> Why would a machine designed to play games need a text editor? It doesn't. COnsoles are for games, and only for games.
And only for games with the most primitive of input methods I might add. I can't see myself playing TAK on a console. Lessee, all the number keys are used, as well as ctrl, shift, alt, pause, several fkeys, and several keys on the keyboard. Arrow keys scroll the screen so you don't have to whip the mouse (or in a console's case, the stick) around to do it.
Heck, a game like Longbow 2 probably uses every single key on the keyboard.
Yes perhaps the PSX2 can theoretically use the keyboard. But the average console game will never use one. Thus most are joystick jigglers where complexity is in these ridiculously hard to sequence "combos"
I saw one of the new G3 powermacs at CompUSA today while I was picking up a new modem. I played with it a bit, played the future cop demo, started up some other app, I forget what, got the message: "there is not enough memory to run . Try closing the application "Hoyle's Casino" first."
This was an app that had been in the background the whole time I was running. I see they still can't page.
Actually perl is a special case because you have a choice of Artistic or GPL. The philosophy behind that is "If you make any changes, you better not break it, or if you do, then you better let everyone fix it."
But mostly I am just sick to my stomach reading this crap and it's not limited to slashdot. I thought Free Software was about a choice one made about their own creations, the software they'd use, and if there wasn't an open alternative available, it was about making one. Now it's all about thousands of people whining and ranting and poiting, "gimme gimme gimme". They don't want to write any code to provide free alternatives, they just demand others give away their work for nothing. Demonizing one of Linux's biggest boosters for not giving every single value-add away gratis is just shameful.
I'm just sick of AD&D period. It's TRITE. Every fantasy RPG land, and especially the CRPG's are worlds where every commonor reads, where every town has a weapons and armor shop, a magic shop, and a half-dozen generic taverns. Lands infested with generic monsters (in the mines when I started BG, I thought, "how about that... a DUNGEON").
I've seen D&D GM's (DM is considered an insult) pull out some amazingly well-crafted and creative stories out of these worlds, mostly by just overlaying their ideas of what makes a decent gameworld over the dross supplied by the authors. I don't have the same amount of faith in the makers of Baldur's Gate, that's for certain.
Re:Typical Bigotry...Give MS a fair shot...
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In my world, even a badly-written application should not rot the rest of the system. The usual rot problem was preferences. Prefs files became corrupt so often, everyone pretty much got used to making regular copies of them just so they wouldn't have to redo their setup every time. Prefs files became corrupt usually because of the constant reboots typical to a Mac, which although they're decreasing in frequency, the reboot reflex on our resident Mac-freaks was, shall we say, practiced. Don't even start on "well-written apps", it wasn't Illustrator's fault the backup TSR... er, INIT crashed the system. When the system would come back up, prefs would be corrupted. Apparently Macs never heard of a fsck, heck any kind of disk check at all is third party (was at the time I was there anyhow). Would spoil the illusion of a fast boot I guess, though now it does pop up a warning that in true Windows fashion makes you want to punch its "friendly" face ("Your computer was not shut down cleanly" -- "NO SHIT, YOU MADE ME HARD BOOT IT").
Even my linux system displays some instability over time, though it's often *forced* by applications demanding the latest bleeding edge gtk+ or whatnot (*cough*xmms*cough*). I've never really managed to cause that rot without root, except KDE has displayed some rot in that it will no longer come up with more than two desktops (I have six) despite saving preferences.
I guess the only way to really avoid it is to code to anal-retentively detailed and strict specifications. But that wouldn't be as "fun".
You are perfectly correct, but what you cannot do is edit the rpm database information by hand, as you need something specialized to read the rpm db, that being the rpm command itself in most cases. I'm not knocking it, I am saying that editable text files are overrated in some instances.
As for the previous person's comment about the registry, you should be able to write a script that exports the registry into a.reg file, throws it into vi, then uploads it back. You'll get some nice bonuses of atomic transactions too, it'll either upload or it won't at all (at least I believe that's how it works).
Mind you the usual stupidity I run into with NT is institutional ("it doesnt come with the OS and it doesnt cost $10,000 or more so it must be an unstable hack"), and the fact that it has no decent out-of-the-box remote admin tools. Perhaps W2K will fix that, let's see if it can be kept from falling over as well.
Re:Typical Bigotry...Give MS a fair shot...
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> I constantly had to reinstall windows and its applications every 6 months on all the boxes to keep them up and running without a crash every day.
I call that phenomenom "System Rot". Windows is notorious for rot. Actually the absolute worst offender is the mac, but remote reinstalls on a mac network were as easy as dragging the install folder from the master install server (which I just kept open) to the offending machine. Keeping an old configuration was similarly easy, just copy the system folder.
When I supported MS Exchange, it was fascinating how badly that application rotted. First the spellchecker went away, then some property pages here and there, and it would progressively decay until it was unusable, sometimes taking personal folders files with it. Thousands of Exchange users, five of us techs did an average of four exchange reinstalls a day.
I'll say one thing: most games these days actually respect the system. DirectX may be a developer's idea of a joke (every API call has the version number in the function name even though VC++ *does* do namespaces), but it does at least stay managed a lot better than the way installers simply overwrite files willy-nilly.
Re: Typical Bigotry vs. excellent propoganda
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> Read "The Microsoft Files" if you have any doubt about Gates' Napoleonic excesses.
Read "The Plot to Get Bill Gates" for another POV. Can't be any more biased than the first.
Not everything on your redhat box is editable from the command line. Try managing your RPM database by hand. Whups, it's a berkeley db database, ain't it?
I might note that although solaris's pkg* tools suck, that the database, such as it is, can be hand-edited such that I can put a new file under the ownership of an existing package or remove a single file from package control.
Bleh, I left some words out. The various languages like vbscript, jscript, python, perlscript all TARGET the back-end, the sort of "windows-script" (which is laughably primitive, but seems to be enough so far).
Yes you can. If there's one thing MS has actually done reasonably WELL, it's made most of its newer GUI components scriptable from its scripting engine, which is also a modular architecture targeting a backend. Basically you're writing in Windows-Script, and VBScript, JScript, and even PerlScript. Python also works well in this area too. (Before you screech about PerlScript, Perl also supports Apple Events, it's never been a least-common-denominator thing). Then Macs have AppleScript, so it really leaves Unix and X toolkits out in the cold. Motif is kinda scriptable, but it's a joke. All the other toolkits are stone age.
NT's plenty scriptable, it just has a command shell that isn't capable of doing it on the fly, a scripting front-end that still requires three-letter file extensions to determine the language (and actually pops up a bloody SPLASH SCREEN), and of course you can't redirect I/O from status windows and such.
I wonder if Notepad STILL has a tiny file size limit? Been what, 10 years?
> Even NT4 has several "command lines to a TCP session" utilities in the resource kit
Ah, like the wondrous UNSUPPORTED telnetd? The one with warning labels all over it? The one that crashes the moment you disconnect? I was quaking in my boots... from laughter.
And if you honestly consider server manager to be a usable admin tool, then wow you have low standards. How about user manager? Boy sure would be neet to get account status from the list. Of course the list when you have a thousand users tends to take eons to refresh, unless you go to low-bandwidth in which case you can't see any of them.
Every time I attempt to use an MS tool, I end up muttering over and over "what a joke. what a fucking joke". Then the Microsofties then blame me for not tolerating crap, it's a failing in me, why can't I praise it for being GUI?
Well no, Unix is the OS, Unixen are several instances of the OS. Unix boxen are several boxes running perhaps one flavor of Unix or several Unixen (or "flavors of Unix" if that's your preference).
MudOS has zero security in the driver. I've been looking for a better MOO than MOO lately, and I looked at LPmud, and none of the drivers cut it. One mudlib has a domain-based security system, but without driver security, it's a breach waiting to happen.
Won't cut it for what I need. Besides, I'd really like to see a MUD run X.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd buy a heatsink shaped like a drunk lustful goat.
Think about this. That many polygons, at a TV resolution, you could probably do much of the texturing with polygons Now that's 3d :)
> Why would a machine designed to play games need a text editor? It doesn't. COnsoles are for games, and only for games.
And only for games with the most primitive of input methods I might add. I can't see myself playing TAK on a console. Lessee, all the number keys are used, as well as ctrl, shift, alt, pause, several fkeys, and several keys on the keyboard. Arrow keys scroll the screen so you don't have to whip the mouse (or in a console's case, the stick) around to do it.
Heck, a game like Longbow 2 probably uses every single key on the keyboard.
Yes perhaps the PSX2 can theoretically use the keyboard. But the average console game will never use one. Thus most are joystick jigglers where complexity is in these ridiculously hard to sequence "combos"
Well, Marc Ewing is the co-founder of Redhat. He wrote rpm. Dunno who the guy with the boatload of shares is though.
Apply a little logic: If a server was brought to its knees by slashdotting, wouldn't the name resolution to it have to work first?
Your DNS is messed. Or more likely netscape glitched and blamed DNS like it always does. Hit shift-reload a few times.
> What!?! They are not "their" users! They are AOL's customers, but that doesn't give AOL the right to treat them like commodities.
Customers are commodities. Ask any marketer. They buy and sell you all the time.
The perfect companion to the ChiaMac I would say... :)
I saw one of the new G3 powermacs at CompUSA today while I was picking up a new modem. I played with it a bit, played the future cop demo, started up some other app, I forget what, got the message: "there is not enough memory to run . Try closing the application "Hoyle's Casino" first."
This was an app that had been in the background the whole time I was running. I see they still can't page.
I walked away, saying "yep, still sucks"
Actually perl is a special case because you have a choice of Artistic or GPL. The philosophy behind that is "If you make any changes, you better not break it, or if you do, then you better let everyone fix it."
But mostly I am just sick to my stomach reading this crap and it's not limited to slashdot. I thought Free Software was about a choice one made about their own creations, the software they'd use, and if there wasn't an open alternative available, it was about making one. Now it's all about thousands of people whining and ranting and poiting, "gimme gimme gimme". They don't want to write any code to provide free alternatives, they just demand others give away their work for nothing. Demonizing one of Linux's biggest boosters for not giving every single value-add away gratis is just shameful.
Yeah that's what prevented KDE from being released under GPL. Oh wait. It is.
Read. Understand. Post. In that order
I'm just sick of AD&D period. It's TRITE. Every fantasy RPG land, and especially the CRPG's are worlds where every commonor reads, where every town has a weapons and armor shop, a magic shop, and a half-dozen generic taverns. Lands infested with generic monsters (in the mines when I started BG, I thought, "how about that... a DUNGEON").
I've seen D&D GM's (DM is considered an insult) pull out some amazingly well-crafted and creative stories out of these worlds, mostly by just overlaying their ideas of what makes a decent gameworld over the dross supplied by the authors. I don't have the same amount of faith in the makers of Baldur's Gate, that's for certain.
In my world, even a badly-written application should not rot the rest of the system. The usual rot problem was preferences. Prefs files became corrupt so often, everyone pretty much got used to making regular copies of them just so they wouldn't have to redo their setup every time. Prefs files became corrupt usually because of the constant reboots typical to a Mac, which although they're decreasing in frequency, the reboot reflex on our resident Mac-freaks was, shall we say, practiced. Don't even start on "well-written apps", it wasn't Illustrator's fault the backup TSR ... er, INIT crashed the system. When the system would come back up, prefs would be corrupted. Apparently Macs never heard of a fsck, heck any kind of disk check at all is third party (was at the time I was there anyhow). Would spoil the illusion of a fast boot I guess, though now it does pop up a warning that in true Windows fashion makes you want to punch its "friendly" face ("Your computer was not shut down cleanly" -- "NO SHIT, YOU MADE ME HARD BOOT IT").
Even my linux system displays some instability over time, though it's often *forced* by applications demanding the latest bleeding edge gtk+ or whatnot (*cough*xmms*cough*). I've never really managed to cause that rot without root, except KDE has displayed some rot in that it will no longer come up with more than two desktops (I have six) despite saving preferences.
I guess the only way to really avoid it is to code to anal-retentively detailed and strict specifications. But that wouldn't be as "fun".
You are perfectly correct, but what you cannot do is edit the rpm database information by hand, as you need something specialized to read the rpm db, that being the rpm command itself in most cases. I'm not knocking it, I am saying that editable text files are overrated in some instances.
.reg file, throws it into vi, then uploads it back. You'll get some nice bonuses of atomic transactions too, it'll either upload or it won't at all (at least I believe that's how it works).
As for the previous person's comment about the registry, you should be able to write a script that exports the registry into a
Mind you the usual stupidity I run into with NT is institutional ("it doesnt come with the OS and it doesnt cost $10,000 or more so it must be an unstable hack"), and the fact that it has no decent out-of-the-box remote admin tools. Perhaps W2K will fix that, let's see if it can be kept from falling over as well.
> I constantly had to reinstall windows and its applications every 6 months on all the boxes to keep them up and running without a crash every day.
I call that phenomenom "System Rot". Windows is notorious for rot. Actually the absolute worst offender is the mac, but remote reinstalls on a mac network were as easy as dragging the install folder from the master install server (which I just kept open) to the offending machine. Keeping an old configuration was similarly easy, just copy the system folder.
When I supported MS Exchange, it was fascinating how badly that application rotted. First the spellchecker went away, then some property pages here and there, and it would progressively decay until it was unusable, sometimes taking personal folders files with it. Thousands of Exchange users, five of us techs did an average of four exchange reinstalls a day.
I'll say one thing: most games these days actually respect the system. DirectX may be a developer's idea of a joke (every API call has the version number in the function name even though VC++ *does* do namespaces), but it does at least stay managed a lot better than the way installers simply overwrite files willy-nilly.
> Read "The Microsoft Files" if you have any doubt about Gates' Napoleonic excesses.
Read "The Plot to Get Bill Gates" for another POV. Can't be any more biased than the first.
Not everything on your redhat box is editable from the command line. Try managing your RPM database by hand. Whups, it's a berkeley db database, ain't it?
I might note that although solaris's pkg* tools suck, that the database, such as it is, can be hand-edited such that I can put a new file under the ownership of an existing package or remove a single file from package control.
Bleh, I left some words out. The various languages like vbscript, jscript, python, perlscript all TARGET the back-end, the sort of "windows-script" (which is laughably primitive, but seems to be enough so far).
> Ooops, sorry, can't script a GUI!
Yes you can. If there's one thing MS has actually done reasonably WELL, it's made most of its newer GUI components scriptable from its scripting engine, which is also a modular architecture targeting a backend. Basically you're writing in Windows-Script, and VBScript, JScript, and even PerlScript. Python also works well in this area too. (Before you screech about PerlScript, Perl also supports Apple Events, it's never been a least-common-denominator thing). Then Macs have AppleScript, so it really leaves Unix and X toolkits out in the cold. Motif is kinda scriptable, but it's a joke. All the other toolkits are stone age.
NT's plenty scriptable, it just has a command shell that isn't capable of doing it on the fly, a scripting front-end that still requires three-letter file extensions to determine the language (and actually pops up a bloody SPLASH SCREEN), and of course you can't redirect I/O from status windows and such.
I wonder if Notepad STILL has a tiny file size limit? Been what, 10 years?
I have finger, qotd and chargen turned off on my box. I need chargen for a test, it's a one-line script using netcat.
And finger is a security nightmare when it works as designed, let's not even get into the lousy implementations of it.
> Even NT4 has several "command lines to a TCP session" utilities in the resource kit
... from laughter.
Ah, like the wondrous UNSUPPORTED telnetd? The one with warning labels all over it? The one that crashes the moment you disconnect? I was quaking in my boots
And if you honestly consider server manager to be a usable admin tool, then wow you have low standards. How about user manager? Boy sure would be neet to get account status from the list. Of course the list when you have a thousand users tends to take eons to refresh, unless you go to low-bandwidth in which case you can't see any of them.
Every time I attempt to use an MS tool, I end up muttering over and over "what a joke. what a fucking joke". Then the Microsofties then blame me for not tolerating crap, it's a failing in me, why can't I praise it for being GUI?
Joke. And every ISP knows it.
EROS sure is secure: it doesn't run on anything and there are no usable apps for it.
My paperweight is pretty secure too.
Nice theory though, perhaps we'll see it in practice someday.
Well no, Unix is the OS, Unixen are several instances of the OS. Unix boxen are several boxes running perhaps one flavor of Unix or several Unixen (or "flavors of Unix" if that's your preference).
Unices sounds too much like Unisys.
> and the K in KDE is just "K" now, no longer standing for "Kool."
Actually I was under the impression that it originally stood for "Kalle's Desktop Environment".
MudOS has zero security in the driver. I've been looking for a better MOO than MOO lately, and I looked at LPmud, and none of the drivers cut it. One mudlib has a domain-based security system, but without driver security, it's a breach waiting to happen.
Won't cut it for what I need. Besides, I'd really like to see a MUD run X.
$ top
PID USER PRI NI SIZE RSS SHARE STAT LIB %CPU %MEM TIME COMMAND
391 root 12 0 38356 35M 2576 S 0 1.5 57.0 18:11 X
That's 38 megs, 35 in core.
I now await the standard blather about how "RAM is cheap" and how that justifies this astonishing bloat.