The/. humorist - All his post are belong to his welcome new Natalie-Portman-covered-in-hot-grits overlords.
no... All his post are belong to his welcome new beowulf cluster of new Natalie-Portman-covered-in-hot-grits-moving-along- because-there-is-nothing-to-see-and-asking-if-it-r uns-linux overlords somehow leading to profit in soviet russia
...somewhere, a calculus teacher just had a heart attack from reading your comment. Pi may have an infinite number of digits in its decimal representation, but that does not make it infinite (rather, since it does not repeat, it is called a transendental(sp?) number).
your second point is exactly the reason i will be forking over a large sum of money to id software as soon as i get a pc capable of playing their newer games.
With the upcomming apollo runtime, native applications can be created with full access to all machine resources.
i was about to ask when we would get a linux flash player that supports all these features, then i read this... i don't want a linux flash player that supports these features anymore. we suffered enough (in fact we are still suffering) the last time a company decided to allow something to download and execute native code *cough*ie*cough*activex*cough*
because we didn't bother to find out what nslookup was, when ping worked just fine. and now it doesn't matter, they block all http://ipaddresshere/ requests from your browser.
the problem is that most people don't understand the issue of DRM. let's say that you got all the GNU/Linux,BSD, and Mac users along with every single programmer in the US (i'm being as generous as i can here) to stop buying DRM'ed music, the music industry probably wouldn't even notice, or worse they would blame it on internet piracy and point to it as the reason that they _have_ to put DRM on their music. try explaining to joe shmoe how evil DRM is after that.
the problem with the third option is that they are required by the state to try to block stuff like porn, the keyword being try. there is absolutely no way they can block even half of the "bad" sites, but because of braindead laws they set up proxy servers that look for keywords, and end up blocking more useful sites than bad sites, and the semi intelligent students figure out how to get around it to do their work (until recently at my old school, you could create a batch file to start cmd.exe, use ping to find the ip address of a site, then type that into the browser), and the admins don't really care because they are complying with the law. (and some of the sites they block are pretty rediculous: my old school wouldn't let you visit freshmeat)
my point was that a lot of programmers don't have any clue there is something other than windows (and some just don't have any clue at all, one of my family members worked with a programmer who didn't understand the concept of a bit), and those that do are often forced to write non-portable code because of either deadlines or because other programmers have to work on that code too.
I would bet good money that, given a reasonably (not even brilliantly) well-written program, designed with portability in mind, that the cost of doing a port is insignificant compared to doing QA on a new platform.
75% of programmers have no idea what portable code is, let alone how to write it, 20% don't write portable code because of deadlines, 5% are lucky enough to work at id software (i pulled the numbers out of my ass, but you get the point)
the reason i mentioned her lab sucking was that it only started sucking after she took over it. also, our IT staff (well, person), and our teacher wouldn't trust us (especially since a certain student who had caused them nightmares had just left the school)
I had the opposite experience, our old computer science teacher retired (and he was a great teacher), and we were left with a teacher that had taught calculus at some point in the past, but she had no clue about java or computers in general, the computers in her lab (macs) went from being a pleasure to work with to making Windows XP on a 386 look good, the only reason we could accomplish anything was because it took us 2 weeks to root our boxes and the fileserver. No one in that class took the AP test (I already had my 5, and was taking the class for fun, one other person could have gotten a 5, but didn't spend $82 because most colleges wont give credit for it, the rest of the class left knowing little more about programming than they came in with). The one good thing about the class: she walks up to my friend who has a terminal up that says something to the effect of root@darwin root# and sees nothing out of the ordinary.
you forgot a really big one in your list of open source games: tremulous (http://tremulous.sourceforge.net). it is based on the GPL'ed Quake3 engine and the data is released under a creative commons license. and while i'm listing stuff based on quake3, i think Wolfenstien: Enemy territory deserves a mention, it's a great game, and it's free as in beer.
Think about what you're saying for a minute: you want one API that is equally good for low performance, high level graphics (X,GDI,Quartz), _and_ high performance, low level graphics (OpenGL and DirectX). There are high level libraries like wxWidgets, GTK+, and QT that will work on just about any system, which is sort of what you are talking about. Your average email client or browser doesn't want to know about triangles and framebuffers; it is perfectly happy doing all its graphics processing on the CPU, but a modern game needs to be able to quickly process huge amounts of information to produce a 3D scene. Back to your printing analogy, it would be pretty rediculous if someone suggested the use of postscript in 3D printing.
In every online game I've played, people will always ask stupid questions that they could have answered themselves by looking at the manual/FAQ in about 30 seconds. The only thing worse than that are n00bs who don't even ask (in the case of the current game I'm wasting my time with, Tremulous, I often see 'UnnamedPlayer' trying to build a base, which leaves me with the choice of trying to fix his mistakes and getting the base pwned by goons because there weren't enough defences from the two of us fighting for build points, or just trying to shoot stuff, but the base still gets pwned by goons because the n00b did everything wrong, and no amount of shooting stuff will fix it). If people would RTFM, they would know the basics (like not building anything until you have an idea of what a base should look like), and save everyone else a lot of headaches.
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no, he just recently took over delaying the release of dnf, before him came his father, and his father before that...
...somewhere, a calculus teacher just had a heart attack from reading your comment. Pi may have an infinite number of digits in its decimal representation, but that does not make it infinite (rather, since it does not repeat, it is called a transendental(sp?) number).
macs come with both emacs and vi(m) last time i checked.
most games i know won't work on just half a core.
your second point is exactly the reason i will be forking over a large sum of money to id software as soon as i get a pc capable of playing their newer games.
that's a bit wordy for a mod option, how about 'too much myspace' ?
because we didn't bother to find out what nslookup was, when ping worked just fine. and now it doesn't matter, they block all http://ipaddresshere/ requests from your browser.
the problem is that most people don't understand the issue of DRM. let's say that you got all the GNU/Linux,BSD, and Mac users along with every single programmer in the US (i'm being as generous as i can here) to stop buying DRM'ed music, the music industry probably wouldn't even notice, or worse they would blame it on internet piracy and point to it as the reason that they _have_ to put DRM on their music. try explaining to joe shmoe how evil DRM is after that.
the problem with the third option is that they are required by the state to try to block stuff like porn, the keyword being try. there is absolutely no way they can block even half of the "bad" sites, but because of braindead laws they set up proxy servers that look for keywords, and end up blocking more useful sites than bad sites, and the semi intelligent students figure out how to get around it to do their work (until recently at my old school, you could create a batch file to start cmd.exe, use ping to find the ip address of a site, then type that into the browser), and the admins don't really care because they are complying with the law. (and some of the sites they block are pretty rediculous: my old school wouldn't let you visit freshmeat)
my point was that a lot of programmers don't have any clue there is something other than windows (and some just don't have any clue at all, one of my family members worked with a programmer who didn't understand the concept of a bit), and those that do are often forced to write non-portable code because of either deadlines or because other programmers have to work on that code too.
shame on you for not installing tabbrowser preferences, which (among other things) has a setting to copy the windoze behavior that is on by default.
the reason i mentioned her lab sucking was that it only started sucking after she took over it. also, our IT staff (well, person), and our teacher wouldn't trust us (especially since a certain student who had caused them nightmares had just left the school)
me too.
how was that modded insightful. (wait, i know, the first response to my comment will be 'you must be new here')
I had the opposite experience, our old computer science teacher retired (and he was a great teacher), and we were left with a teacher that had taught calculus at some point in the past, but she had no clue about java or computers in general, the computers in her lab (macs) went from being a pleasure to work with to making Windows XP on a 386 look good, the only reason we could accomplish anything was because it took us 2 weeks to root our boxes and the fileserver. No one in that class took the AP test (I already had my 5, and was taking the class for fun, one other person could have gotten a 5, but didn't spend $82 because most colleges wont give credit for it, the rest of the class left knowing little more about programming than they came in with). The one good thing about the class: she walks up to my friend who has a terminal up that says something to the effect of root@darwin root# and sees nothing out of the ordinary.
you forgot a really big one in your list of open source games: tremulous (http://tremulous.sourceforge.net). it is based on the GPL'ed Quake3 engine and the data is released under a creative commons license. and while i'm listing stuff based on quake3, i think Wolfenstien: Enemy territory deserves a mention, it's a great game, and it's free as in beer.
since flash memory is only good for a limited number of writes, i would think that a swap file is thing you want to put there.
Think about what you're saying for a minute: you want one API that is equally good for low performance, high level graphics (X,GDI,Quartz), _and_ high performance, low level graphics (OpenGL and DirectX). There are high level libraries like wxWidgets, GTK+, and QT that will work on just about any system, which is sort of what you are talking about. Your average email client or browser doesn't want to know about triangles and framebuffers; it is perfectly happy doing all its graphics processing on the CPU, but a modern game needs to be able to quickly process huge amounts of information to produce a 3D scene. Back to your printing analogy, it would be pretty rediculous if someone suggested the use of postscript in 3D printing.
trust me. you don't wanna know
The 'parent' seems to 'like' using 'quotes' a lot in his 'posts'.
In every online game I've played, people will always ask stupid questions that they could have answered themselves by looking at the manual/FAQ in about 30 seconds. The only thing worse than that are n00bs who don't even ask (in the case of the current game I'm wasting my time with, Tremulous, I often see 'UnnamedPlayer' trying to build a base, which leaves me with the choice of trying to fix his mistakes and getting the base pwned by goons because there weren't enough defences from the two of us fighting for build points, or just trying to shoot stuff, but the base still gets pwned by goons because the n00b did everything wrong, and no amount of shooting stuff will fix it). If people would RTFM, they would know the basics (like not building anything until you have an idea of what a base should look like), and save everyone else a lot of headaches.