You're griping about life-threatening conditions (food, water), and then you stick this in?
The reason this is out there is because the people rolling into NO to try to care for people and start dealing with the disaster conditions have no fucking way to communicate. However, if they can bring in a laptop with wireless (hardly an exotic item, and there are plenty of ways to charge the things, starting with mundane car cigarette lighters which run off gas that you will have with you from driving in and moving into the fancier (I've seen solar cell chargers for laptops and so forth), they can communicate. They also provide asynchronous communication via email and so forth, which means that you don't have to be actually connected except for maybe once a day to send out all the things you need to send out (requests for supplies, updates, counts of people in an area, and so forth).
I think that getting cell service back up is even more useful (most folks carry cells these days and text messaging provides asynch communication), but it's a little harder to communicate with 'em.
And besides, why are you going to gripe about the details? Have *you* been supplying those crucial "female sanitary supplies" to New Orleans? No? Then why do you feel that you have the right to denigrate someone who *is* going out of their way to try to get things functioning down there again?
I am sure some nop's and jmp statements could point it in the right direction;).
The point that the person was trying to make (for which you rather unjustifiably called them a moron) is that you can't encode a nop or a jmp with just 0x78 bytes. That means that you can't push exploit code over into the browser to execute using this hole. That doesn't mean that it's impossible to cause a problem with this -- there is a very slim possibility that something crucial could be overwritten while keeping the program operational (for instance, suppose there is a bit somewhere nearby in memory that, if enabled, allows a remote website full script execution privileges, and a series of 0x78 bytes could overwrite that memory).
The chance of there being a away to finagle this into any kind of security exploit other than a DoS while visiting a specific website is very minimal, though. Maybe Thunderbird users could be hit by email that crashes their mail client, which would be somewhat more serious, as it would be a push DoS instead of a pull DoS.
I don't really worry about every browser flaw that comes out. I run "yum update" every couple of days, and maybe I'm vulnerable for a few days...but, hell, such is life, and I don't really want to waste lots of time worrying about some security bug -- hell, someone could just mug me for my wallet.
You know, people have been pretty consistently screaming about the horrendous federal fuckup, with lots of TV footage of inhumane conditions (well, conditions that most people in the world live in, but that citizens of the US aren't really used to).
But, really, let's think about the situation.
Nobody, not a single person, knew exactly what was going to happen up until after Katrina went through. Nobody knew whether the walls would break, what would be unusable and what wouldn't, and so forth. Nobody even knew what would be hit the hardest, or how much.
So the first step is figuring out what's usable and what isn't. You can't always do that from just a flyover, and it takes a while even to piece together all the photographs of a flyover. So it's going to take a while just to figure out what in the existing infrastructure you can use. What if they trucked everyone onto I-10 and then I-10 collapsed due to undermined foundations? Sure, it seems easy in hindsight...
Second, there was some less-than-mediagenic behavior on the part of cops (one group had people begging for food at a Wal-Mart -- they opened it up, and sure enough, people looted everything. Another group just sat around, with no information about what to do). That may not be great, but there aren't many major disasters where you *aren't* going to have localized chaos in the aftermath. Yes, the cops may not have been organized after the disaster, but authorities managed to get 4/5 of the population to leave (remember that lots of people couldn't leave or didn't believe that this was going to be a big deal), and managed to keep hospital, firefighting, and police personnel in place.
Communication was out, and there were only a few sat phones and radios set up. There isn't a whole lot you can do about that. It's going to take a while to repair landlines. Maybe more wireless gear would have been helpful -- in the days after Katrina, tons of radio volunteers started donating hardware and expertise to assist the communication situation.
You had people running around and shooting things. Okay, maybe in the future it's a good idea to tell Wal-Mart to move out all the guns from its store when it's planning on evacuating. I don't think I would have thought of that in advance, though.
Power is out and it's taking a while to restore -- but there isn't any real screw-up there. You have almost all your poles down, lots of lines broken or chopped through by people who need to pass them, flooded facilities, and highly conductive water all over the place. It's just going to take time to get back.
It did take a while (a day or two too long, in places) to chopper in fuel for hospitals who had generators going out. Okay, maybe establish a reserve of fuel to fly in...but, again, remember that even simple things like that aren't so simple. New Orleans' airports are out of commission -- as far as I know, there isn't any flight coordination going on (though I'm not a pilot -- perhaps there's some system for such situations). There are people shooting at helicopters.
FEMA tried to bring in a mobile hospital, but it's new. Lousiana didn't know what to do (every bureaucrat doesn't want to be responsible for some kind of liability), so it went to Mississippi. That will definitely be resolved next time (dammit, there needs to be an Good Samaritan law that gets invoked when FEMA has to start rolling in where malpractice suits are automatically invalid, or lawsuits need to have damage seriously capped in the US, because concerns about liability has screwed things over many a time).
There were fires, but no water pressure to put them out. That sucked, but it's happened plenty of places before (including after California earthquakes). Maybe have a fast-response aerial firefighting plane to deal with major fires after disasters.
Remember, also, that there was a hurricane active right after New Orleans got hit. It wasn't that *easy* to move aircraft around, period.
Geeks bitterly complain about marketroids being boring, dull, and stupid. Here we have some guy who said "Let's cut out the labeling cost on our keyboard, quadruple the cost, and get the thing on Slashdot and see how many people will actually buy the thing." He's thinking outside of the box. If you don't buy this keyboard, you are advocating a return to those boring marketers who watch Bounty commercials for hours and and suggest tweaking the shade of the lighting on the paper towels by half a notch.
Seriously, you want a keyboard without labels? Go to a computer lab where the keyboards get heavy use and snag one. Offer to replace their keyboard with worn-out labels with a nice new one (about $12). Take the keyboard apart and dunk it in soapy water to get all the finger oil off it, and you have a nice, blank keyboard for a lot less money. Send the $70 you saved to some poor schmuck who lost their house in Hurricane Katrina and is trying to scrape by while they look for a job in a new city with no possessions.
Regardless, the person who forwarded these emails to external parties should be fired because company emails shouldn't be forwarded to unintended recipients without original author's consent.
The entire concept of considering all emails at work "business communications" is ridiculous. You ever say something personal to the person in the cubicle next door? Yeah? You ever use your PBX to talk to the person down the hall? Email is just the modern way of doing that.
Now, granted, they shouldn't have got in a spat, but a *firing offense*? That's absolutely absurd. What actual damage did they cause the firm, maybe an hour of wasted time on each of their parts?
Now, I can understand people being concerned about massive goofing off at work -- Slashdot, email, and so forth make it easy for that to be an issue. But expecting *no* personal communication at work is ridiculous. I don't cease being a human when I'm at work -- you can expect me to be working the strong majority of the time, but if you don't expect me to comment on, say, Katrina to co-workers, you want robots working for you, not humans.
Finally, having your lunch stolen is a real pisser -- I remember when I was working at a research firm and someone (would have had to have been at least a thirty-year-old, and most people there were more like sixty) who had to have been making a pretty significant chunk of change swiped one of the sandwiches from my lunch. I was pretty pissed -- there's no real way to defend your lunch in a common fridge -- and while I didn't send out an email asking for reimbursement, I can understand being as pissed as she was.
Why didn't they just sit down with the secretaries, have 'em shake hands and make up, tell 'em not to CC lots of people or make personal attacks, and let them get back to work? It's just ridiculous. Every now and then in their life, people get pissed off enough to do stupid things. Most of them, fortunately, are not in a situation to do something stupid, but these ones were. So now, instead of the company having two experienced secretaries who won't get in flamewars again, they're going to have to go hire two new people. Great.
There are times when you want to fire someone -- when that person is just not suited to work at the company. However, this smells awfully like a knee-jerk from some guy upstairs -- and that's not good management.
Re:If your child sees boobs, they will become a sl
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Pornified
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What we need is a "Porn Madness!" documentary in the vein of Reefer Madness.
Will this bring upon a new era of PC Game superiority?
God, this is a sad attempt to revive a tired flamefest.
The answer is no, for two reasons.
First, the PC and the console are two different beasts. The different peripherals and capabilities of each system tend to lend them to different types of games. My favorite PC games have not hit the console, and visa versa.
Second, console games sell a lot more copies (partly due to the greater Joe Sixpack appeal from easier setups and partly because it's a pain in the ass to pirate games on modern consoles, so you don't see two-thirds of the games out there being pirated, as you do on the computer). A lack of compatibility would probably not be a really good thing for the PC, given that there are more development dollars in console games (actually, a lack of compatibility almost always screws over the end user and benefits only the system vendors).
In the silver lining department, this is probably a good thing for Linux -- the large and current commercial game library on Windows is one of its greatest strengths in the college crowd, and whatever college students use is what everyone uses in a couple years.
You are correct (IANAL, but you're right). However, this is *not* what the MySQL people claim -- take a look at their commercial license webpage. The existence of this webpage is one major reason why I prefer to avoid MySQL. The people behind MySQL not have a Do No Evil stance. At least the postgres people aren't assholes.
There are many jobs that very few people are willing to do because the pay and working conditions are so poor. Telemarketing is one of those jobs. But, as they say, you can't have a world full of doctors without an army of janitors. Someone's got to do the work that no one wants to do.
No, I don't agree. Just because a company has made a job available does not mean that that job should exist.
And I sympathize with those people who have to choose between working a terrible telemarketing job and eating.
I sympathize too with anyone who is considering getting a telemarketing job. They're probably having a rough time. That said, I still don't feel any need for a telemarketing industry.
Linux is no drop-in replacement for Windows. You cannot get the style of gaming that you get on Windows on Linux. Period.
On the other hand, if you're a Linux user looking for entertainment, there really is no shortage. On your base Gnome system, you've "sol", which is a scalable vector graphics Solitaire with about eight bazillion Solitaire games more than Microsoft's SOL.EXE. If you can live without graphics, many years of improvements and coding have made ToME one hell of a roguelike (with, admittedly, one hell of a learning curve). Diablo was derived from these things, but lost all the sophistication of the game.
If you love strategy, check out Battle for Wesnoth, which is a polished strategy game in the hex-wargame genre, or FreeCiv.
If you've never played interactive fiction, it's another text-based genre that's a lot of fun, and deserves a shot. Get yourself a copy of TADS and a copy of Babel, or if you want an adult game, try Ideal Highschool.
The multiplayer FPS that most people seem to be playing on Linux is a tank game called BZFlag.
If you're looking for more, try hitting up HappyPenguin and sorting by rating, which will pretty consistently give you decent stuff.
You can make some pretty consistent general statements about open-source games. They are usually uglier/less flashy than their closed-source equivalents, because there are few artists working on open-source projects (maybe art just happens to be such a competitive field that nobody can spare the time and fund a hobby with their day job -- dunno). They tend to have a much greater degree of replayability than commercial releases, since the developer wants to play it too -- you could easily play most open-source games for ten years and still continue to enjoy them. Many (though certainly not all) open-source games have a strategic element to them, or something that requires the application of the brain a bit, and less pure twitch. Very few open source games have cutscenes or cinematics (though they do exist). Some open source games have been around for many years, and have a very high degree of complexity and sophistication -- closed source games don't have a development cycle of this length, and the ability to keep adapting to trends in playing. With a few exceptions (I really like Battle for Wesnoth's music, for instance), sound and audio is limited and low-quality compared to commercial games. Globulation 2, for instance, is an RTS with essentially *no* audio.
Maybe it's not your cup of tea, but I think that Darwinia is pretty cool.
Majesty is also decent, but then I'm a big fan of RTSes that "run themselves" heavily at the micro-level -- I hated Blizzards micromanagement-heavy RTSes.
So this is a pic of a NEW linux game? Exactly how many of them are there?
Well, a fair number. If you mean closed source, commercial-style games, about this many (slow because LGP is getting hammered -- that was pretty stupid, putting both machines on the same line, so that you can't sell anything while people are hammering the server).
And there are probably some ways to take advantage of the fact that they've encoded it as JPEG.
I doubt it. Presumably they created the image before encoding anything.
The problem is that the potential Linux game library is pretty small, and people here have already identified all the real possibilities.
And, dammit, I want LGP to release Knights and Merchants. They finished porting the single-player, which is all I wanted, and now they're apparently just sitting on the port. ARGH!
Oh wait, this is for Linux. They won't get rich...one guy will buy the game and everyone else will get the torrent of it.
Do you have the slightest evidence to support the fact that Linux users pirate more software than Windows users?
In general, I'd say the fact that someone is using Linux is a reasonable sign that they're interested in using a legal version of something rather than just pirating Windows.
The newest game out for Linux is probably the port of NWN. There's been a big lull in games since Loki went under, with more infrequent releases.
Linux is not a drop-in replacement for Windows. If you want a game-launching-shell, Windows is a much better choice. If you want a Windowsesque desktop, Linux is just okay, but aside from being Free, nothing that special. If you want to really use Linux as a Unix system -- lots of scripting, piping stuff together, multiple desktops, remote access, then it becomes a really fucking awesome system, and you start raving about it on Slashdot (where people interpret "Linux is fantastic" as "I should remove Windows, even though I have no interest in Linux-specific features").
This will be followed by a press release from the RIAA about how music piraters are "flooding the Internet with traffic and preventing legitimate businesses from getting work done" with some graphs. Slashdot will post a dubious story about how Microsoft is the root cause of the problem. This post will then be followed by another, almost identical.
You know, I figured that the single good thing about GWB getting office (particularly with Cheney as VP) is that the oil companies would be in heaven and the public would at least have good gas prices. Instead, gas prices have gone to hell in a handbasket. Yes, some of that really cannot be laid at Bush's feet, but dammit, it's still sad.
I've always wondered why people have this thing for assassinating Presidents -- who will be followed by the Vice President (who, at least these days, is of the same party as the President). In any event, the longest a President can last is eight years, anyway, and if he's really doing a bad job, only four (well, at least in the ideal).
It seems that if you were out to produce political change by killing someone, a Supreme Court Justice, who can hold the position until they die or step down, would be vastly more effective. Also, justices have less public awareness, so there would be less of a martyr factor.
I remember at least a couple spots -- when first wadering across the pillars surrounding the fountain on Myst Island, sea sounds in the background, on the original Myst, and later in Riven when walking down through the sea cave with the holes opening out onto a view of the ocean, some tubular bells playing in the background, and eerie blue lights along the way, that I was sad that I couldn't ever actually experience the thing.
The Myst game itself was all right. I've played games with better puzzles, though (mostly text-based interactive fiction -- the idea being to challenge the player but never let him get stuck). But the experience was the point of playing the game, the feeling of having visited a fantastic world. And the unique *Myst* experience of not being where things had happened, but stumbling across the aftermath, and slowly unfolding beautiful or chilling stories...that was really neat.
Re:We could re-do Myst...better, even!
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Cyan Worlds Closes
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The detail is beyond what you're thinking about.
I remember the Making of Myst video, where one of the artists was discussing the level of detail in the *original* Myst, where they'd start saying something like "Well, we want a clock on this shelf. And the clock should look old, and have this kind of markings on its front, and around the markings should be engravings, and the plate with the engravings should be screwed on, and the screws should look like the following sketch..."
Rendering and CPU technology has improved, and you can render much nicer things with the available cycles. But it still takes just this side of forever to design and model everything.
As for man hours -- seriously, I can't think of anything that should drastically reduce the time required. IIRC, Myst had a lengthy development cycle, something like five years, and I rembember there being at least the Miller brothers, a sound engineer and an artist -- that's about twenty man-years of work right there, and there were probably more people involved. I think that your prediction of five man-months is probably pretty low.
God, you Sun-haters piss me off
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OpenOffice Goes LGPL
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Of course it could just be PR, since Sun stirred up a lot of bad publicity with the introduction of the CDDL for the release of Solaris.
You know, the groundless Sun-bashing on here is just absurd, and is really stupid.
Sun has done some awfuly nice things for the open-source world that probably wouldn't have happened any time soon without them. They're doing this *despite* the fact that their business is one of the *the most impacted* by the increasing use of open source.
Sun is out to make a buck. Yes, that's a good thing to keep in mind. They're like Apple, IBM, and Microsoft. However, they, like IBM, have chosen to generally work *with* the open source world, as opposed to attacking it, like Microsoft.
What I can't figure out is why whenever I see a story about Sun doing something to help open source, about eight-six-zillion people on here immediately start ragging on Sun. You don't like Solaris? Fine. I prefer Linux myself. You think Sun hardware is overpriced? Fine. I agree. But Sun doesn't bully their way into my life a la Microsoft and then spread shitty products all over. Seriously, it sounds like some of the people on here had their parents murdered by Sun or something. Give them a goddamn break already. If they do something like SCO did, then you can start up the hating. But I don't see any reason to Sun-bash when Sun isn't doing anything wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
Women need sanitary female supplies.
You're griping about life-threatening conditions (food, water), and then you stick this in?
The reason this is out there is because the people rolling into NO to try to care for people and start dealing with the disaster conditions have no fucking way to communicate. However, if they can bring in a laptop with wireless (hardly an exotic item, and there are plenty of ways to charge the things, starting with mundane car cigarette lighters which run off gas that you will have with you from driving in and moving into the fancier (I've seen solar cell chargers for laptops and so forth), they can communicate. They also provide asynchronous communication via email and so forth, which means that you don't have to be actually connected except for maybe once a day to send out all the things you need to send out (requests for supplies, updates, counts of people in an area, and so forth).
I think that getting cell service back up is even more useful (most folks carry cells these days and text messaging provides asynch communication), but it's a little harder to communicate with 'em.
And besides, why are you going to gripe about the details? Have *you* been supplying those crucial "female sanitary supplies" to New Orleans? No? Then why do you feel that you have the right to denigrate someone who *is* going out of their way to try to get things functioning down there again?
I am sure some nop's and jmp statements could point it in the right direction ;).
The point that the person was trying to make (for which you rather unjustifiably called them a moron) is that you can't encode a nop or a jmp with just 0x78 bytes. That means that you can't push exploit code over into the browser to execute using this hole. That doesn't mean that it's impossible to cause a problem with this -- there is a very slim possibility that something crucial could be overwritten while keeping the program operational (for instance, suppose there is a bit somewhere nearby in memory that, if enabled, allows a remote website full script execution privileges, and a series of 0x78 bytes could overwrite that memory).
The chance of there being a away to finagle this into any kind of security exploit other than a DoS while visiting a specific website is very minimal, though. Maybe Thunderbird users could be hit by email that crashes their mail client, which would be somewhat more serious, as it would be a push DoS instead of a pull DoS.
I don't really worry about every browser flaw that comes out. I run "yum update" every couple of days, and maybe I'm vulnerable for a few days...but, hell, such is life, and I don't really want to waste lots of time worrying about some security bug -- hell, someone could just mug me for my wallet.
You know, people have been pretty consistently screaming about the horrendous federal fuckup, with lots of TV footage of inhumane conditions (well, conditions that most people in the world live in, but that citizens of the US aren't really used to).
But, really, let's think about the situation.
Nobody, not a single person, knew exactly what was going to happen up until after Katrina went through. Nobody knew whether the walls would break, what would be unusable and what wouldn't, and so forth. Nobody even knew what would be hit the hardest, or how much.
So the first step is figuring out what's usable and what isn't. You can't always do that from just a flyover, and it takes a while even to piece together all the photographs of a flyover. So it's going to take a while just to figure out what in the existing infrastructure you can use. What if they trucked everyone onto I-10 and then I-10 collapsed due to undermined foundations? Sure, it seems easy in hindsight...
Second, there was some less-than-mediagenic behavior on the part of cops (one group had people begging for food at a Wal-Mart -- they opened it up, and sure enough, people looted everything. Another group just sat around, with no information about what to do). That may not be great, but there aren't many major disasters where you *aren't* going to have localized chaos in the aftermath. Yes, the cops may not have been organized after the disaster, but authorities managed to get 4/5 of the population to leave (remember that lots of people couldn't leave or didn't believe that this was going to be a big deal), and managed to keep hospital, firefighting, and police personnel in place.
Communication was out, and there were only a few sat phones and radios set up. There isn't a whole lot you can do about that. It's going to take a while to repair landlines. Maybe more wireless gear would have been helpful -- in the days after Katrina, tons of radio volunteers started donating hardware and expertise to assist the communication situation.
You had people running around and shooting things. Okay, maybe in the future it's a good idea to tell Wal-Mart to move out all the guns from its store when it's planning on evacuating. I don't think I would have thought of that in advance, though.
Power is out and it's taking a while to restore -- but there isn't any real screw-up there. You have almost all your poles down, lots of lines broken or chopped through by people who need to pass them, flooded facilities, and highly conductive water all over the place. It's just going to take time to get back.
It did take a while (a day or two too long, in places) to chopper in fuel for hospitals who had generators going out. Okay, maybe establish a reserve of fuel to fly in...but, again, remember that even simple things like that aren't so simple. New Orleans' airports are out of commission -- as far as I know, there isn't any flight coordination going on (though I'm not a pilot -- perhaps there's some system for such situations). There are people shooting at helicopters.
FEMA tried to bring in a mobile hospital, but it's new. Lousiana didn't know what to do (every bureaucrat doesn't want to be responsible for some kind of liability), so it went to Mississippi. That will definitely be resolved next time (dammit, there needs to be an Good Samaritan law that gets invoked when FEMA has to start rolling in where malpractice suits are automatically invalid, or lawsuits need to have damage seriously capped in the US, because concerns about liability has screwed things over many a time).
There were fires, but no water pressure to put them out. That sucked, but it's happened plenty of places before (including after California earthquakes). Maybe have a fast-response aerial firefighting plane to deal with major fires after disasters.
Remember, also, that there was a hurricane active right after New Orleans got hit. It wasn't that *easy* to move aircraft around, period.
The National Guard was cal
"They din't have none of that there democrusy until we done gave it to 'em. They ain't no suvrin cuntry without it."
Geeks bitterly complain about marketroids being boring, dull, and stupid. Here we have some guy who said "Let's cut out the labeling cost on our keyboard, quadruple the cost, and get the thing on Slashdot and see how many people will actually buy the thing." He's thinking outside of the box. If you don't buy this keyboard, you are advocating a return to those boring marketers who watch Bounty commercials for hours and and suggest tweaking the shade of the lighting on the paper towels by half a notch.
Seriously, you want a keyboard without labels? Go to a computer lab where the keyboards get heavy use and snag one. Offer to replace their keyboard with worn-out labels with a nice new one (about $12). Take the keyboard apart and dunk it in soapy water to get all the finger oil off it, and you have a nice, blank keyboard for a lot less money. Send the $70 you saved to some poor schmuck who lost their house in Hurricane Katrina and is trying to scrape by while they look for a job in a new city with no possessions.
Regardless, the person who forwarded these emails to external parties should be fired because company emails shouldn't be forwarded to unintended recipients without original author's consent.
The entire concept of considering all emails at work "business communications" is ridiculous. You ever say something personal to the person in the cubicle next door? Yeah? You ever use your PBX to talk to the person down the hall? Email is just the modern way of doing that.
Now, granted, they shouldn't have got in a spat, but a *firing offense*? That's absolutely absurd. What actual damage did they cause the firm, maybe an hour of wasted time on each of their parts?
Now, I can understand people being concerned about massive goofing off at work -- Slashdot, email, and so forth make it easy for that to be an issue. But expecting *no* personal communication at work is ridiculous. I don't cease being a human when I'm at work -- you can expect me to be working the strong majority of the time, but if you don't expect me to comment on, say, Katrina to co-workers, you want robots working for you, not humans.
Finally, having your lunch stolen is a real pisser -- I remember when I was working at a research firm and someone (would have had to have been at least a thirty-year-old, and most people there were more like sixty) who had to have been making a pretty significant chunk of change swiped one of the sandwiches from my lunch. I was pretty pissed -- there's no real way to defend your lunch in a common fridge -- and while I didn't send out an email asking for reimbursement, I can understand being as pissed as she was.
Why didn't they just sit down with the secretaries, have 'em shake hands and make up, tell 'em not to CC lots of people or make personal attacks, and let them get back to work? It's just ridiculous. Every now and then in their life, people get pissed off enough to do stupid things. Most of them, fortunately, are not in a situation to do something stupid, but these ones were. So now, instead of the company having two experienced secretaries who won't get in flamewars again, they're going to have to go hire two new people. Great.
There are times when you want to fire someone -- when that person is just not suited to work at the company. However, this smells awfully like a knee-jerk from some guy upstairs -- and that's not good management.
What we need is a "Porn Madness!" documentary in the vein of Reefer Madness.
Will this bring upon a new era of PC Game superiority?
God, this is a sad attempt to revive a tired flamefest.
The answer is no, for two reasons.
First, the PC and the console are two different beasts. The different peripherals and capabilities of each system tend to lend them to different types of games. My favorite PC games have not hit the console, and visa versa.
Second, console games sell a lot more copies (partly due to the greater Joe Sixpack appeal from easier setups and partly because it's a pain in the ass to pirate games on modern consoles, so you don't see two-thirds of the games out there being pirated, as you do on the computer). A lack of compatibility would probably not be a really good thing for the PC, given that there are more development dollars in console games (actually, a lack of compatibility almost always screws over the end user and benefits only the system vendors).
In the silver lining department, this is probably a good thing for Linux -- the large and current commercial game library on Windows is one of its greatest strengths in the college crowd, and whatever college students use is what everyone uses in a couple years.
Also, the Postgres people don't try to trick you into buying a non-GPL license when you have no reason to do so.
You are correct (IANAL, but you're right). However, this is *not* what the MySQL people claim -- take a look at their commercial license webpage. The existence of this webpage is one major reason why I prefer to avoid MySQL. The people behind MySQL not have a Do No Evil stance. At least the postgres people aren't assholes.
There are many jobs that very few people are willing to do because the pay and working conditions are so poor. Telemarketing is one of those jobs. But, as they say, you can't have a world full of doctors without an army of janitors. Someone's got to do the work that no one wants to do.
No, I don't agree. Just because a company has made a job available does not mean that that job should exist.
And I sympathize with those people who have to choose between working a terrible telemarketing job and eating.
I sympathize too with anyone who is considering getting a telemarketing job. They're probably having a rough time. That said, I still don't feel any need for a telemarketing industry.
Linux is no drop-in replacement for Windows. You cannot get the style of gaming that you get on Windows on Linux. Period.
On the other hand, if you're a Linux user looking for entertainment, there really is no shortage. On your base Gnome system, you've "sol", which is a scalable vector graphics Solitaire with about eight bazillion Solitaire games more than Microsoft's SOL.EXE. If you can live without graphics, many years of improvements and coding have made ToME one hell of a roguelike (with, admittedly, one hell of a learning curve). Diablo was derived from these things, but lost all the sophistication of the game.
If you love strategy, check out Battle for Wesnoth, which is a polished strategy game in the hex-wargame genre, or FreeCiv.
If you've never played interactive fiction, it's another text-based genre that's a lot of fun, and deserves a shot. Get yourself a copy of TADS and a copy of Babel, or if you want an adult game, try Ideal Highschool.
If you want a vertical shooter, check out Chromium B.S.U..
The multiplayer FPS that most people seem to be playing on Linux is a tank game called BZFlag.
If you're looking for more, try hitting up HappyPenguin and sorting by rating, which will pretty consistently give you decent stuff.
You can make some pretty consistent general statements about open-source games. They are usually uglier/less flashy than their closed-source equivalents, because there are few artists working on open-source projects (maybe art just happens to be such a competitive field that nobody can spare the time and fund a hobby with their day job -- dunno). They tend to have a much greater degree of replayability than commercial releases, since the developer wants to play it too -- you could easily play most open-source games for ten years and still continue to enjoy them. Many (though certainly not all) open-source games have a strategic element to them, or something that requires the application of the brain a bit, and less pure twitch. Very few open source games have cutscenes or cinematics (though they do exist). Some open source games have been around for many years, and have a very high degree of complexity and sophistication -- closed source games don't have a development cycle of this length, and the ability to keep adapting to trends in playing. With a few exceptions (I really like Battle for Wesnoth's music, for instance), sound and audio is limited and low-quality compared to commercial games. Globulation 2, for instance, is an RTS with essentially *no* audio.
Maybe it's not your cup of tea, but I think that Darwinia is pretty cool.
Majesty is also decent, but then I'm a big fan of RTSes that "run themselves" heavily at the micro-level -- I hated Blizzards micromanagement-heavy RTSes.
So this is a pic of a NEW linux game? Exactly how many of them are there?
Well, a fair number. If you mean closed source, commercial-style games, about this many (slow because LGP is getting hammered -- that was pretty stupid, putting both machines on the same line, so that you can't sell anything while people are hammering the server).
And there are probably some ways to take advantage of the fact that they've encoded it as JPEG.
I doubt it. Presumably they created the image before encoding anything.
The problem is that the potential Linux game library is pretty small, and people here have already identified all the real possibilities.
And, dammit, I want LGP to release Knights and Merchants. They finished porting the single-player, which is all I wanted, and now they're apparently just sitting on the port. ARGH!
Oh wait, this is for Linux. They won't get rich...one guy will buy the game and everyone else will get the torrent of it.
Do you have the slightest evidence to support the fact that Linux users pirate more software than Windows users?
In general, I'd say the fact that someone is using Linux is a reasonable sign that they're interested in using a legal version of something rather than just pirating Windows.
The newest game out for Linux is probably the port of NWN. There's been a big lull in games since Loki went under, with more infrequent releases.
Linux is not a drop-in replacement for Windows. If you want a game-launching-shell, Windows is a much better choice. If you want a Windowsesque desktop, Linux is just okay, but aside from being Free, nothing that special. If you want to really use Linux as a Unix system -- lots of scripting, piping stuff together, multiple desktops, remote access, then it becomes a really fucking awesome system, and you start raving about it on Slashdot (where people interpret "Linux is fantastic" as "I should remove Windows, even though I have no interest in Linux-specific features").
All depends on what you want to do.
This will be followed by a press release from the RIAA about how music piraters are "flooding the Internet with traffic and preventing legitimate businesses from getting work done" with some graphs. Slashdot will post a dubious story about how Microsoft is the root cause of the problem. This post will then be followed by another, almost identical.
but the Europeans are still taught about popular uprisings...So far Americans have only seen this on a very, very small scale.
So the American Revolutionary War, American Civil War, Whiskey Rebellion, and so forth don't count?
The young, on the whole, don't vote. God damn the old for voting for anyone who claims to be marginally more Christian than someone else.
You know, I figured that the single good thing about GWB getting office (particularly with Cheney as VP) is that the oil companies would be in heaven and the public would at least have good gas prices. Instead, gas prices have gone to hell in a handbasket. Yes, some of that really cannot be laid at Bush's feet, but dammit, it's still sad.
I've always wondered why people have this thing for assassinating Presidents -- who will be followed by the Vice President (who, at least these days, is of the same party as the President). In any event, the longest a President can last is eight years, anyway, and if he's really doing a bad job, only four (well, at least in the ideal).
It seems that if you were out to produce political change by killing someone, a Supreme Court Justice, who can hold the position until they die or step down, would be vastly more effective. Also, justices have less public awareness, so there would be less of a martyr factor.
I remember at least a couple spots -- when first wadering across the pillars surrounding the fountain on Myst Island, sea sounds in the background, on the original Myst, and later in Riven when walking down through the sea cave with the holes opening out onto a view of the ocean, some tubular bells playing in the background, and eerie blue lights along the way, that I was sad that I couldn't ever actually experience the thing.
The Myst game itself was all right. I've played games with better puzzles, though (mostly text-based interactive fiction -- the idea being to challenge the player but never let him get stuck). But the experience was the point of playing the game, the feeling of having visited a fantastic world. And the unique *Myst* experience of not being where things had happened, but stumbling across the aftermath, and slowly unfolding beautiful or chilling stories...that was really neat.
The detail is beyond what you're thinking about.
I remember the Making of Myst video, where one of the artists was discussing the level of detail in the *original* Myst, where they'd start saying something like "Well, we want a clock on this shelf. And the clock should look old, and have this kind of markings on its front, and around the markings should be engravings, and the plate with the engravings should be screwed on, and the screws should look like the following sketch..."
Rendering and CPU technology has improved, and you can render much nicer things with the available cycles. But it still takes just this side of forever to design and model everything.
As for man hours -- seriously, I can't think of anything that should drastically reduce the time required. IIRC, Myst had a lengthy development cycle, something like five years, and I rembember there being at least the Miller brothers, a sound engineer and an artist -- that's about twenty man-years of work right there, and there were probably more people involved. I think that your prediction of five man-months is probably pretty low.
Of course it could just be PR, since Sun stirred up a lot of bad publicity with the introduction of the CDDL for the release of Solaris.
You know, the groundless Sun-bashing on here is just absurd, and is really stupid.
Sun has done some awfuly nice things for the open-source world that probably wouldn't have happened any time soon without them. They're doing this *despite* the fact that their business is one of the *the most impacted* by the increasing use of open source.
Sun is out to make a buck. Yes, that's a good thing to keep in mind. They're like Apple, IBM, and Microsoft. However, they, like IBM, have chosen to generally work *with* the open source world, as opposed to attacking it, like Microsoft.
What I can't figure out is why whenever I see a story about Sun doing something to help open source, about eight-six-zillion people on here immediately start ragging on Sun. You don't like Solaris? Fine. I prefer Linux myself. You think Sun hardware is overpriced? Fine. I agree. But Sun doesn't bully their way into my life a la Microsoft and then spread shitty products all over. Seriously, it sounds like some of the people on here had their parents murdered by Sun or something. Give them a goddamn break already. If they do something like SCO did, then you can start up the hating. But I don't see any reason to Sun-bash when Sun isn't doing anything wrong.