As it turns out, Nintendo chose not to have any operating system or common code at all running on the Broadway CPU. When you run a game, everything that shows up on your screen, ever, is being loaded from that spinning polycarbonate disc. And there are no mechanisms for anything else to run on that CPU: no update infrastructure, no Home Menu updates, nothing. If they ever want to have a "hypervisor" run above games, they'll need to get a new CPU with full-blown virtualization capability (or an emulator), because games assume they have direct access to the CPU and most of the hardware.
If you've been following the Wii scene, you might be thinking, "what about IOS?" Indeed, Nintendo's security and I/O Operating System runs alongside games (on a separate CPU built in to the Hollywood chipset) and it is updated as part of system updates. It includes some important bits and pieces like some peripheral drivers. However, as it turns out, Nintendo has decided that every new feature will be developed as a separate fork. Your Wii contains many IOS versions, and the older have never been updated except for security reasons (to fix our exploits). Not that they've added many new features, but if you look closely, new IOS features do not operate when you're playing older games. This includes any updates to the WiiConnect24 downloads code, and even some minor things like the "slot LED blinks when you eject a disc" feature - try it when you're playing Zelda and you'll see that it doesn't work, because it's using the very old IOS9.
but it also means (thanks to the GPL) that pretty much the entire mod has to be open source.
This is actually not true. The only thing open source that the standalone "mod" (now a game on its own accord, but heh) must do is keep the engine itself open. The game data, including models, art, even QVM code, is perfectly fine being proprietary. In your own examples, World of Padman is precisely developed like this; the game itself is proprietary while the engine is free. Although there are many, like Tremulous, where the entire game is free, it is not a requirement.
Even RMS agrees that this is perfectly acceptable; his view is all about software being free, but he sees no pressing reason that art must be free as well.
Furthermore, I don't even believe it's possible to use FAT as a root filesystem for Linux due to lack of proper permissions and case-sensitivity.
You used to be able to with UMSDOS, but that was removed around Linux 2.6.10 or so. It even added proper permissions and case sensitivity and other nifty things, including long filenames without breaking 8.3 compatibility and was originally introduced in 1994 (wait a minute...;)
When I had a 400MB hard disk, I had a tape drive and a 512MB tape to back up the entire hard disk. The system also had a (read only) CD drive, which made two removable media options for me that had larger capacity than my actual hard disk could contain.
His only reason for that, as spelled out in the FAQ, seems to be that he once had someone cheat him in an earlier free software project he had and now he's afraid of ever doing it again.
Pretty lame. It's akin to getting burned by a match and then never wanting to be near a campfire.
(If your post is intended to be facetious, I apologize for the following)
And that is...? Sensible defaults that don't block your every move? OpenBSD has only had 2 remote security holes in its default installation for 16 years now, that is several orders of magnitude better than anything Microsoft has ever produced, it's even better than Linux distributions to a smaller degree.
- I just tried using GNOME at 640x480, the screen resolution dialog box fits perfectly fine even with tons of space on every side of the window. Either Ubuntu seriously fucked things up (I use Debian), or you are spreading shit.
- Netscape software? What are you doing using that ancient piece of crap? the Network-Manager in GNOME supports dialup just fine.
- Applications -> System Tools -> System Monitor. Has tabs for filesystems and general hardware specs. Amazing, huh?
It's for convenience really, and it could be turned off. The idea of the default timeout is really so that if you want to run a few root commands in a row, you won't have to retype your password after every try. If you really want to be sure that you never accidentally run sudo see `man sudoers`
timestamp_timeout Number of minutes that can elapse before sudo will ask for a passwd again. The default is 15. Set this to 0 to always prompt for a password. If set to a value less than 0 the user's timestamp will never expire. This can be used to allow users to create or delete their own timestamps via sudo -v and sudo -k respec‐ tively.
Note that most distributions don't enable sudo for the user account per default (not even Ubuntu's parent distro, Debian), it would be interesting what the Ubuntu folks would say if you suggested turning off sudo per default.
"use Windows XP corporate edition" pretty much nails you as a pirate anyway (there is no "corporate edition"), I'm sure Microsoft has your IP address now and will contact your ISP. Have a nice day.
Last time I heard of MS SQL (about a year ago), it was called by the person I was speaking to "As an utter waste of money, just go for Oracle for something good"; paraphrased, but the enthusiasm for MS SQL was lacking obviously.
I've been feeling for a while now that Microsoft should probably just drop everything and become solely a games developer (with a possible exception of MS Office, their only real successful product, put that on the Xbox or something).
Pretty much every browser supports using 32-bit-color PNGs for favicons, so your number of unique ones is quite low. Let's see... oh, my calculator overflowed just trying to calculate all possible unique favicons in the actual constraints.
If your needs are so drastic, just split it into multiple projects for each team. You can tie them all together via submodules to make a meta-project git to clone when someone really wants it all.
Really not an argument against git, you're just not thinking hard enough.
I hadn't really thought of that, I had assumed you were referring to Subversion's rather common case where multiple projects are stored in the same repo, and you checkout different directories to access one of them.
Slashdot Mirror
Read: It's a near impossibility to support older titles. It would be nice to head over to http://hackmii.com/2009/02/why-the-wii-will-never-get-any-better/ and find out why; specifically:
Even better: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/images/middle-mouse-button-press.png
This is actually not true. The only thing open source that the standalone "mod" (now a game on its own accord, but heh) must do is keep the engine itself open. The game data, including models, art, even QVM code, is perfectly fine being proprietary. In your own examples, World of Padman is precisely developed like this; the game itself is proprietary while the engine is free. Although there are many, like Tremulous, where the entire game is free, it is not a requirement.
Even RMS agrees that this is perfectly acceptable; his view is all about software being free, but he sees no pressing reason that art must be free as well.
Everybody knows they run AIX.
Laid off, not fired. Though the difference is subtle, the former does not place a negative mark on their résumé.
Do they really need to attempt to compete with it?
You used to be able to with UMSDOS, but that was removed around Linux 2.6.10 or so. It even added proper permissions and case sensitivity and other nifty things, including long filenames without breaking 8.3 compatibility and was originally introduced in 1994 (wait a minute... ;)
When I had a 400MB hard disk, I had a tape drive and a 512MB tape to back up the entire hard disk. The system also had a (read only) CD drive, which made two removable media options for me that had larger capacity than my actual hard disk could contain.
How times have changed!
His only reason for that, as spelled out in the FAQ, seems to be that he once had someone cheat him in an earlier free software project he had and now he's afraid of ever doing it again.
Pretty lame. It's akin to getting burned by a match and then never wanting to be near a campfire.
Uh... no. UDF works fine in full read-write mode as any other regular filesystem does.
(If your post is intended to be facetious, I apologize for the following)
And that is...? Sensible defaults that don't block your every move? OpenBSD has only had 2 remote security holes in its default installation for 16 years now, that is several orders of magnitude better than anything Microsoft has ever produced, it's even better than Linux distributions to a smaller degree.
Is this a joke post? I seriously can't tell.
- I just tried using GNOME at 640x480, the screen resolution dialog box fits perfectly fine even with tons of space on every side of the window. Either Ubuntu seriously fucked things up (I use Debian), or you are spreading shit.
- Netscape software? What are you doing using that ancient piece of crap? the Network-Manager in GNOME supports dialup just fine.
- Applications -> System Tools -> System Monitor. Has tabs for filesystems and general hardware specs. Amazing, huh?
Until she gets smart and tells you "I deleted that video file that wouldn't play for you, and emptied the Trash folder too!"
Actually root can see anything even if it's mode 0000.
But then there's nothing to hold the windows up! ... wait while I call Jay Leno for putting this in his "Truth in Labeling" part of the show
Note that most distributions don't enable sudo for the user account per default (not even Ubuntu's parent distro, Debian), it would be interesting what the Ubuntu folks would say if you suggested turning off sudo per default.
No, because then you'd defeat the whole purpose of the add-on system.
"use Windows XP corporate edition" pretty much nails you as a pirate anyway (there is no "corporate edition"), I'm sure Microsoft has your IP address now and will contact your ISP. Have a nice day.
brb putting my tinfoil hat on
Last time I heard of MS SQL (about a year ago), it was called by the person I was speaking to "As an utter waste of money, just go for Oracle for something good"; paraphrased, but the enthusiasm for MS SQL was lacking obviously.
I've been feeling for a while now that Microsoft should probably just drop everything and become solely a games developer (with a possible exception of MS Office, their only real successful product, put that on the Xbox or something).
Pretty easy on Linux, too. Just move all the contents of $HOME from machine 1 to machine 2.
I think the subject says enough...
Pretty much every browser supports using 32-bit-color PNGs for favicons, so your number of unique ones is quite low. Let's see... oh, my calculator overflowed just trying to calculate all possible unique favicons in the actual constraints.
If your needs are so drastic, just split it into multiple projects for each team. You can tie them all together via submodules to make a meta-project git to clone when someone really wants it all.
Really not an argument against git, you're just not thinking hard enough.
I hadn't really thought of that, I had assumed you were referring to Subversion's rather common case where multiple projects are stored in the same repo, and you checkout different directories to access one of them.
Anyhow, most, but not all, public git servers have a gitweb or similar attached, which will at least let you browse and download files from the tree if you need to. For example, grabbing the latest README of Linus' Linux tree can be had via http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git;a=blob_plain;f=README;hb=HEAD
Git itself doesn't provide any mechanism for it, however, but it's fairly unusual to be interested in a specific file rather than the entire project.