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Homer's blog

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Return to Castle Wolfenstein on GNU/Linux

RTCW

Like most iD titles, RTCW was ultimately released under the GPL, and is thus available as a GNU/Linux native game. Installing it under Gentoo is as simple as "emerge games-fps/rtcw", but unfortunately the game itself no longer works in modern GNU/Linux systems. This is only to be expected with proprietary software that becomes abandoned, and would affect the operation of that software on any OS, but naturally it doesn't have to be that way with Free Software, which can be revived at any time, even years later.

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Video Fixer

Here's a script I wrote to "fix" videos I ripped from DVD/BD, where the rip is too big to fit on a FAT32 formatted flash drive (my Smart TV doesn't recognise NTFS or ext2/3/4 filesystems), has the wrong resolution/aspect, and/or possibly contains multiple language audio tracks I don't need (my Smart TV also doesn't play DTS audio).

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Photo May Prove Assange Innocent

Assange Party

A photo published by the Mail Online, shows one of the two women who accused besieged Wikileaks spokesman Julian Assange of "rape", happily smiling with him at a party ... two days after he allegedly "raped" her. This casts even further doubt on what is already a highly dubious story, as it seems very unlikely that a rape victim would voluntarily attend a party with her would-be "rapist" at all, much less be smiling about it for the camera.

Although the woman, known only as "Woman A", has had her face obscured in the photo "for legal reasons", The Mail reveals she's 33 years old, which by a process of simple elimination means she must be Anna Ardin (who also goes by the pseudonym "Bernardin"), the 33 year-old militant feminist currently in hiding in the American-Israeli occupied West Bank, not her co-accuser, 28 year-old Sofia Wilén.

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What Carmack actually said about Linux

id odd
First, here’s what he didn’t say:

Linux development is another story altogether. Even though Valve is now actively pursuing the Linux market, id has been there before, and just has not seen positive results. Remember how many past titles from id actually ran on Linux, and for how long these were supported? John says that Linux development simply does not pay the bills. It creates goodwill among the Linux crowd, but that is about it.

I watched Carmack’s keynote ... all three hours and thirty-six minutes of it. Twice. And took notes.

The first thing that needs to be said about the above quote is it’s actually by Josh Walrath, Managing Editor of PC Perspective, not Carmack. The only thing Carmack said about Linux was this:

Not nearly as many people are interested in paying for games on the platform.

That’s it. No mention of "goodwill", a lack of "positive results" or "paying the bills". The only mention of "past titles" was his reference to the fact that Linux "just hasn't carried its weight compared to the mac"... on Quake Live, which was actually an abysmal failure for reasons entirely unrelated to Linux. In other words Linux accounts for comparatively fewer sales of id's games. Fewer, not "none", not a total lack of "positive results", not Linux isn't "paying the bills", and not "we're going bankrupt because of Linux". That's just pure hyperbole. Moreover, at no point did Carmack explicitly state nor even imply that id were abandoning Linux, as many seem to have inferred from that article.

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Screw Googler Fumbles

El Reg hack, Andrew Orlowski, recently posed the question "Why DOES Google lobby so much?"

It's a loaded question, of course, and the accompanying article is dripping with the sort of rhetoric one expects from a part-time Screw Googler, and a full-time right-wing extremist, like Orlowski.

I gave my answer in the comments:

Prepare for boarding, me young buckaroos"Why does Google lobby so much?"
Submitted on Tuesday 24th July 2012 03:13 GMT
Rejected on Wednesday 25th July 2012 12:11 GMT why?

Probably to balance the vast amount of propaganda peddled by its competitors and opponents.

Obviously.

As for Google's antithetical views on Intellectual Monopoly, they have my full support (in that matter, at least), along with several Nobel Laureates in Economics, so I wouldn't dismiss the "freetard" doctrine (as you put it) so readily, if I were you, especially as most of the Intellectual Monopolists who whine about IP "theft" only acquired said "IP" by "shamelessly stealing" it from others in the first place.

Personally, I'd much rather see Google spread the love, than suffer under the tyrinical regime of hypocritical and fraudulent Intellectual Monopolists.

Just my 2¢ (that's about 1p in English).

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