We could start by mailing the swedish ISP who closed ELOJs web page. Not that it really matters, but whats interesting is that the law suit completely goes against Swedish law, and that the suit contained several demands that in themselves would mean that Scandinavia Online would have to break Swedish law to meet. The suit smells curiously either of disregard of Swedish and International law, or of a completely fake scare-suit. Sweden has recently adapted a personal information integrity law TLAd "PUL", the Personal Informations Law, which prohibits any information about a third person being given out without that persons explicit acceptance of this. So, the suit containing demands for Scandinavia Online to publish the http-logs of ELOJs web page is in fact a request from Mattel for Scandinavia Online to break Swedish law, you see. Furthermore, reverse engineering itself is not a crime in Sweden, and since the buyer of a copy of Cyber Patrol is an OWNER of a LICENSE to that software, that owner has the right to know the contents of the program. Legally. At least in Sweden, and I would assume that Canada and maybe even US law sees things in a similar way. I agree completely with everyone saying that the decryption is a service to the users, and if that also means that it is a disservice against Mattel and its cohorts, then Mattel has some kind of dirt on some of their hands, or perhaps on someone whose hands they are holding. / per edman
No. The list is full of adresses to websites. That information is owned by the sites respectively and not by the publishers of Cyber Patrol. They have compiled that list, but they do not own its contents. Either way, the customer has bought a licence to that information and may do with it almost as he wishes, as long as he can get to it, which he now can.
Actually, I haven't started thinking about the specifics, but what I do know is that this OS architecture is hopeless.
What we would need to do to begin with, is converting the games engine we have finished to work on the platform. Since this was custom made and we still have the programmer, we could just change his platform and feed him his paychecks and that would solve itself. He's a good person.
Other than that, we would need 3D graphics modelling (3DS equiv.), 2D graphics creation and editing (PS5 equiv.), customizable text editing (UltraEdit6-superior) and a nice programming environment (VS6 C++ superior) with standard libs (duh).
Of course, sound drivers would not be a bad thing. Sound engine is one thing, but low-level fiddling is not our ball park and should not be.
A language may not "have" a specific tense as a part of its grammar, but the tense can be expressed. If not by word permutation, then by context or additional words.
Given that the Finnish language was not in the listing of proposed supported language, this leads me to believe that the people behind the UNL project have been on the same track as you are here.
I just don't know.. This whole thing reeks of pointy-haired suitness. For one, we already HAVE an abstracted meta-language unifying people of all tongues and it's called English.
I for one will probably just take the time to simply learn the UNL metalanguage itself to avoid the trouble of people not understanding my grammar.
Do we not have enough misunderstanings in mediums of this sort as it is? People who counter-argue any reasoning with "You probably do not mean what you are saying" or "I do not think I understand what you mean (because I'm trying really hard not to)" will have an easier time than ever evading the issue, saying "It seems we are losing something in the conversion here.. (he he he)"
To wrap this up, I actually think the initiative is good. The outcome is uncertain, but even if translations will be far from perfect, hopefully they will be helpful as long as you aren't picky about your input, and picky about your output, as the saying goes.
That is cosiness. Just like how us Swedes think we have something with the word "lagom" (='about just right', 'close enough'). It, and any other word as well can be approximated within most other languages. The only thing I can really see a problem coming with, just because of the scope of it, is the Inuit mass of words relating to "snow".
Not a day, not an hour and not one minute goes by without me wanting to develop this game for another platform. Preferably Linux, but I would settle for most anything BUT this dreadful Microsoftism that we game developers need to handle in order to gain any kind of marketshare.
Most of you probably have NO idea just how often Windows 98 becomes unstable, crashes or spontaneously reboots when you are running a games application in development. Glide, OpenGL, Direct3D, Directsound and the Windows system itself are ALL crash- and corruption-prone in this platform.
How would you like trying your modifications in runtime and know that you will probably have to restart the computer if your change was a bad idea?
Slashdot Mirror
We could start by mailing the swedish ISP who closed ELOJs web page. Not that it really matters, but whats interesting is that the law suit completely goes against Swedish law, and that the suit contained several demands that in themselves would mean that Scandinavia Online would have to break Swedish law to meet. The suit smells curiously either of disregard of Swedish and International law, or of a completely fake scare-suit. Sweden has recently adapted a personal information integrity law TLAd "PUL", the Personal Informations Law, which prohibits any information about a third person being given out without that persons explicit acceptance of this. So, the suit containing demands for Scandinavia Online to publish the http-logs of ELOJs web page is in fact a request from Mattel for Scandinavia Online to break Swedish law, you see. Furthermore, reverse engineering itself is not a crime in Sweden, and since the buyer of a copy of Cyber Patrol is an OWNER of a LICENSE to that software, that owner has the right to know the contents of the program. Legally. At least in Sweden, and I would assume that Canada and maybe even US law sees things in a similar way. I agree completely with everyone saying that the decryption is a service to the users, and if that also means that it is a disservice against Mattel and its cohorts, then Mattel has some kind of dirt on some of their hands, or perhaps on someone whose hands they are holding. / per edman
No. The list is full of adresses to websites. That information is owned by the sites respectively and not by the publishers of Cyber Patrol. They have compiled that list, but they do not own its contents. Either way, the customer has bought a licence to that information and may do with it almost as he wishes, as long as he can get to it, which he now can.
Is that an offer? ;-)
Actually, I haven't started thinking about the specifics, but what I do know is that this OS architecture is hopeless.
What we would need to do to begin with, is converting the games engine we have finished to work on the platform. Since this was custom made and we still have the programmer, we could just change his platform and feed him his paychecks and that would solve itself. He's a good person.
Other than that, we would need 3D graphics modelling (3DS equiv.), 2D graphics creation and editing (PS5 equiv.), customizable text editing (UltraEdit6-superior) and a nice programming environment (VS6 C++ superior) with standard libs (duh).
Of course, sound drivers would not be a bad thing. Sound engine is one thing, but low-level fiddling is not our ball park and should not be.
/ per
A language may not "have" a specific tense as a part of its grammar, but the tense can be expressed. If not by word permutation, then by context or additional words.
/ per
Given that the Finnish language was not in the listing of proposed supported language, this leads me to believe that the people behind the UNL project have been on the same track as you are here.
I just don't know.. This whole thing reeks of pointy-haired suitness. For one, we already HAVE an abstracted meta-language unifying people of all tongues and it's called English.
I for one will probably just take the time to simply learn the UNL metalanguage itself to avoid the trouble of people not understanding my grammar.
Do we not have enough misunderstanings in mediums of this sort as it is? People who counter-argue any reasoning with "You probably do not mean what you are saying" or "I do not think I understand what you mean (because I'm trying really hard not to)" will have an easier time than ever evading the issue, saying "It seems we are losing something in the conversion here.. (he he he)"
To wrap this up, I actually think the initiative is good. The outcome is uncertain, but even if translations will be far from perfect, hopefully they will be helpful as long as you aren't picky about your input, and picky about your output, as the saying goes.
/ per
That is cosiness. Just like how us Swedes think we have something with the word "lagom" (='about just right', 'close enough'). It, and any other word as well can be approximated within most other languages. The only thing I can really see a problem coming with, just because of the scope of it, is the Inuit mass of words relating to "snow".
Most of you probably have NO idea just how often Windows 98 becomes unstable, crashes or spontaneously reboots when you are running a games application in development. Glide, OpenGL, Direct3D, Directsound and the Windows system itself are ALL crash- and corruption-prone in this platform.
How would you like trying your modifications in runtime and know that you will probably have to restart the computer if your change was a bad idea?
I'm just glad I still have most of my hair!
/ per