Get your own treadmill in a basement and out of site and do techie stuff while on it. Videogames that you... *huff, puff*...that you can get sucked into are the best. I can easily walk miles while staring at a DS or PSP or TV screen with a wireless controller for my console. It doesn't have to be video... *huff, puff*...doesn't have to be videogames, though. A properly mounted laptop could be used actual work or just... *huff, puff*...or just for web browsing.
How can a game written by 3-4 teen/early 20 year olds hope to compete against games that REQUIRE dozens of designers/artists?
Well, here's three ways:
(1) You're ID is just over half mine. You should know by now about this whole F/OSS thing that lets people build on other's work. A F/OSS project can (not always does, but can) use a lot less man-hours than a proprietary job that has to re-invent the wheel.
(2) Games that REQUIRE dozens of designers/artists usually end up being very unoriginal, because whomever has to fund the whole thing does not want to take a risk (and justifiably so). Homebrew stuff, with very small investments, can afford to act out their dreams and try crazy new stuff which may very well be super-awesome. Super-awesome can compete with unoriginal very, very well.
(3) "Games were better back in my day." Maybe I'm getting old and out of touch, or maybe it's just the nostalgia-bonus, but most new games these days don't appeal to me nearly as much as some of the older ones. The ability to take some of my favorite oldies around with me on a portable platform like the DS is very appealing.
I can't tell if the article summary comment is tongue-in-cheek or actually serious. I should hope that it isn't the latter, its tough to believe people are really that delusional.
I ended up buying a used PSP specifically - and only - for homebrew/ports. I haven't purchased or pirated a single "official" PSP game (from what I've seen they all suck to varying degrees - none are worth the bandwidth to pirate), but for quite some time I've used it for things like Quake, NES/SNES/PS emulation (all games I *should* have the rights too - I even own multiple copies of games like Super Metroid), and board games like Chess and (the best game of all time:) Go.
I'm willing to accept that technology is primarily used for piracy and is hurting Nintendo financially, but acting as though there is no way anyone would actually prefer the legitimate usage is, to be frank, either severely misinformed or blatantly malicious. I'll give you Hanlon's razor and just hope you're modded down.
You're seriously underestimating the market value of being able to run Windows and Win16/32/64 applications (without binary translation). Yes, there's other operating systems and software that run fine on ARM and plenty we can do with them, but at the same time there's plenty more people who are petrified of any word processor other than MS Word.
Show me a 300mW ARM processor that runs Crysis (as the Nano does) and I'll concede the point. Until then, shut up sit down and make fun of the "63,434 watts" comment like the rest of us.
The problems with regulation of the internet are not really liberal or conservative issues. It just does not break down along those lines. It is not exactly liberal or conservative policy to deliberately screw over their constituent. (Really, it isn't.)
Liberals are generally for freedom of expression (and hence will want little regulation with the internet) and Conservatives are for freedom of market (and hence will want little regulation with the internet). No reasonably popular political view when taken as a whole would back heavy internet regulation. (No, fascism isn't reasonably popular).
The problems arise from politicians (hiss, boo) who have something to gain from pushing for such regulation and either don't understand the repercussions or don't care. It really does not matter what label they've slapped on themselves. It does not matter what party you're from, Saving The Children is usually viewed as a Good Thing, and directly opposing it is political suicide.
Perhaps accusing them of trying to screw their customers with that was overly harsh, I'll admit. Still, it still stands of an example where a company would lose control if they open source drivers, evil or otherwise.
No, sadly we're no where near critical mass. Not yet. There's three main problems:
(1) Companies lose control if they open source their drivers. Examples: Dell recently killed certain features from their sound drivers, and a ways back Creative was upset at someone who hacked up features into their Vista drivers which were purposefully absent (but present on their XP drivers). Both Dell and Creative "lost" here even with closed source drivers - they'd have never stood a chance to screw over their customers if the drivers were open.
(2) Many companies, which should focus on hardware, still worry others stealing their technology from open sourcing their drivers. nVidia is the biggest example here.
(3) Managment people are stupid and can't seem to comprehend how giving away this information can benefit them.
Slowly things are going the right direction, but it'll be quite a while yet. For the time being the F/OSS community will just have to remain in the weird flux of having some things work better than their closed source counterparts (rt2570 works sooo much better on Linux), while some things are worse (x264 acceleration).
It's sad the same way a car crash is sad. Even if the car crash comprised of jerks and sellouts. It's hard not to stare... with a smile. Because it's sad.
Uh, yeah, of course he has, but that's been patented too, silly. The guy with the patent to hydroponics is a jerk and won't license it out. brxndxn is cool, though, and it'd be a lot easier to just license dirt from brxndxn.
Disclaimer: brxndxn did not pay me to say this, I'm just a happy customer.
You're interpreting this incorrectly. This slashdot entry is officially almost kind of like proof that you're going to lose your bet a little bit.
If MS was stagnant then yes, its market share would continue to slide and eventually MS would lose its stance as market leader. Things like this prove that MS is aware of the situation and is acting to change it. Slowly, perhaps, but it is adapting.
This may be something to cheer or may be something to fear, I'm not really sure yet. If MS turns around and pulls something evil ("extinguish"), it'll be bad. If MS is legitimately moving towards supporting F/OSS and open standards, than even if it survives I'll be quite happy. Either way, if it continues trying new/different things like this I don't see it slipping below 50% OS market share for quite some time.
Yes. I've spoken with a few MS folks, and most that I've spoke with are quite bright and most definitely not evil. There is just an insufficient number of such people in the right places. Did I mention I never spoke with anyone in any sort of upper management?
Uh, yeah, that's actually a perfect example. Not quite sure why you phrased it in such a fashion to make it seam as though this is evidence against my post. Consider the alternative: It's closed source. Even if you know there is a problem you can not do much about it until the company with access to the source code fixes it, if the company is even around twenty five years later. If you're running twenty five year old cold source software the odds of it getting patched ever again are pretty much nil, but if it's open source even such an obscure twenty five year old problem can be fixed by anyone who cares too.
You're quite right. The gamecube has (well, had, sadly) a very competitive scene for Super Smash Bros Melee. It's not unusual for people in that scene to replace the controller every six months (some as often as three) due to, amongst other things, the sticks getting loose.
Intriguing how Linux was already the best, and yet working on improvement when the competition hasn't even considered the problem yet.
That's the beauty of open source. Gotta problem? Don't have to wait for someone else - you can fix it yourself. Doesn't matter if Vista has it or not - some Linux hackers want it, everyone gets it. It's proprietary software companies that have a need to be better only when there's competition. F/OSS gets better when people want it to enough to make it.
Tried it. It's crap. It's got it's own format, instead of using standard LaTeX. I want an editor that gives me just a little bit of WYSIWYG help whilst creating a simple, legible and standard LaTeX source file.
LyX has it's own format, yes, but it can also output to simple legible standard LaTeX. It's not a drop-in replacement for things like Word as I was talking about in my original post, but it's most certainly not crap. It's got it's uses. For really complex math functions it gets a bit hard to follow while just typing the LaTeX source - a WYSIWYG for that is really helpful.
LaTeX, as awesome as it is, doesn't yet have a sufficiently capable WYSIWYG frontend to act as a drop-in replacement for the word processing apps used by a very large number of not-so-savvy people. I use LaTeX and I love it, but it's just not feasible for the masses.
Honestly, if Microsoft made a solid, secure OS without all the "value-added enhancements" and profit-driven lock-in tactics, then public opinion of them would be much higher. I would be very happy to see them shift all OS business to their server-level products, because they really are significantly better than their consumer-level OSs. If they spun off their end-consumer products into another business, fine. Those people who like their bells and whistles can buy them, and those who just want a stable and secure platform would have it also.
The problem as I see it is that the only people who would honestly consider moving from MS due to security et al are already those who use MS's server-level products. The general public opinion doesn't really matter. All the Joe Sixpacks around the world may bitch and moan and echo all the bad things they've heard, but when it comes down to it they still won't seriously entertain the idea of moving away from MS. MS's market share is shrinking, but it'll be quite a while yet before MS actually needs to put out a solid consumer-level OS.
That's a sly trick, trolling by accusing other of trolling to throw the mods off trail. Still, I'll bite. The better Mac gaming does, the more games will support OpenGL. From there it's not a huge jump to make games for Linux, or get OpenGL Windows games to run in Linux through WINE with decent performance. (I've actually seen OpenGL Windows games get better framerates in Linux with WINE than Windows.) Mac gaming isn't huge, true enough, but that doesn't mean we don't want it to be. Chip away at MS's grip on the market from every angle.
The only real reason why you'd want an in-kernel driver is if you wanted to boot off of NTFS
I end up doing a lot of read/write to NTFS from Linux when helping kith and kin with PC problems, and I doubt I'm the only one. I was under the impression that if the driver was in userspace rather than in the kernel the performance would take a hit. I know it's not the most pressing matter, but getting a bit more performance from NTFS read/write is another reason, no? It'd sure be nice to shave every second I can from computer fix-it sessions.
Yes,I honestly care. I care that they didn't ask. I don't care about the specific things that were monitored. I worry that, knowing it's okay to spy on me here without asking, they'll slowly start gathering more and more personal information until they finally do take things I wouldn't want to spread around. So long as I am asked, and have the ability to say "that's going too far," I'd be happy. If you just give them a carte blanche someone will abuse it eventually.
But, I would like to know, what exactly about a video game, shopping experience or some other fluffy adventure that entitles you as a software developer to violate people's rights to privacy, for your own ends, when you would deny that same efficiency to everyone else?
Oh, that's an easy one: It doesn't violate my rights as a developer to put that stuff in my software that you use. Even if I do use the software I honestly don't mind that my own information that I personally okayed is being forwarded back to me. Similarly I don't think telcos have a problem with Obama's FISA betrayal, but they'll feel free to bitch and moan about having their data collected by a game. There are actually people out there who aren't quite so stupid and realize that even if this instance doesn't hurt them, it helps the trend towards something they wouldn't want. Most people aren't quite that bright. Long term thinking is hard.
I complain about it. I don't think enough people complaint about it. I don't think enough people even know about it. Many of the specific things Valve collects without asking I would not have minded if they'd have asked. What worries me is, knowing it's okay to do this much without asking, having the acceptable limits slowly shrink.
Slashdot Mirror
They're cool enough to do in front of other people, no matter how bad you are, and you have something to show off to your friends.
You've never been beatten up by a twelve year old girl, have you? Say, while testing for my yellow belt. Err, your yellow belt.
Get your own treadmill in a basement and out of site and do techie stuff while on it. Videogames that you... *huff, puff* ...that you can get sucked into are the best. I can easily walk miles while staring at a DS or PSP or TV screen with a wireless controller for my console. It doesn't have to be video... *huff, puff* ...doesn't have to be videogames, though. A properly mounted laptop could be used actual work or just... *huff, puff* ...or just for web browsing.
How can a game written by 3-4 teen/early 20 year olds hope to compete against games that REQUIRE dozens of designers/artists?
Well, here's three ways:
(1) You're ID is just over half mine. You should know by now about this whole F/OSS thing that lets people build on other's work. A F/OSS project can (not always does, but can) use a lot less man-hours than a proprietary job that has to re-invent the wheel.
(2) Games that REQUIRE dozens of designers/artists usually end up being very unoriginal, because whomever has to fund the whole thing does not want to take a risk (and justifiably so). Homebrew stuff, with very small investments, can afford to act out their dreams and try crazy new stuff which may very well be super-awesome. Super-awesome can compete with unoriginal very, very well.
(3) "Games were better back in my day." Maybe I'm getting old and out of touch, or maybe it's just the nostalgia-bonus, but most new games these days don't appeal to me nearly as much as some of the older ones. The ability to take some of my favorite oldies around with me on a portable platform like the DS is very appealing.
I can't tell if the article summary comment is tongue-in-cheek or actually serious. I should hope that it isn't the latter, its tough to believe people are really that delusional.
I ended up buying a used PSP specifically - and only - for homebrew/ports. I haven't purchased or pirated a single "official" PSP game (from what I've seen they all suck to varying degrees - none are worth the bandwidth to pirate), but for quite some time I've used it for things like Quake, NES/SNES/PS emulation (all games I *should* have the rights too - I even own multiple copies of games like Super Metroid), and board games like Chess and (the best game of all time:) Go.
I'm willing to accept that technology is primarily used for piracy and is hurting Nintendo financially, but acting as though there is no way anyone would actually prefer the legitimate usage is, to be frank, either severely misinformed or blatantly malicious. I'll give you Hanlon's razor and just hope you're modded down.
Yes, you are supposed to be impressed.
You're seriously underestimating the market value of being able to run Windows and Win16/32/64 applications (without binary translation). Yes, there's other operating systems and software that run fine on ARM and plenty we can do with them, but at the same time there's plenty more people who are petrified of any word processor other than MS Word.
Show me a 300mW ARM processor that runs Crysis (as the Nano does) and I'll concede the point. Until then, shut up sit down and make fun of the "63,434 watts" comment like the rest of us.
I don't recall ever coming across a wifi chipset that can't kick back the noise level. Mine, for example:
$ iwconfig wlan0 | grep Quality
Link Quality=89/100 Signal level:-52dBm Noise leve:-79dBm
The problems with regulation of the internet are not really liberal or conservative issues. It just does not break down along those lines. It is not exactly liberal or conservative policy to deliberately screw over their constituent. (Really, it isn't.)
Liberals are generally for freedom of expression (and hence will want little regulation with the internet) and Conservatives are for freedom of market (and hence will want little regulation with the internet). No reasonably popular political view when taken as a whole would back heavy internet regulation. (No, fascism isn't reasonably popular).
The problems arise from politicians (hiss, boo) who have something to gain from pushing for such regulation and either don't understand the repercussions or don't care. It really does not matter what label they've slapped on themselves. It does not matter what party you're from, Saving The Children is usually viewed as a Good Thing, and directly opposing it is political suicide.
I know, I know, don't feed the trolls. Sorry.
Perhaps accusing them of trying to screw their customers with that was overly harsh, I'll admit. Still, it still stands of an example where a company would lose control if they open source drivers, evil or otherwise.
No, sadly we're no where near critical mass. Not yet. There's three main problems:
(1) Companies lose control if they open source their drivers. Examples: Dell recently killed certain features from their sound drivers, and a ways back Creative was upset at someone who hacked up features into their Vista drivers which were purposefully absent (but present on their XP drivers). Both Dell and Creative "lost" here even with closed source drivers - they'd have never stood a chance to screw over their customers if the drivers were open.
(2) Many companies, which should focus on hardware, still worry others stealing their technology from open sourcing their drivers. nVidia is the biggest example here.
(3) Managment people are stupid and can't seem to comprehend how giving away this information can benefit them.
Slowly things are going the right direction, but it'll be quite a while yet. For the time being the F/OSS community will just have to remain in the weird flux of having some things work better than their closed source counterparts (rt2570 works sooo much better on Linux), while some things are worse (x264 acceleration).
It's sad the same way a car crash is sad. Even if the car crash comprised of jerks and sellouts. It's hard not to stare... with a smile. Because it's sad.
Uh, yeah, of course he has, but that's been patented too, silly. The guy with the patent to hydroponics is a jerk and won't license it out. brxndxn is cool, though, and it'd be a lot easier to just license dirt from brxndxn.
Disclaimer: brxndxn did not pay me to say this, I'm just a happy customer.
You're interpreting this incorrectly. This slashdot entry is officially almost kind of like proof that you're going to lose your bet a little bit.
If MS was stagnant then yes, its market share would continue to slide and eventually MS would lose its stance as market leader. Things like this prove that MS is aware of the situation and is acting to change it. Slowly, perhaps, but it is adapting.
This may be something to cheer or may be something to fear, I'm not really sure yet. If MS turns around and pulls something evil ("extinguish"), it'll be bad. If MS is legitimately moving towards supporting F/OSS and open standards, than even if it survives I'll be quite happy. Either way, if it continues trying new/different things like this I don't see it slipping below 50% OS market share for quite some time.
Save your pennies, you're gonna owe some money.
Yes. I've spoken with a few MS folks, and most that I've spoke with are quite bright and most definitely not evil. There is just an insufficient number of such people in the right places. Did I mention I never spoke with anyone in any sort of upper management?
Assume the Party Escort Submission Position, or you will miss the party.
Uh, yeah, that's actually a perfect example. Not quite sure why you phrased it in such a fashion to make it seam as though this is evidence against my post. Consider the alternative: It's closed source. Even if you know there is a problem you can not do much about it until the company with access to the source code fixes it, if the company is even around twenty five years later. If you're running twenty five year old cold source software the odds of it getting patched ever again are pretty much nil, but if it's open source even such an obscure twenty five year old problem can be fixed by anyone who cares too.
You're quite right. The gamecube has (well, had, sadly) a very competitive scene for Super Smash Bros Melee. It's not unusual for people in that scene to replace the controller every six months (some as often as three) due to, amongst other things, the sticks getting loose.
Intriguing how Linux was already the best, and yet working on improvement when the competition hasn't even considered the problem yet.
That's the beauty of open source. Gotta problem? Don't have to wait for someone else - you can fix it yourself. Doesn't matter if Vista has it or not - some Linux hackers want it, everyone gets it. It's proprietary software companies that have a need to be better only when there's competition. F/OSS gets better when people want it to enough to make it.
Tried it. It's crap. It's got it's own format, instead of using standard LaTeX. I want an editor that gives me just a little bit of WYSIWYG help whilst creating a simple, legible and standard LaTeX source file.
LyX has it's own format, yes, but it can also output to simple legible standard LaTeX. It's not a drop-in replacement for things like Word as I was talking about in my original post, but it's most certainly not crap. It's got it's uses. For really complex math functions it gets a bit hard to follow while just typing the LaTeX source - a WYSIWYG for that is really helpful.
LaTeX, as awesome as it is, doesn't yet have a sufficiently capable WYSIWYG frontend to act as a drop-in replacement for the word processing apps used by a very large number of not-so-savvy people. I use LaTeX and I love it, but it's just not feasible for the masses.
Honestly, if Microsoft made a solid, secure OS without all the "value-added enhancements" and profit-driven lock-in tactics, then public opinion of them would be much higher. I would be very happy to see them shift all OS business to their server-level products, because they really are significantly better than their consumer-level OSs. If they spun off their end-consumer products into another business, fine. Those people who like their bells and whistles can buy them, and those who just want a stable and secure platform would have it also.
The problem as I see it is that the only people who would honestly consider moving from MS due to security et al are already those who use MS's server-level products. The general public opinion doesn't really matter. All the Joe Sixpacks around the world may bitch and moan and echo all the bad things they've heard, but when it comes down to it they still won't seriously entertain the idea of moving away from MS. MS's market share is shrinking, but it'll be quite a while yet before MS actually needs to put out a solid consumer-level OS.
That's a sly trick, trolling by accusing other of trolling to throw the mods off trail. Still, I'll bite. The better Mac gaming does, the more games will support OpenGL. From there it's not a huge jump to make games for Linux, or get OpenGL Windows games to run in Linux through WINE with decent performance. (I've actually seen OpenGL Windows games get better framerates in Linux with WINE than Windows.) Mac gaming isn't huge, true enough, but that doesn't mean we don't want it to be. Chip away at MS's grip on the market from every angle.
Apparently families used to gather around the fireplace in the winter. My family? We have a LAN party.
The only real reason why you'd want an in-kernel driver is if you wanted to boot off of NTFS
I end up doing a lot of read/write to NTFS from Linux when helping kith and kin with PC problems, and I doubt I'm the only one. I was under the impression that if the driver was in userspace rather than in the kernel the performance would take a hit. I know it's not the most pressing matter, but getting a bit more performance from NTFS read/write is another reason, no? It'd sure be nice to shave every second I can from computer fix-it sessions.
Yes,I honestly care. I care that they didn't ask. I don't care about the specific things that were monitored. I worry that, knowing it's okay to spy on me here without asking, they'll slowly start gathering more and more personal information until they finally do take things I wouldn't want to spread around. So long as I am asked, and have the ability to say "that's going too far," I'd be happy. If you just give them a carte blanche someone will abuse it eventually.
But, I would like to know, what exactly about a video game, shopping experience or some other fluffy adventure that entitles you as a software developer to violate people's rights to privacy, for your own ends, when you would deny that same efficiency to everyone else?
Oh, that's an easy one: It doesn't violate my rights as a developer to put that stuff in my software that you use. Even if I do use the software I honestly don't mind that my own information that I personally okayed is being forwarded back to me. Similarly I don't think telcos have a problem with Obama's FISA betrayal, but they'll feel free to bitch and moan about having their data collected by a game. There are actually people out there who aren't quite so stupid and realize that even if this instance doesn't hurt them, it helps the trend towards something they wouldn't want. Most people aren't quite that bright. Long term thinking is hard.
I complain about it. I don't think enough people complaint about it. I don't think enough people even know about it. Many of the specific things Valve collects without asking I would not have minded if they'd have asked. What worries me is, knowing it's okay to do this much without asking, having the acceptable limits slowly shrink.