world that we live in, not some alternate reality. I was even careful to qualify them with a specific date, because things may change in the future.In this reality that we live in, right now, if you want to play games on your PC, you're going to find a lot more variety in games to play (and generally higher quality games, though that's more debatable) if you chose Windows as your OS rather than Linux.
My point was never that Linux (or Windows, or MacOS, or BeOS) was a better overall platform, or that it was better to develop on. It was just that if you just want to play games, you're likely to be happier with Windows than Linux.Of course, it may be that you'd be even happier with a PS2 or an Xbox or a Gamecube than a Windows box for games, but that's another issue entirely, another issue that I'm not covering here.
And really, if you want to `demand Linux support', you don't do it at the beta test when you're asking for a free download. (And you don't do it on /., for that matter.) You do it when the finished product is out -- you let the company know that `if you had a Linux version out, I'd buy it. But you don't, so I won't!' There needs to be a dollar figure next to your demand, or they'll totally ignore it. Few commercial companies are going to make a Linux version of something just so you can download it for free. (Though having it be a value-add to a product for Windows that you paid for, that's another matter.)
But really, I was talking about PC gamers. I touched consoles a tiny bit later in the post, but I could have been more clear in the beginning. Thanks for bringing it up.
But really, are there more people playing games on Playstations than on PCs? I have my doubts. After all, even if you just play Minesweeper or Solitaire on your PC occasionally, you're still a `gamer', are you not?
(Fortunately, both of these games are available for Linux, so obviously Linux already has the games needed to attact a large percentage of the gamers out there!)
And for the few games that do work on Linux, in many cases they're much harder to install and lack certain features of the Windows versions. And like it or not, Windows does offer better support for things like gaming hardware than Linux does, and the graphics and sound APIs are generally more appropriate/efficient/faster for games than those in Linux.
Fair or not, right now, if you want to play games, Windows is probably a better platform than Linux.
Well, all right. When you start your game company, you be sure to make your games just for Linux, and we'll see how long you stay in business. Why make a game that only 100,000 people can use, when you can make a game that 10,000,000 people can use (note: numbers are totally made up) with the same effort?Like it or not, Windows is what the vast majority of the gamers use, so that's who the developers develop for. How do we fix that? Well, we get more gamers to use Linux and to demand Linux support in their games. And these people need to be willing to pay for these Linux games -- wanting free versions won't cut it. So far, we're not doing very well in that front at all.
And seriously, getting most of the commercial games that are available for Linux working in Linux is somewhat tricky. Getting OpenGL hardware support isn't difficult, but there's often other dependancies and such that have to be done before a certain game will work, and even when it does work it often doesn't work as well as the Windows version.
Every time I have to defend Windows or explain why somebody chose Windows rather than Linux I feel like I'm in some sort of bizarro-world, since I'm a pretty serious Windows detractor. But ultimately, as things stand at the end of 2005, Windows is a better platform for gaming than Linux or MacOS -- the support is there, the games are there, and things generally work with little pain. The only platforms that can rival it are the various consoles (and in many ways, they do have it beat, and in many ways, Windows beats them.)
Sure, lots of people understand that. What's your point? OK, but lots of people will jump through their hoops, and a few actually will sign up for their forums and buy subscriptions, so I doubt that the creators of D&D Online and the IGN/Fileplanet people will really miss you that much.Though to be fair, a small computer generally uses a good deal less than 240 watts. Even though you may have a 450 watt power supply, that's just a peak rating -- the average should be closer to 200 watts for most computers (though of course the very fastest cpus use a lot more, as do the latest video cards, and if you do SLI or SMP the power consumption goes through the roof.) These things aren't very expensive, but they're very useful in determining just how much power various things use.
Of course, the PPC chips are a lot more efficient. You could just get a Mac -- I'll bet that Mac Mini uses much less power, and the Mac cube used so little power that it got by without even having a cooling fan.
Really, if somebody thinks they're in space when they're really on a TV set, they don't need any further confusion :)
If you were rotating something huge, like Niven's Ringworld, then the differences between that and the Earth's gravity would be hard to detect by a person without any special gear, but in a rotating space ship of a size that we could reasonably create today, the differences would be rather obvious, things that I've already mentioned.
You could also create gravity on a space ship by including a floor or some other object below you that's SO massive that it creates enough gravity and attracts you down that way, but then your ship would have a mass of a small moon or so and that's not very practial (we're talking sci-fi stuff here.) And if the mass were really dense (I'm talking neutron star dense here, which would be needed to make the ship a reasonable size), the tidal forces might be noticible to a person, or how the gravity always points towards the center of the ship. Maybe -- I'd have to pull out a calculator and start working on some real numbers.
In any event, the sort of people who believe that you do experience almost full gravity in LEO and who don't doubt the existence of `gravity generators' aren't likely to notice that absense of any of the differences in gravity that one might expect in a spaceship that generates gravity (or the illusion of gravity, depending on how you see it) in any way.
It also makes me wonder what they're going to do with the people they vote out. Eject them from the airlock? (So far, every reality show I've ever seen has ejected somebody each week or so, a convention that Survivor started that has stayed around.)
That would be great fun, to put somebody in the airlock, letting them think they're about to die, and then opening the door and they walk out into the sun :)
But there's some differences too. For example, the `gravity' at your head would be less than the gravity at your head, which is true on the Earth too, but the effect would be much much larger -- large enough that you might notice it. And if you were to jump straight up off the floor, your path up would not appear to be a straight line. Apparantly people's inner ears can tell the difference too, which I guess might explain how spinning things at the circus make you puke :)
But sure, if people think there's gravity because they're in `low Earth orbit' (when in fact as long as you're in orbit, you feel practically no gravity, no matter how low your orbit is) then I guess they won't be looking for those subtle effects. The ISS is only 200 miles up -- it's hard to get in a lower altitude than that above the Earth and actually stay there for any length of time -- and the astronauts float around just fine :)
Still, the whole thing sounds like a stunt, like the people MUST know they're not actually in space. Could they just be actors? Is this the new Joe Schmoe? If not, I really feel sorry for them when they `land' -- the whole world will know just how naive they are.
Ultimately, I'm not sure that invented is the correct term. Created, wrote, initiated, started -- maybe. But not invented.
And certainly, RMS did not write all the GNU software, though he's certainly written a lot of it.
As I understand it, the argument that you're referring to is that `if RMS wants bugs fixed faster, he should fix them himself', right? If so, I don't see how it invalidates anything. Sure, RMS started the FSF and wrote much of the GNU software (including emacs) and he probably is still be the leader (I haven't watched the FSF politics in a while), but I'm not sure how that can invalidate anything.RMS should be familiar with the GPL and it's `no warranty' clauses. Even RMS isn't entitled to any sort of warranty with his GPL covered software, and he should know full well that if he wants something done with it, the only sure-fire way to do it is to do it himself. The grandparent post seems right-on to me.
Though really, if you read his actual post, it doesn't sound so unreasonable. And really, he only seems to be talking about a two week period, and it is December -- lots of people take vacations around this time, and may not actually be cranking away at emacs. He's simply asking for help, which lots of maintainers of projects do from time to time.
In any event, the /. summary talks about lots of new things in emacs -- cygwin support, MacOS X support, mouse wheel support. Obviously the work involved in all of these was completed long ago, because I already have emacs 21 on my cygwin installs, I recall having emacs on my MacOS X box, and if I fire up emacs on my Linux box right now, the mouse wheel works just fine.
Ahh, here's why the mouse wheel works --
Still, many of these issues seem like they've been there already for a very long time.The next time you resign from an IT job, there are things you should do before you resign if you want them to be done --
-- take your personal computer hardware, books, papers, etc. home. Before you resign. If you wait to do it after, you may not even get the chance (as they show you the door), and you'll have to argue with them about it. And if you do get the chance, they may be watching you like a hawk and you'll have to justify it.
-- same goes for your personal files and stuff you want to save. Save it off the network and computers BEFORE you resign. Some companys are cool about this sort of thing, some aren't. Don't take the risk. This is also a good thing to do if you get wind of layoffs coming up that you might be involved in.
-- If there are any projects you want to see completed before you leave, complete them before you resign.
But no, an editorial in a big newspaper isn't going to do it. Most people don't care, and there's a lot of powerful people (big companies, lawyers, etc.) who are very interested in making sure that the current system stays in place. But perhaps if people can start attributing the massive increases in costs in healthcare to patent abuse, or how AIDS drugs can't even be afforded by poor countries to help their people, that might be a good start. (And yet pharmacuticals are exactly the sort of things where patents make a lot of sense -- they're not obvious and cost lots of money to research. They're not good examples as /. readers often see them, but they're what the masses will understand.)
Dunno about you, but around here, that stuff still isn't obvious to the layperson. Really, the problems with those two specific things isn't that the patents shouldn't have been granted, but that the companies first said they wouldn't actually enforce the patents, then changed their minds.
Now, the laser pointer/cat patent, I can't argue with that. And in fact, I certainly do think that the patent system needs a lot of overhauls -- reduce patent terms, get rid of or seriously limit software and business method patents, actually enforce the `not obvious to the layperson' and `not covered by previous art' restrictions ... but if you're looking for examples of patents that should have never been granted, mp3 and lzw are not good examples.
Really, all you have to do is say that `days were longer back then.' That's the great thing about dogma ... you (if you're the church or ruling body) you can always make more.
I'm not sure more of that would be a good thing.
My right index finger much preferred games like Dungeon Siege, where I didn't have to click the left mouse button at least once for every monster to kill :)
Now, I'm assuming that the computer is left on 24/7 (which may not be what you calculated), is otherwise idle, and the power difference between idle and busy is 100 watts. I'm neglecting any additional cooling required due to the extra 100 watts of heat put into your house (during the summer), and I'm also neglecting any less heating required due to that extra 100 watts (during the winter.) As I understand it, the extra cooling can be quite expensive, perhaps even more expensive than the extra electricity used by the computer in the first place, though I'd love to see a more quantitative figure given if somebody can provide one.
Either way, $93/year isn't a lot, but it's not insignifigant either. And what does running SETI really gain you? You get a spiffy screensaver (but we're assuming that the monitor is left turned off. If it's left on so you can see that spiffy screensaver, the power consumption goes up considerably) and you get your name in some statistics somewhere, and maybe you'll be the lucky one to find Elvis's signal (assuming that you pick SETI and not something else), but ultimately you're paying $93/year for very little tangible benefit.