Quoting: ShmerlThat's great, especially Wayland plans.

This is a thing that I haven't seen talked about a whole lot, but I am so glad Ubuntu dropped Mir. Everyone talks about them dropping Unity for Gnome, but frankly that doesn't matter much. There's lots of those things and one more or less is no biggie.
But Wayland is the kind of infrastructure it's so much better if there's only one of it, and going forward it could matter quite a lot to Linux gaming that we didn't end up with both Wayland and Mir making things complicated.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Looks like this could be my kind of game.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: Colombo

Patches cannot objectively be both free and not-free at the same time.

Here, there is the logical error you are making.

How can it be a logical error to essentially quote one of the foundational axioms of symbolic logic? I can imagine it being an error, but not a logical one.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

It is a problem, but on the other hand it certainly seems to be true that while with many games, people buy it when it's new, play it for 15-20 hours or something, and then done . . . with Paradox games people tend to buy the base game, play it for 30-40 hours, buy a DLC, play for another 12-15, buy another DLC, rinse and repeat, with a few extra stints of just going back to it and losing a weekend without having bought anything new, adding up very often to hundreds of hours. So if you talk $$$/hour of entertainment, Paradox tends to actually stack up fine against most of the competition near as I can figure.
And it would be frankly financially impossible to just put out a game with the depth and complexity of something like CK II with a dozen DLCs already rolled in at launch. They'd have to ask for megabucks for the game (and so it wouldn't sell), except they'd probably fold before release just developing the damn thing for as long as it would take. So while the situation isn't perfect, I'm not sure what I'd advocate as a solution.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

I like Spaz one. I've heard this is very different, so I'll have to consider it separately on its own merits. Sounds like it might be good though.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

It's a blip. But the trend even without that number looks positive. And we've seen a number of sources lately suggesting a positive overall trend for Linux use. Basically everyone except the Steam survey.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: heidi.wenger

Quoting: zimplex1Absolute degeneracy.

Or just the common mindset of liberals? Yet they won't tolerate you if you're conservative enough to disagree with them :whistle:

Tolerating intolerance is a different category from tolerating groups such as (other races, other genders, other sexual orientations). Cases for or against the two of them need to be made separately. This should be obvious to conservatives, since they typically don't tolerate (various groups of people) but do tolerate intolerance. In fact, it's actually quite difficult to hold the same stance on the two cases--how, for instance, would one both be intolerant of other races and intolerant of intolerance?

So the "liberals are so inconsistent/hypocritical because they tolerate eg gays but don't tolerate us" argument is basically facetious, a cute "zinger" meant to annoy the unwary but with nothing behind it. It's like saying that because you tolerate sushi, to be consistent you have to also tolerate swearing.

Note that this comment says nothing about the relative merits of "liberalism" or "conservatism" in themselves, I'm just pointing out the illogic of a particular argument I see too often.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: qptain NemoFinally, the attention this case would bring could be the most fatal mistake of all. MS can't afford to lose the "who cares about Linux lol" cultural status quo. If they themselves show that they care about Linux, let alone are this threatened by it, it would make a lot of people's heads turn and actually reconsider the situation. There is no more damning evidence of viability of Linux vs Windows than MS themselves testifying to that fact by moving into the offensive.

. . . With the possible exception of MS themselves literally testifying on the witness stand in such a court case that Linux is important enough that Wine is dangerous and damaging to them, which they'd probably have to do in order to make a case for damages or whatever.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: BeamboomAnd yes, a good review is very structured

Ah, I see what you mean now. You sounded very much like you were talking about an organizational structure.
You seem to be making a bit of a "No True Scotsman" argument. You point out all the cases and factors which make most "professional" reviewers fail to live up to the standards you raise, but then insist that we should think and act as if they all did.

There are actually other problems with professional reviewers, that can set in even if they're the "unicorn" case of having all the excellent qualities and advantages you list all rolled into one semi-mythical reviewer and simultaneously has made no concessions to "the industry". For instance, professional reviewers whether of movies, games or whatever, are jaded. Their very expertise tends to cause them to experience games differently from the typical gamer and look for different things in a game. They will put a high value on novelty because they have seen the setups that became cliche so many times before. But many gamers, particularly the more casual, have not, and so if a classic setup (whether in terms of mechanics or story type or whatever) became cliche because it was basically a good one, it will be a good thing for a casual gamer but a bad thing for a typical professional reviewer. To put it a different way, gamers will be looking more for "is it fun?", while reviewers will inevitably start shifting towards "is it interesting?"

On average this sort of problem doesn't outweigh the extra effort put into a full review or the experience involved, no. But I think your position, which basically seems to be that amateurs should shut up and listen to their betters while nobody should ever read what mere players of games say about them because it's almost all worthless dribble (although you concede sometimes somebody speaks who really belongs among the elect and so doesn't count) is also somewhat distorted. And really, if professional reviewers, with their many advantages and platforms and whatnot, can't get people to pay attention . . . whose fault is it? Ehhh, truthfully probably not theirs, there's a lot of systemic stuff going on, but you're talking like it's somehow immoral for an amateur to successfully get people to read what they say.

More broadly, I think that the position that the problem with modern times is the failure of technocracy and the rejection of expertise, is mistaking a symptom for the cause. In these times, expertise and authority are increasingly rejected because they are not trusted. One frightening manifestation of this is the rise of people who believe all kinds of fascist bullshit instead because they don't have a good alternative source of truth (and because some groups are actively taking advantage of this failure of trust to try to gain power through demagoguery). But the problem is not the lack of trust--the problem is that many of the technocrats and experts really are untrustworthy, that they have served money and power at most people's expense. People may be thrashing around failing to find workable alternatives, and some of the amateurs that rise instead may not know jack--but the fact is, people have been hosed for a long time and the job of many experts has been to explain, while billionaires are pissing on our heads, that it's raining and anyway we should be grateful for the "trickle-down" effect. Blaming the amateurs for things falling apart is misplaced. The amateurs are a failing attempt at salvage of a situation that was falling apart anyway.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: GuestI have no interest in such streaming services. They're not even satisfactory on my 1gb LAN, let alone over the internet. Nor do I wish to 'rent' access to games. Nor do I want 'yet' another subscription.

The value is terrible in the end to boot.

I am also prejudiced against this sort of arrangement. I sometimes feel like half my life is spent resisting new and innovative methods of getting me to shell out yet another monthly fee--which will then prove impressively difficult to cancel.

View this comment - View article - View full comments