There aren't many of us, but open source composers do exist.
It's interesting, because I think in many ways, OS music composition still reflects the more early (idealistic?) days of OS programming. The entry price to make good sounding music is still steep. There's no OS DAW that I know of that can do what you need one to do, and music production still relies heavily on hardware, both to mix sound and to generate sound (thought this is changing!). So the people you get donating the stuff they write without a thought to recouping the monetary investment they've made are passionate about music and the community. Sharing the music is its own reward, as it were.
And there's demand. Now a person starting up an OS project has to have a muse. They have to have an idea that hasn't been done. But back in the early days of GNU, it wasn't so much of a question. It was like "We don't cp or ls yet. Work on that." or "emacs doesn't read email yet. Clearly it must before it can be considered complete."
That's still the state of things in OS music -- there's still that need. The community provides the inspiration for you and you just bang out a(n elegant and awe-inspiring) musical representation of it. I know many digital composers that, when hard up for new ideas for their own stuff, take gratis commissions or other free work just to get the juices flowing.
At any rate, if your game needs music, drop me a line. I may be able to hook you up. skiaatskiadotnet
Unless, of course, you want to play it on your iPod. Then a good amount of back-looking will be required.
Seriously, Ogg has not been "designed to completely replace all proprietary, patented audio formats". It was designed to provide similar performance patent-encumbered and DRM-crippled lossy audio compression formats such as mp3. It clearly can't "replace" mp3 until it has the market drive and support behind it that mp3 has (see above comment re: ogg and iPods).
Also, Ogg has no business replacing lossless audio formats such as wav, aiff, and SDII.
Don't know if it's what the poster was originally talking about, but this went past the pages of freshmeat's new OS X section mentioned on/. a few days ago.
Eek. Maybe I've watched too much Alien or played too much StarCraft, but you couldn't pay me enough money to be the first person back on a space station that's been abandoned for a year or more.
You know how weird your house feels after being away for two weeks on vacation? Now imagine "two weeks" is actually "a year" and "your house" is actually "your house that's been drifting aimlessly in the cold blackness of space".
For one thing, you listing FOX as one of the non-conspiracy-rag news agencies scares me;-)
On another topic, you bring up an interesting point on how it's not our gov't that censors the media, but the media itself. There's also a post below that talks about how Canada's papers are owned my two men who can say what is and isn't printed (that sounds quite unreal to me... is that true?).
But even if this is the case, it's important to remember that this has nothing to do with "freedom of the press". Say there is only one agent of the press in this nation. That reporter would write the only news any of us read, and in all likelihood it would be a pretty biased account of what was going on. But is that reporter free to report on whatever he/she likes?
As long as it's the case that a reporter can investigate whatever whim comes to him/her, that reporter is free and freedom of the press is maintained.
If there is only one story or one point of view covered by the press (due to bias, competition, compensation, &c.), but officers of the press are in theory free to investigate whatever stories they like, the fault is not in a nation's freedom of press, but with the nation's lack of diversity in reputable news sources.
Is the US guilty of this? Yes, I think it is -- mostly for the reasons you list above. And really, when it comes down to it, this is the type of thing that the US is notorious for. We have freedom of speech, but we get Howard Stern. We have freedom of press, but we get the Enquirer.
Still, I'd much rather be accused of not fulfilling the potential of a principal than be accused of not defending the rights that principal grants.
It will be hard to get the right laws,
given the evil influences of Microsoft and the
entertainment industry, but it's not a physical
or moral impossibility.
Once you have LAWS to enforce what should be a MORAL issue, you remove all chance for morality to blossom there. All moral discussion is replaced by a discussion of the letter of the law.
Discussions on morality can be had by everyone. Discussions on the letter of the law can only be had effectively by lawyers. Who has more/better/costlier lawyers, Hollywood or me?
Now tell me how codifying rights management in the law books would work out in my/the public's best interests.
Not only does the SMBdie app not work at all for win9x boxes, but of the 4 win 2000, two win XP, and 1 win.NET boxes I tested it on, it failed with a "f#@$, this box is not vulnerable" error. I'm glad to see my machines aren't (easily) crashable, but this also casts doubt as to the credulity of the claims that that this truly is an exploit, or that Microsoft is indeed at fault at all.
Have we come to the point where we're making up Windows exploits to make MS look bad? A kind of back-at-ya FUD? I would have thought that there were enough genuine exploits to go around.
-Not- highest grosing -ever-.
on
Sen To, X-Men 2
·
· Score: 1
Spirited Away is not the highest grosing film in Japan. It's the highest grosing JAPANESE film in japan.
To add a bit of clarity, when the article above talks about "Apple's decision to offer no upgrade fee to existing Mac OS X users" it means "Apple's decision not to offer a discounted upgrade price to existing Mac OS X users".
I misread this and spent half an hour looking for details on when and how Apple decided to let 10.1 users upgrade to jaguare for nothing:)
Just think, anyone who buys an old box of OS X off the shelf (or anyone who boots into pre-installed OS X for the first time from OS 9) is going to be confronted with the flashy welcome screen asking them something like "Wouldn't you really like to get a mac.com email address? After all, it's FREE!"
Of course it's not anymore. What will happen if the users click OK? Will they get a message box that says "Just Kidding"?
I don't deny that there are many IDEAS for splash screens out there. Hell, I've whipped up one or two of my own in gimp. But lets say I want to USE one of those spashscreens that I find with the above google search? What do I do? As far as I've gathered from the bug in my original posting, it requires a recompile of the source!?!
Please correct me if I'm wrong. Anyway, if the way for users to implement their own spashscreens is to get the source and compile it with their own image... well that's not much of a solution. That doesn't even rank as a workaround.
What I purchased was the WarCraft II Battle Chest. It came with the expansion ("beyond the black portal"??) and some stratagy guides. Perhaps it also included the WCII B.net edition you speak of? I don't remember installing anything special, but I may be mistaken.
Date: Fri, 22 Feb 2002 10:48:01 -0500 (EST)
From: Josh Emmons
To: sales@blizzard.com, support@blizzard.com
Subject: Regarding bnetd...
I have been a long time Blizzard supporter. I own (yes, that's right OWN,
not pirate) every Blizzard game since Warcraft II. My friends and I played
WarCraft II for a while on BattleNet, but eventually stopped way before
the release of Starcraft because the server was slow, unreliable, and
generally filled with rude and immature players that would constantly
taunt and harass us. Thus I set up my own bnetd server NOT to circumvent
copy protection (all of my friends and I had already played on BattleNet,
and therefore all had legal, purchased copies of your game), but to
escape the BattleNet "culture" which we found utterly dissuaded us from
wanting to play your excellent game.
When bnetd worked so well for us that we were able to play with complete
reliability and privacy and to keep our own custom rankings and to
display those rankings on a custom web scoreboard, I decided to check if
it had starcraft support. As it turned out, it had just been added. My
friends and I were ecstatic. We all went out and bought starcraft (you
heard me right, we BOUGHT IT. WE gave YOU money for it), and played it
for many many months. We also BOUGHT BroodWar, which is still my pick for
best thought out extension to any game.
Now I read that your are trying to shut down bnetd because (and I quote
from your own site): "Servers that emulate Battle.net facilitate software
piracy of Blizzard products by circumventing Blizzard's authentication
code. Blizzard products are intellectual property, and we are well within
our legal rights to protect our products from software piracy."
First, I have seen first hand how little your so called "authentication
code" is worth. The one time I tried to log into BattleNet with my NEWLY
PURCHASED copy of StarCraft, I was unable to, being told there was already
someone who had registered my ID number. Tech support explained to me
that there was a tool that allowed crackers to generate these IDs randomly
and that someone must have generated my ID before I logged on. In this
case it would seem that even your proprietary BattleNet is doing a poor
job at preventing piracy. Maybe you should spend your efforts going after
the people who make these IDs available rather than bnetd which,
as I have stated above, has many many uses as a legitimate tool and, for
me, justified the purchase of three Blizzard games.
Second, there is no reason what so ever that you could not "authenticate"
purchased copies of blizzard games through some means other than
BattleNet. You could set up a second on-line authentication service apart
from BattleNet. You could require the key to install the game (I think
you already do this, don't you? Maybe the fact that keys seem to be so
readily available to crackers makes this a useless authentication method?
Maybe you need to create better keys?) That you rely on BattleNet, an
supposedly optional, take-it-or-leave-it, unnecessary "feature" of your
games, to authenticate purchased blizzard games is poor design on your
part and should not be used as an excuse to punish those who have made
your products into something enjoyable (for me at least, for the reasons
stated above).
Finally, no one is doubting that you are "well within your legal
rights" to protect your intellectual property. None would argue that
piracy is bad and that it hurts you as a game company. But you have NO
right to prosecute a group that has spent a large amount of time and
energy reverse engineering NOT your authentication code (it would be
whoever made the key generator that did that), but a product that YOU
DERIVE NO PROFIT FROM WHATSOEVER (BattleNet is free of charge. It says so
on the box of EVERY game you sell). Not only is this kind of persecution
tantamount to playground bullying (you have money for lawyers, the bnetd
developers do not), and not only does it stain the name of Blizzard in the
hearts of gamers around the world, making us think of you as fascist,
money grubbing, double-speaking, un-fun, corporate drones, but this legal
action you are taking effectively removes the one reason I had to play
your games.
I was looking forward to WarCraft III. I don't know if I would have used
BattleNet or bnetd to play it, but that issue is now a moot point for
me. My morality will no longer let me support Blizzard unless they cease
this prosecution of the bnetd team and issue a formal apology on the
Blizzard and/or BattleNet website. I would call for all gamers to join me
in this boycott.
I am cross-posting this letter to slashdot.org, penny-arcade.com, all of
the rec.games.blizzard news group sites, and any gaming magazine or
website that will print it. I grant the right and fully encourage anyone
who reads this to distribute it in any way that they can.
Xft is a simple library designed to interface the FreeType rasterizer with the X Rendering Extension.
FreeType is a software font engine that can be used in graphics libraries, display servers, font conversion tools, text image generation tools, etc. to produce high quality glyphs and characters. The important thing here is that FreeType supports Adobe Type1 and TrueType (that is, Windows) scalable fonts.
the X Rendering Extension is a protocol that represents a new way to render (that is, draw) stuff on your screen in X windows.
thus, Xft's incorporation into Mozilla gives us smooth, high quality, Windows compatible fonts while surfing the web on Linux or *BSD
[1] This is a fine world that we live in, where I can find a website devoted to the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
It is a fine world that we live in, where CNN credits/. for correcting thier ignorance.
Since publication of this story, CNN and other media have been criticized for falling for a clear hoax. According to popular technical web site slashdot.org the story is full of holes.
Never thought I'd ever see/. mentioned on CNN two years ago.
If there were a way to mod up that Cringely article, I would. Actually, I'm tired of only having Cringely in a slashbox. CowboyNeal, there needs to be a new option that lets me overwrite Katz's "Features" with whatever article happens to be on the Pulpit that week.
Oh! You're right! I missed that you could have 18 people play at once. Now that's massive!:)
Seriously, if action takes place with limited number of people (which is to say: some number less than you can cram onto the server) it's not massively multi-player, It's just multi-player.
Sure, if you're not actually playing you can wander around looking for someone to play with. But in that case the world just becomes a big lobby. It doesn't matter how many people you can interact with in the lobby, because you're not playing. In that case, it's not massively multi-player, it's just massively multi.
By definition you need to have all three of these elements (thousands of people, together at the same time, actually playing a game) for something to be massively multi-player. It's not like this is an unrealistic goal. It's been done several times already. But it's clear from this article that this is not the direction that Square is taking.
How is this massively multi-player? It's barely even multi-player. Like Phanasy Star on-line, FFXI looks like it will only let you have a limited number of players (those on your "team") on the screen at any given time. This, in effect, is just letting you play with three buddies on-line rather than forcing you to have a multi-tap and three extra controllers. Any comparison between this type of ORPG and a MMPORPG like everquest or ultima on-line (where EVERYBODY who's playing can interact and fight and not just the few on your team) seems ignorant to me.
Slashdot Mirror
There aren't many of us, but open source composers do exist.
It's interesting, because I think in many ways, OS music composition still reflects the more early (idealistic?) days of OS programming. The entry price to make good sounding music is still steep. There's no OS DAW that I know of that can do what you need one to do, and music production still relies heavily on hardware, both to mix sound and to generate sound (thought this is changing!). So the people you get donating the stuff they write without a thought to recouping the monetary investment they've made are passionate about music and the community. Sharing the music is its own reward, as it were.
And there's demand. Now a person starting up an OS project has to have a muse. They have to have an idea that hasn't been done. But back in the early days of GNU, it wasn't so much of a question. It was like "We don't cp or ls yet. Work on that." or "emacs doesn't read email yet. Clearly it must before it can be considered complete."
That's still the state of things in OS music -- there's still that need. The community provides the inspiration for you and you just bang out a(n elegant and awe-inspiring) musical representation of it. I know many digital composers that, when hard up for new ideas for their own stuff, take gratis commissions or other free work just to get the juices flowing.
At any rate, if your game needs music, drop me a line. I may be able to hook you up. skiaatskiadotnet
Seriously, Ogg has not been "designed to completely replace all proprietary, patented audio formats". It was designed to provide similar performance patent-encumbered and DRM-crippled lossy audio compression formats such as mp3. It clearly can't "replace" mp3 until it has the market drive and support behind it that mp3 has (see above comment re: ogg and iPods).
Also, Ogg has no business replacing lossless audio formats such as wav, aiff, and SDII.
Don't know if it's what the poster was originally talking about, but this went past the pages of freshmeat's new OS X section mentioned on /. a few days ago.
Eek. Maybe I've watched too much Alien or played too much StarCraft, but you couldn't pay me enough money to be the first person back on a space station that's been abandoned for a year or more.
You know how weird your house feels after being away for two weeks on vacation? Now imagine "two weeks" is actually "a year" and "your house" is actually "your house that's been drifting aimlessly in the cold blackness of space".
Cut and pasted from half.com:
"If you like MAC OS X Developer's Guide you may also enjoy:
Bridget Jones's Diary
Hardcover, 1998
Helen Fielding
$3.75 (Save $19.20)
At Home in Mitford
Paperback, 1996
Jan Karon
$1.00 (Save $11.95)
The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing
Hardcover Textbook, 1999
Melissa Bank, Melissa Banks
$2.25 (Save $21.70)"
For one thing, you listing FOX as one of the non-conspiracy-rag news agencies scares me ;-)
On another topic, you bring up an interesting point on how it's not our gov't that censors the media, but the media itself. There's also a post below that talks about how Canada's papers are owned my two men who can say what is and isn't printed (that sounds quite unreal to me... is that true?).
But even if this is the case, it's important to remember that this has nothing to do with "freedom of the press". Say there is only one agent of the press in this nation. That reporter would write the only news any of us read, and in all likelihood it would be a pretty biased account of what was going on. But is that reporter free to report on whatever he/she likes?
As long as it's the case that a reporter can investigate whatever whim comes to him/her, that reporter is free and freedom of the press is maintained.
If there is only one story or one point of view covered by the press (due to bias, competition, compensation, &c.), but officers of the press are in theory free to investigate whatever stories they like, the fault is not in a nation's freedom of press, but with the nation's lack of diversity in reputable news sources.
Is the US guilty of this? Yes, I think it is -- mostly for the reasons you list above. And really, when it comes down to it, this is the type of thing that the US is notorious for. We have freedom of speech, but we get Howard Stern. We have freedom of press, but we get the Enquirer.
Still, I'd much rather be accused of not fulfilling the potential of a principal than be accused of not defending the rights that principal grants.
Once you have LAWS to enforce what should be a MORAL issue, you remove all chance for morality to blossom there. All moral discussion is replaced by a discussion of the letter of the law.
Discussions on morality can be had by everyone. Discussions on the letter of the law can only be had effectively by lawyers. Who has more/better/costlier lawyers, Hollywood or me?
Now tell me how codifying rights management in the law books would work out in my/the public's best interests.
Not only does the SMBdie app not work at all for win9x boxes, but of the 4 win 2000, two win XP, and 1 win.NET boxes I tested it on, it failed with a "f#@$, this box is not vulnerable" error. I'm glad to see my machines aren't (easily) crashable, but this also casts doubt as to the credulity of the claims that that this truly is an exploit, or that Microsoft is indeed at fault at all.
Have we come to the point where we're making up Windows exploits to make MS look bad? A kind of back-at-ya FUD? I would have thought that there were enough genuine exploits to go around.
Spirited Away is not the highest grosing film in Japan. It's the highest grosing JAPANESE film in japan.
I misread this and spent half an hour looking for details on when and how Apple decided to let 10.1 users upgrade to jaguare for nothing :)
Maya PLE requires a 3-buton mouse. Not made by apple, but not exactly weak sause either.
Damn you /.! You lonegunmaned the keynote for me!!
Just think, anyone who buys an old box of OS X off the shelf (or anyone who boots into pre-installed OS X for the first time from OS 9) is going to be confronted with the flashy welcome screen asking them something like "Wouldn't you really like to get a mac.com email address? After all, it's FREE!"
Of course it's not anymore. What will happen if the users click OK? Will they get a message box that says "Just Kidding"?
I don't deny that there are many IDEAS for splash screens out there. Hell, I've whipped up one or two of my own in gimp. But lets say I want to USE one of those spashscreens that I find with the above google search? What do I do? As far as I've gathered from the bug in my original posting, it requires a recompile of the source!?!
Please correct me if I'm wrong. Anyway, if the way for users to implement their own spashscreens is to get the source and compile it with their own image... well that's not much of a solution. That doesn't even rank as a workaround.
I'm a big mozilla fan, but to be forking for 1.0 and still have no splash screen or icons? And this stuff isn't even themeable, so the usual suspects can't help us.
This is the kind of stuff closed-source people are laughing at. Why can't the Moz team get this together??
What I purchased was the WarCraft II Battle Chest. It came with the expansion ("beyond the black portal"??) and some stratagy guides. Perhaps it also included the WCII B.net edition you speak of? I don't remember installing anything special, but I may be mistaken.
From: Josh Emmons
To: sales@blizzard.com, support@blizzard.com
Subject: Regarding bnetd...
I have been a long time Blizzard supporter. I own (yes, that's right OWN, not pirate) every Blizzard game since Warcraft II. My friends and I played WarCraft II for a while on BattleNet, but eventually stopped way before the release of Starcraft because the server was slow, unreliable, and generally filled with rude and immature players that would constantly taunt and harass us. Thus I set up my own bnetd server NOT to circumvent copy protection (all of my friends and I had already played on BattleNet, and therefore all had legal, purchased copies of your game), but to escape the BattleNet "culture" which we found utterly dissuaded us from wanting to play your excellent game.
When bnetd worked so well for us that we were able to play with complete reliability and privacy and to keep our own custom rankings and to display those rankings on a custom web scoreboard, I decided to check if it had starcraft support. As it turned out, it had just been added. My friends and I were ecstatic. We all went out and bought starcraft (you heard me right, we BOUGHT IT. WE gave YOU money for it), and played it for many many months. We also BOUGHT BroodWar, which is still my pick for best thought out extension to any game.
Now I read that your are trying to shut down bnetd because (and I quote from your own site): "Servers that emulate Battle.net facilitate software piracy of Blizzard products by circumventing Blizzard's authentication code. Blizzard products are intellectual property, and we are well within our legal rights to protect our products from software piracy."
First, I have seen first hand how little your so called "authentication code" is worth. The one time I tried to log into BattleNet with my NEWLY PURCHASED copy of StarCraft, I was unable to, being told there was already someone who had registered my ID number. Tech support explained to me that there was a tool that allowed crackers to generate these IDs randomly and that someone must have generated my ID before I logged on. In this case it would seem that even your proprietary BattleNet is doing a poor job at preventing piracy. Maybe you should spend your efforts going after the people who make these IDs available rather than bnetd which, as I have stated above, has many many uses as a legitimate tool and, for me, justified the purchase of three Blizzard games.
Second, there is no reason what so ever that you could not "authenticate" purchased copies of blizzard games through some means other than BattleNet. You could set up a second on-line authentication service apart from BattleNet. You could require the key to install the game (I think you already do this, don't you? Maybe the fact that keys seem to be so readily available to crackers makes this a useless authentication method? Maybe you need to create better keys?) That you rely on BattleNet, an supposedly optional, take-it-or-leave-it, unnecessary "feature" of your games, to authenticate purchased blizzard games is poor design on your part and should not be used as an excuse to punish those who have made your products into something enjoyable (for me at least, for the reasons stated above).
Finally, no one is doubting that you are "well within your legal rights" to protect your intellectual property. None would argue that piracy is bad and that it hurts you as a game company. But you have NO right to prosecute a group that has spent a large amount of time and energy reverse engineering NOT your authentication code (it would be whoever made the key generator that did that), but a product that YOU DERIVE NO PROFIT FROM WHATSOEVER (BattleNet is free of charge. It says so on the box of EVERY game you sell). Not only is this kind of persecution tantamount to playground bullying (you have money for lawyers, the bnetd developers do not), and not only does it stain the name of Blizzard in the hearts of gamers around the world, making us think of you as fascist, money grubbing, double-speaking, un-fun, corporate drones, but this legal action you are taking effectively removes the one reason I had to play your games.
I was looking forward to WarCraft III. I don't know if I would have used BattleNet or bnetd to play it, but that issue is now a moot point for me. My morality will no longer let me support Blizzard unless they cease this prosecution of the bnetd team and issue a formal apology on the Blizzard and/or BattleNet website. I would call for all gamers to join me in this boycott.
I am cross-posting this letter to slashdot.org, penny-arcade.com, all of the rec.games.blizzard news group sites, and any gaming magazine or website that will print it. I grant the right and fully encourage anyone who reads this to distribute it in any way that they can.
truly,
-Josh Emmons
CONGRATS TACO!!!!!!
Judging from the email she sent accepting, she sounds like quite a girl!
Xft is a simple library designed to interface the FreeType rasterizer with the X Rendering Extension.
FreeType is a software font engine that can be used in graphics libraries, display servers, font conversion tools, text image generation tools, etc. to produce high quality glyphs and characters. The important thing here is that FreeType supports Adobe Type1 and TrueType (that is, Windows) scalable fonts.
the X Rendering Extension is a protocol that represents a new way to render (that is, draw) stuff on your screen in X windows.
thus, Xft's incorporation into Mozilla gives us smooth, high quality, Windows compatible fonts while surfing the web on Linux or *BSD
[1] This is a fine world that we live in, where I can find a website devoted to the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
/. for correcting thier ignorance.
/. mentioned on CNN two years ago.
It is a fine world that we live in, where CNN credits
Since publication of this story, CNN and other media have been criticized for falling for a clear hoax. According to popular technical web site slashdot.org the story is full of holes.
Never thought I'd ever see
You're overlooking the greatest example of the above -- Borland changing it's name back to Borland from "Inprise".
If there were a way to mod up that Cringely article, I would. Actually, I'm tired of only having Cringely in a slashbox. CowboyNeal, there needs to be a new option that lets me overwrite Katz's "Features" with whatever article happens to be on the Pulpit that week.
It is an open-standard protocol for accessing information services.
more can be found here.
Oh! You're right! I missed that you could have 18 people play at once. Now that's massive! :)
Seriously, if action takes place with limited number of people (which is to say: some number less than you can cram onto the server) it's not massively multi-player, It's just multi-player.
Sure, if you're not actually playing you can wander around looking for someone to play with. But in that case the world just becomes a big lobby. It doesn't matter how many people you can interact with in the lobby, because you're not playing. In that case, it's not massively multi-player, it's just massively multi.
By definition you need to have all three of these elements ( thousands of people, together at the same time , actually playing a game) for something to be massively multi-player. It's not like this is an unrealistic goal. It's been done several times already. But it's clear from this article that this is not the direction that Square is taking.
How is this massively multi-player? It's barely even multi-player. Like Phanasy Star on-line, FFXI looks like it will only let you have a limited number of players (those on your "team") on the screen at any given time. This, in effect, is just letting you play with three buddies on-line rather than forcing you to have a multi-tap and three extra controllers. Any comparison between this type of ORPG and a MMPORPG like everquest or ultima on-line (where EVERYBODY who's playing can interact and fight and not just the few on your team) seems ignorant to me.