Shogo is on your top sellers list? PC gamers got tired of that one 5 years ago. (Then again, "top sellers" on a Linux game site might mean you sold two boxes of it.)
Despite your firm belief that Slashdot is personally spiting you, the fact is that developers use DirectX because it's easy to make a game with, it's cheap to work with, and it ports easily to Xbox and Xbox 360. When Microsoft releases XNA, if they haven't already, it'll be all those things PLUS free. Linux has no development tools that can compete with that.
In addition to that, let's assume that Slashdot is representative of the Linux community as a whole. Have you noticed anything about the articles here on P2P? That's right! Almost everyone here is pro-piracy and feels no guilt stealing anything they can get their grubby hands on. You know why there's no PC or Mac port of Halo 2? It's because Halo 1 was the most-pirated game in history... who would want to write for an audience that's perfectly willing to steal your product? That's just dumb.
Uh, that's pretty much his entire point. Why would you want to use Linux game development tools, all 9 of them, learn different APIs and interfaces for every single one, and just cross your fingers and hope they all happen to work together when you could use just a single package that you *know* all works together, and you *know that once you've learned one part of it, you've learned most of it?
This points out another problem with Linux, although not one exclusively related to games. Finger-pointing.
Ok, so it's not Linux that's flawed, it's one particular program. But what about Ubuntu for adding that program to its package manager despite being obviously buggy? Point the finger that way!
Oh, your wireless card doesn't work in Ubuntu? Well, try SuSE! Now your modem doesn't work? Try Fedora! Now your USB drive isn't auto-mounting? Try Ubuntu!... oh wait.
Look, people don't care who's at fault, they just know there's a problem and it has to be fixed. Apple and Microsoft don't engage in finger-pointing, they just FIX THE PROBLEMS. This is what the open source community needs to do.
Why the hell are there different sound libraries in the first place? Why would anybody need more than one?
The three obvious problems I have with both set of instructions:
1) They both require downloading things. The.o file I can download onto a memory card or USB memory key and transfer to the laptop that way, but I have no clue how do use apt-get with no internet connection, if it's possible at all. Instructions for setting up network cards probably shouldn't assuming a working network connection, huh?
2) If the process is simply a set of instructions to follow, why doesn't Ubuntu just DO it instead of making me do all this work? I mean, duh. You'd never see Microsoft or Apple saying, "here's a common task 99% of our users will have to do, and we know exactly how to do it, but let's not and make them figure it out."
3) I know from experience that during this process, some of those commands *will* break (they always seem to), and this guide like all the others doesn't have any "what to do if this doesn't work" section. It seems that every set of instructions written for a task in Linux is written as if it cost $50/word to download or something. It would be much better to spend a paragraph describing what the command I'm supposed to parrot actually does, and what to do if it fails.
And a minor little problem:
I have an iBook and not a PowerBook, and neither of these sets of instructions are for iBooks. Maybe the process is the same, I don't know.
Anyway, I took Ubuntu off my iBook because not having an Internet connection was a deal-breaker. If I decide to try it again someday, I'll keep these instructions handy. Honestly, I don't see that happening for a while, since my work situation has changed since last I tried it and I can't go even a day without a functional laptop now.
1) I don't want to use WPA, I just want to use the card with a normal non-encrypted network,
2) I couldn't follow those instructions.
3) It seemed like you had to edit a text file (and perhaps reboot?) every time you wanted a new network. Since the train I commute on in the morning has a different network ID for each car, that's extremely impractical for me.
Do you have a set written with an experienced OS X/Windows user (but Linux newbie) in mind that lets the card connect to any network? Preferably one that uses the GUI? (Since GUI instructions are easier for me to follow than that command-line stuff.)
By the time you have a x.0 release, people have already tried it out and decided whether they like the product or whether it's crap. QA needs to happen much earlier than that, otherwise your product will leave the gate with a reputation for bugs. And those reputations are very hard to get rid of once you receive them-- look at Real Networks' reputation. RealPlayer has been a pretty good piece of software now for a couple of years, but there are still tons and tons of people who refuse to install it because old versions were so buggy/annoying.
1) Why is it *supposed* to be? If you upgrade and something touches your home directory, that's a bug. You're not "supposed" to have to do anything that's just a bug work-around. You don't have to do it on Windows NT/2000/XP, or on Mac OS X... why are you "supposed" to do it on Linux?
2) Partitions aren't (generally) resizable. I can't tell you how many times I've seen an NT4 machine that someone had "helpfully" partitioned to keep the system and data separate, only to not have nearly enough space when it came time to install a patch to NT or upgrade to 2000. How do you *know* how much disk space to use for your system (which changes when you decide to update the OS in the future), how do you know how much disk space to use for your files (which changes when you decide to rip your DVDs?) If you can predict the future like this, you should be in a different industry, like the stock market.
3) 99% of computer users don't know what a partition is. How could you possibly expect people to know they are "supposed" to do something they don't even know about? (As I said above, knowledge of what a partition is isn't required by any other major OS; why is it required by Linux?)
Wait, you got an Airport card working on PPC? Can you post more details about that please? I tried for ages to get the AirPort Extreme card in my iBook working, and finally gave up. There are instructions on the Ubuntu website, but they are horribly-difficult to follow if you're not a super-genius Linux hacker and seemed to be x86-only anyway.
I agree with your last paragraph more than anything I've read in this thread. Open source products, in general, have terrible or non-existent QA and that needs to change before it's more than a hobby and server OS. From my own experience attempting to put in bugs, it seems to me that if you put in a bug you're expected to write the code to resolve it as well. If you're not able to write the code, your bug will invariably be forgotten (and eventually marked as 'closed' when the next version is released, even if that bug still exists), or it will become a flamefest between the developers and the poor soul who put in the bug.
Whoa, buddy. What if I "THE USER" want to make my PDF file read-only? Isn't that the same as DRM? Why *shouldn't* I be able to do this using open source software?
The real problem is that nobody in this debate defines "DRM." What you *mean* is (perhaps) DRM is bad when it's used to prevent the copying of videogames, movies and music. I wouldn't agree with that statement... but no matter how you look at it, restricting DRM restricts my rights as a user to do what the hell I want to do with my personal property.
He could have used the (somewhat) more mainstream term "Metrosexual" which means roughly the same thing, but is actually meaningful to people who don't spend half their lives watching crappy cartoons from halfway across the world.
Anyway, the objection that the horde didn't have any "attractive" characters was/is entirely valid. That's why, IMO, the majority of servers have a lot more population on the alliance side than the horde side. Who wants to look at a tauren's ass all day when you can look at a sexy night elf's ass?
You should write an email to him using the word "grok." I'm sure that'll clear it right up, huh?
Seriously, though, anybody who uses the word "grok" in a conversational setting is already beyond hope. Get out of the house a little bit more and figure out how to talk to normal people, please.
I think the real point is if GPL2 and GPL3 are incompatible with each other, and a whole bunch of open source projects move to GPL3, that's going to cause huge issues for distro makers. So you'll end up with a world where almost every open source project has two different forks, one for GPL2 and one for GPL3, each of which is maintained separately from the other.
I'm not saying that will happen. But to dismiss this article as if there was no relevance isn't helping anything. There is a real potential issue here.
As for Stallman becoming irrelevant, my personal opinion would be "thank God!" The sooner that wacko retires to Argentina or somewhere, the sooner people can start treating the open source community with a little bit of respect and dignity. And maybe they can get a spokesman who doesn't have a hissy-fit every time someone asks him to wear a namebadge at a conference.
Apple has nothing against free formats. It's the recording companies that insist on adding DRM. iTunes' motto used to be "rip, mix, burn"... do you think Steve Jobs cares if you make a burned copy of a CD?
While it's probably a good idea to put all scientific journals in the public domain in some way, or at least publicly available, wouldn't a Wiki be about the WORST way of doing it? Just wait for some wisenheimer to change the data, you'd go years without discovering it. Or changing the abstract of the paper to something entirely different than it used to be-- I mean 99% of people just read the abstract anyway.
In short, Wikipedia is a terrible place for scientific journals.
This list is like 6 years old. I don't think Seanbaby's even touched his website in 4 years or so. It predates Battlecruiser 3000. (From what I understand, the game wasn't THAT bad, it just had terrible controls that couldn't be configured.)
Diakatana isn't THAT bad a game. Honestly, I've played much worse than just didn't happen to get the publicity... even picking a FPS that came out around the same time, IronStorm (I think was the name) was a total piece of crap. If you expand to RPGs, "Wizards and Warriors" came out in like 2001 without the capability of running in Windows 2000 and no 3D acceleration support at all. (And yes, it was a 3D game.) It was also buggy as crap... I think I got about halfway through before getting stopped by a huge game-ending bug.
4. yes, finder sucks. it takes some adaptation to learn to live with it. long time mac users have no complaints about it, whereas when i switched over from pc it was waa-waa time.
No, real long-time Mac users who remember the *excellent* Finder included in every OS from 1.0 to 9.2.2 also complain about it. OS X Finder sucks, period... no matter who you are, no matter what you're doing. Any Mac user, old or new, who says the Finder doesn't suck either hasn't used any other file browser, or has his head so far up Steve Jobs' ass you can't trust a word.
The funny thing is that Apple made a big deal about rewriting the Finder in one of the releases... I think 10.3. But all they did is get the existing crappy Finder and ported it to Cocoa without fixing any of the stuff that made it crappy in the first place.
Gamer: Lots of cons, no real pros. Are there any games for a Mac that do not suck?
Yes. (I have World of Warcraft and Civilization IV installed at the moment), but (with the exception of Blizzard games) they always come out 6 months later and run like crap even on the same quality of hardware. World of Warcraft in Windows on a Radeon 9800 Pro runs much faster than WOW on a Mac with the same video card. Go figure.
Just because I'm on a roll, you're also assuming in your post that I believe in some sort of "ecological catastrophe." No. Remember the mid-90s when everyone was terrified that KILLER BEES were moving northward into the US and soon we wouldn't even be able to go outside without getting stung and killed? There were press conferences about the killer bees, there were movies made about it (Swarm, starring Angela Lansbury, heh). And what happened? Nothing. I live in Washington State, and I've never seen or heard about a killer bee attack. The national media isn't talking about it anymore, so I guess it just... fizzled. I think this global warming thing is the same way. Just a large-scale version of the Seattle Windshield Pitting Epidemic of 1954. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_Windshield_Pi tting_Epidemic
I think the real problem is that environmentalists want to draw a certain line, say 1850, and declare that everything invented/done *before* that line is "natural" and everything done after that line is unnatural.
My personal perspective is that humans have been changing this planet for the entire time we've been humans. What's the point of drawing an arbitrary line (which would declare 99% of human history as "natural" for that matter) and say the other 1% is bad? That strikes me as pretty stupid.
But I guess part of the debate here is for whoever making claims about the natural world should probably define what they think the "natural" world is. If they're talking about the world before human occupation, well, then the process of discovering that is about the same as figuring out how the dinosaurs lived... because that world is long, long gone. (Except perhaps in central Africa.)
(As you can probably tell I'm not much of an environmentalist. I think most environmentalist policies are either extremely stupid [opposing wind power because it 'kills birds'], or way overzealous [the entire endangered species movement, including the spotted owl which 1) isn't endangered and 2) has destroyed the economy of thousands of towns and small businesses].)
It does. OS X has this feature mostly-complete as well (there's a prototype of it in 10.4 you can access if you have the developer tools installed.) Presumably, Apple will release their version of same in 10.5.
Slashdot Mirror
Shogo is on your top sellers list? PC gamers got tired of that one 5 years ago. (Then again, "top sellers" on a Linux game site might mean you sold two boxes of it.)
Despite your firm belief that Slashdot is personally spiting you, the fact is that developers use DirectX because it's easy to make a game with, it's cheap to work with, and it ports easily to Xbox and Xbox 360. When Microsoft releases XNA, if they haven't already, it'll be all those things PLUS free. Linux has no development tools that can compete with that.
In addition to that, let's assume that Slashdot is representative of the Linux community as a whole. Have you noticed anything about the articles here on P2P? That's right! Almost everyone here is pro-piracy and feels no guilt stealing anything they can get their grubby hands on. You know why there's no PC or Mac port of Halo 2? It's because Halo 1 was the most-pirated game in history... who would want to write for an audience that's perfectly willing to steal your product? That's just dumb.
Uh, that's pretty much his entire point. Why would you want to use Linux game development tools, all 9 of them, learn different APIs and interfaces for every single one, and just cross your fingers and hope they all happen to work together when you could use just a single package that you *know* all works together, and you *know that once you've learned one part of it, you've learned most of it?
This points out another problem with Linux, although not one exclusively related to games. Finger-pointing.
... oh wait.
Ok, so it's not Linux that's flawed, it's one particular program. But what about Ubuntu for adding that program to its package manager despite being obviously buggy? Point the finger that way!
Oh, your wireless card doesn't work in Ubuntu? Well, try SuSE! Now your modem doesn't work? Try Fedora! Now your USB drive isn't auto-mounting? Try Ubuntu!
Look, people don't care who's at fault, they just know there's a problem and it has to be fixed. Apple and Microsoft don't engage in finger-pointing, they just FIX THE PROBLEMS. This is what the open source community needs to do.
Why the hell are there different sound libraries in the first place? Why would anybody need more than one?
The three obvious problems I have with both set of instructions:
.o file I can download onto a memory card or USB memory key and transfer to the laptop that way, but I have no clue how do use apt-get with no internet connection, if it's possible at all. Instructions for setting up network cards probably shouldn't assuming a working network connection, huh?
1) They both require downloading things. The
2) If the process is simply a set of instructions to follow, why doesn't Ubuntu just DO it instead of making me do all this work? I mean, duh. You'd never see Microsoft or Apple saying, "here's a common task 99% of our users will have to do, and we know exactly how to do it, but let's not and make them figure it out."
3) I know from experience that during this process, some of those commands *will* break (they always seem to), and this guide like all the others doesn't have any "what to do if this doesn't work" section. It seems that every set of instructions written for a task in Linux is written as if it cost $50/word to download or something. It would be much better to spend a paragraph describing what the command I'm supposed to parrot actually does, and what to do if it fails.
And a minor little problem:
I have an iBook and not a PowerBook, and neither of these sets of instructions are for iBooks. Maybe the process is the same, I don't know.
Anyway, I took Ubuntu off my iBook because not having an Internet connection was a deal-breaker. If I decide to try it again someday, I'll keep these instructions handy. Honestly, I don't see that happening for a while, since my work situation has changed since last I tried it and I can't go even a day without a functional laptop now.
Thanks, but:
1) I don't want to use WPA, I just want to use the card with a normal non-encrypted network,
2) I couldn't follow those instructions.
3) It seemed like you had to edit a text file (and perhaps reboot?) every time you wanted a new network. Since the train I commute on in the morning has a different network ID for each car, that's extremely impractical for me.
Do you have a set written with an experienced OS X/Windows user (but Linux newbie) in mind that lets the card connect to any network? Preferably one that uses the GUI? (Since GUI instructions are easier for me to follow than that command-line stuff.)
By the time you have a x.0 release, people have already tried it out and decided whether they like the product or whether it's crap. QA needs to happen much earlier than that, otherwise your product will leave the gate with a reputation for bugs. And those reputations are very hard to get rid of once you receive them-- look at Real Networks' reputation. RealPlayer has been a pretty good piece of software now for a couple of years, but there are still tons and tons of people who refuse to install it because old versions were so buggy/annoying.
1) Why is it *supposed* to be? If you upgrade and something touches your home directory, that's a bug. You're not "supposed" to have to do anything that's just a bug work-around. You don't have to do it on Windows NT/2000/XP, or on Mac OS X... why are you "supposed" to do it on Linux?
2) Partitions aren't (generally) resizable. I can't tell you how many times I've seen an NT4 machine that someone had "helpfully" partitioned to keep the system and data separate, only to not have nearly enough space when it came time to install a patch to NT or upgrade to 2000. How do you *know* how much disk space to use for your system (which changes when you decide to update the OS in the future), how do you know how much disk space to use for your files (which changes when you decide to rip your DVDs?) If you can predict the future like this, you should be in a different industry, like the stock market.
3) 99% of computer users don't know what a partition is. How could you possibly expect people to know they are "supposed" to do something they don't even know about? (As I said above, knowledge of what a partition is isn't required by any other major OS; why is it required by Linux?)
Wait, you got an Airport card working on PPC? Can you post more details about that please? I tried for ages to get the AirPort Extreme card in my iBook working, and finally gave up. There are instructions on the Ubuntu website, but they are horribly-difficult to follow if you're not a super-genius Linux hacker and seemed to be x86-only anyway.
I agree with your last paragraph more than anything I've read in this thread. Open source products, in general, have terrible or non-existent QA and that needs to change before it's more than a hobby and server OS. From my own experience attempting to put in bugs, it seems to me that if you put in a bug you're expected to write the code to resolve it as well. If you're not able to write the code, your bug will invariably be forgotten (and eventually marked as 'closed' when the next version is released, even if that bug still exists), or it will become a flamefest between the developers and the poor soul who put in the bug.
... except it does not use my os x custom dictionary, so for me it is a lot less useful than safari.
Whoa, buddy. What if I "THE USER" want to make my PDF file read-only? Isn't that the same as DRM? Why *shouldn't* I be able to do this using open source software?
The real problem is that nobody in this debate defines "DRM." What you *mean* is (perhaps) DRM is bad when it's used to prevent the copying of videogames, movies and music. I wouldn't agree with that statement... but no matter how you look at it, restricting DRM restricts my rights as a user to do what the hell I want to do with my personal property.
He could have used the (somewhat) more mainstream term "Metrosexual" which means roughly the same thing, but is actually meaningful to people who don't spend half their lives watching crappy cartoons from halfway across the world.
Anyway, the objection that the horde didn't have any "attractive" characters was/is entirely valid. That's why, IMO, the majority of servers have a lot more population on the alliance side than the horde side. Who wants to look at a tauren's ass all day when you can look at a sexy night elf's ass?
The tabernacle was the name of the computer in the Sean Connery classic movie "Zardoz": http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7328510519 873373264&q=zardoz
As you can see from the trailer, the Tabernacle is indestructible and ever-lasting. So it's a good choice.
You should write an email to him using the word "grok." I'm sure that'll clear it right up, huh?
Seriously, though, anybody who uses the word "grok" in a conversational setting is already beyond hope. Get out of the house a little bit more and figure out how to talk to normal people, please.
I think the real point is if GPL2 and GPL3 are incompatible with each other, and a whole bunch of open source projects move to GPL3, that's going to cause huge issues for distro makers. So you'll end up with a world where almost every open source project has two different forks, one for GPL2 and one for GPL3, each of which is maintained separately from the other.
I'm not saying that will happen. But to dismiss this article as if there was no relevance isn't helping anything. There is a real potential issue here.
As for Stallman becoming irrelevant, my personal opinion would be "thank God!" The sooner that wacko retires to Argentina or somewhere, the sooner people can start treating the open source community with a little bit of respect and dignity. And maybe they can get a spokesman who doesn't have a hissy-fit every time someone asks him to wear a namebadge at a conference.
Apple has nothing against free formats. It's the recording companies that insist on adding DRM. iTunes' motto used to be "rip, mix, burn"... do you think Steve Jobs cares if you make a burned copy of a CD?
While it's probably a good idea to put all scientific journals in the public domain in some way, or at least publicly available, wouldn't a Wiki be about the WORST way of doing it? Just wait for some wisenheimer to change the data, you'd go years without discovering it. Or changing the abstract of the paper to something entirely different than it used to be-- I mean 99% of people just read the abstract anyway.
In short, Wikipedia is a terrible place for scientific journals.
BeOS had tabbed-windows system-wide since it was released. What year was that? It also had to be around 1994 or so...
This list is like 6 years old. I don't think Seanbaby's even touched his website in 4 years or so. It predates Battlecruiser 3000. (From what I understand, the game wasn't THAT bad, it just had terrible controls that couldn't be configured.)
Diakatana isn't THAT bad a game. Honestly, I've played much worse than just didn't happen to get the publicity... even picking a FPS that came out around the same time, IronStorm (I think was the name) was a total piece of crap. If you expand to RPGs, "Wizards and Warriors" came out in like 2001 without the capability of running in Windows 2000 and no 3D acceleration support at all. (And yes, it was a 3D game.) It was also buggy as crap... I think I got about halfway through before getting stopped by a huge game-ending bug.
4. yes, finder sucks. it takes some adaptation to learn to live with it. long time mac users have no complaints about it, whereas when i switched over from pc it was waa-waa time.
No, real long-time Mac users who remember the *excellent* Finder included in every OS from 1.0 to 9.2.2 also complain about it. OS X Finder sucks, period... no matter who you are, no matter what you're doing. Any Mac user, old or new, who says the Finder doesn't suck either hasn't used any other file browser, or has his head so far up Steve Jobs' ass you can't trust a word.
The funny thing is that Apple made a big deal about rewriting the Finder in one of the releases... I think 10.3. But all they did is get the existing crappy Finder and ported it to Cocoa without fixing any of the stuff that made it crappy in the first place.
Gamer: Lots of cons, no real pros. Are there any games for a Mac that do not suck?
Yes. (I have World of Warcraft and Civilization IV installed at the moment), but (with the exception of Blizzard games) they always come out 6 months later and run like crap even on the same quality of hardware. World of Warcraft in Windows on a Radeon 9800 Pro runs much faster than WOW on a Mac with the same video card. Go figure.
Just because I'm on a roll, you're also assuming in your post that I believe in some sort of "ecological catastrophe." No. Remember the mid-90s when everyone was terrified that KILLER BEES were moving northward into the US and soon we wouldn't even be able to go outside without getting stung and killed? There were press conferences about the killer bees, there were movies made about it (Swarm, starring Angela Lansbury, heh). And what happened? Nothing. I live in Washington State, and I've never seen or heard about a killer bee attack. The national media isn't talking about it anymore, so I guess it just ... fizzled. I think this global warming thing is the same way. Just a large-scale version of the Seattle Windshield Pitting Epidemic of 1954. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_Windshield_Pi tting_Epidemic
I think the real problem is that environmentalists want to draw a certain line, say 1850, and declare that everything invented/done *before* that line is "natural" and everything done after that line is unnatural.
My personal perspective is that humans have been changing this planet for the entire time we've been humans. What's the point of drawing an arbitrary line (which would declare 99% of human history as "natural" for that matter) and say the other 1% is bad? That strikes me as pretty stupid.
But I guess part of the debate here is for whoever making claims about the natural world should probably define what they think the "natural" world is. If they're talking about the world before human occupation, well, then the process of discovering that is about the same as figuring out how the dinosaurs lived... because that world is long, long gone. (Except perhaps in central Africa.)
(As you can probably tell I'm not much of an environmentalist. I think most environmentalist policies are either extremely stupid [opposing wind power because it 'kills birds'], or way overzealous [the entire endangered species movement, including the spotted owl which 1) isn't endangered and 2) has destroyed the economy of thousands of towns and small businesses].)
It does. OS X has this feature mostly-complete as well (there's a prototype of it in 10.4 you can access if you have the developer tools installed.) Presumably, Apple will release their version of same in 10.5.