Showing headlines posted by AwesomeTux

"So we have a few great Free Software gaming engines now, like DarkPlaces used in Nexuiz, Cube 2 used in Sauerbraten, Qfusion used in Warsow, soon id Tech 4 which is used in id Software's Quake 4, Doom 3, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars along with many others, and the HPL1 engine used in Frictional Games' "Penumbra: Overture". All of these engines have some combination of normal mapping, bump mapping, and/or parallax mapping..."

"So we all know that users who are new to the command-line find it intimidating, no matter what operating system, they just find it intimidating. These users are the kind of people who never used early Unix or MS-DOS, they were introduced to computers with graphics and point-and-click interfaces. And I've been wondering: What's so intimidating? I know for a fact that some people know what the command-line is, they know its power, a simple mix-up of the 'dd' command's 'if' and 'of' options and your drive is broken, and that alone is intimidating enough to avoid it."

"The proprietary game `Minecraft`, which is written in Java, may have been inspired by Sauerbraten (also known as `Cube 2`)." ... "Minecraft and Cube 2: Sauerbraten have a lot in common, if you put gameplay footage of both in front of someone who has never played either, I think that person would think they are the same game, well, maybe without Minecraft's pixelated textures."

"Wouldn't it be nice to just start an application at the navigation stage? Well you can. As well as: graphically feed text to Espeak or Festival, graphically display a command's output like a directory listing or a file's contents, graphically start a web browser at a specific website like a Google search with your input, and so much more! This is basic BASH and Zenity, so don't worry, it's easy!"

"So we've probably all seen the mock-ups for Firefox 4.0 by now, but has any of it been implemented? In the Windows version, yes. On the GNU+Linux version, partially. And it looks like it's going to stay that way. I'm going to show you what's different in the current development version (nightly 4.0b8pre) from 3.6."

"YouTube has slowly but surely been expanding the availability of WebM in their HTML 5 open video beta, but uploaders have so far had no control over whether their videos would be available in a free format. Videos deemed popular enough by Google would be made available in WebM, but other than that, only videos which happened to be HD (720p or greater) would definitely be viewable in WebM."

"We see it all the time, someone straying from one distribution or another because you "have to use the command-line". I've even heard that in person, I've heard it too many times. So, I looked around to see what may be causing this impression, and sure enough it didn't take long to fine. Simply browsing Ubuntu Forums I would get the impression that Ubuntu doesn't have any graphical way to configure the system if I didn't know any better."

"A kind of poor website management consists of "file includes" (that is: one file requests to display and/or execute the contents of another file) having multiple HTML or PHP files and then including multiple other files for headers, footers, navigation, and/or copyright and other things. As a business we have to add and remove -- or just adjust prices for -- products on multiple pages several times a month."

"Google has open sourced a new "lossy" image format known as WebP — pronounced "weppy" — claiming it can cut the size of current web images by almost 40 per cent. CNet revealed the format with a story late this morning, and Google soon followed with a blog post describing the technology, which has been released as a developer preview. WebP is derived from VP8, the video codec Google acquired with its purchase of On2 Technologies earlier this year and promptly open sourced as part of the new WebM format."

"... [in The Social Network]'s official trailer, you can see what appears to be an old version of the KDE Desktop Environment. This particular still image is from a scene in the movie taking place in 2003, so KDE 3 would be an accurate version for the year." ... "It is unlikely that all of these things would be combined exactly like they are on KDE 3 based distributions and the Desktop Environment not be KDE 3."

"Popular Canadian rock band 'Sum 41', doesn't like Facebook perhaps for technical and practical reasons, not really political reasons, but it's still awesome."

"Almost two years ago, I reviewed Ubuntu, the user-friendly version of the free Linux operating system. I wasn't impressed. I found the software a pain to install, a pain to work with, and—even if it cost me nothing—far less worthy of my time than other major OSes. "Nothing about Ubuntu is an advantage over anything in either Mac or Windows—it has no more features, no better stability, no greater speed," I wrote."

"Why am I reinventing Disqus? That is the question I've been getting asked since I 'announced' on Identi.ca that I'd be replacing Disqus with a free (AGPL) comment system that I was to write." ... "Complete lack of Source Code: Currently, Disqus doesn't distribute their source code, and don't plan to do so in the future." ... "And who exactly is the owner of the comments when Disqus claims broad rights to use the 'content' in anyway they see fit?" ...

"The idea of implementing more open source in government is far from a new idea. In February of 2009, Osborne published an article in The Times that said when it comes to IT, big companies should take steps towards open standards and that government should take advantage of available open source technologies."

"What fills an entire CD, only fills 17% of a 4GB thumb drive" ... "In contrast to Live CDs, the data contained on a Live USB can be changed and additional data can be stored on the same device" ... "To make a Live USB all you need is a drive, the tools, and a LiveCD ISO image file, in fact you may even use a LiveDVD ISO image file as well"

"Awhile ago, two family members of mine were programing something for a simple task, they chose to do it in Visual Basic as the program was going to be running in a Windows environment anyway." ... "There were small problems getting it to work properly (as this can happen programing anything.) Seeing the code, everything looked like it would work"

"This article has been bounding and jumping around in the nether regions of my mind for quite a while now. It decided today that it needs to be set free." ... "As an advocate for using FOSS in general and Linux in particular I have pondered this apparent conundrum for a long time. With FOSS and Linux I get “free” software and it is worth quite a lot to me in terms of usability and function."

"Seeking real freedom of choice in a technology ecosystem where vendors are exerting more and more control" ... "I'm not religious about technology. My strategy is to use what works best, period. This is why, for more than a decade, I've been using a Mac as my primary computer (and had been using Macs for some of my work long before that). Apple's personal computers continue to be the best combination of hardware and software on the market today."

"The Linux desktop has come a long way, but are there still improvements to be made? At least one group of dedicated hackers thinks so, and is working with Ubuntu to improve it. " ... "The Linux desktop has come a long way, but are there still improvements to be made? At least one group of dedicated hackers thinks so, and is working with Ubuntu to improve it. "

"The result is strong Copyleft licensed Free Software, this design is a reference to that. I made this simple design because I wanted this specific shirt, I think it would be cool to wear."