Locally the xbox seems to be doing reasonably well ( I live in the midwest in a college town). The PS2 is clearly the dominant player, but their are a lot of people that bought the XBox in order to be able to play Halo.
I think that if Microsoft can beat Sony to the market by a substantial amount of time and offer a good reason to upgrade, they could come out as an equal player. The primary problem that they could have to deal with is that they will not be able to produce an adequate reason for people to upgrade, and sony will continue to set the standard for console games. Software publishers may include slicker graphics for the xbox 2 but the same games will be available on the PS2, and only when the PS3 come out will developers take advantage of the xbox 2's new capabilities.
Basically what it comes down to is that until Microsoft has sent in the troopers to "acquire" squaresoft, sony will remain the leader.
I do not think that this would be a good idea. While it would be impressive if they could pull it off, the risk of failure outweighs the benefits even more greatly than that of a manned mission. Attempting to deploy "several bleeding edge technologies" on a "very short time scale" for a project like repairing the hubble space telescope is simply not a good idea. In all likelihood the technology used will not be adequately developed and it will be a unnecessary failure.
With the recent success of the Mars missions, NASA is starting to get its good name back, they need to see this continue and properly manage their risk, not spend money on projects they know will in all likelihood fail.
www.dialasong.com
or you can still call the phone number, but I forget what the phone number is, the web version is more canned than the phone number - which actually has new and strange material. Aaron Bryden
try the performer demos
on
Linux Demos?
·
· Score: 2
Now that sgi has released performer for linux, you can show a relatively impressive demo of opening up an.flt model and zooming in on it and rotating it and the such. These would be helpful for showing what can be done 3d-wise on your computers.
Performer can be found at http://www.sgi.com/software/performer/linux.html
You also mentioned quake3 in your question, this demo is also workable in linux and if you have the full version you could demo some of the more impressive mods.
For linux-specific demos though, I would recomend the performer demos. Aaron Bryden
Linux and the Apple fill different niche markets. Most of the people that I know that still heavily use macintoshes for work are people who do video editing or other graphics and msuic or sound related work. The other people I know that use macintoshes just want a computer that will work and know that a macintosh is easy to use and install and that it will not have signifigant issues out of box like many windows machines do. For these people, a mac is perfect and I believe they will continue to use them rather than having to learn another system that is more difficult to setup.
Linux on the other hand does not fill either of these niche markets. Currently, doing video editing is not as easy or as inexpensive on linux as it is on a macintosh and while linux is much more stable than win98, it is much more difficult to configure than a mac and is also more intimidating in general. The niche that linux fills is people that were not happy with the power or stability that their previous system gave them and wanted something better. This niche is not directly competing with Apple's primary market.
Because of these factors, I believe that the mac will be with us for a while still. Whether or not the macintosh computer will eventually die out I do not know, but I know that linux will not be the os to kill it and that right now they are alive and well.
As Usual, IANAL, However I do not expect this to make it past the appeal process. In the past the supreme court upheld free speech in many qestionable circumstances. All that 2600 has done is provide information about where you can find material that can be used to circumvent copy protection. The key point here is that they are not directly conspiring with you to break the law, they are merely pointing you to a tool that can be used for a variety of reasons. If you and they got together in a chat room or through e-mail decided that you were going to make copies of some copyrighted dvd's and upload them to the net, then you would be going beyond the bounds of free-speech. Merely providing information always has been and always will be acceptable. If it had not been, you would not be able to find information on manifacturing explosives at your friendly neighborhood library.
If this changes and I doubt it will. It will do nothing but force people who want/need knowledge pertaining to these subjects underground.
part of the problem with the modifications, is that your modification will run signifigantly faster if you compile windows dll's for it instead of qvm's. If your mod is pushing the engine to its limits, that 5 or ten fps increase can be worth alot. Their is a way to compile the code natively in linux but most mod-makers to not take the extra time as the majority of their audience consists of windows users. Aaron Bryden
I think that their were several reasons for low sales. In my mind the top reasons and the reasons that I did not purchase the linux version are:
1.The windows version was released signifigantly later than the linux version. I am a huge fan of Id's games and bought the game the first day it was available.
2. It is difficult to setp up 3-d for linux - things are getting better, but at the time that quake3 was released I would not have been able to use my nvidia tnt2 with quake3. The drivers simply were not sufficient. Now drivers are available for many cards. However, it is still a signifigant chore to set up Xfree86 4.0 under redhat 6.2 and get the nvidia drivers working. Presumably Redhat 7.0 will fix this.
3. If you buy the windows version you will eventually be able to get the linux binaries. I am willing to dual boot to play quake for a while as long as I will later be able to switch over to linux.
4. Not many retailers carry the linux version. Aaron Bryden
I am very dissapointed to see the lack of support that most have shown so far in the discussion of this forum. Most of the posts have either been useless trolls or simply stupid. Do you think what you are doing is at all helpful. Did you even follow the links. Looking at this it is probably not the type of game that I would play now as I am more into the first person shooter genre. It is however something that I would have loved when I was younger and anything that broadens the scope of linux is a good thing so rather than criticizing stop and think what you are doing. So far their have been very few worthwhile posts. Slashdot is going downhill and only the people that are causing the problems can fix this.
When you are hitting the submit button pause and think for a second. Is what you are doing in any way helpful. Is it even going to help you or are you behaving the way you are simply to be cute or because you want attention?
On another note people that actually read the article would have noticed that this is a good thing not only because linux will get more software but because the developers are embracing a concept called "charity ware" in which people who like the software give money to a charity instead of paying the developers.
Slashdot Mirror
Locally the xbox seems to be doing reasonably well ( I live in the midwest in a college town). The PS2 is clearly the dominant player, but their are a lot of people that bought the XBox in order to be able to play Halo.
I think that if Microsoft can beat Sony to the market by a substantial amount of time and offer a good reason to upgrade, they could come out as an equal player. The primary problem that they could have to deal with is that they will not be able to produce an adequate reason for people to upgrade, and sony will continue to set the standard for console games. Software publishers may include slicker graphics for the xbox 2 but the same games will be available on the PS2, and only when the PS3 come out will developers take advantage of the xbox 2's new capabilities.
Basically what it comes down to is that until Microsoft has sent in the troopers to "acquire" squaresoft, sony will remain the leader.
I do not think that this would be a good idea. While it would be impressive if they could pull it off, the risk of failure outweighs the benefits even more greatly than that of a manned mission. Attempting to deploy "several bleeding edge technologies" on a "very short time scale" for a project like repairing the hubble space telescope is simply not a good idea. In all likelihood the technology used will not be adequately developed and it will be a unnecessary failure.
With the recent success of the Mars missions, NASA is starting to get its good name back, they need to see this continue and properly manage their risk, not spend money on projects they know will in all likelihood fail.
here is one of the documents
Tier one troubleshooting guide
Aaron Bryden
www.dialasong.com or you can still call the phone number, but I forget what the phone number is, the web version is more canned than the phone number - which actually has new and strange material.
Aaron Bryden
Now that sgi has released performer for linux, you can show a relatively impressive demo of opening up an .flt model and zooming in on it and rotating it and the such. These would be helpful for showing what can be done 3d-wise on your computers.
Performer can be found at http://www.sgi.com/software/performer/linux.html
You also mentioned quake3 in your question, this demo is also workable in linux and if you have the full version you could demo some of the more impressive mods.
For linux-specific demos though, I would recomend the performer demos.
Aaron Bryden
Linux and the Apple fill different niche markets. Most of the people that I know that still heavily use macintoshes for work are people who do video editing or other graphics and msuic or sound related work. The other people I know that use macintoshes just want a computer that will work and know that a macintosh is easy to use and install and that it will not have signifigant issues out of box like many windows machines do. For these people, a mac is perfect and I believe they will continue to use them rather than having to learn another system that is more difficult to setup.
Linux on the other hand does not fill either of these niche markets. Currently, doing video editing is not as easy or as inexpensive on linux as it is on a macintosh and while linux is much more stable than win98, it is much more difficult to configure than a mac and is also more intimidating in general. The niche that linux fills is people that were not happy with the power or stability that their previous system gave them and wanted something better. This niche is not directly competing with Apple's primary market.
Because of these factors, I believe that the mac will be with us for a while still. Whether or not the macintosh computer will eventually die out I do not know, but I know that linux will not be the os to kill it and that right now they are alive and well.
Aaron Bryden
As Usual, IANAL, However I do not expect this to make it past the appeal process. In the past the supreme court upheld free speech in many qestionable circumstances. All that 2600 has done is provide information about where you can find material that can be used to circumvent copy protection. The key point here is that they are not directly conspiring with you to break the law, they are merely pointing you to a tool that can be used for a variety of reasons. If you and they got together in a chat room or through e-mail decided that you were going to make copies of some copyrighted dvd's and upload them to the net, then you would be going beyond the bounds of free-speech. Merely providing information always has been and always will be acceptable. If it had not been, you would not be able to find information on manifacturing explosives at your friendly neighborhood library.
If this changes and I doubt it will. It will do nothing but force people who want/need knowledge pertaining to these subjects underground.
Aaron Bryden
part of the problem with the modifications, is that your modification will run signifigantly faster if you compile windows dll's for it instead of qvm's. If your mod is pushing the engine to its limits, that 5 or ten fps increase can be worth alot. Their is a way to compile the code natively in linux but most mod-makers to not take the extra time as the majority of their audience consists of windows users.
Aaron Bryden
I think that their were several reasons for low sales. In my mind the top reasons and the reasons that I did not purchase the linux version are:
1.The windows version was released signifigantly later than the linux version. I am a huge fan of Id's games and bought the game the first day it was available.
2. It is difficult to setp up 3-d for linux - things are getting better, but at the time that quake3 was released I would not have been able to use my nvidia tnt2 with quake3. The drivers simply were not sufficient. Now drivers are available for many cards. However, it is still a signifigant chore to set up Xfree86 4.0 under redhat 6.2 and get the nvidia drivers working. Presumably Redhat 7.0 will fix this.
3. If you buy the windows version you will eventually be able to get the linux binaries. I am willing to dual boot to play quake for a while as long as I will later be able to switch over to linux.
4. Not many retailers carry the linux version.
Aaron Bryden
I am very dissapointed to see the lack of support that most have shown so far in the discussion of this forum. Most of the posts have either been useless trolls or simply stupid. Do you think what you are doing is at all helpful. Did you even follow the links. Looking at this it is probably not the type of game that I would play now as I am more into the first person shooter genre. It is however something that I would have loved when I was younger and anything that broadens the scope of linux is a good thing so rather than criticizing stop and think what you are doing. So far their have been very few worthwhile posts. Slashdot is going downhill and only the people that are causing the problems can fix this.
When you are hitting the submit button pause and think for a second. Is what you are doing in any way helpful. Is it even going to help you or are you behaving the way you are simply to be cute or because you want attention?
On another note people that actually read the article would have noticed that this is a good thing not only because linux will get more software but because the developers are embracing a concept called "charity ware" in which people who like the software give money to a charity instead of paying the developers.
Aaron
Aaron Bryden