And that works reasonably well for popular open source projects, where volunteers can build new binaries to keep up with updated dependencies, but it's a real problem for closed-source projects.
Whether or not paving the way for closed-source projects on Linux is a good thing will depend on whom you ask, but I suspect that's one of the major motivations for this project.
Colour me curious. I've never met a programmer who's capable of writing an H.264 codec but still has the arrogance of a sophomore. Do you have a link to your project?
You know, I'd be perfectly happy if HTML supported COBOL. My problem with JavaScript isn't that it's a terrible language, it's that it's the only language.
I'd be much happier if HTML had a standard VM and a standard API, so that we could use whatever language we want.
HTML is a software platform now, and being stuck with one programming language is stifling. Can you imagine if we were only allowed to use one language when writing Windows/Linux/Mac software?
The Wayland devs were definitely a little too obscure whenever the issue of remoting came up. They kept saying that remoting was out of scope with regard to Wayland, and technically, they were right, but it lead to a lot of misunderstandings.
Imagine if somebody asked "Does the Linux kernel support email?" Of course it doesn't; email is done way higher in the stack. There's not a single line of code in the Linux kernel that has anything to do with email. But you would be giving people the wrong impression if you said "Linux doesn't support email", and that's exactly what the Wayland devs were doing.
You already have multiple incompatible remote rendering back ends in X, it's just really hard to do in X. The reason the Unix mantra "do one thing well" is so important is because it allows you to swap out parts and innovate more easily.
"Network transparent" means you can look at the bits over the wire and tell what it's doing. You can't do this with X nowadays, because nowadays it sends whole frame buffers instead of individual drawing commands. It's network opaque. Yes, X supports remoting, but it's not network transparent anymore.
The nice thing about the Wayland stack is that it's much easier to replace parts of the stack with something else. I'm sure this won't be the last remoting protocol we see layered on top of Wayland.
Q: Does Linux support email? A: No, that is outside the scope of Linux.
There is not a single line in Linux that is written to support email. Does that mean you can't do email in Linux? Of course not! Similarly, you can have remote display when using Wayland, it's just not part of the Wayland core.
No, really. I mean, it was, but it isn't anymore. Why? Because nowadays everybody uses SHM and DRI2, which don't work over the network.
So unless you're using Motif, then all X is doing is shipping bitmaps over the network, and doing it in an extremely chatty way that involves lots of round-trips from server to client for every single frame, injecting huge amounts of latency for no reason.
But chances are you don't really care about network transparency. Chances are you just think it's a synonym for remote display.
Now, technically, those projects do not add remoting to Wayland, but instead add it to Weston, the reference compositor for Wayland. That's because the Wayland developers follow the Unix philosophy: do one thing really well. Wayland is not a kitchen sink like X is. It's part of a stack of interchangeable parts, and there's no reason remoting needs to be implemented directly in the display server.
It takes a bit of time to comprehend that graph when you first see it, but once you grok it, take a look at the 'centre right' population in the house. They've been completely supplanted by the far right. So have the conservative liberals. The same trend is visible in the senate, although not to the same extreme. The left-leaning population, on the other hand, hasn't had a significant amount of extremism since before the great depression.
And these scores aren't based on how people identify, they're based on their roll call, and then their votes are compared to their peers to see how similar they are to each other. Dig into it a bit. It's really interesting.
What you want is Microsoft's PixelSense (formerly known as the Surface before they repurposed that name). I don't know how well it deals with the multiple computers part, but I'm not sure you should look to Minority Report for that feature. When they were working with multiple computers they had to physically insert iPad-sized disks into the machine to transfer data.
I think that article has it backwards. Minority Report was modelling ideas that people in the UI community found exciting, not the other way around. It certainly helped raise the global consciousness a few years early, but without Minority Report the UI community would still have been excited about those ideas.
The article does make valid points, but most people on this site will already be familiar with them. Notably that multi-touch is not panacea, WIMP still has its place (especially for anything more complicated than shuffling photos), and that there's no such thing as an "interfaceless design"; in my opinion, the term "invisible interface" would more accurately convey the strengths and flaws of these designs.
If you meant "What if all the players fall in the first category?", then that's a non-problem. In that scenario, everybody has IPv6 access, so they'll have no problem talking over that.
If you meant "Isn't there another category where players have a NATed IPv4 address and no IPv6 address?", then that's unlikely. NATing IPv4 addresses is a transitional technique, so it doesn't make much sense to do that until you support IPv6.
It's not going to be flawless -- there's a lot of routers in peoples homes that don't support IPv6, and there's doubtlessly a lot of games that don't support IPv6 -- but it's not the end of the world, and being behind a NAT is actually good incentive to get people to switch to IPv6.
Who cares where we start as long as we start. Waste is waste isn't it?
Three things.
First, cutting waste is good, but if I'm in debt, I'm not going to save much money by cutting the milk from my grocery budget, especially if I'm paying off a mortgage on a summer home. You have to look at the big-ticket items first. Prioritizing the small things is irresponsible.
Second, it doesn't seem right for a site like this to "target" an institution. If this is truly for the people, then they should try to remain impartial.
Finally, YouCut doesn't seem to be effective. They've already generated fourteen proposals, and it doesn't look like a single one has even come close to being cut when it was presented on the floor. If it never actually generates any savings, it's just another source of waste.
All of the players will either have: * an IPv6 address and a (possibly NATed) IPv4 address, or * an unNATed IPv4 address.
If the entire group of players falls into the same category, then it's a non-issue. If it's mixed, then one of the players in the second category should run the server.
Those aren't insurmountable. We're talking about a transition period here, so the assumption is that people will have unNATed IPv6 addresses, and you can use those to connect to peers. VoIP also doesn't necessarily need to allow incoming traffic, as long as there's a central server that can bounce the traffic. Services like Skype and MSN already do this, because customers usually aren't handy with opening ports.
Now, why on Earth would you let something as trivial as being guilty of a crime get in the way of having your charges dropped? It sounds to me like you need a better attorney!
I disagree. This might come down to different demographics, but whenever I ask people why they love Facebook so much it usually boils down to the fact that it's easier to use than email. PMs and event discussions are expected to be as private as emails.
Of course, when Facebook dies and people start using the next big social networking site, they'll need to recreate their address book (or "friends list", or whatever) all over again, and they won't have any backups of any of those discussions.
Well, they probably didn't eat it because it went bad, and then they just never got around to throwing it out. It's like that Tupperware container in your fridge.
Worry not, they plan to have a new default keymap by the time the final version of 2.5 is released (i.e. by the time 2.6 is released) and that will have ctrl-z as the default for undo. I'm not entirely sure why it hasn't been done yet. I've seen some talk on the blender.devel list about issues with the configuration system, so maybe that has something to do with it. It's still on the TODO, though, so for now I still have faith that the new keymap will be included in this release.
Does anybody else think it's weird to see books being released for a beta version of Blender when Blender 2.6 will be coming out in a matter of months?
I haven't had an interest in video games since the great console war between the Sega Megadrive and Super Nintendo.... a review that gave the game less than 30%... Sounds like the modern-day gaming media could do with a little of that.
But those shitty Sega games deserved it. Heyo!
Sorry, I was on the Nintendo side during that war:)
Seriously though, the trend was already starting back then. Ignore the fact that we use a 6-10 rating scale nowadays. 30% equals 1.5/5 stars. Do you think a movie that is as bad as the game you just described would ever get 1.5/5 stars?
Saved games definitely aren't as trivial as they sound. When the game is running, it stores a whole lot of data that isn't needed in the saved games, so the programmer has to sift through all the data that's actually necessary to save -- transforming it into a different representation sometimes -- and then regenerate the extra data when loading the saved game. It's easy for something to slip through the cracks; usually all the bugs are worked out before release, but when the bug doesn't manifest itself until 40 hours into the game (and probably not reliably at that) then it's very easy to imagine how the testers never ran into it.
However, the exact situation you're describing -- a saved game that loads and won't save -- would almost certainly be trivial for a programmer to fix if they had your saved game. Easily repeatable cases like that are the kind of bug reports programmers love. However, after the big publishers launch a game (optionally with a little bit of time dedicated to post-launch bug fixes if it's a PC title) they completely abandon it. The team is gone and they're all working on new games, which are probably already behind schedule.
When it comes to stuff like this, you usually get much better support from small indie developers. Support indie devs!
Probably because the article refers to "blasting some red eyed space Nazis".
Is it offensive? Well, I think we as a society have long since stopped caring about offending Nazis, especially when it comes to the space-faring variety. But maybe some people are offended by the mere use of the word.
Is it aggressive? Well, yeah. But it's an aggressive game. That just raises more questions: is it impossible to discuss the gameplay of an aggressive game without failing Jackmovich's litmus test?
Oh, I also just noticed that this article was actually submitted by Jackmovich himself, although he submitted it under his Twitter alias and referred to himself in the third person. Normally I wouldn't care, but when you're making such a huge deal about journalistic integrity, it's a little sketchy.
The article doesn't really focus on the issue of game reviews, although I think we can all agree that there's a problem there.
Actually, the article is kind of hypocritical and self-fellating. It discusses the importance of having multiple sources (but really, how much gaming news actually merits multiple sources?), the unprofessionalism of editorializing news stories (welcome to blogging) and of running stories that aren't game news (because it's unreasonable to assume that gamers would be interested in Pac Man lawn ornaments), and how offensive and sexist the industry is.
Now, calling somebody sexist is a pretty serious charge, but unfortunately, he didn't make his data public (hows that for journalistic integrity?) but rather gave a very, very small sample of the articles chosen. Here's one of his examples. Can you spot the sexism? I can't!
He also posts a quote from his boss, but leaves his own website out of this harsh "study", which seems pretty self-serving.
Finally, he goes into a speech about how important it is to stick to the codes of journalistic integrity, and how game journalism can be so much more than just "enthusiast press" (as though that's a four-letter word). If he was attacking Gamasutra or gamesindustry.biz, that's one thing, but blogs? He's very guilty himself of posting stories which only include the official source, so maybe he should get off his high horse and set an example before he belittles everybody else.
Slashdot Mirror
And that works reasonably well for popular open source projects, where volunteers can build new binaries to keep up with updated dependencies, but it's a real problem for closed-source projects.
Whether or not paving the way for closed-source projects on Linux is a good thing will depend on whom you ask, but I suspect that's one of the major motivations for this project.
Colour me curious. I've never met a programmer who's capable of writing an H.264 codec but still has the arrogance of a sophomore. Do you have a link to your project?
You know, I'd be perfectly happy if HTML supported COBOL. My problem with JavaScript isn't that it's a terrible language, it's that it's the only language.
I'd be much happier if HTML had a standard VM and a standard API, so that we could use whatever language we want.
HTML is a software platform now, and being stuck with one programming language is stifling. Can you imagine if we were only allowed to use one language when writing Windows/Linux/Mac software?
Get back to us when you've written a GPU-powered database.
The Wayland devs were definitely a little too obscure whenever the issue of remoting came up. They kept saying that remoting was out of scope with regard to Wayland, and technically, they were right, but it lead to a lot of misunderstandings.
Imagine if somebody asked "Does the Linux kernel support email?" Of course it doesn't; email is done way higher in the stack. There's not a single line of code in the Linux kernel that has anything to do with email. But you would be giving people the wrong impression if you said "Linux doesn't support email", and that's exactly what the Wayland devs were doing.
You already have multiple incompatible remote rendering back ends in X, it's just really hard to do in X. The reason the Unix mantra "do one thing well" is so important is because it allows you to swap out parts and innovate more easily.
"Network transparent" means you can look at the bits over the wire and tell what it's doing. You can't do this with X nowadays, because nowadays it sends whole frame buffers instead of individual drawing commands. It's network opaque. Yes, X supports remoting, but it's not network transparent anymore.
The nice thing about the Wayland stack is that it's much easier to replace parts of the stack with something else. I'm sure this won't be the last remoting protocol we see layered on top of Wayland.
Here's a better example than X/OpenGL:
Q: Does Linux support email?
A: No, that is outside the scope of Linux.
There is not a single line in Linux that is written to support email. Does that mean you can't do email in Linux? Of course not! Similarly, you can have remote display when using Wayland, it's just not part of the Wayland core.
What's more, remote display on Wayland has already been prototyped. Twice.
Hey, guess what?
X is not network transparent.
No, really. I mean, it was, but it isn't anymore. Why? Because nowadays everybody uses SHM and DRI2, which don't work over the network.
So unless you're using Motif, then all X is doing is shipping bitmaps over the network, and doing it in an extremely chatty way that involves lots of round-trips from server to client for every single frame, injecting huge amounts of latency for no reason.
But chances are you don't really care about network transparency. Chances are you just think it's a synonym for remote display.
Guess what else?
Wayland supports remote display.
Here's one implementation, and here's another implementation written by somebody else.
Now, technically, those projects do not add remoting to Wayland, but instead add it to Weston, the reference compositor for Wayland. That's because the Wayland developers follow the Unix philosophy: do one thing really well. Wayland is not a kitchen sink like X is. It's part of a stack of interchangeable parts, and there's no reason remoting needs to be implemented directly in the display server.
Although I applaud you for trying not to pick sides, in this case it really does appear that the conservatives have been growing increasingly extreme.
Thankfully, XKCD compiled some research to make this trend clear:
http://xkcd.com/1127/large/
It takes a bit of time to comprehend that graph when you first see it, but once you grok it, take a look at the 'centre right' population in the house. They've been completely supplanted by the far right. So have the conservative liberals. The same trend is visible in the senate, although not to the same extreme. The left-leaning population, on the other hand, hasn't had a significant amount of extremism since before the great depression.
And these scores aren't based on how people identify, they're based on their roll call, and then their votes are compared to their peers to see how similar they are to each other. Dig into it a bit. It's really interesting.
Au contraire! The replacement has small surface details etched into it to promote new bone growth.
What you want is Microsoft's PixelSense (formerly known as the Surface before they repurposed that name). I don't know how well it deals with the multiple computers part, but I'm not sure you should look to Minority Report for that feature. When they were working with multiple computers they had to physically insert iPad-sized disks into the machine to transfer data.
I think that article has it backwards. Minority Report was modelling ideas that people in the UI community found exciting, not the other way around. It certainly helped raise the global consciousness a few years early, but without Minority Report the UI community would still have been excited about those ideas.
The article does make valid points, but most people on this site will already be familiar with them. Notably that multi-touch is not panacea, WIMP still has its place (especially for anything more complicated than shuffling photos), and that there's no such thing as an "interfaceless design"; in my opinion, the term "invisible interface" would more accurately convey the strengths and flaws of these designs.
I'm not sure what you mean by that.
If you meant "What if all the players fall in the first category?", then that's a non-problem. In that scenario, everybody has IPv6 access, so they'll have no problem talking over that.
If you meant "Isn't there another category where players have a NATed IPv4 address and no IPv6 address?", then that's unlikely. NATing IPv4 addresses is a transitional technique, so it doesn't make much sense to do that until you support IPv6.
It's not going to be flawless -- there's a lot of routers in peoples homes that don't support IPv6, and there's doubtlessly a lot of games that don't support IPv6 -- but it's not the end of the world, and being behind a NAT is actually good incentive to get people to switch to IPv6.
Who cares where we start as long as we start. Waste is waste isn't it?
Three things.
First, cutting waste is good, but if I'm in debt, I'm not going to save much money by cutting the milk from my grocery budget, especially if I'm paying off a mortgage on a summer home. You have to look at the big-ticket items first. Prioritizing the small things is irresponsible.
Second, it doesn't seem right for a site like this to "target" an institution. If this is truly for the people, then they should try to remain impartial.
Finally, YouCut doesn't seem to be effective. They've already generated fourteen proposals, and it doesn't look like a single one has even come close to being cut when it was presented on the floor. If it never actually generates any savings, it's just another source of waste.
All of the players will either have:
* an IPv6 address and a (possibly NATed) IPv4 address, or
* an unNATed IPv4 address.
If the entire group of players falls into the same category, then it's a non-issue. If it's mixed, then one of the players in the second category should run the server.
Those aren't insurmountable. We're talking about a transition period here, so the assumption is that people will have unNATed IPv6 addresses, and you can use those to connect to peers. VoIP also doesn't necessarily need to allow incoming traffic, as long as there's a central server that can bounce the traffic. Services like Skype and MSN already do this, because customers usually aren't handy with opening ports.
Now, why on Earth would you let something as trivial as being guilty of a crime get in the way of having your charges dropped? It sounds to me like you need a better attorney!
I disagree. This might come down to different demographics, but whenever I ask people why they love Facebook so much it usually boils down to the fact that it's easier to use than email. PMs and event discussions are expected to be as private as emails.
Of course, when Facebook dies and people start using the next big social networking site, they'll need to recreate their address book (or "friends list", or whatever) all over again, and they won't have any backups of any of those discussions.
Well, they probably didn't eat it because it went bad, and then they just never got around to throwing it out. It's like that Tupperware container in your fridge.
Worry not, they plan to have a new default keymap by the time the final version of 2.5 is released (i.e. by the time 2.6 is released) and that will have ctrl-z as the default for undo. I'm not entirely sure why it hasn't been done yet. I've seen some talk on the blender.devel list about issues with the configuration system, so maybe that has something to do with it. It's still on the TODO, though, so for now I still have faith that the new keymap will be included in this release.
Does anybody else think it's weird to see books being released for a beta version of Blender when Blender 2.6 will be coming out in a matter of months?
I haven't had an interest in video games since the great console war between the Sega Megadrive and Super Nintendo. ... a review that gave the game less than 30% ... Sounds like the modern-day gaming media could do with a little of that.
But those shitty Sega games deserved it. Heyo!
Sorry, I was on the Nintendo side during that war :)
Seriously though, the trend was already starting back then. Ignore the fact that we use a 6-10 rating scale nowadays. 30% equals 1.5/5 stars. Do you think a movie that is as bad as the game you just described would ever get 1.5/5 stars?
Saved games definitely aren't as trivial as they sound. When the game is running, it stores a whole lot of data that isn't needed in the saved games, so the programmer has to sift through all the data that's actually necessary to save -- transforming it into a different representation sometimes -- and then regenerate the extra data when loading the saved game. It's easy for something to slip through the cracks; usually all the bugs are worked out before release, but when the bug doesn't manifest itself until 40 hours into the game (and probably not reliably at that) then it's very easy to imagine how the testers never ran into it.
However, the exact situation you're describing -- a saved game that loads and won't save -- would almost certainly be trivial for a programmer to fix if they had your saved game. Easily repeatable cases like that are the kind of bug reports programmers love. However, after the big publishers launch a game (optionally with a little bit of time dedicated to post-launch bug fixes if it's a PC title) they completely abandon it. The team is gone and they're all working on new games, which are probably already behind schedule.
When it comes to stuff like this, you usually get much better support from small indie developers. Support indie devs!
Probably because the article refers to "blasting some red eyed space Nazis".
Is it offensive? Well, I think we as a society have long since stopped caring about offending Nazis, especially when it comes to the space-faring variety. But maybe some people are offended by the mere use of the word.
Is it aggressive? Well, yeah. But it's an aggressive game. That just raises more questions: is it impossible to discuss the gameplay of an aggressive game without failing Jackmovich's litmus test?
Oh, I also just noticed that this article was actually submitted by Jackmovich himself, although he submitted it under his Twitter alias and referred to himself in the third person. Normally I wouldn't care, but when you're making such a huge deal about journalistic integrity, it's a little sketchy.
The article doesn't really focus on the issue of game reviews, although I think we can all agree that there's a problem there.
Actually, the article is kind of hypocritical and self-fellating. It discusses the importance of having multiple sources (but really, how much gaming news actually merits multiple sources?), the unprofessionalism of editorializing news stories (welcome to blogging) and of running stories that aren't game news (because it's unreasonable to assume that gamers would be interested in Pac Man lawn ornaments), and how offensive and sexist the industry is.
Now, calling somebody sexist is a pretty serious charge, but unfortunately, he didn't make his data public (hows that for journalistic integrity?) but rather gave a very, very small sample of the articles chosen. Here's one of his examples. Can you spot the sexism? I can't!
He also posts a quote from his boss, but leaves his own website out of this harsh "study", which seems pretty self-serving.
Finally, he goes into a speech about how important it is to stick to the codes of journalistic integrity, and how game journalism can be so much more than just "enthusiast press" (as though that's a four-letter word). If he was attacking Gamasutra or gamesindustry.biz, that's one thing, but blogs? He's very guilty himself of posting stories which only include the official source, so maybe he should get off his high horse and set an example before he belittles everybody else.