> Why doesn't FreeBSD have the stigma Gentoo does?/usr/ports insipred Portage...
For starters, FreeBSD did not go around making fantastic claims about the efficiency of ports-compiled code, nor was recompiling the base system some sort of rite of passage into enlightenment about "how the system works". But mostly it was the fact that it was BSD, which just doesn't have as big of an advocacy culture.
> I like an OS with a little LESS configurability than Gentoo. Some like it though.
I like the configurability, and frankly the compiling part doesn't bother me (of course I start with a stage3 install or better), it's that it's a crapshoot whether it'll actually get things right, from whether it updates your configuration properly to whether portage is globally broken from update to update.
Plus, while every distribution has sometimes acrimonious debates over its management, the various flamewars of infighting in Gentoo always struck me as being conducted with a whole lot less maturity. This was years ago though, so perhaps some of the more obstreperous elements have been weeded out. At any rate, despite not having those nice USE flags, I've found debian works for my servers (I'm largely forced to use RHEL, but I carve out an exception here and there). As for home... well I pretty much just play games and use a TV capture card with no Linux support, so I'm no longer booting there.
I thought the promise of component software was to make swapping features in and out a function of runtime, not compilation. I guess most of our software is still stuck in the 1970's.
> Firstly I doubt they would seriously get that many tech support calls.
Not tech support, but sales support. "Dude, where's my order" kind of stuff. 2K is a pretty darn big company though, so I imagine they can handle it, but it can really screw your supply chain if you don't stagger shipping dates properly.
My guess is it's largely about marketing -- you get more buzz if you have lots of releases than just one big one.
> Censorship is when the government infringes on your free speech.
No, it's when any third party does. You have a right to be a censor in your own home, as do most private entities. Wal-mart may have that right, but it is still being a censor, and it's perfectly accurate to call it that.
I'm so sick of the "it's only bad when government does it" argument.
Ah yes, the X21 chips, the chips that will save the world. Weird word sizes, and of course programmable only in forth. By forth nuts, for forth nuts, forth forth uber alles, all other languages are conspiracies by hardware companies to sell faster hardware because they're all awful kludges compared to the shining beacon of enlightment that is forth, etc.
Sorry, maybe I read too much comp.lang.forth, but the sour attitude seemed to stem from chipchuck himself. Just possibly it turned off a few potentially interested parties? Now the shBoom looked promising, but under PatSci's stewardship it appears doomed to be nothing but a source of IP licensing.
One of the first few characters you talk to in that game is a lesbian.
There's also Fable, where you could choose to be gay, marry a man, and even have sex with him (all the sex is off camera and implied with a few lines of spoken dialog). I don't care so much if a game "tackles" the issue of homosexual characters -- having them in the game matter-of-factly should really be enough. It is hard to make a game with a significant romantic subplot that retains all options though -- I mean, I always did suspect something between Tidus and Auron, but he still always goes for Yuna regardless, and I suspect they're all going to be cut from the same mold in the medium future.
> Do you really think San Andreas would have flopped if they sold it through the internet or mail order?
An unqualified yes, it would have flopped. The majority of copies sold were for the PS2, which doesn't even have downloadable content. I could allow that it might have broken even, but imagine a game that wasn't a hotly-anticipated sequel trying to sell this way? It's not like we're going to see real AAA titles be downloadable anytime soon because of all the retail arrangements.
I'm glad to see that Citizendium has adopted a more realistic policy on the expertise requirements by moving to approval instead of pre-vetting. I still think the barriers to entry for "trivial" editing are going to be a problem. Most of the barriers are a function of the MediaWiki software, which is really not well-suited for the type of workflow changes that would be needed to support it. I think something working like a distributed SCM system would be more appropriate, where diffs could be pushed upstream as patchsets instead of just blindly saved into the head branch. I'm not holding my breath that Mediawiki will ever make this happen though.
DRM *only* affects the music and videos you legally purchased. If you want better interoperability and performance, download your music from P2P. That's the ultimate lesson of DRM.
Win2k's wireless support is horrendous for starters. XP added an ugly skin on top of 2k and killed pipe performance, something most people don't notice, but didn't destroy overall performance or break things to such a degree that Vista did. Run without a theme and XP is pretty much a better 2k.
To some extent, some things needed breaking. The audio path wasn't one of them. Hell, DirectShow used to be one of the best features of Windows, but they had to go break that to serve their DRM masters.
This is really uncool. You are not supposed to destroy one of a kind movie props. A casting from the prop is hardly one of a kind.
Moron. Yet we're still in agreement about him there.
> I just made the same argument for different sized metal bearings as you made for different nanometer threading.
Hey, lookit me, I can make the play-do ball smaller or bigger, nanoscale architectures must be the same thing! Very nice, put your bike helmet back on.
The ability to ignore a whole thread, or from a point downwards would be nice on slashdot. An NNTP interface would be nice on slashdot. But I guess we're stuck with whatever scraps they throw us now and then.
It's a shame James Gosling didn't learn from this when he went on to write Java, which could have been NeWS-done-right if RMI had been used by default for communicating with view objects.
Java was already slow out of the gate due to throwing away a couple decades of VM research in its initial version, with the only advancement in the state of the art being the bytecode verifier. I shudder to think of what adding RMI on top of AWT's existing Lack Of Zip would have done.
Anyway, the promise of DPS was that you wouldn't write your widget code in postscript, it would be generated by the toolkit instead. I certainly don't see PS as being harder to write than sequencing X primitives by hand.
and, btw, there's nothing wrong rupert murdoch seeding his conservative point of view in his media acquisitions. it's a free country, and his media conglomerate has obviously done quite well financially by addressing a conservative fan base. good for him, good for fox news (local and national)
Having the freedom to throw journalistic ethics out the window in favor of addressing one's fan base doesn't make it right.
Oh wait, different rules apply to conservatives. Never mind.
Your complaints about rifts are spot-on -- an awful hodgepodge as a game, but great as a premise. I only ever played it a couple times (as a juicer, and no the refill question wasn't addressed), and I'm pretty sure both games ended up with us clearing the table an hour later to play quarters til we passed out.
Seems to me though that the golden age of RPG's is long passed though. I know I personally just can't get into the tabletop games anymore.
Sorry for the double post, but some moderator has a hard-on for my posts, and I feel like gaming the system as much as they do (hey, appropriate for this article).
GURPS, yikes. Very nice character creation system, but one-second combat rounds? Micromanagement beyond belief and an awesome headache for a GM. I never met a GM who ran GURPS combat by the book. Ever read the GURPS Hi-Tech worldbook and see how much die-rolling you would have to do with artillery? It's almost comical. I'll take something like White Wolf's storyteller system -- my favorite part of it is how it encourages "specializing" your basic attributes (something you can do with GURPS advantages/disadvantages to a degree, but WW left more to the GM while still giving him numbers to fall back on)
Rifts and the Palladium games were damn fun -- Megadamage FTW! And I always liked the magic/technology backstory and brutal post-apocalyptic atmosphere better than the silliness of shadowrun. But the ne plus ultra of munchkin gaming: Champions. I remember buying whole bricks of d6 just for that game.
Things I really loved were the damage charts in ICE games though, like the ones in Spell Law: I recall the maximum result for concussion damage was something like "Foe is reduced to a gelatinous mass. Get a spatula."
Slashdot Mirror
You know, it's not really fair use to copy and paste the entire article verbatim. It's not even slashdotted right now.
> Why doesn't FreeBSD have the stigma Gentoo does? /usr/ports insipred Portage...
For starters, FreeBSD did not go around making fantastic claims about the efficiency of ports-compiled code, nor was recompiling the base system some sort of rite of passage into enlightenment about "how the system works". But mostly it was the fact that it was BSD, which just doesn't have as big of an advocacy culture.
> I like an OS with a little LESS configurability than Gentoo. Some like it though.
... well I pretty much just play games and use a TV capture card with no Linux support, so I'm no longer booting there.
I like the configurability, and frankly the compiling part doesn't bother me (of course I start with a stage3 install or better), it's that it's a crapshoot whether it'll actually get things right, from whether it updates your configuration properly to whether portage is globally broken from update to update.
Plus, while every distribution has sometimes acrimonious debates over its management, the various flamewars of infighting in Gentoo always struck me as being conducted with a whole lot less maturity. This was years ago though, so perhaps some of the more obstreperous elements have been weeded out. At any rate, despite not having those nice USE flags, I've found debian works for my servers (I'm largely forced to use RHEL, but I carve out an exception here and there). As for home
I thought the promise of component software was to make swapping features in and out a function of runtime, not compilation. I guess most of our software is still stuck in the 1970's.
> Firstly I doubt they would seriously get that many tech support calls.
Not tech support, but sales support. "Dude, where's my order" kind of stuff. 2K is a pretty darn big company though, so I imagine they can handle it, but it can really screw your supply chain if you don't stagger shipping dates properly.
My guess is it's largely about marketing -- you get more buzz if you have lots of releases than just one big one.
Big difference between posting something original on a blog with ads, and paraphrasing an article on your own ad-filled blog solely for the revenue.
Doesn't that describe slashdot pretty well?
> Censorship is when the government infringes on your free speech.
No, it's when any third party does. You have a right to be a censor in your own home, as do most private entities. Wal-mart may have that right, but it is still being a censor, and it's perfectly accurate to call it that.
I'm so sick of the "it's only bad when government does it" argument.
Ah yes, the X21 chips, the chips that will save the world. Weird word sizes, and of course programmable only in forth. By forth nuts, for forth nuts, forth forth uber alles, all other languages are conspiracies by hardware companies to sell faster hardware because they're all awful kludges compared to the shining beacon of enlightment that is forth, etc.
Sorry, maybe I read too much comp.lang.forth, but the sour attitude seemed to stem from chipchuck himself. Just possibly it turned off a few potentially interested parties? Now the shBoom looked promising, but under PatSci's stewardship it appears doomed to be nothing but a source of IP licensing.
> Are you using a flame thrower in 1080i that slowly melts their skin as they scream in horrible pain?
Yeah, those WWII games are pretty disturbing, eh?
> 'The Longest Journey'
One of the first few characters you talk to in that game is a lesbian.
There's also Fable, where you could choose to be gay, marry a man, and even have sex with him (all the sex is off camera and implied with a few lines of spoken dialog). I don't care so much if a game "tackles" the issue of homosexual characters -- having them in the game matter-of-factly should really be enough. It is hard to make a game with a significant romantic subplot that retains all options though -- I mean, I always did suspect something between Tidus and Auron, but he still always goes for Yuna regardless, and I suspect they're all going to be cut from the same mold in the medium future.
The text in your comic reminds me of this one
> Do you really think San Andreas would have flopped if they sold it through the internet or mail order?
An unqualified yes, it would have flopped. The majority of copies sold were for the PS2, which doesn't even have downloadable content. I could allow that it might have broken even, but imagine a game that wasn't a hotly-anticipated sequel trying to sell this way? It's not like we're going to see real AAA titles be downloadable anytime soon because of all the retail arrangements.
I'm glad to see that Citizendium has adopted a more realistic policy on the expertise requirements by moving to approval instead of pre-vetting. I still think the barriers to entry for "trivial" editing are going to be a problem. Most of the barriers are a function of the MediaWiki software, which is really not well-suited for the type of workflow changes that would be needed to support it. I think something working like a distributed SCM system would be more appropriate, where diffs could be pushed upstream as patchsets instead of just blindly saved into the head branch. I'm not holding my breath that Mediawiki will ever make this happen though.
DRM *only* affects the music and videos you legally purchased. If you want better interoperability and performance, download your music from P2P. That's the ultimate lesson of DRM.
Win2k's wireless support is horrendous for starters. XP added an ugly skin on top of 2k and killed pipe performance, something most people don't notice, but didn't destroy overall performance or break things to such a degree that Vista did. Run without a theme and XP is pretty much a better 2k.
To some extent, some things needed breaking. The audio path wasn't one of them. Hell, DirectShow used to be one of the best features of Windows, but they had to go break that to serve their DRM masters.
> I just made the same argument for different sized metal bearings as you made for different nanometer threading.
Hey, lookit me, I can make the play-do ball smaller or bigger, nanoscale architectures must be the same thing! Very nice, put your bike helmet back on.
> Tolkien created the spellings 'elves' and 'dwarves' instead of elfs and dwarfs
[[citation needed]]. My suspicion is he used an alternate spelling already in common use.
Nonono, perl code is the wall of unintelligible punctuation.
Well, unless you use this
It's a shame James Gosling didn't learn from this when he went on to write Java, which could have been NeWS-done-right if RMI had been used by default for communicating with view objects.
Java was already slow out of the gate due to throwing away a couple decades of VM research in its initial version, with the only advancement in the state of the art being the bytecode verifier. I shudder to think of what adding RMI on top of AWT's existing Lack Of Zip would have done.
Anyway, the promise of DPS was that you wouldn't write your widget code in postscript, it would be generated by the toolkit instead. I certainly don't see PS as being harder to write than sequencing X primitives by hand.
> But one way of changing a law is to make it completely unenforceable by a mass civil disobedience campaign
You first. I suggest a nice busy and visible public space, like Tianmen Square.
and, btw, there's nothing wrong rupert murdoch seeding his conservative point of view in his media acquisitions. it's a free country, and his media conglomerate has obviously done quite well financially by addressing a conservative fan base. good for him, good for fox news (local and national)
Having the freedom to throw journalistic ethics out the window in favor of addressing one's fan base doesn't make it right.
Oh wait, different rules apply to conservatives. Never mind.
Your complaints about rifts are spot-on -- an awful hodgepodge as a game, but great as a premise. I only ever played it a couple times (as a juicer, and no the refill question wasn't addressed), and I'm pretty sure both games ended up with us clearing the table an hour later to play quarters til we passed out.
Seems to me though that the golden age of RPG's is long passed though. I know I personally just can't get into the tabletop games anymore.
When you're done clearing your throat, mind telling us what the title of the story is?
Sorry for the double post, but some moderator has a hard-on for my posts, and I feel like gaming the system as much as they do (hey, appropriate for this article).
GURPS, yikes. Very nice character creation system, but one-second combat rounds? Micromanagement beyond belief and an awesome headache for a GM. I never met a GM who ran GURPS combat by the book. Ever read the GURPS Hi-Tech worldbook and see how much die-rolling you would have to do with artillery? It's almost comical. I'll take something like White Wolf's storyteller system -- my favorite part of it is how it encourages "specializing" your basic attributes (something you can do with GURPS advantages/disadvantages to a degree, but WW left more to the GM while still giving him numbers to fall back on)
Rifts and the Palladium games were damn fun -- Megadamage FTW! And I always liked the magic/technology backstory and brutal post-apocalyptic atmosphere better than the silliness of shadowrun. But the ne plus ultra of munchkin gaming: Champions. I remember buying whole bricks of d6 just for that game.
Things I really loved were the damage charts in ICE games though, like the ones in Spell Law: I recall the maximum result for concussion damage was something like "Foe is reduced to a gelatinous mass. Get a spatula."