Slashdot Mirror

I disagree. Everyone here is taking the opinion that all that goes into games is programming and art, forgetting the one thing that makes games great: design. I don't mean the design of the code, I mean the ruleset by which the game operates, and the game mechanics. Programming is about implementing that design, and art is about giving it a coherent look. Unfortunately, I think most open-source games come from a programming pradigm where the coder starts writing stuff, and plugging problems as he goes, with no real 'feel' for the overall design and game mechanics.

For example, I have been playing FreeCiv a lot lately. For those that don't know, FreeCiv is a free/open source game based on Sid Meier's Civilization series. I really like it, but let's face it, it's just a clone. Now, I'm willing to bet that when Sid Meier made the original Civilization, the majority of work went into gameplay & balance, not into coding. It's that kind of vision of how a game should *work* that most free/open game projects seem to lack. I'm not saying that they're all bad or unoriginal - it's just the nature of the free/open source community to be made up mostly of coders honing their skills rather than game designers.

Some other data: Linuz Journal's 2003 user choice awards picked out Frozen Bubble as their best game - a clone of an old arcade game. Second was Quake 3, and third was Tux Racer. Tux Racer at least seems to have an original concept and design, so at least it shows the community can come up with some original ideas.

"Obviously Linux owes its heritage to UNIX, but not its code. We would not, nor will not, make such a claim." [August 28, 2002]

"This case is not about the debate about the relative merits of the proprietary versus open-source software models. This case is also not about IBM's right to develop and promote open-source software, so long as they do that without SCO's proprietary information." [March 7 2003]

"There will be a day of reckoning for Red Hat and SuSE when this is done." [April 24 2003] (for fun, contrast to motion to dismiss court filings in Red Hat v. SCO Group, particularily where it claims there is no "actual controversy", and Red Hat has no reason to fear a lawsuit from SCO... Well, at least not until they finish with IBM)

Yeah, I'm sure Darl has a much better understanding of the issues. Lets look at another perspective instead, shall we? When Darl took over, SCO was sinking fast. They needed income, and they needed it soon. Linux was never a moneymaker for SCO/Caldera, but they did have some of these old contracts over SVR4 source code with some pretty big names. As Darl so eloquently put it, "Contracts are what you use against parties you have relationships with." Maybe, just maybe they could rattle some sabres and see what money floats their way to shut them up.

Ever heard of Della Crose ??

Did the fact that Debian recieved not one not two but three "Reader's Choice" awards have any influence on your company's decision to no longer directly support the standard distribution of RHL?

Then check out a site like Linux Journal. They're generally pretty unbiased, as shown by their Fedora at a Glance article as well as many many software reviews... not just distros.

Then check out a site like Linux Journal. They're generally pretty unbiased, as shown by their Fedora at a Glance article as well as many many software reviews... not just distros.

Linux Journal Covered this over a year ago... Issue 101: CVS homedir...

i perfer Arch myself.

Linux Journal: Apache on Linux
Uptime: Down faster than a drunken cheerleader on prom night

George W Bush: IIS on Windows 2000
Uptime: Still going!

HTH HAND!

• 1 had completed just basic public education (high school)
• 15 had attended college or technical school
• 23 had an undergraduate degree (B.S., B.A., etc.)
• 19 had attended graduate school
• 15 had a graduate degree (M.S., M.A., etc.)
• 9 had done further graduate work
• 19 had a terminal degree (Ph.D., M.D., etc.)

• 4 had 1 year
• 10 had 2-4 years
• 31 had 5-9 years
• 40 had 10-20 years
• 16 had 20+ years

"Contrary to popular belief about hackers, the open source community is mostly comprised of highly skilled IT professionals who have on average over 10 years of programming experience."

NVidia has the right idea. It links a static lib against the interface code (which builds against the installed kernel) during the installer.

That should become standard practice.


Consider DKMS.

It's possible to achieve widespread compatibility, if the developers are paying attention, that is.

There was an article in the linux journal had an article in issue 106 on how to replace the excange server with a linux replacement so that users won't know the difference. here's the link

Network Management with Nagios is an article about deploying Nagios for a large mixed Linux/Unix/Microsoft environment at John Deere.

The documentary Revolution OS explores the human side of the open source and free software movements, illuminating the behind-the-scenes story of the hackers and programmers rebelling against the corporate machine.

This 90-minute film begins with Richard Stallman's quest to create a free operating system. It then follows the movement through its two-decades-long evolution in interviews with Stallman, Linus Torvalds (creator of the open-source operating system Linux), Eric Raymond (author of The Cathedral and the Bazaar), Bruce Perens (author of the Open Source Definition), Brian Behlendorf (leader of the Apache Web server project), Michael Tiemann (founder of the first open source company) and Larry Augustin (founder of VA Linux Systems). Revolution OS also depicts the culture of the open source movement by documenting the Installfest parties where people can bring their computers to get free, expert Linux tech support; and the Refund Day protest marches, where Linux users demand reimbursement of the extra fees that get tacked onto the purchase price of new computers for pre-installed Microsoft applications.

Didn't even stop to think about the new Sinbad movie from Dreamworks either. Or IBM's General Parallel File System (GPFS) Sorry FYI

Linux Storms Hollywood

Linux in Hollywood a Star is Born

The hypocrisy of threads like this, where people fall in line to champion the justness of copyright and the Great God GPL, following hot on the heels of numerous anti-RIAA threads where many of those same people claimed copyright was being abused, information wants to be free and so on, is incredible.

<speech length=warandpeace>

Until the recent advent of the Internet, there was no practical way to get your music distributed other than through the RIAA and their ilk. This follows software... outside FidoNet, there was no way of getting your software into users' hands other than the traditional (expensive, cumbersome, backroom-deal-riddled) retail channels, and no easy way of remotely collaborating in real time; and then with academic and later public networks, a different way of doing software arose, people from Alaska to Zambia collaborate on software and get enough direct benefits from the collaboration tha they have no need to charge for the software, and this revolution is currently mowing down the entrenched software providers.

One of the driving forces behind the software revolution is and was the excessive greed of software manufacturers. One of the driving forces behind "music piracy" ("Harrrr! Yer music or yer life!") is the excessive greed of the RIAA-style cartels. As Microsoft worked hard to force all providers to work through their operating system, so RIAA & co work to force all musicians to work through their distribution channels. There are a lot of parallels. Microsoft tries to own your software, the RIAA tries to own your music.

From this, you can see that GPL and anti-RIAA are indeed on the same sides of their respective revolutions (if not exactly parallel: it should be the Creative Commmons licence and the GPL teaming up), so you would expect the same people to be standing up for each.

Make no mistake, by the way, the GPL is totally anathema to Microsoft's modus operandi. Becaus they can't control it, it has no part in Microsoft's corporate life. They're as happy as anyone else to have free product to layer any of their "real" offerings (SFU) on, but bitch like fury when the exact same licence sweeps in and undermines their monopoly cash-cows. It was far more clever of Scott than most people understand to have

bought StarDivision and unleashed StarOffice (and so OpenOffice.org) on the unsuspecting world. Up until that point, the only real GPLed threat to a Microsoft cash cow was Linux, and one of the big things hampering it was a really extensive and complete office suite. For half a billion dollars, Scott bought a lot of pain for his main competitor, and a lot of goodwill for Sun (which they seem to be squandering these days, but you can't win them all).

Now for the difference. With software, you can offer the item percieved as a product for free, and then make money on peripheral factors like support. The money to be made from anciliary music products (T-shirts and other merchandise, concerts) generally isn't there, and nobody's dreamed up a musical equivalent for "support". Musicians still need to be able to make money by making music, and finally people seem to have begun stepping up to that particular plate. iTunes and MusicMatch are just a scratch on the surface. As independent musicians start to realise that, hey, they can get up to half of the retail price of their tracks, and yes, it is possible - even realistic - for MusicMatch to sell two million copies of their track if it's really good, these outlets will take off.

The next step will be when more open methods of creating music hit the mainstream. There's now no particular reason why Joeline (in Chicago, USA) can't lay down a bass track written by Olaf (in Helsinki, Finland) for Enrico (in Ivirgarzama, Cochabamba, Bolivia) and Anastasiya (in her NSTU dorm at N

I overlooked something obvious. The success of CinePaint (born "Film GIMP") would suggest that the GIMP (or at least one of its direct children) is perfectly fine for use in video work. If it's good enough for "2 Fast 2 Furious, Scooby-Doo , Harry Potter, Stuart Little and other feature films," it's probably good enough for video work.

Those comments seem pretty consistant with what Mr. Love has said in the past. Here are some other interviews he's done:

LWN at Comdex 2000: http://old.lwn.net/2000/features/Comdex/RansomLove .php3

Linux Journal, Aug. 2000: http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=5406

SCO has no intention to sue Linux end-users

Originally, SCO had no intention of suing anyone at all:
According to McBride, "obviously Linux owes its heritage to UNIX, but not its code. We would not, nor will not, make such a claim."

But at the beginning of August:
"The legal liability for Linux clearly rests with the end user."

"We have the ability to go to users with lawsuits and we will if we have to."

McBride and company have never kept their story straight in the past - expecting them to do so now that they've made another statement we like would probably be overly optimistic.

You can easily find information on how to avoid buffer overflows, such as in this article.

However, the developers in the lsh project (for example) do not appear to have given this subject much thought. In the lsh manual, the chapter on Threats silently assumes the software works as designed. It does not mention protection against exploits such as buffer overflows.

And the coding standards outlined in the lsh hacking guide are targeted at avoiding breakage by the programmers, not by outside attackers.

Projects developing exploit-sensitive software should implement proper measures to avoid buffer overflows. As long as this is done, C may still be the appropriate language for such projects.

Don't go crying that the NDA is bad because no one else can know, it's just an appropriate way to keep SCO's claims in secret until the legal matters have been settled

Anyone who would claim this has not read the terms of SCO's NDA. First, The NDA would ban you from discussing, ever again, with anyone, the documents shown to you even if they turned out to be non-infringing. Second, SCO openly said that even under NDA, they would not show a totality of the infringing code, so the NDA would not help. Lastly, any allegations by SCO you had violated the NDA would require you to fly to Utah. Someone under this NDA would be hampered to the point where they would be (a) incapable of significantly investigating whether the code shown by SCO as allegedly infringing was, in fact, infringing (b) serverely hampered from working on the linux kernel in future.

I believe he was reffering to how people just expect SCO's claims to be false, without knowing anything about them, because they like the idea of not worrying about paying for things

I expect SCO's claims to be false because I believe in the principle that people accused of a crime, such as copyright infringement, are innocent until proven guilty. I will continue to consider SCO's claims to be utterly false, and refuse to accept the idea they could be true, until they show me one single shred of evidence that their claims are true. If they provide any evidence, any at all, I will *begin* to consider they are correct. However, with no evidence, I will refuse to consider the ideas that SCO's claims about infringing code in linux are true; that Elvis is alive; that John F. Kennedy was assasinated by the Mormons; that a race of superintelligent 40-foot rats live on the moon; or that the Timecube theory is true.

Cry me a river if you don't like it.

We are already following this exact plan. Have you not been reading slashdot?

google for "linux journal sump" (no quotes) - and press, I'm feeling lucky.

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=6827

What am I filing for?

That's the $64K question isn't it? I was hoping someone more clever than I would help out on that. This account of using small claims to get a windows refund is interesting. I wonder if linux developers who have had their copyright infringed or reputation damaged would have a claim.

BS: I still know too little about .Net to be comfortable writing about it.

LJ: Can C# be a universal language for everything?

BS: No. It's too high level for many kinds of systems programming, too specialized to Windows for many other kinds of programming and proprietary. That, of course, doesn't mean it cannot be a good tool for the middle-of-the-road Windows applications it is designed for.

LJ: But .NET is a platform that can be designed for various OSes. For example, there are some steps available from Microsoft to make that platform for FreeBSD. Do you still think that it's too specialized to Windows?

BS: Let's wait and see how things develop. Currently .Net is a Microsoft proprietary platform for Windows, and I don't expect to see significant use of it elsewhere anytime soon.

...however I doubt countries such as China would be interested in something so open as Linux.

"'Tis better to be thought a fool, than open one's mouth and remove all doubt." -Samuel Johnson

According to this article, Red Flag Linux was created by the Institute of Software at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The Chinese government's Ministry of Information Industry is Red Flag's second largest shareholder.

Yeah, you can do the same thing that this guy did. Take them to small claims, get a full refund for the licenses, and use it to buy a few more computers for the kids.

I read an article in LinuxJournal where some guy took his vendor to small claims court and won a judgement against them for the windows license refund.

To the original poster, this might be worth looking at or trying.

So you didn't RTFA...The Dell agreement is in the BIOS, so you're genius solution of booting from a floppy and fdisking the hard drive wouldn't work. He even tried to bypass the the BIOS but then it booted right into Windows (while trying to boot a linux CD) WITHOUT AGREEING TO ANYTHING, which could have implicitly made him agree without even knowing it. So how would this guy ever be able to get his Windows Refund?

I'm not sure that the core issue here is the license issue of how he couldn't get past it, but rather Dell's official policy (as far as it seems and there's not a whole lot to prove me wrong) is to simply lie and blindly agree to legal documents that its company distributes, but you aren't able to see them until you agree to them. Pretty nasty Catch-22.

He may be talking about this: http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=7037

I think this is also a very american discussion. While we argue about how much the users in the first-world countries can take in terms of change and brain power to use new and "more interesting" interfaces other areas of the world are readily adopting linux (look)
Of course this may be more evangelism from the preachers but could it be that first worlders eventually fall behind as other people adopt and use cheaper, virus free (for now), possibly better tools?
Another issue is that we all know that what really sells stuff to people is not quality or versatility but marketing. Linux has no centralized organization (that I know of) to market desktop use. I do not see RedHat or SuSe putting the cash up to do this effectively.

W4ZKK

BTW the big WiFi 802.11b thing is in a Amatuer Radio allocation.

Blake Stowell, SCO's PR Director, told the Linux Journal that the 2002 licensing of 'Ancient Unix' code was for non-commercial use only. And only for 16-bit. The folks at Linux Journal were quick to point out that the 2002 announcement letter said no such thing:

"The text of the letter, sent January 23, 2002 by Bill Broderick, Director of Licensing Services for Caldera, in fact makes no mention of "non-commercial use" restrictions, does not include the words "non-commercial use" anywhere and specifically mentions "32-bit 32V Unix" as well as the 16-bit versions. "

When confronted with the facts, how dows Mr. Stowell respond? "That is what I was told by Chris Sontag." Impressive. Boy I would love to hear him say that in court!

Y'know, I'm wondering if we aren't doing SCO a favor by pointing out the glaring errors in SCO's wackier-by-the-minute assertions. People are very concerned about countering the lies being ground out by SCO. I know I am. But what if this is more than just PR fluff? What if they are really so detached from reality, and so incompetent in knowing their own history, that they really believe what they're saying? Then just let them spout off. Don't correct them. Let them hang themselves the moment they step into court. If they tried this argument in front of a judge I think the entire suit would be summarily dismissed (IANAL).

The funny thing is when all this started there was supposedly no code in the kernel.

Then two weeks later the same guy claims that UnixWare source "is all over the place"

While these quotes probably wouldn't be too useful as evidence in court. It does well to show that these guys are throwing darts to choose how to go forth with this legal campaign.

I am surprised that I did not see people talking about this right off the bat. Superworms were a concept where worms/viruses would use a P2P type of organization to enhance their infections, remain undetected, and update themselves. In the original paper I read (linked from this Slasdot story), the author postulated that the eventual outcome would be to have two or maybe multiple competing worm distributors battling for control over the entire Internet. Sounds like something from James Bond.

Are we seeing the dawn of Superworms that update our computers and themselves without our knowledge or permission?

In the case of Windoze, I do not mind. Windoze users gave up their freedom when they paid Big Brother Bill to lobby Washington to take away their freedom. But a few or even one individual controlling the entire Internet and, by extrapolation, most if not all world communication: That is frightening.

You might find Eric S. Raymond's take on the question quite informative.

Definitely micro$oft. I mean, based on this article in Linux Journal, even micro$uck, i mean micro$oft uses Linux for critical stuff like DNS. Point made.

In rebuttal of letter from Microsoft Peru by Peruan Congressman Dr. Edgar Villanueva contends that :

It is also necessary to make it clear that the aim of the Bill we are discussing is not directly related to the amount of direct savings that can by made by using free software in state institutions. That is in any case a marginal aggregate value, but in no way is it the chief focus of the Bill. The basic principles which inspire the Bill are linked to the basic guarantees of a state of law, such as:

Free access to public information by the citizen.

Permanence of public data.

Security of the State and citizens.

So cost in economic terms is marginal for this gentleman. Linux Journal interviewed him.

"I still can't figure out how the claim that the GNU Public License encourages free speech is not utterly disingenuous. The GPL is the opposite of free speech; it's a highly detailed copyright agreement with the purpose of restricting the expression of derivative works."

I just remembered reading this article in Linux Journal about Dreamworks running Photoshop via VMWare.

In Korea a person tried making it his own trademark.
a Boston man tried taking control of it.
Microsoft Purchased it
although it's currently controlled by The Linux Mark Institute so Linus doesn't have to deal with it.

Ok I took a few minutes to do some research for you.

The statement of the NDAless witness in German

An English translation of the above.

What another person that did sign the NDA can say about what he saw.

2002, great, too bad it wasn't available in 1991.

From: torvalds@klaava.Helsinki.FI (Linus Benedict Torvalds)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: Gcc-1.40 and a posix-question
Message-ID:
Date: 3 Jul 91 10:00:50 GMT
Hello netlanders,

Due to a project I'm working on (in minix), I'm interested in the posix standard definition. Could somebody please point me to a (preferably) machine-readable format of the latest posix rules? Ftp-sites would be nice.

A month later, Linus posted:

As to POSIX, I'd be delighted to have it, but POSIX wants money for their papers, so that's not currently an option.

This June 1999 article is good: The Past and Future of Linux Standards

Also, this Dec 2000 interview with Linus touches on Linux and POSIX/LSB standards.

To sum it all up: POSIX is good, LSB is good, let's work together towards world peace.

One example?

What about the whole friggin' Wall Street companies?

RedHat + Oracle are running many critical parts of Merryl-Lynch, First Boston-Credit Swisse...

Also, the German Parliament runs with Linux servers.

And Banco do Brasil as well.

And many, may others, including the US Army and the Hong Kong's HSBC

What else do you need?

Peace

In order to see the disputed code, SCO makes one sign a NDA. Fine. What's to prevent him from passing the data to someone else who then posts it?

Umm, the NDA?

If you think it can't hurt you, why don't you sign it?

And if you still think it's a good idea, read this.

I actually found this solution for a virtual CD-ROM jukebox on http://www.linuxjournal.com

It worked for me in a test environment. I was serving up CD images faster than Hot Grits!

"Obviously Linux owes its heritage to UNIX, but not its code. We would not, nor will not, make such a claim."

Darl McBride, CEO, The SCO Group, August 2002 Linux Journal Article #6293

Yeah, I know, the "Free Software" community will keep Mozilla alive. Except where have they been up till now? Mozilla has been open-source for five years, and still almost all development has been done by Netscape employees.

Face it, Mozilla is dead. It's not the standard browser anywhere, except for a few zealots and the small number of people who do everything on Solaris or Irix. Not even Apple backs it.

Mind you, I'm not happy about this. I hate Microsoft being able to ignore web standards. I hate that you can only use SVG in plugin-based "objects". But fighting battles that were lost years ago is not going to change any of this.

Maybe, and I say maybe there is hope for the kHTML engine, which is the basis of Sonqueror and Safari. I've always like this engine, even when it was new and buggy. It's small, it's fast, and every time I look at it, it's drastically better.

I very much doubt if Internet Explorer will ever lose its supremacy. But if you just can't tolerate this, forget the bloated Gecko engine and start thinking about a Windows port of kHTML.

Mozilla has received numerous awards and critical acclaim since releasing its first stable version last year. We've had Infoworld and PC World give us Best of 2003 awards; eWeek say "Mozilla is the best browser on the market"; and just got an editor's choice award from LinuxJournal magazine. All of these are clear indications that the Mozilla project is doing something very right.

It's an API with a GUI. It just happens to be packaged with an OS, but as shown when migrating from Win9x to Win2k and even Lindows, the underlying OS can be changed without much trouble.

The problem with printing under Linux is that there is no API to do it. Rendering something on screen does not mean that you can print it. Windows 3.1 had this figured out. In Linux you have to re-write everything so that it can be rendered in X and rendered again in Postscript (semantics about creating your own abstraction layers to generate the Postscript and X stuff aside).

Here's a spiffy article about it I just pulled out of Google. http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=6729

Middle-click copy and paste is to me, a pain in the ass. Select-to-copy is pretty bad as it wipes out your clipboard with the slip of your mouse. And accidentally clicking the middle button over a terminal window shouldn't give you a sinking feeling. It's kind of spiffy to be able to copy and paste with the mouse like that, but first, I can do all of that without the mouse in Windows, and second, I can't do any of that without the mouse in Linux.... and if I really wanted to, I could dig up some Logitech driver which would let me customize my middle button for copy and paste... but again, it wouldn't be any fun.

Can you select a region of a graphic in the Gimp and paste it into Open Office yet? How about Abiword? It might work for Gnumeric, and hey, who knows, maybe the next time I check out Linux on the Desktop, somebody will have figured out how to get different applications with different forms of data to speak to one another using common intermediate formats/methods like CGM or OLE (which both suck, but existed in Win3.1 and are far better than what Linux has).

As for sound, with ESD, if I hit the 'Stop' button on XMMS, I get a noticable lag waiting for the audio to stop. Disabling ESD corrects this. The best way to get sound working well under Linux is to find a card which will do the mixing in the driver. I never had that problem in Win3.1 either.

And I didn't say that Windows was great, just that the Linux desktop is in many important ways inferior to Windows 3.1

If you want to shoot down Win3.1, you can talk about the stability, GDI limitations and real-mode drivers.

FLOS Caribbean: Success, Part II. More fodder, perhaps.

The code in contention is Unix System V.

Is that a fact?.

I suppose someone ought to tell the guys at SCO that, because they seem blissfully unaware.