I would keep it around. I have a 486 era machine I am not using right now, but probably will at some point. I don't think that Ultima 8 pagan is quite emulated, although I know there was a project to do it. Also, as nice as Exult is, it still isn't quite the same as playing the original Ultima 7 and 7.5. I'm not sure if you could emulate windows 3.1 either, and I do have fond memories of it, particularly that early paint program, even though I am using GIMP now.
A lot of the nostelgia with me, isn't just playing games and stuff that I did back in the day, but going back to parts of the era I missed. For instance, I recently found out the history of some of the code in a project that I am working on today, I found some of the original coders from 1992 talking about it on old defunct email addresses. Sometimes I wish I could go back to 1992, and instead of wasting my time trying to beat Drakkhen (that I never did beat btw), spend time learning X11 and the Athena Widget set back what it was actually cool and I could find other people willing to talk about it. www.wograld.org
I've often commented that the Drupal community is a piranha pool. Many Drupal developers come off as arrogant, and do little to help newbies, instead nibbling away at their desire to learn Drupal. This whole idea of Misery seems to be conceived by the ideals of the Drupal community. Instead of just being straight out and banning someone, they are going to make their websites a real pain to use. I get the bad feeling some of them won't just be using it on trolls, but ordinary users as well.
Maybe they could merge and finally fix the dependency hunt problem with all those libraries and out-dated packages for each distro. Applications could actually come with the version of the library you need rather than relying on distributions to get it right.
Many typical RPGs and like games, such as Crossfire, have a level system. This system frequently has levels that can go as high as in the 100's or as low as ten (but frequently this number is scaled up and up in order for the developers to create more content without doing any real work). When a character gains a level, she also gains stats. She might gain in strength, dexterity, intellect, or whatever other attributes are put into the game. The problem is she has 100 levels, so say she starts with 20 strength, and then gains a point in strength every level, now at level 100 she has 120 strength. The newbie character logs in with his 20 strength newbie. The problem is she is going to really be 6 times more powerful, so then, what happens if she decides now that she has maxed out her character, her new mission in life is to grief newbies. The newbies don't really have much of a chance against her.
But the real issue is that instead of 100 levels, there might be thousands of levels. By the time you get a maxed leveled character, that is several years of work. No lifers play day in and day out to get max level, and some games don't even really have a cap on levels, so the no lifer has this character that is several times more powerful than that of the casual player. The no lifer then dominates everyone, and everyone else realizes they will never get that powerful, so they quit. This is bad for the game, because eventually the no-lifer realizes that he is the only one left playing it, and he would rather rank up on a chart where he has some real competition, not just who had no life for so many years.
Ultima Online did it well. Swing a sword, gain points in dexterity and strength, cast a spell, gain a point in intellect, up to a reasonable cap for your total stats. I think it was something like 255 total, with a max of 150 in any given stat, and up to 25 more points with stat scrolls. But this way there were no uber l33t character with thousands more hit points than the newbie. Sure, maxed our characters were more powerful than the newbies, but anyone could easily get a maxed out character with just a little bit of time and effort, so most people had maxed out characters. The games focus was not on character development, beyond tweaking your template for a given game play change. The focus was on actually playing the game, going to dungeons, finding loot, crafting, and finding resources, socializing, and trading. People did not think of it as a grind game where the primary focus was character development. How you played your character mattered far more, as did customizing your template and equipment for your play style.
I've also reposted this in my blog http://wogralddev.blogspot.com/ , along with a lot of other game development and design posts.
A couple things I found that help.
1) start a blog with your project and update how you are working on it and what you are working on frequently. It helps, even if you didn't get any code written. I know after I started mine, my motivation increased dramatically.
2) really learn the language you are programming in well. The problem is, you may be able to think in logic, but if you can't translate that into code that compiles and runs, you are just hitting a brick wall. Learning programming is one of those things that can be easier said than done. Once you know the syntax the logic of what you are working on follows naturally into the syntax.
Things that don't help
1) giving up - you may think you are depressed now, but wait till you try to taken away your sole motivation for existence - yikes!
2)Drugs - like you can really afford that now anyway what with the bad economy anyway. Plus, meds won't give you motivation, it will just make it more possible to do something you hate. So all you end up doing is more and more things you don't really like.
My spouse had a work schedule like that. It was great, him actually being home and eating right instead of keeping weird hours, coming home at 3 am and eating junk food at work.
I remember having Friday off as being a great day for him to run errands and go to doctors appointments.
The down side is the company he had that work schedule at had a very mainstream sort of culture and didn't appreciate his unique ways of thinking. They eventually got rid of him when they got rid of a whole bunch of people due to not getting a contract.
Don't do pascal. It is a useless language that is missing fun features like the goto statement. Also, the biggest gift you can give your students is enthusiasm. Encourage them to play around with the code rather than just doing the assignments. Better yet, have them create their own small project assignments that use the language features you are trying to teach (rather than say, making a student who has no interest in buying a house write a program to calculate mortgage payments.) I remember the most fun I had programing in school was getting the computer to print "I hate algebra" 100 times in basic.
Unfortunately, the fact of the matter is so many instructors teach programming poorly and/or don't really know it themselves. Insist that the programs actually compile and run. This way you know the students know the concepts rather than writing a bunch of garbage. Also, don't forget to teach important things like the compiler or interpreter (use a good free-software one like gcc, don't make students buy expensive toolkits they don't need. It should work on Linux, Windows and Mac so that students can do it at home. ) If you somehow fail to teach programming and/or you students are unhappy with you, don't be surprised. It means you are just a normal person rather than an extraordinary teacher.
This is what bothers me, how could he let his ex-wife and kids get in the way of his passion for file systems. Why didn't he keep that in mind instead of killing her?
So this is what windows gaming has turned into. Is some content important enough to install rootkits for and pay for DRM that could just be deleted at anytime? Do yourself a favor people, learn to program and write your own games.
Now, does this card finnally come with a Free Software 3D graphics drivers? I won't use any proprietary closed source drivers to work on graphics for the replacement to proprietary games. That would be allowing the graphics card makers to get away with too much and setting a bad example for the community!
>>>>>>You are correct in assuming that I firmly believe that the FSF are a genuinely repressive institution. The words and actions of the organisation's supporters online provide me with further evidence to support that belief on a daily basis.
First of all, I want to say I am an fsf associate member. I am actively involved in commenting on the gpl3 draft and advocating the use of free software.
I admit when I saw this story, I was initially tempted to mod people down for making anti-fsf trolls, but then I decided that since this story is so important to me, it would be better I post on it rather than try to moderate what other people had said. You clearly have a lot to say and feel very passionate about your position.
Richard Stallman is a man very much like yourself, not afraid to speak his mind even if other people disagree. It was a strange feeling, at first to hear someone say things that were echoing in my mind that I was afraid to speak. But it has given me the courage to say what needs to be said and do what needs to be done.
I understand the fear that the fsf will become just as dominating and repressive as Microsoft. But the more I read about it, the more I began to understand the reasoning behind the use of the GPL copyleft in order to make sure everyone who wants a copy of the source code can get it.
There are people who take advantage of programmers, such as Microsoft, owning their source code and taking it away from them. I personally have been taken advantage of by Microsoft in the sense that I got a buggy file eating product and even the disgusting porn pop ups from using Microsoft software.
>>>>The real problem is that if there is one thing he is truly masterful at, it's fearmongering. Every single time someone here voices an opinion that dissents from the FSF's party line, the attempt to refute the dissenter *always* includes an appeal to fear.
Fear is a good thing when the fears are legitimate. For instance, if when driving I did not believe that myself or my car could be damaged, I would not be careful and drive much faster and more recklessly. Unfortunately, proprietary software has proved time and time again that my fears are well warranted.
Even though we are not all professional programmers, we are all united by the fact we want certain freedoms to come with our software. We want to be able to modify our own files. We want to decide what programs can run on our own computers. We don't want Bill Gates or Steve Jobs spying on us or telling us how many times we are allowed to reinstall our OS.
Sometimes, in our effort to make sure that no one takes advantage of us, we may in some cases go to far, or act in ways that are in fact, counter productive. We may not even be aware we are doing this. Please, go through and carefully read the latest draft of the GPL. If you see something that is wrong, please make your comment.
Google and Microsoft have different niches and are not really going head to head. There is no Google OS. MS search is and always will be a joke.
One place I do think that the web and the desktop are coming together is gaming. Web based games such as http://www.phantasyrpg.com/register.php?step=1&ref =122782 mean that you have a client, but most of the work is done server side. This also eliminates the hassle of installing software for your platform. We will continue to develop different clients. Even if the client is not a web browser, multiple games will use the same client.
I wish the beat your competition into the ground monopolist attitude that some people have would just die. This is the open source revolution here. We don't need to have one guy win while the other guy loses. Red hat does plenty of other things besides working with Oracle. Its not about making the other guy lose, its about you winning. If there is no market, then you all lose.
Ok, I'll admit that my Stallman History isn't a strong as it could be. Maybe he has said things to that effect. But - for whatever reason - he
and the FSF chose not to codify a "no $$$ for software" rule into the GPL. That is what I was basing my statement on. Maybe Stallman does have
a problem with it on some level, but technically the GPL doesn't rule it out.
Stallman has charged money for the distribution of software in the past and the FSF continues to do so. The objection isn't charging for software, it is having a monopoly on the distribution of software. I can buy one copy of a GNU distribution, make as many copies as I want, and then sell the copies for whatever price and/or give them away for free. I am not allowed by law to do that with proprietary software such as ms windows.
The other important point is that the four freedoms are more important than propping up a specific business model, so if tomorrow everyone has broadband so there is no market for selling software on CD ROMs, then that doesn't give business owners a right to make laws to allow them to keep that same business model.
Daniel Lyons is a known propagator of FUD. He just writes up stories that have the facts wrong all the time. I'm somewhat surprised slashdot even gave this piece of non-news any attention. It must be a slow day today.
Yes, the average user would care about DRM, if only they knew what it was. That is why they don't like it when they can't do what they expected to with the music they just thought they got. No one likes defective products. http://defectivebydesign.org/en/join/fsf
heck, I'm afraid of my dual booting XP just sharing a data partition on my Linux drive..
Yes, and that is why I don't dual boot with XP. I had a bad XPerience with it eating my data.
If Vista ever comes out, I would not be surprised if its unintended data eating abilities are not even better than the "alpha" version of Xp that was sold in stores back in 2002.
Have you tried checking anything into any big OSS project? (the Linux kernel, gcc, Firefox...) That source code is effectively read-only unless you're part of the elite inner circle.
In the end, I decided the time would be better spent working on my own project rather than trying to live up to the high standards that someone else has set. There is alot of free software not out there that needs to be writen and/or dead projects that need to be resurected.
That still does not make the source code only read only, since you can always modify the code and use your newly created version instead of what is distributed. If you think other people would prefer your version you can fork the project.
Personally, I'm glad windows Vista is doomed to failure. I wouldn't want anyone using it.
>>>The most valuable thing a commercial project can have is users. The most valuable thing an opensource project can have is a good leader. And by that I mean someone who knows what the software should do, and who knows how to listen to users telling her how it should do it, and then say no to developers who fail to do what the users want (that is also in scope/line with the project).
I kind of always thought the project needed a coder to direct it. If only because the only thing coders seem to respect is code. Otherwise, it seems like you are a waste of thier time.
http://www.jastiv.com/ .
Copying of any kind is nothing like theft. If I have a copy of something, I can give you a copy of it and still keep my copy at the same time. That is not the same with physical objects since your use of it deprives me of my use of it.
I don't watch TV anymore and I don't miss it. I stopped in 2003 when I moved out of my parents house. I just never bothered to get cable. For a while, I got alot of ps2 games and played some mmorpgs, but then I got more and more into GNU/Linux and realized just how much of my time I was wasting on things I could not modify to my liking. As far as sitting back and watching something, generally I like to participate in something rather than sit back and watch, of course I might very well be in the minority here, but there is plenty of intresting stuff to read on the internet anyway. Right now I have a webcomic http://www.jastiv.com/ At some point in the near future, I plan to make some kind of animated short movie that of course works out of the box with no proprietary plugins. I am not going to waste money on software licenses.
Slashdot Mirror
I would keep it around. I have a 486 era machine I am not using right now, but probably will at some point. I don't think that Ultima 8 pagan is quite emulated, although I know there was a project to do it. Also, as nice as Exult is, it still isn't quite the same as playing the original Ultima 7 and 7.5. I'm not sure if you could emulate windows 3.1 either, and I do have fond memories of it, particularly that early paint program, even though I am using GIMP now. A lot of the nostelgia with me, isn't just playing games and stuff that I did back in the day, but going back to parts of the era I missed. For instance, I recently found out the history of some of the code in a project that I am working on today, I found some of the original coders from 1992 talking about it on old defunct email addresses. Sometimes I wish I could go back to 1992, and instead of wasting my time trying to beat Drakkhen (that I never did beat btw), spend time learning X11 and the Athena Widget set back what it was actually cool and I could find other people willing to talk about it. www.wograld.org
I've often commented that the Drupal community is a piranha pool. Many Drupal developers come off as arrogant, and do little to help newbies, instead nibbling away at their desire to learn Drupal. This whole idea of Misery seems to be conceived by the ideals of the Drupal community. Instead of just being straight out and banning someone, they are going to make their websites a real pain to use. I get the bad feeling some of them won't just be using it on trolls, but ordinary users as well.
Maybe they could merge and finally fix the dependency hunt problem with all those libraries and out-dated packages for each distro. Applications could actually come with the version of the library you need rather than relying on distributions to get it right.
I actually like April Fools.
Many typical RPGs and like games, such as Crossfire, have a level system. This system frequently has levels that can go as high as in the 100's or as low as ten (but frequently this number is scaled up and up in order for the developers to create more content without doing any real work). When a character gains a level, she also gains stats. She might gain in strength, dexterity, intellect, or whatever other attributes are put into the game. The problem is she has 100 levels, so say she starts with 20 strength, and then gains a point in strength every level, now at level 100 she has 120 strength. The newbie character logs in with his 20 strength newbie. The problem is she is going to really be 6 times more powerful, so then, what happens if she decides now that she has maxed out her character, her new mission in life is to grief newbies. The newbies don't really have much of a chance against her.
But the real issue is that instead of 100 levels, there might be thousands of levels. By the time you get a maxed leveled character, that is several years of work. No lifers play day in and day out to get max level, and some games don't even really have a cap on levels, so the no lifer has this character that is several times more powerful than that of the casual player. The no lifer then dominates everyone, and everyone else realizes they will never get that powerful, so they quit. This is bad for the game, because eventually the no-lifer realizes that he is the only one left playing it, and he would rather rank up on a chart where he has some real competition, not just who had no life for so many years.
Ultima Online did it well. Swing a sword, gain points in dexterity and strength, cast a spell, gain a point in intellect, up to a reasonable cap for your total stats. I think it was something like 255 total, with a max of 150 in any given stat, and up to 25 more points with stat scrolls. But this way there were no uber l33t character with thousands more hit points than the newbie. Sure, maxed our characters were more powerful than the newbies, but anyone could easily get a maxed out character with just a little bit of time and effort, so most people had maxed out characters. The games focus was not on character development, beyond tweaking your template for a given game play change. The focus was on actually playing the game, going to dungeons, finding loot, crafting, and finding resources, socializing, and trading. People did not think of it as a grind game where the primary focus was character development. How you played your character mattered far more, as did customizing your template and equipment for your play style.
I've also reposted this in my blog http://wogralddev.blogspot.com/ , along with a lot of other game development and design posts.
A couple things I found that help. 1) start a blog with your project and update how you are working on it and what you are working on frequently. It helps, even if you didn't get any code written. I know after I started mine, my motivation increased dramatically. 2) really learn the language you are programming in well. The problem is, you may be able to think in logic, but if you can't translate that into code that compiles and runs, you are just hitting a brick wall. Learning programming is one of those things that can be easier said than done. Once you know the syntax the logic of what you are working on follows naturally into the syntax. Things that don't help 1) giving up - you may think you are depressed now, but wait till you try to taken away your sole motivation for existence - yikes! 2)Drugs - like you can really afford that now anyway what with the bad economy anyway. Plus, meds won't give you motivation, it will just make it more possible to do something you hate. So all you end up doing is more and more things you don't really like.
My spouse had a work schedule like that. It was great, him actually being home and eating right instead of keeping weird hours, coming home at 3 am and eating junk food at work. I remember having Friday off as being a great day for him to run errands and go to doctors appointments. The down side is the company he had that work schedule at had a very mainstream sort of culture and didn't appreciate his unique ways of thinking. They eventually got rid of him when they got rid of a whole bunch of people due to not getting a contract.
Don't do pascal. It is a useless language that is missing fun features like the goto statement. Also, the biggest gift you can give your students is enthusiasm. Encourage them to play around with the code rather than just doing the assignments. Better yet, have them create their own small project assignments that use the language features you are trying to teach (rather than say, making a student who has no interest in buying a house write a program to calculate mortgage payments.) I remember the most fun I had programing in school was getting the computer to print "I hate algebra" 100 times in basic. Unfortunately, the fact of the matter is so many instructors teach programming poorly and/or don't really know it themselves. Insist that the programs actually compile and run. This way you know the students know the concepts rather than writing a bunch of garbage. Also, don't forget to teach important things like the compiler or interpreter (use a good free-software one like gcc, don't make students buy expensive toolkits they don't need. It should work on Linux, Windows and Mac so that students can do it at home. ) If you somehow fail to teach programming and/or you students are unhappy with you, don't be surprised. It means you are just a normal person rather than an extraordinary teacher.
This is what bothers me, how could he let his ex-wife and kids get in the way of his passion for file systems. Why didn't he keep that in mind instead of killing her?
So this is what windows gaming has turned into. Is some content important enough to install rootkits for and pay for DRM that could just be deleted at anytime? Do yourself a favor people, learn to program and write your own games.
Now, does this card finnally come with a Free Software 3D graphics drivers? I won't use any proprietary closed source drivers to work on graphics for the replacement to proprietary games. That would be allowing the graphics card makers to get away with too much and setting a bad example for the community!
First of all, I want to say I am an fsf associate member. I am actively involved in commenting on the gpl3 draft and advocating the use of free software.
I admit when I saw this story, I was initially tempted to mod people down for making anti-fsf trolls, but then I decided that since this story is so important to me, it would be better I post on it rather than try to moderate what other people had said. You clearly have a lot to say and feel very passionate about your position.
Richard Stallman is a man very much like yourself, not afraid to speak his mind even if other people disagree. It was a strange feeling, at first to hear someone say things that were echoing in my mind that I was afraid to speak. But it has given me the courage to say what needs to be said and do what needs to be done. I understand the fear that the fsf will become just as dominating and repressive as Microsoft. But the more I read about it, the more I began to understand the reasoning behind the use of the GPL copyleft in order to make sure everyone who wants a copy of the source code can get it.
There are people who take advantage of programmers, such as Microsoft, owning their source code and taking it away from them. I personally have been taken advantage of by Microsoft in the sense that I got a buggy file eating product and even the disgusting porn pop ups from using Microsoft software.
>>>>The real problem is that if there is one thing he is truly masterful at, it's fearmongering. Every single time someone here voices an opinion that dissents from the FSF's party line, the attempt to refute the dissenter *always* includes an appeal to fear.
Fear is a good thing when the fears are legitimate. For instance, if when driving I did not believe that myself or my car could be damaged, I would not be careful and drive much faster and more recklessly. Unfortunately, proprietary software has proved time and time again that my fears are well warranted.
Even though we are not all professional programmers, we are all united by the fact we want certain freedoms to come with our software. We want to be able to modify our own files. We want to decide what programs can run on our own computers. We don't want Bill Gates or Steve Jobs spying on us or telling us how many times we are allowed to reinstall our OS.
Sometimes, in our effort to make sure that no one takes advantage of us, we may in some cases go to far, or act in ways that are in fact, counter productive. We may not even be aware we are doing this. Please, go through and carefully read the latest draft of the GPL. If you see something that is wrong, please make your comment.
One place I do think that the web and the desktop are coming together is gaming. Web based games such as http://www.phantasyrpg.com/register.php?step=1&ref =122782 mean that you have a client, but most of the work is done server side. This also eliminates the hassle of installing software for your platform. We will continue to develop different clients. Even if the client is not a web browser, multiple games will use the same client.
I admit I never really liked some of the features in FireFox anyway, such as the the automatic download to desktop.
I wish the beat your competition into the ground monopolist attitude that some people have would just die. This is the open source revolution here. We don't need to have one guy win while the other guy loses. Red hat does plenty of other things besides working with Oracle. Its not about making the other guy lose, its about you winning. If there is no market, then you all lose.
Stallman has charged money for the distribution of software in the past and the FSF continues to do so. The objection isn't charging for software, it is having a monopoly on the distribution of software. I can buy one copy of a GNU distribution, make as many copies as I want, and then sell the copies for whatever price and/or give them away for free. I am not allowed by law to do that with proprietary software such as ms windows.
The other important point is that the four freedoms are more important than propping up a specific business model, so if tomorrow everyone has broadband so there is no market for selling software on CD ROMs, then that doesn't give business owners a right to make laws to allow them to keep that same business model.
Daniel Lyons is a known propagator of FUD. He just writes up stories that have the facts wrong all the time. I'm somewhat surprised slashdot even gave this piece of non-news any attention. It must be a slow day today.
Yes, the average user would care about DRM, if only they knew what it was. That is why they don't like it when they can't do what they expected to with the music they just thought they got. No one likes defective products. http://defectivebydesign.org/en/join/fsf
Yes, and that is why I don't dual boot with XP. I had a bad XPerience with it eating my data.
If Vista ever comes out, I would not be surprised if its unintended data eating abilities are not even better than the "alpha" version of Xp that was sold in stores back in 2002.
No, but I have tried getting some artwork into a minor project. http://www.wesnoth.org/
In the end, I decided the time would be better spent working on my own project rather than trying to live up to the high standards that someone else has set. There is alot of free software not out there that needs to be writen and/or dead projects that need to be resurected.
That still does not make the source code only read only, since you can always modify the code and use your newly created version instead of what is distributed. If you think other people would prefer your version you can fork the project.
Personally, I'm glad windows Vista is doomed to failure. I wouldn't want anyone using it.
I kind of always thought the project needed a coder to direct it. If only because the only thing coders seem to respect is code. Otherwise, it seems like you are a waste of thier time. http://www.jastiv.com/ .
I never even got xp after seeing what it was like.
We are already organizing protests. Come, join us in our effort. http://www.defectivebydesign.org/
Copying of any kind is nothing like theft. If I have a copy of something, I can give you a copy of it and still keep my copy at the same time. That is not the same with physical objects since your use of it deprives me of my use of it.
I don't watch TV anymore and I don't miss it. I stopped in 2003 when I moved out of my parents house. I just never bothered to get cable. For a while, I got alot of ps2 games and played some mmorpgs, but then I got more and more into GNU/Linux and realized just how much of my time I was wasting on things I could not modify to my liking. As far as sitting back and watching something, generally I like to participate in something rather than sit back and watch, of course I might very well be in the minority here, but there is plenty of intresting stuff to read on the internet anyway. Right now I have a webcomic http://www.jastiv.com/ At some point in the near future, I plan to make some kind of animated short movie that of course works out of the box with no proprietary plugins. I am not going to waste money on software licenses.