Tell that to the great unwashed mass of users that don't use Firefox because it's not their default browser. But be sure to speak slowly, because they won't understand that the blue E isn't all of the Internet
I'm honestly not sure. It has been pointed out above and elsewhere that I am factually off-base, so this is all moot, anyway. But in years of playing and thinking about games, this is one of the few times that any game has triggered any sense of dread.
I don't offer any answers. I obviously had an immediate emotional response that is not universal.
I'm not Jack Thompson, but is anyone else even remotely disturbed at the subtext of this sort of game? The demo floating around on XBL features some good old-fashioned ultraviolence perpetrated by a Caucasian protagonist (the player, natch) against your stereotypical Latino gangbangers.
My younger brother is totally unconcerned with this--he wants to super-jump and shoot people--but I can't help but wonder whether this sort of thing isn't necessarily part of a complete mental breakfast.
have to choose your world size so that it fits in your available RAM
This is exactly what I'm talking about. If the graphics engine were not such a resource pig, you would be able to play the game on the map of your choice--as was possible in earlier versions of Civilization.
Now, however, if you can't hack the graphical requirements, you can't test how the ruleset functions on the larger game maps. And what do you gain from this? The ability to zoom in and look at your individual city improvements? Why? there is no in-game benefit to that level of arbitrary detail. You are not going to find that one hidden, idle peasant by zooming in. You are not going to order that miserable peasant to go gather wood or ore or sulfur or whatever it is they do in Warcraft. All of that RTS micro-management has been abstracted by the ruleset.
Yes, I just spoke out against Holy Warcraft. Go ahead and mod me down, but I think Warcraft has done irreparable damage to strategy gaming. The assumption now--in publishing houses, if not necessarily the game-buying public's mind--is that all strategy games must look like Warcraft. This is not a bad idea if your game mechanics are like Warcraft--real-time, resource-gathering, and small-unit based. This is a stupendously bad idea when your game mechanics are like Civilization: turn-based and relatively abstract.
The worst part about this trend is that idiots like us buy into this bloat, and then convince ourselves that it's not so bad. We have been bought off by useless bling--zooming into our cities to view the Hanging Gardens of Jersey City--when we should instead be applying for another lesson at Sun Tzu's War Academy.
Nothing in the Civ4 ruleset would be too complex to implement on the DS. The Civ4 GRAPHICS engine, however, would be excessive. Civ 3 and Civ 4 were great rulesets grafted onto the most unbelievable graphical bloat ever foisted upon the gameplaying public.
Alpha Centauri's isometric three-dimensionality had a definite impact on gameplay: sea levels changed, artillery bombardment effectiveness varied with the difference in elevation, moisture & rainfall patterns differed on windward and leeward slopes of mountainsides, &c. Civ 3 and Civ 4 had prettier graphics, but none of their 3D graphics made any difference to the ruleset, which could have been quickly and easily implmented with sprites and tiles.
If Sid Meier were to bring me the Civ 4 ruleset with sprites and tiles on the DS, I would play the DS version to the exclusion of the PC version, because it would mean a return to the real roots of the Civ games and a turn away from useless bling and graphical bloat.
Sadly, with the way game development seems to be headed, I doubt I'll see Civ on the DS. I'll break down and get a DS, finally, when SimCity releases.
Not bad for a single hardware manufacturer, admittedly--but why then did Apple continue to account for less than one in ten desktop computer users? Each individual Wintel clone model might not have amounted to much, but in aggregate, they buried Apple and continue to do so.
Would seem to fit into the PRC's pattern of taking 'deviant' thought and pathologizing it. Now, instead of re-education camps, internet 'addicted' youths are treated with all the care and compassion the Party can muster.
I'll bet my last yuan renminbi that this will be used to lock up bloggers and other people with similar internet 'addictions.' Surely you must be addicted if your jones for information has you circumventing the Great Firewall of China, right?
Where were you in the '80s and '90s? Apple had plenty of brand awareness. It had always been the slickest marketing operation this side of Satan. The fact that it wasn't an iProduct had nothing at all to do with the Newton's failure. The Newton failed because it had no market other than a few geeks.
The first iProduct, the iMac, might have been a design icon, but what were its actual sales as a fraction of the total PC market? Branding isn't everything. Many people might buy just for the brand, but many more simply can't afford that kind of nonsense.
He may be sweaty and irritable, but he's not dumb. He'll wait to do that until no other alternative presents itself, and then only reveal his true claims in the Initial Complaint of a lawsuit.
Kill the flamethrowers. The article is about Ubuntu, not Gentoo. If you have a burning need to build a package from source, Gentoo-style, in a Debian or Debian-daughter system, consider apt-build which will get the job done for you.
Otherwise, the article was a very sensible discussion on installing the guts of a 'modern' distro--in this case Ubuntu--on some less than current hardware. Another such discussion is in the LowMemorySystems page in the Ubuntu wiki.
The important thing to take away, in any case, is the non-trivial lesson that you cannot have your cake and eat it, too: installing on limited hardware means understanding your hardware limits and considering your packages accordingly. (I hear bearded Slackers in the back chortling. Hush, you, let me finish first.),
Interestingly, the article confirms what I've been doing on my own IBM Thinkpad 570e lately. My only question to whomever still might be reading this is: is there a lightweight CSS-compatible browser that's not a memory pig on the order of Konqueror or even Firefox? Dillo works well enough, but I'm wondering if there isn't maybe a browser between Dillo and the heavyweights.
Slashdot Mirror
cheap at double or triple the price, yes. OLPC + vim == ideal note-taking for student me.
Tell that to the great unwashed mass of users that don't use Firefox because it's not their default browser. But be sure to speak slowly, because they won't understand that the blue E isn't all of the Internet
I'm honestly not sure. It has been pointed out above and elsewhere that I am factually off-base, so this is all moot, anyway. But in years of playing and thinking about games, this is one of the few times that any game has triggered any sense of dread.
I don't offer any answers. I obviously had an immediate emotional response that is not universal.
I wasn't worried as much by the content as by the defaults.
For my own part, I wonder if I, myself, wouldn't be less unnerved if the demo character's race were randomly rolled, rather than fixed.
I'm not Jack Thompson, but is anyone else even remotely disturbed at the subtext of this sort of game? The demo floating around on XBL features some good old-fashioned ultraviolence perpetrated by a Caucasian protagonist (the player, natch) against your stereotypical Latino gangbangers.
My younger brother is totally unconcerned with this--he wants to super-jump and shoot people--but I can't help but wonder whether this sort of thing isn't necessarily part of a complete mental breakfast.
have to choose your world size so that it fits in your available RAM
This is exactly what I'm talking about. If the graphics engine were not such a resource pig, you would be able to play the game on the map of your choice--as was possible in earlier versions of Civilization.
Now, however, if you can't hack the graphical requirements, you can't test how the ruleset functions on the larger game maps. And what do you gain from this? The ability to zoom in and look at your individual city improvements? Why? there is no in-game benefit to that level of arbitrary detail. You are not going to find that one hidden, idle peasant by zooming in. You are not going to order that miserable peasant to go gather wood or ore or sulfur or whatever it is they do in Warcraft. All of that RTS micro-management has been abstracted by the ruleset.
Yes, I just spoke out against Holy Warcraft. Go ahead and mod me down, but I think Warcraft has done irreparable damage to strategy gaming. The assumption now--in publishing houses, if not necessarily the game-buying public's mind--is that all strategy games must look like Warcraft. This is not a bad idea if your game mechanics are like Warcraft--real-time, resource-gathering, and small-unit based. This is a stupendously bad idea when your game mechanics are like Civilization: turn-based and relatively abstract.
The worst part about this trend is that idiots like us buy into this bloat, and then convince ourselves that it's not so bad. We have been bought off by useless bling--zooming into our cities to view the Hanging Gardens of Jersey City--when we should instead be applying for another lesson at Sun Tzu's War Academy.
Nothing in the Civ4 ruleset would be too complex to implement on the DS. The Civ4 GRAPHICS engine, however, would be excessive. Civ 3 and Civ 4 were great rulesets grafted onto the most unbelievable graphical bloat ever foisted upon the gameplaying public.
Alpha Centauri's isometric three-dimensionality had a definite impact on gameplay: sea levels changed, artillery bombardment effectiveness varied with the difference in elevation, moisture & rainfall patterns differed on windward and leeward slopes of mountainsides, &c. Civ 3 and Civ 4 had prettier graphics, but none of their 3D graphics made any difference to the ruleset, which could have been quickly and easily implmented with sprites and tiles.
If Sid Meier were to bring me the Civ 4 ruleset with sprites and tiles on the DS, I would play the DS version to the exclusion of the PC version , because it would mean a return to the real roots of the Civ games and a turn away from useless bling and graphical bloat.
Sadly, with the way game development seems to be headed, I doubt I'll see Civ on the DS. I'll break down and get a DS, finally, when SimCity releases.
Steve's potency seems never to have been in doubt.
Not bad for a single hardware manufacturer, admittedly--but why then did Apple continue to account for less than one in ten desktop computer users? Each individual Wintel clone model might not have amounted to much, but in aggregate, they buried Apple and continue to do so.
Would seem to fit into the PRC's pattern of taking 'deviant' thought and pathologizing it. Now, instead of re-education camps, internet 'addicted' youths are treated with all the care and compassion the Party can muster.
I'll bet my last yuan renminbi that this will be used to lock up bloggers and other people with similar internet 'addictions.' Surely you must be addicted if your jones for information has you circumventing the Great Firewall of China, right?
Where were you in the '80s and '90s? Apple had plenty of brand awareness. It had always been the slickest marketing operation this side of Satan. The fact that it wasn't an iProduct had nothing at all to do with the Newton's failure. The Newton failed because it had no market other than a few geeks.
The first iProduct, the iMac, might have been a design icon, but what were its actual sales as a fraction of the total PC market? Branding isn't everything. Many people might buy just for the brand, but many more simply can't afford that kind of nonsense.
Doesn't validate. There's an unclosed tag in there.
It's kinda like Schrodinger's cat: she's dead *and* not dead...until we open the box.
He may be sweaty and irritable, but he's not dumb. He'll wait to do that until no other alternative presents itself, and then only reveal his true claims in the Initial Complaint of a lawsuit.
"exploring capital relationships"???
Whatever happened to the good, old, straightforward begging for cash???
expecting the Linux community to unite behind anything is like expecting Maoists to collaborate with Stalinists.
:%/s/TFM/TFA/g
Wait. IBM did it. so it's good. TFM also mentions Novell. IT'S A TRAP. It simplifies license compliance. It allows commercial software. wait, what?
Slashdot suffers a mental kernel panic
Indeed. Maybe if NASA got out of the launch business, it could focus more on basic science and engineering?
Kazehakase brought Mozilla with it as a dependency--not exactly 'light'!--but it seems to work fine.
Kill the flamethrowers. The article is about Ubuntu, not Gentoo. If you have a burning need to build a package from source, Gentoo-style, in a Debian or Debian-daughter system, consider apt-build which will get the job done for you.
Otherwise, the article was a very sensible discussion on installing the guts of a 'modern' distro--in this case Ubuntu--on some less than current hardware. Another such discussion is in the LowMemorySystems page in the Ubuntu wiki.
The important thing to take away, in any case, is the non-trivial lesson that you cannot have your cake and eat it, too: installing on limited hardware means understanding your hardware limits and considering your packages accordingly. (I hear bearded Slackers in the back chortling. Hush, you, let me finish first.),
Interestingly, the article confirms what I've been doing on my own IBM Thinkpad 570e lately. My only question to whomever still might be reading this is: is there a lightweight CSS-compatible browser that's not a memory pig on the order of Konqueror or even Firefox? Dillo works well enough, but I'm wondering if there isn't maybe a browser between Dillo and the heavyweights.
"Come to Linux. Please? We have cookies!"
Ur-Quan Masters: 2 (or, how you got the Mark 2)
comment endlessly on /.?
Please. People don't even RTFA most of the time--and that's HYPERLINKED.