sure luke intervened, but it is anakin who finally makes the good decision and eliminates the emperor. this is the whole point of the end of return of the jedi - his redepemtion and 'savior' by luke.
even though luke saved his father's 'soul' (or whatever the star wars version) by showing him the good inside of him (anakin), anakin is indeed the one that makes the final decision to eliminate the emperor.
on a side note, of all of the star wars crap that's floating around these days, the darth vader blog that was updated prior to the release of episode 3 had the best writing of the entire series - it brought forth vader's personality and writing in a way that no one at lucas arts could possibly.
i agree - the fact that they didn't try to pass off 'people with strange foreheads' as aliens was one of the reasons that i thought the show was particularly great.
definitely the best acting i've seen on tv in a long time (the new battlestar is the other other show that's geniunely surprised me)...i heard the hype about it, watched an episode and wasn't too impressed, but after 'obtaining' the entire series recently i was extremely impressed.
can't wait until serenity comes out. such great characters'...
sure windows comes with all this crap, but how come myself and everyone i know ends up spending hours installing the 'actual' software that they want once the windows install is completed...
internet explorer gets run exactly ONCE - to visit www.mozilla.org and download firefox, after which point i spend the next 2 years continually deleting that freakin IE shortcut that keeps reinserting itself onto my desktop no matter how many times i delete it or tell it 'not' to appear on my desktop.
same with media players...and mail programs...and office software...and...and....
The average consumer won't buy the 'disabled' version of windows because they think buying an OS is like buying a car - you get it with all the options so it's 'better', instead of actually being knowledgeable about what the options 'do' (ie DRM, activation, spyware/security holes, the standard microsoft nightmares, i mean features)...
microsoft isn't exactly going to spend any marketing money on promoting the EU version of the OS, so the average consumer doesn't even know it exists likely...
they see XP on the shelf at whatever stores, since microsoft charges the same amount of money for the 'xp' version or the 'xp crippled version' (microsoft marketing terms), which one is the average user going to choose?
Oh, and another major annoyance (for me anyways) is that it creates NOT ONE, but TWO seperate folders in the 'my docs' folder for 'profiles'.
First is just 'Battlefield 2' and then it makes a second folder called 'Battlefield 2 Demo'...
I absolutely hate programs that insist on dumping shit into the my docs folder like this...no matter how much microsoft wants developers to do this, the my docs folder is for shit i actually use - profiles and other garbage that I'll never actually need to look at should be stored in the application folder...
Just tried it out for a few minutes...seems to be pretty fun.
My biggest complaint with DICE games is that they manage to make the absolute worst installers ever, and their menu's are the laggiest nightmares i've ever seen in a game...
Another complaint is that when you are first configuring the game, every time you change video settings, it has to spend a LONG time 'optimizing the shaders' for your new settings...
For myself, I have no idea how much I can tweak the video options to get the best visuals/performance out of the game, which resulted in 2 or 3 passes through these 'optimizations'...all in all I ended up having to spend almost an hour just installing and configuring the stupid game before I could even get into a game without the machine lagging out hardcore.
Also, why does it take SO LONG to start up and (even worse) disconnect from a SINGLE PLAYER SERVER!! I mean seriously...
Publishers whine about games not being able to reach the 'mystical' mass-market and then provide hideous install processes - 600 meg DEMO's that include a TON of extra shit that the game doesn't even need etc...
You go through 2 licenses that you must agree to before you even can install the demo...one for the 'tools' and one for the 'software'...
The demo includes so much extra crap that it really tarnishes what should be a really enjoyable game all around (if you can get over the fact that it's basically US Army propaganda):
1) Gamespy Arcade - why won't this program just die... 2) Nvidia Drivers - nvidia bribed them into bundling drives with the demo, adding extra bloat 3) Full DirectX9c - which seems to be a 'custom' version of DirectX9c because the game complained about a missing dll even if i didn't install this...I already HAD directx9c, why am i FORCED to install something like this?
Anyways...Once you get into the game itself it's extremely fun, but gawd-help you if you need to get back to that menu for whatever reason.
------------
With that said, the choppers are alot easier to fly than BF:Vietname - BFV's choppers made the game worth playing personally...i could fly around doing nothing for hours just because it was so fun...
The UH-60 is REALLY SLOW, but it's infinitely easier to hover than the BFV choppers...
The coolest thing about the planes is that the HUD in them actually works - you can see your tilt & rotation right from the HUD (duh like a 'real' chopper these days)...
Having the ability to hover in the VTOL planes is pretty sweet as well, but I imagine this will probably result in over-powered aircraft once people become really good at them...mind you there are alot more anti-aircraft options in this game compared to BFV as well, so who knows...
They have the muffled 'wounded' effect that FarCry does when you are hurt, except this time you get to stare at the empty sky waiting for the 30 seconds for the respawn to kick in...
For the short period of time that I have to play games in my schedule, there are too many annoyances to make me buy this game...I've already suffered through several DICE releases to realize what they are good at and what they aren't...so, it's fun, for what it is...but will it get my money?
No thanx...don't need YET ANOTHER ARMY GUY GAME (YAAGG)
at the time i was most definitely not writing computer games - i was implementing a customer relationship management program that unified over 300 sales people across north america into a single application (goldmine).
it made me laugh at the time as well - here i am a freak wandering around their IT department of hundreds of suit n tie folks with degrees out the ying yang and none of them had any idea how to manage this kind of thing.
was the difference between book knowledge and real world experience i think.
i don't have any tattoo's personally though, never found an artist that i wanted to draw on me (or could afford)
I run a game company and have done IT type work for over 10 years - it's never been an issue that's even come up. This is while I have a lip ring, ear rings, dreads halfway down my back and play in 2 bands professionally...
In certain cases i've even been hired specifically BECAUSE I look like I do - the reasoning I was told is that 'business people expect hackers to look that' and that it made the clients think that the consulting firm knew what they were doing...
This was a company that contracted to fortune 500 companies, large government/non-profit agencies and so on.
It all comes down to whether you have a professional attitude and ability to communicate and work with people though. Experience and actually knowing what you are doing doesn't help either;}
Ihe big thing is that for most IT, web and game development, most of the work has absolutely nothing to do with what you look like, so why should your appearance really affect what kind of jobs are available to you.
In our case we spent quite a while pricing at Dell and sure you can get the barebones machine for that price, but by the time you get the machine to a reasonable spec across the board, somehow they always end up costing $2500...no matter how we priced them, they always end up costing the same amount of money.
Mind you, that $500 machine is more than enough machine for 99% of the people out there.
This is exactly what's wrong with the computer industry these days - everyone seems to assume that people are eager to upgrade their machines to the latest and greatest the second that they are released.
Every company i've ever worked for in IT has had less-than bleeding edge machines, often what would be considered 'antique' by computer/software manufactureres - but the truth is that these are the machines that the rest of the world ACTUALLY USES because they are what we have.
If my company could afford bleeding edge computers, sure we'd buy them, but at this point the machines we have are doing perfectly fine for what they are.
With that said, I'm typing this on a 333 Mhz machine with 188 Mb of Ram - and Open Office STILL loads faster than what this guy says in TFA. Not sure what he could have possibly done to slow his machine down so much. In fact I just tried opening Write in the background while I typed this and it still only took like 10 seconds (at most) to open.
Slow? Hell, we don't have a 2.2 Ghz machine in the office even - we just bought a brand-spanking new Dell laptop (our first new computer purchase in a while) and it's only a 2 Ghz machine.
Not sure what planet this author comes from, but the 'rest of the world' is using much slower machines than software and hardware companies seem to realize.
No one I know (even audio/video professionals, etc) has uber-fast machines, and the ones we have do the job we need perfectly fine.
Game companies are the worst for this - they whine about not being able to reach the 'mass market' and then they release games like the new BattleField 2 demo that ONLY runs on WinXP, has a minimum system spec of a 2.2+ Ghz machine, etc...
open source groupware - includes calender, export & import of contacts, web-based email (sorta hurting mind you, no anti-spam etc), todo management as well as web-based file management among other things.
i've been using it for a few years and it does the trick very well - particularly if you are frequently online and need to get that one useful piece of info from anywhere.
todo's can be assigned to projects, specifically to individual contacts, you can have any number of notes per contact (useful for phone discussion logs) and also has built in 'bug tracking' as well.
we use it for all of our project management simply because i haven't found anything else as useful.
no matter HOW useful outlook is, there's no way that it is worth the license fee and yearly tax that is required to set it up and keep legit...
my point is that microsoft indonesia does NOT necessarily have to transfer any kind of profits or revenue to the parent company, instead holding it in whatever country that the revenue was earned.
or more likely, the revenue/profit is transfered to the 'microsoft offshore holding company' which has zero corporate tax whatsoever.
have you never heard of the 'zaibatsu' mega corporation? this is the whole issue with corporations that are larger than countries...they can shift their revenue around without actually ever having the revenue 'register' in a specific country.
This can also be a downside (particularly for smaller companies):
for example, VISA USA(which is a different company than VISA international etc) started forcing companies that want to charge visa to american citizens to have an US-registered corporation in addition to whereever your company is 'actually' registered.
so my canadian-registered corporation, in order to sell products via VISA to americans must have a US-registered corporation as well, even if we have no employees in the US.
This results in a 'double tax' on all of our revenues - the US corporation pays corporate tax on all sales in the US, and then we pay corporate tax in Canada when we bring the money into canada...the end result being that we have considerably less revenue after all of the tax is applied...
We aren't large enough to have registered corporations in all of the 'zero corporate tax' zones around the world, and don't get the benefit that larger companies do when shifting revenues around like microsoft & the other megacorp's do.
microsoft likely would NOT have to pay US taxes on the money earned simply because this is very likely 'Microsoft Indonesia Inc' that is getting the revenue (being an indonesian registered company) instead of Microsoft USA that gets the recenue.
as a developer that has worked with open source projects and developers (from the contributing and organizing sides both), this kind of 'requirement' would be absolutely impossible to enforce.
as an open source developer, you either take what you can get (ie spend the time integrating the changes into the primary build) or you don't.
having patches that are 'compatible with the rcs system used by the original developers' is absolutely ridiculous. this is what diff is for.
trying to enforce things like specific commenting types and 'descriptions of the code' is just ludicrous - you should be happy people provide you with code, period - if it's too difficult to integrate, perhaps the original developers need a better revision control system that has a diff that works?
i can't count the number of days that i have spent integrating code from random developers around the world into our own open source project - could i have developed said features from scratch? possibly, depending on what is being submitted.
could i have better spent the time doing new development for the project? potentially...
this kind of 'take what you can get' system is the foundation of open-source. you either take the contributions, or you don't.
whining about it because you have a big company that happens to have adopted your program is ridiculous.
there are hundreds of thousands of open source projects out there that would kill for a company like apple to donate code to them.
open source simply requires that they post their changes, not that they provide you with a 1-step integration of their forked code into your who-knows-what-has-changed 'primary' branch.
trying to force people to specifically donate their changes to the specific developer that happened to have posted the original code completely breaks the open-source model as well.
our current generation open-source game engine has gone through multiple lead developers - several of which just 'disappeared' off the face of the earth. being open source, other developers picked up the ball and continued the development of the engine.
in our case, the underlying graphics engine is owned by a company that has zero interest in supporting the open-source community (they bought the technology after it was open sourced) so this kind of forced submission process just will not work in the real world.
not only will it not work, but if the 'official' development team decides not to implement the code changes, who knows - perhaps there is another team out there that WILL integrate the changes...
this is the world of open-source. not every project has a linus at the top with the override of every step of the process.
i could have swore i saw the same article only a few days ago.
on gamesindustry.biz there is another article saying how the xbox division is back in the red as well - when the previous article claimed that the reason that microsoft's profits were 'record high' was BECAUSE of the game division...
exactly, why does slashdot even give didiot the time of day any more - she's 'proven' her 'independence' so many times in the past year or so with the sco/linux debacle, let alone the fud that she spouts consistently.
it's obvious she's a microsoft employee, and the yankee group have destroyed any credibility they 'might' have had by continuing to employ her.
non-story, complete fud
Re:The Sony PSP is the worst example of this
on
Re-Imagining Apple
·
· Score: 1
eat shit - real intelligent you are, posting as an AC
this is exactly what i was thinking - are we that deprived of valid news that we're reduced to debating about the validity of a machine that is supposed to make you try to sound funny?
ridiculous
The Sony PSP is the worst example of this
on
Re-Imagining Apple
·
· Score: 1
not only does it have WAAAAY too many buttons, but to enter any kind of information like numbers or text, you have to not only use the stupid 4 button keypad for navigation, but they've also thrown in the cel-phone style 'cycling through numbers & letters' interface as well...
it's an abstraction of an abstraction - just ridiculous...
if you are going to provide a 'mock' interface for people to enter information, why not provide a whole keyboard instead of the cel-phone letter/number game...
so stupid...but there's a lot about the PSP that makes it seem half-baked and incomplete...
well, don't know about other distro's, but we've been trying to get ati drivers to build properly under fedora core 3 for a few days now - getting any kind of 'real' 3d acceleration under fedora just isn't happening so far, and the bug reports & 'unofficial fedora faq' seem to have basically said 'ati == teh suxors' essentially as far as their linux drivers goes.
Just because you might have gotten the ati drivers to work for your machine doesn't mean that it's 'easy' or that 'ati has gotten their act together'
when i can actually get 3d accelerated OpenGL support running on one of our many machines (all with ati cards unfortunately) then i'll reconsider...at this point we're looking to support nvidia on linux but that's about it, which is unacceptable...
we're trying to get our game engine ported to linux, which shouldn't be TOO hard, but we've been stumped even getting 3d acceleration working under these stupid ATI cards.
can't wait to harass them at GDC about this...so stupid, how are we supposed to make linux the 'new gaming platform' when a roomfull of nerds can't even get 3d support working, let alone our game engine ported & tested & released to the point where the average consumer can use it...
ridiculous - it's pretty sad state of affairs at the moment though
Slashdot Mirror
as others have mentioned, wrong, wrong wrong.
sure luke intervened, but it is anakin who finally makes the good decision and eliminates the emperor. this is the whole point of the end of return of the jedi - his redepemtion and 'savior' by luke.
even though luke saved his father's 'soul' (or whatever the star wars version) by showing him the good inside of him (anakin), anakin is indeed the one that makes the final decision to eliminate the emperor.
on a side note, of all of the star wars crap that's floating around these days, the darth vader blog that was updated prior to the release of episode 3 had the best writing of the entire series - it brought forth vader's personality and writing in a way that no one at lucas arts could possibly.
i agree - the fact that they didn't try to pass off 'people with strange foreheads' as aliens was one of the reasons that i thought the show was particularly great.
definitely the best acting i've seen on tv in a long time (the new battlestar is the other other show that's geniunely surprised me)...i heard the hype about it, watched an episode and wasn't too impressed, but after 'obtaining' the entire series recently i was extremely impressed.
can't wait until serenity comes out. such great characters'...
exactly...
sure windows comes with all this crap, but how come myself and everyone i know ends up spending hours installing the 'actual' software that they want once the windows install is completed...
internet explorer gets run exactly ONCE - to visit www.mozilla.org and download firefox, after which point i spend the next 2 years continually deleting that freakin IE shortcut that keeps reinserting itself onto my desktop no matter how many times i delete it or tell it 'not' to appear on my desktop.
same with media players...and mail programs...and office software...and...and....
The average consumer won't buy the 'disabled' version of windows because they think buying an OS is like buying a car - you get it with all the options so it's 'better', instead of actually being knowledgeable about what the options 'do' (ie DRM, activation, spyware/security holes, the standard microsoft nightmares, i mean features)...
microsoft isn't exactly going to spend any marketing money on promoting the EU version of the OS, so the average consumer doesn't even know it exists likely...
they see XP on the shelf at whatever stores, since microsoft charges the same amount of money for the 'xp' version or the 'xp crippled version' (microsoft marketing terms), which one is the average user going to choose?
yikes you sound like a born again christian trying to push jesus onto the heathens of the world.
scam or not, having that much enthusiasm over something that doesn't exist and you don't really have any ownership over is scary.
might want to unplug and go see what a failure your 'first life' is becoming as a result...
Oh, and another major annoyance (for me anyways) is that it creates NOT ONE, but TWO seperate folders in the 'my docs' folder for 'profiles'.
/end rant
First is just 'Battlefield 2' and then it makes a second folder called 'Battlefield 2 Demo'...
I absolutely hate programs that insist on dumping shit into the my docs folder like this...no matter how much microsoft wants developers to do this, the my docs folder is for shit i actually use - profiles and other garbage that I'll never actually need to look at should be stored in the application folder...
anyways...
Just tried it out for a few minutes...seems to be pretty fun.
My biggest complaint with DICE games is that they manage to make the absolute worst installers ever, and their menu's are the laggiest nightmares i've ever seen in a game...
Another complaint is that when you are first configuring the game, every time you change video settings, it has to spend a LONG time 'optimizing the shaders' for your new settings...
For myself, I have no idea how much I can tweak the video options to get the best visuals/performance out of the game, which resulted in 2 or 3 passes through these 'optimizations'...all in all I ended up having to spend almost an hour just installing and configuring the stupid game before I could even get into a game without the machine lagging out hardcore.
Also, why does it take SO LONG to start up and (even worse) disconnect from a SINGLE PLAYER SERVER!! I mean seriously...
Publishers whine about games not being able to reach the 'mystical' mass-market and then provide hideous install processes - 600 meg DEMO's that include a TON of extra shit that the game doesn't even need etc...
You go through 2 licenses that you must agree to before you even can install the demo...one for the 'tools' and one for the 'software'...
The demo includes so much extra crap that it really tarnishes what should be a really enjoyable game all around (if you can get over the fact that it's basically US Army propaganda):
1) Gamespy Arcade - why won't this program just die...
2) Nvidia Drivers - nvidia bribed them into bundling drives with the demo, adding extra bloat
3) Full DirectX9c - which seems to be a 'custom' version of DirectX9c because the game complained about a missing dll even if i didn't install this...I already HAD directx9c, why am i FORCED to install something like this?
Anyways...Once you get into the game itself it's extremely fun, but gawd-help you if you need to get back to that menu for whatever reason.
------------
With that said, the choppers are alot easier to fly than BF:Vietname - BFV's choppers made the game worth playing personally...i could fly around doing nothing for hours just because it was so fun...
The UH-60 is REALLY SLOW, but it's infinitely easier to hover than the BFV choppers...
The coolest thing about the planes is that the HUD in them actually works - you can see your tilt & rotation right from the HUD (duh like a 'real' chopper these days)...
Having the ability to hover in the VTOL planes is pretty sweet as well, but I imagine this will probably result in over-powered aircraft once people become really good at them...mind you there are alot more anti-aircraft options in this game compared to BFV as well, so who knows...
They have the muffled 'wounded' effect that FarCry does when you are hurt, except this time you get to stare at the empty sky waiting for the 30 seconds for the respawn to kick in...
For the short period of time that I have to play games in my schedule, there are too many annoyances to make me buy this game...I've already suffered through several DICE releases to realize what they are good at and what they aren't...so, it's fun, for what it is...but will it get my money?
No thanx...don't need YET ANOTHER ARMY GUY GAME (YAAGG)
at the time i was most definitely not writing computer games - i was implementing a customer relationship management program that unified over 300 sales people across north america into a single application (goldmine).
it made me laugh at the time as well - here i am a freak wandering around their IT department of hundreds of suit n tie folks with degrees out the ying yang and none of them had any idea how to manage this kind of thing.
was the difference between book knowledge and real world experience i think.
i don't have any tattoo's personally though, never found an artist that i wanted to draw on me (or could afford)
I run a game company and have done IT type work for over 10 years - it's never been an issue that's even come up. This is while I have a lip ring, ear rings, dreads halfway down my back and play in 2 bands professionally...
;}
In certain cases i've even been hired specifically BECAUSE I look like I do - the reasoning I was told is that 'business people expect hackers to look that' and that it made the clients think that the consulting firm knew what they were doing...
This was a company that contracted to fortune 500 companies, large government/non-profit agencies and so on.
It all comes down to whether you have a professional attitude and ability to communicate and work with people though. Experience and actually knowing what you are doing doesn't help either
Ihe big thing is that for most IT, web and game development, most of the work has absolutely nothing to do with what you look like, so why should your appearance really affect what kind of jobs are available to you.
Yeah, good point...
In our case we spent quite a while pricing at Dell and sure you can get the barebones machine for that price, but by the time you get the machine to a reasonable spec across the board, somehow they always end up costing $2500...no matter how we priced them, they always end up costing the same amount of money.
Mind you, that $500 machine is more than enough machine for 99% of the people out there.
This is exactly what's wrong with the computer industry these days - everyone seems to assume that people are eager to upgrade their machines to the latest and greatest the second that they are released.
Every company i've ever worked for in IT has had less-than bleeding edge machines, often what would be considered 'antique' by computer/software manufactureres - but the truth is that these are the machines that the rest of the world ACTUALLY USES because they are what we have.
If my company could afford bleeding edge computers, sure we'd buy them, but at this point the machines we have are doing perfectly fine for what they are.
With that said, I'm typing this on a 333 Mhz machine with 188 Mb of Ram - and Open Office STILL loads faster than what this guy says in TFA. Not sure what he could have possibly done to slow his machine down so much. In fact I just tried opening Write in the background while I typed this and it still only took like 10 seconds (at most) to open.
Slow? Hell, we don't have a 2.2 Ghz machine in the office even - we just bought a brand-spanking new Dell laptop (our first new computer purchase in a while) and it's only a 2 Ghz machine.
Not sure what planet this author comes from, but the 'rest of the world' is using much slower machines than software and hardware companies seem to realize.
No one I know (even audio/video professionals, etc) has uber-fast machines, and the ones we have do the job we need perfectly fine.
Game companies are the worst for this - they whine about not being able to reach the 'mass market' and then they release games like the new BattleField 2 demo that ONLY runs on WinXP, has a minimum system spec of a 2.2+ Ghz machine, etc...
Hilarious...
http://www.phprojekt.com/
open source groupware - includes calender, export & import of contacts, web-based email (sorta hurting mind you, no anti-spam etc), todo management as well as web-based file management among other things.
i've been using it for a few years and it does the trick very well - particularly if you are frequently online and need to get that one useful piece of info from anywhere.
todo's can be assigned to projects, specifically to individual contacts, you can have any number of notes per contact (useful for phone discussion logs) and also has built in 'bug tracking' as well.
we use it for all of our project management simply because i haven't found anything else as useful.
no matter HOW useful outlook is, there's no way that it is worth the license fee and yearly tax that is required to set it up and keep legit...
other web-based options:
http://www.phpcollab.com/
phpcollab is a bit easier on the eyes than phprojekt, but seems to complicate the process more than it should be.
I seem to recall a custom version of the GIMP that attempted to make the interface behave more like photoshop, et al
can't remember the name of it at the moment however
my point is that microsoft indonesia does NOT necessarily have to transfer any kind of profits or revenue to the parent company, instead holding it in whatever country that the revenue was earned.
;}
or more likely, the revenue/profit is transfered to the 'microsoft offshore holding company' which has zero corporate tax whatsoever.
have you never heard of the 'zaibatsu' mega corporation? this is the whole issue with corporations that are larger than countries...they can shift their revenue around without actually ever having the revenue 'register' in a specific country.
This can also be a downside (particularly for smaller companies):
for example, VISA USA(which is a different company than VISA international etc) started forcing companies that want to charge visa to american citizens to have an US-registered corporation in addition to whereever your company is 'actually' registered.
so my canadian-registered corporation, in order to sell products via VISA to americans must have a US-registered corporation as well, even if we have no employees in the US.
This results in a 'double tax' on all of our revenues - the US corporation pays corporate tax on all sales in the US, and then we pay corporate tax in Canada when we bring the money into canada...the end result being that we have considerably less revenue after all of the tax is applied...
We aren't large enough to have registered corporations in all of the 'zero corporate tax' zones around the world, and don't get the benefit that larger companies do when shifting revenues around like microsoft & the other megacorp's do.
good old corporate accounting
microsoft likely would NOT have to pay US taxes on the money earned simply because this is very likely 'Microsoft Indonesia Inc' that is getting the revenue (being an indonesian registered company) instead of Microsoft USA that gets the recenue.
taking a punch and dealing with it instead of whining and crying about it. basically admitting you've made a mistake...
as a developer that has worked with open source projects and developers (from the contributing and organizing sides both), this kind of 'requirement' would be absolutely impossible to enforce.
as an open source developer, you either take what you can get (ie spend the time integrating the changes into the primary build) or you don't.
having patches that are 'compatible with the rcs system used by the original developers' is absolutely ridiculous. this is what diff is for.
trying to enforce things like specific commenting types and 'descriptions of the code' is just ludicrous - you should be happy people provide you with code, period - if it's too difficult to integrate, perhaps the original developers need a better revision control system that has a diff that works?
i can't count the number of days that i have spent integrating code from random developers around the world into our own open source project - could i have developed said features from scratch?
possibly, depending on what is being submitted.
could i have better spent the time doing new development for the project? potentially...
this kind of 'take what you can get' system is the foundation of open-source. you either take the contributions, or you don't.
whining about it because you have a big company that happens to have adopted your program is ridiculous.
there are hundreds of thousands of open source projects out there that would kill for a company like apple to donate code to them.
open source simply requires that they post their changes, not that they provide you with a 1-step integration of their forked code into your who-knows-what-has-changed 'primary' branch.
trying to force people to specifically donate their changes to the specific developer that happened to have posted the original code completely breaks the open-source model as well.
our current generation open-source game engine has gone through multiple lead developers - several of which just 'disappeared' off the face of the earth. being open source, other developers picked up the ball and continued the development of the engine.
in our case, the underlying graphics engine is owned by a company that has zero interest in supporting the open-source community (they bought the technology after it was open sourced) so this kind of forced submission process just will not work in the real world.
not only will it not work, but if the 'official' development team decides not to implement the code changes, who knows - perhaps there is another team out there that WILL integrate the changes...
this is the world of open-source. not every project has a linus at the top with the override of every step of the process.
i could have swore i saw the same article only a few days ago.
on gamesindustry.biz there is another article saying how the xbox division is back in the red as well - when the previous article claimed that the reason that microsoft's profits were 'record high' was BECAUSE of the game division...
very strange...
i think is what the fark headline would read...
these people actually get money for this kind of thing?
where do we sign up?
basically, microsoft again trying to co-opt the opensource / community process instead of properly adopting it.
reject, refuse, deny
exactly, why does slashdot even give didiot the time of day any more - she's 'proven' her 'independence' so many times in the past year or so with the sco/linux debacle, let alone the fud that she spouts consistently.
it's obvious she's a microsoft employee, and the yankee group have destroyed any credibility they 'might' have had by continuing to employ her.
non-story, complete fud
eat shit - real intelligent you are, posting as an AC
this is exactly what i was thinking - are we that deprived of valid news that we're reduced to debating about the validity of a machine that is supposed to make you try to sound funny?
ridiculous
not only does it have WAAAAY too many buttons, but to enter any kind of information like numbers or text, you have to not only use the stupid 4 button keypad for navigation, but they've also thrown in the cel-phone style 'cycling through numbers & letters' interface as well...
it's an abstraction of an abstraction - just ridiculous...
if you are going to provide a 'mock' interface for people to enter information, why not provide a whole keyboard instead of the cel-phone letter/number game...
so stupid...but there's a lot about the PSP that makes it seem half-baked and incomplete...
How about using a different pdf viewer?
Foxit PDF is a great little pdf viewer for windows - you couldn't pay me enough to install acrobat...
well, don't know about other distro's, but we've been trying to get ati drivers to build properly under fedora core 3 for a few days now - getting any kind of 'real' 3d acceleration under fedora just isn't happening so far, and the bug reports & 'unofficial fedora faq' seem to have basically said 'ati == teh suxors' essentially as far as their linux drivers goes.
Just because you might have gotten the ati drivers to work for your machine doesn't mean that it's 'easy' or that 'ati has gotten their act together'
when i can actually get 3d accelerated OpenGL support running on one of our many machines (all with ati cards unfortunately) then i'll reconsider...at this point we're looking to support nvidia on linux but that's about it, which is unacceptable...
we're trying to get our game engine ported to linux, which shouldn't be TOO hard, but we've been stumped even getting 3d acceleration working under these stupid ATI cards.
can't wait to harass them at GDC about this...so stupid, how are we supposed to make linux the 'new gaming platform' when a roomfull of nerds can't even get 3d support working, let alone our game engine ported & tested & released to the point where the average consumer can use it...
ridiculous - it's pretty sad state of affairs at the moment though