PhysicsFS:
1.0.2 and 2.0.0 released!
http://icculus.org/news/news.php?id=4514icculus.org:
CVS, your days are numbered! We are pulling the plug on cvs.icculus.org on
March 31st!
http://icculus.org/news/news.php?id=4508 I take back what I said about CloudFront...if you need to push 3 terrabytes
a month, you're looking at hundreds of dollars a month so strangers can play
Postal 2 and Prey for free.
Sadly, no one else seems better. Sony charging publishers 16 cents/gigabyte
for DLC makes a lot of sense now...it's one cent cheaper than Amazon's base
rate. :(
What does one do, when one gives out gigabytes of free shit? At least when
someone buys a game based on a demo, those 16 pennies seem like a darn good
investment. But if my attach rate for these big-ass servers, demos, and
installers was 100%, it would still gain me zero bucks, not counting the
400 bucks a month spent on bandwidth.
Man, I need a sugar daddy at Akamai so badly.
Other stuff:
My rant from yesterday stands, but I wanted to add some notes:
- There is apparently a
freedesktop thing, but looking aside the
infuriating need to stick "XDG" on everything, I'm not sure I dig on the
idea of using environment variables. I'd rather this have to call a piece of
system-controlled code that can set policy, and handle things like creating
directories, etc, so every app that needs to be changed needs extremely
minimal changes, and reduce their ability to get things wrong. Granted,
that system code could respect these XDG_* variables if that makes sense.
Even looking beside that: dude, it's 2009, can we stop using environment
variables and shell scripts for everything? Is it heresy to ask that?
Honest to god, though: how'd that $BROWSER thing work out?
- My code example wasn't meant to be a locked down API. I'd change things in
it already.
- Someone pointed out
GoboLinux. That's sort of what I'd like to see, but
I'm not really concerned with /bin and friends all that much, and the
symlink soup they do is kind of nasty...but it still proves this is a
feasible thing. I think Mac OS X might have that more or less done right:
/bin, /usr, /etc (etc!) all still exist and have things you'd expect, and
the Unix Goodness is there...but they also have an /Applications directory
for all the bundled apps that the end user (not the Unix command line guru)
cares about. For that, it's possible that
klik is moving in the right
direction. I'm not sure, though. I think there's a lot of hostility to the
idea of Application Bundles, since the primary beneficiary might be
closed-source software. This is probably why there's no pleasant equivalent
of OS X .dmg files, either. But that's not the hill I want to die on right
now, so we'll fight that fight another day.
- Fundamentally, the hurdle is not designing a solution. That takes ten
minutes. The hurdle is patching, and patching, and patching.
--ryan.