Here is where all of the/. "Elite" harp on and on about how crapy games are. They will rant and rave about how games require too much resources now adays, how they aren't efficient with memory, how they shouldn't require 3d accelerators, how the cpu requirements are ridiculous ("it should run on a 386!") and how the hard drive requirements are through the roof ("I could do it with only 12megs of hdd!"). Some of these folks will take the next illogical step and say it is a conspiracy to keep consumers buying hardware, others will say it is programmer lazyness. On top of that, most of them will say it doesn't matter anyway because nothing will ever be better than [Insert OLD dated game here, that ironically required cutting edge hardware to run when it came out].
Seriously folks, here is how it is. PC gaming is the cream of the crop for gaming. It costs more, and it takes more effert to get going, but the rewards are more too. Sure, it's cutting edge, but I LIKE cutting edge. THAT is why I play PC games, to me it's like constantly living on the edge of the future. When the future comes to the rest of you, us cutting edge PC gamers will say "Yeah.. I finished that one last season..".
The manufacturers wouldn't be making these games if there weren't a market for them. If you don't like the way the games are made then you aren't a part of the community, and have nothing to do with the market. Go mind your own business.
Re:review of Katz's review (summary: katz != siske
on
Slashdot Meets X-Men
·
· Score: 1
Bravo!
I so much want to avoid jumping on the Katz hating bandwagon.. but well, he just keeps screwing up so badly.
"As morality fails (and let's face it: morality is maintained by spirituality)."
This is pretty much the basis of your entire argument. I've seen it many times before in other place, and I completely disagree with it.
On the contrary, I believe that spirituality impedes moral progress by focusing on rewards or punishments. Ideally, a person should do good because they want to, not because they expect to get rewarded (or punished if they dont).
Who is more moral, the atheist who does right because he thinks it's right, or the christian who does right because he wants to get into heaven?
In case you haven't noticed, tons of people start big ambititous software products in Linux, but nobody follows through. I frequent linuxgames.com and happypenguin.com but I'm sick and tired of reading about this or that new project when 90% of them go unfinished. I just wish someone would do a -mildy- ambitious game and finish it, something along the lines of dragonwarrior 1 for the nes or something...
*shrug* I never went to college and I was originally hired as a PC repair tech. I got the job as a network admin by just doing what needed to be done when it needed doing. As our Internet business grew I took on all the work of that until it is now all that I do, here I am a few years later doing a different job for the same money.
I really am good at what I do even though I'm untrained, but what is a poor degreeless guy to do?
Yes I have been mulling that over in my mind, and it is enticing, but too expensive.
If I add the cost of a new MB, and the PC-133 I would need (just have pc-100 now...:( ) it comes out to $350 or $400 total, compared to $120 for the FC-PGA Celeron533 upgrade.
Like I said before, I'm poor, and that extra $250 is prohibitively expensive. That said, anybody want to hire a Network Administrator with 4 years experience? I'm willing to relocate..;)
This is just flat wrong. An OC'd CPU with peltier and watercooled heatsink is still cheaper than a top of the line cpu, but will perform like one.
On top of that, if you don't want to put in the time/effort/money to build that rig, you can just OC without it but not go as high. Most Celeron 533's will do 800mhz without additional cooling measures. Thats more performance for no additional cost. Consider that CPU can be purchased for around $100, and you have just saved yourself about $300 over buying a retail 800mhz cpu.
Although people say an OC'd cpu will not last as long, after 5 years of OC'ing nearly a dozen CPU's I have yet to see longevity of the CPU become a problem. Generally speaking, if you are going to burn them out it is going to happen when you are experimenting in your intitial setup, and even that is extremely rare.
"Is a couple hundred dollars so hard to come by that we are unwilling to spend it for the peace of mind and stability of a processor we know is not about to overheat?"
The answer, yes. Newsflash; a couple hundred bucks is rich man territory if you look at the state of humanity on a global scale. Hell we don't even hav eto leave the good ol US of A. You have even sat down NEXT to people in restuarants who consider a couple hundred bucks quite a bit of cash. Amazing huh?
That aside, the truth is, we get more performance at -significantly- reduced cost, not just a few hundred dollars. Those Durans that are doing 950mhz are $100 CPUs and outperform 1000mhz Intel chips.:P
And as a longtime overclocker you know all of this personally right? This is total BS. An overclocked processor isn't significantly more likely to create an incorrect result in RC5 than one a normally clocked one. If something fails it will fail the same way a normal CPU will, it will screw up enough stuff such that the client wont function at least, and probably bring the OS to it's knees too. As for the Dick size contest, that is sometimes true, but not usually. I Overclock because I make $8/hour (in other words, im poor) but I still like to play Quake competitively online. A Celeron300A cost me ~$100 when I purchased it and I achieve framerates in Quake2 which are identical to the framerates a p2-450 gets you. This was -without- having to put any money into extreme cooling measures, nothing but a stock heatsink and fan. At the time I purchased that Celeron it cost me about 1/5th of what a p2-450 would have cost, and by overclocking I got the same performance.
Stability? Rock solid, and over a year later, its still going strong.
I plan on getting one of the new flipchip Celeron 533's for about $100 here in the next week or two, drop that into a FC-PGA to Slot-1 converter ($20) and according to everything I have read it should do 800mhz with stock cooling.
And again.. why am I doing it? Because I'm poor. And yes, I have a small penis, but that is unrelated.
Debian claims that the GPL and the QTL are incompatible. KDE is left out of Debian because KDE is distributed under the GPL, but links against QT, this should not be legal. Now, this situation isn't really anyones fault but is more of an oversight.
Now the Debian people want KDE to fix this problem by adding a clause to the license on their software that specifically allows this case. The KDE people do not want to do this because it would take too much work to contact all of those people and get permission to change the license their code is being released under.
Now given all of that information, it means that all of those distributions that distribute KDE now are doing so illegally.
The only thing is, that's not the whole story.
The GPL allows you to link your software against libraries with a more restricted license if, and only if, the library in question is a system library.
This is everything I was able to gleen from the sitution from reading these posts. I have a few questions though that I would like to see addressed.
Firstly, what precisely does it take to consider a library a system library?
Second, Given this situation I can only assume that all of these other distributions consider QT a system library, and that is how they are distributing KDE. Is this true?
Third, why does Debian not just consider QT a system library, since I understand they do in fact distribute QT as part of their core package?
I have read the GPL and it leaves the defintion of system library somewhat vauge. I am wondering if perhaps the reason that Debian does not consider QT a system library is because by doing so they set a precedent that makes it somewhat easy to consider a library a 'system library' thereby weakening the GPL?
IANAL Well, regardless of wether that is the case or not. It has occured to me that if the majority of the major distributions forced KDE to change their license to be included, by denying that QT is a system library, this would set a good precedent for the GPL, because it raises the bar for what a library has to be in order to be considered a system library. If so, I think that that would be A Very Good Thing.
My opinion on this matter comes down to this; If considering QT a system library weakens the GPL in any way, then it shouldn't be done. Since the only other way to rectify this problem is for KDE to go through the license change hassle, then so be it.
On the other hand, if QT is in fact a system library, then there is no problem, and the Debian folks should include KDE since there is nothing to worry about.
I think that is a bit oversimplified. If what you say is true, how come all the Linux browsers right now suck compared to IE?
I'm not trolling, I'm serious. You might recall an article on here a few months back that pointed out that one of the biggest problems we have with Linux is web browsing; It's something that everyone does, but our OS doesn't do it half as well as the oppositions OS. If it's so simple, then whats the holdup on Mozilla? If it's so simply, why are we loosing so horribly?
I am a Network Administrator for an ISP. I have delt with customers quite a bit, and I can't count the number of times I have asked a customer what their OS was, and got the response "Internet Explorer" or "Netscape".
You might want to quantify the browser as just a tool like 'troff', and to you (and allot of us I'm sure) it might be, but that doesn't make it true to everyone.
Besides, I don't think the DOJ has been focusing on the browser at the expense of everything else, I just think they are being thorough, and who would argue with that?
Saying that all bright people don't like college is kind of like saying that noone who doesnt go to college is going to be successful.
There are tons of examples that went both ways.
I think the -really- immaginative and bright people find college cumbersome, but it's probably just wishful thinking hinged on the fact that I personally found it that way.
I suspect it is just a personality thing.
This I will say; I have an instant distrust of anyone who did well in school. I just know they are probably way too conformist for me.
Napster probably does hurt record sales. I don't see any reason to think it shouldn't. I for one know that I don't buy as much music as I used to, and I have been using Napster quite a bit.
The question in my mind, isn't if it does, but why. Most people are quick to jump on Napster users and critisize them as greedy theives. Are they really? Maybe, but I like to think that if I had the opportunity to pay for the music I'm downloading, I would do it. This is more an evolution of medium I think. People want to be able to download music, and they are going to do so. If it's free, well fine, but if the record industry came up with a way to charge for it then people would still use it.
Personally I think this is just the kind of thing we need to shake up the industry. The industry has been increasing prices and falling into slothlike pattern. They are no longer worried about pleasing the consumer because they think they already have us pleased. They keep increasing prices and we keep paying them. Well no more. They will have to adapt to this new medium or die.
Screw the record industry, the dirty bastards have been ripping me off for years! It couldnt cost more than about a buck fifty to make a cd but they still cost $20!! Fuck that! Making a CD costs a fraction of what it does to make a Cassete, but prices have still been going up for 20 years! Well they have been sticking to us for so long, we don't have to take it! They can take their price
fixing, profiteering, gluttonous asses and SUCK IT! ITS A MUSICAL REVOLUTION AND THE MAN IS GOING DOWN! WE WONT BEND OVER AND TAKE IT ANYMORE, DOWNLOAD UNTIL YOUR MODEM BURNS!
DOWN WITH METALLICA!!! DOWN WITH DRE!!! VIVA LA NAPSTER!! VIVA LA RESISTANCE!!
Porting? According to this link: http://www.neverwinternights.com/about.html Neverwinter Nights is be developed as a platform independent project for Linux/Mac/Windows. How does that require porting?
Slashdot Mirror
NT == No text.
Is what I had here in the first place but the stupid 'ascii art' filter caught it.
Without copyright, those licenses wouldn't be needed.
Here is where all of the /. "Elite" harp on and on about how crapy games are. They will rant and rave about how games require too much resources now adays, how they aren't efficient with memory, how they shouldn't require 3d accelerators, how the cpu requirements are ridiculous ("it should run on a 386!") and how the hard drive requirements are through the roof ("I could do it with only 12megs of hdd!"). Some of these folks will take the next illogical step and say it is a conspiracy to keep consumers buying hardware, others will say it is programmer lazyness. On top of that, most of them will say it doesn't matter anyway because nothing will ever be better than [Insert OLD dated game here, that ironically required cutting edge hardware to run when it came out].
Seriously folks, here is how it is. PC gaming is the cream of the crop for gaming. It costs more, and it takes more effert to get going, but the rewards are more too. Sure, it's cutting edge, but I LIKE cutting edge. THAT is why I play PC games, to me it's like constantly living on the edge of the future. When the future comes to the rest of you, us cutting edge PC gamers will say "Yeah.. I finished that one last season..".
The manufacturers wouldn't be making these games if there weren't a market for them. If you don't like the way the games are made then you aren't a part of the community, and have nothing to do with the market. Go mind your own business.
Bravo!
I so much want to avoid jumping on the Katz hating bandwagon.. but well, he just keeps screwing up so badly.
This is a good response.
It could be better though.
Im still very miffed that customizing that panel at the bottom isn't half as easy as I would like it to be.
Does a significant segment of the population really have so many choices?
I don't even have 1 DSL provider, let alone several to choose from. Must be nice.
That said, when DSL becomes available here, I doubt I'll be doing any research, it'll be better than 56k no matter how you slice it.
Yeah thats the story, but not before being forced to withdraw his opinion that the earth was not the center of the universe.
"As morality fails (and let's face it: morality is maintained by spirituality)."
This is pretty much the basis of your entire argument. I've seen it many times before in other place, and I completely disagree with it.
On the contrary, I believe that spirituality impedes moral progress by focusing on rewards or punishments. Ideally, a person should do good because they want to, not because they expect to get rewarded (or punished if they dont).
Who is more moral, the atheist who does right because he thinks it's right, or the christian who does right because he wants to get into heaven?
In case you haven't noticed, tons of people start big ambititous software products in Linux, but nobody follows through. I frequent linuxgames.com and happypenguin.com but I'm sick and tired of reading about this or that new project when 90% of them go unfinished. I just wish someone would do a -mildy- ambitious game and finish it, something along the lines of dragonwarrior 1 for the nes or something...
yeah yeah.. blah blah blah...
translation: Im an old fuddy duddy.
*shrug* I never went to college and I was originally hired as a PC repair tech. I got the job as a network admin by just doing what needed to be done when it needed doing. As our Internet business grew I took on all the work of that until it is now all that I do, here I am a few years later doing a different job for the same money.
I really am good at what I do even though I'm untrained, but what is a poor degreeless guy to do?
heh.. life story. yeah.. its the weekend.
Yes I have been mulling that over in my mind, and it is enticing, but too expensive.
;)
If I add the cost of a new MB, and the PC-133 I would need (just have pc-100 now...:( ) it comes out to $350 or $400 total, compared to $120 for the FC-PGA Celeron533 upgrade.
Like I said before, I'm poor, and that extra $250 is prohibitively expensive.
That said, anybody want to hire a Network Administrator with 4 years experience? I'm willing to relocate..
This is just flat wrong.
An OC'd CPU with peltier and watercooled heatsink is still cheaper than a top of the line cpu, but will perform like one.
On top of that, if you don't want to put in the time/effort/money to build that rig, you can just OC without it but not go as high. Most Celeron 533's will do 800mhz without additional cooling measures. Thats more performance for no additional cost. Consider that CPU can be purchased for around $100, and you have just saved yourself about $300 over buying a retail 800mhz cpu.
Although people say an OC'd cpu will not last as long, after 5 years of OC'ing nearly a dozen CPU's I have yet to see longevity of the CPU become a problem. Generally speaking, if you are going to burn them out it is going to happen when you are experimenting in your intitial setup, and even that is extremely rare.
I'm right near there and I have never heard of this. Geez, if you want someone to show up then freaking advertise.
This is an easy one to answer.
:P
"Is a couple hundred dollars so hard to come by that we are unwilling to spend it for the peace
of mind and stability of a processor we know is not about to overheat?"
The answer, yes. Newsflash; a couple hundred bucks is rich man territory if you look at the state of humanity on a global scale. Hell we don't even hav eto leave the good ol US of A. You have even sat down NEXT to people in restuarants who consider a couple hundred bucks quite a bit of cash. Amazing huh?
That aside, the truth is, we get more performance at -significantly- reduced cost, not just a few hundred dollars. Those Durans that are doing 950mhz are $100 CPUs and outperform 1000mhz Intel chips.
And as a longtime overclocker you know all of this personally right?
This is total BS. An overclocked processor isn't significantly more likely to create an incorrect result in RC5 than one a normally clocked one. If something fails it will fail the same way a normal CPU will, it will screw up enough stuff such that the client wont function at least, and probably bring the OS to it's knees too.
As for the Dick size contest, that is sometimes true, but not usually. I Overclock because I make $8/hour (in other words, im poor) but I still like to play Quake competitively online. A Celeron300A cost me ~$100 when I purchased it and I achieve framerates in Quake2 which are identical to the framerates a p2-450 gets you. This was -without- having to put any money into extreme cooling measures, nothing but a stock heatsink and fan. At the time I purchased that Celeron it cost me about 1/5th of what a p2-450 would have cost, and by overclocking I got the same performance.
Stability? Rock solid, and over a year later, its still going strong.
I plan on getting one of the new flipchip Celeron 533's for about $100 here in the next week or two, drop that into a FC-PGA to Slot-1 converter ($20) and according to everything I have read it should do 800mhz with stock cooling.
And again.. why am I doing it? Because I'm poor. And yes, I have a small penis, but that is unrelated.
Debian claims that the GPL and the QTL are incompatible.
KDE is left out of Debian because KDE is distributed under the GPL, but links against QT, this should not be legal. Now, this situation isn't really anyones fault but is more of an oversight.
Now the Debian people want KDE to fix this problem by adding a clause to the license on their software that specifically allows this case.
The KDE people do not want to do this because it would take too much work to contact all of those people and get permission to change the license their code is being released under.
Now given all of that information, it means that all of those distributions that distribute KDE now are doing so illegally.
The only thing is, that's not the whole story.
The GPL allows you to link your software against libraries with a more restricted license if, and only if, the library in question is a system library.
This is everything I was able to gleen from the sitution from reading these posts. I have a few questions though that I would like to see addressed.
Firstly, what precisely does it take to consider a library a system library?
Second, Given this situation I can only assume that all of these other distributions consider QT a system library, and that is how they are distributing KDE. Is this true?
Third, why does Debian not just consider QT a system library, since I understand they do in fact distribute QT as part of their core package?
I have read the GPL and it leaves the defintion of system library somewhat vauge. I am wondering if perhaps the reason that Debian does not consider QT a system library is because by doing so they set a precedent that makes it somewhat easy to consider a library a 'system library' thereby weakening the GPL?
IANAL
Well, regardless of wether that is the case or not. It has occured to me that if the majority of the major distributions forced KDE to change their license to be included, by denying that QT is a system library, this would set a good precedent for the GPL, because it raises the bar for what a library has to be in order to be considered a system library. If so, I think that that would be A Very Good Thing.
My opinion on this matter comes down to this; If considering QT a system library weakens the GPL in any way, then it shouldn't be done. Since the only other way to rectify this problem is for KDE to go through the license change hassle, then so be it.
On the other hand, if QT is in fact a system library, then there is no problem, and the Debian folks should include KDE since there is nothing to worry about.
I think that is a bit oversimplified. If what you say is true, how come all the Linux browsers right now suck compared to IE?
I'm not trolling, I'm serious. You might recall an article on here a few months back that pointed out that one of the biggest problems we have with Linux is web browsing; It's something that everyone does, but our OS doesn't do it half as well as the oppositions OS. If it's so simple, then whats the holdup on Mozilla? If it's so simply, why are we loosing so horribly?
I am a Network Administrator for an ISP. I have delt with customers quite a bit, and I can't count the number of times I have asked a customer what their OS was, and got the response "Internet Explorer" or "Netscape".
You might want to quantify the browser as just a tool like 'troff', and to you (and allot of us I'm sure) it might be, but that doesn't make it true to everyone.
Besides, I don't think the DOJ has been focusing on the browser at the expense of everything else, I just think they are being thorough, and who would argue with that?
/*
:)
* PS. I hate whoever though up the year 1970 - couldn't they have gotten
* a leap-year instead? I also hate Gregorius, pope or no. I'm grumpy.
*/
This cracks me up. He even hates the Pope,
seriously, this is probably going to end up in some news article some day;
This just in...
"Linux created by Pope hater! OS of Satan!"
Of coarse I guess we would have to fight with Microsoft for the "OS of Satan" title...
Saying that all bright people don't like college is kind of like saying that noone who doesnt go to college is going to be successful.
There are tons of examples that went both ways.
I think the -really- immaginative and bright people find college cumbersome, but it's probably just wishful thinking hinged on the fact that I personally found it that way.
I suspect it is just a personality thing.
This I will say; I have an instant distrust of anyone who did well in school. I just know they are probably way too conformist for me.
Napster probably does hurt record sales. I don't see any reason to think it shouldn't. I for one know that I don't buy as much music as I used to, and I have been using Napster quite a bit.
The question in my mind, isn't if it does, but why. Most people are quick to jump on Napster users and critisize them as greedy theives. Are they really? Maybe, but I like to think that if I had the opportunity to pay for the music I'm downloading, I would do it. This is more an evolution of medium I think. People want to be able to download music, and they are going to do so. If it's free, well fine, but if the record industry came up with a way to charge for it then people would still use it.
Personally I think this is just the kind of thing we need to shake up the industry. The industry has been increasing prices and falling into slothlike pattern. They are no longer worried about pleasing the consumer because they think they already have us pleased. They keep increasing prices and we keep paying them. Well no more. They will have to adapt to this new medium or die.
Screw the record industry, the dirty bastards have been ripping me off for years! It couldnt cost more than about a buck fifty to make a cd but they still cost $20!! Fuck that! Making a CD
costs
a fraction of what it does to make a Cassete, but prices have still been going up for 20 years! Well they have been sticking to us for so long, we don't have to take it! They can take their price
fixing, profiteering, gluttonous asses and SUCK IT! ITS A MUSICAL REVOLUTION AND THE MAN IS GOING DOWN! WE WONT BEND OVER AND TAKE IT ANYMORE, DOWNLOAD
UNTIL
YOUR MODEM BURNS!
DOWN WITH METALLICA!!! DOWN WITH DRE!!! VIVA LA NAPSTER!! VIVA LA RESISTANCE!!
P.S. This isn't flamebait, I'm serious.
Am I the only one that thought this post was a bunch of extremely obvious speculations thrown together in such a way as to get some easy karma?
Bah, call me redundant or whatever. But this isn't porting so the title of this newspost is way inaccurate.
Porting? According to this link:
http://www.neverwinternights.com/about.html
Neverwinter Nights is be developed as a platform independent project for Linux/Mac/Windows. How does that require porting?