Java, or link to the Cygwin library. The latter gives you a kind of POSIX API wrapper for your windows applications. So you can use POSIX threads and IPC stuff if you want. I'm not sure how efficient that is though, or how stable the general Cygwin API is.
So this legal issue works just like with emulator BIOS files. In order for some emulators to work, you need the system's firmware (Playstation, Amiga, Gameboy Advance), which is copyrighted and isn't bundled. If you acquire it from your device yourself, you're in the green however.
So.. nothing new here.
No, there is no difference. And no it isn't stealing; it is copyright infringement and you know that, so why use that stupid analogy?
Still I think OSS software abuse is slightly more serious than private filesharing, notably because OSS software makers rarely make any money from their work. Licensees honouring the license is their "pay for the effort" sort to speak.
Abiding by an OSS license doesn't cost you a dime. Only a bit of extra effort and the occasional e-mail/snailmail received or webserver bandwidth in the case of GPL, or simply making sure that header files are intact for MIT/BSD variants.
That's why I put OSS 'freeloaders' even lower than people who infringe copyright by downloading songs/movies/games. In my opinion stealing someones acknowledgement/due credit is way more insulting than causing a potential lost sale.
But this is absolute madness, Ambassador! Why should you build such a thing?
<Ambassador de Sadesky: > There were those of us who fought against it, but in the end we could not keep up with the expense involved in the arms race, the space race, and the peace race. At the same time our people grumbled for more nylons and washing machines. Our doomsday scheme cost us just a small fraction of what we had been spending on defense in a single year. The deciding factor was when we learned that your country was working along similar lines, and we were afraid of a doomsday gap.
<President Merkin Muffley: > This is preposterous. I've never approved of anything like that.
<Ambassador de Sadesky: > Our source was the New York Times.
<Dr. Strangelove: > Based on the findings of the report, my conclusion was that this idea was not a practical deterrent for reasons which at this moment must be all too obvious.
Creator's Club is simply nothing like the OtherOS support Sony had. One is for developing XNA framework games and selling them on Xbox Live, the other is for turning your PS3 into a slightly gimped Linux box (gimped as in no direct access to GPU). They're targeted at completely different people and don't even serve remotely the same purpose.
I second this. Not to mention that the Creators Club subscription costs money, and is needed in order to debug and upload applications to the XBox360. While installing Linux on the PS3 is completely free with no strings attached.
Say goodbye to a lot of software inventions. Why should other fields of technology enjoy patent protection, but not software?
The idea of being able to patent algorithms or mathematical equations is preposterous, no matter how obvious the algorithm is or not.
Code belongs under copyright, not patents. I like to play around with code and math *without* worrying about infringing patents.
Protect the implementation, fine. But leave the concept free for everyone.
Bush was a huge asshat who increased the size of government and spent like a drunken sailor. Screw him. But if you are pissed at Bush for his poor policies, how can you turn around and embrace Obama who has already outspent Bush in just 6 months?
IIRC, Bush happened to spend money on two needless wars, unless you think revenge was a fair motive.
Obama on the other hand got a recession to take care of just when he entered office. You think those two events can be compared directly and fairly when it comes to government spending?
I hope what you just wrote was a joke. In that case, disregard this post.
Just about the only thing I can immediately think of that should be GPL is standard libraries for a programming language (C++ STL for example).
I doubt you understand the consequences of your preposition. The C++ standard library is based on templates, so you can't link dynamically to it. Translation units need the whole template definition and declaration in order to successfully instantiate an object or function based on a templated type. If this was the case, all code which used your C++ standard library implementation would have to be
released under GPL. Not even LGPL would work here. This is why even GNU does an exception for their implementations of libc and C++ libraries.
People talk about "code freedom". It seems ridiculous (to me) for code to have freedom. What about my freedom? If I make something awesome with a library that is GPL and I'm feeling altruistic, I can't let people sell it without distributing source? That's ridiculous.
You don't have an inherent right to use GPL code without abiding to the license conditions any more than you have the right to breach copyright on other works. No one forces GPL down your throat. You can choose not to use it.
If you feel so altruistic, code your own implementation of whatever library you find licensed under GPL and release your code under MIT or BSD.
Re:Now, now, in fairness to Dan Brown
on
Tetraktys
·
· Score: 1
Yeah, Digital Fortress *really* sucked. I mean, it was so dumb and full of flaws I found it insulting. The protagonist (a cryptographer) didn't even understand an obvious anagram clue until the very end of the book. And failing cooling systems made a computer explode. Brown also seems confused regarding the difference between bits and bytes. They also put machines to work on decrypting something without knowing which algorithm to use. It's quite sad.
I couldn't agree more.
Most of my friends who I tried to teach C programming showed a nasty lack of imagination. "What the hell can I do with just the standard library? I can't make GUI windows or fancy graphics!" All but one was put off, even when I gave them pretty decent suggestions.
With just a R/W file handle I've coded raytracers, triangle rasterizers, maze generators, file parsers and miscellaneous effects. The graphics stuff was dumped as a still frame in the TGA format (Targa), or several if it was an animation. Hell, even my ARM emulator can run code with no other dependancies except the C standard libraries. SDL is used for the psuedo-peripherals like audio and displaying the framebuffer, which isn't needed for just running pure code and emulate a communication port.
I assume you have an even larger standard library in Python than in C.
But Killzone 2 is already somewhat laggy in its control system and this impacts the feel of the game still further. While there is a 17 per cent increase in resolution, this is far less noticeable than the additional numbness in the controls.
If this is true, why are console games nowadays still made with coupled game state and graphics state? Any game developer worth his/her salt will decouple game state updates and input polling from the actual rendering. On the Xbox 360 and PS3 you have several cores. Use them by creating hardware threads goddamnit!
Glenn Fiedler wrote a pretty decent (though a bit dumbed down) article about this years ago: Fix your timestep
In the old days of Atari/NES/SNES/SEGA MS/SEGA Genesis, this was less common due to the nature of the development environment. Interrupts for vertical blanks and horisontal blanks were used for timing (instead of an RTC) and for frame-based effects.
Yeah, I also agree that five years is way too short. However, with a shorter copyright protection, (say 12 - 20 years) I'd say GPL lose some of its meaning, as works *would* enter the public domain after that period and hopefully not be outdated. With the current status quo of 70 years after the author's death, it is not the case. Sure, works in the public domain is not the same freedom as Stallman advocates, and I guess that's exactly what he is concerned about. Since proprietary software makers rarely release the source code, one could claim that copyright as it works today treats GPL unfairly compared to proprietary code. There is no enforcement to release software when the copyright expires. It's simply available or "lost".
I strongly disagree.
First off, you write C++ the moment your code is C++ standard compliant. C++ is a multi-purpose language, almost like a swiss army knife. People have different styles, and there are tons of ways to approach one single problem. Just because one is reluctant to use inheritance, RTTI and other features doesn't make ones code less C++'ish. I use C++ mostly for template and procedural programming, but I do use other features when they make the most sense as a solution.
"If you don't use keyword/language semantic X, then you don't really *use* the language" is utter crap. Sorry.
Second, your claim that you can avoid buffer overflows is theoretical at best. You don't seem to take performance into account. Sure, some people have the luxury to check the ranges in the overloaded subscript operator and throw std::out_of_range exceptions when something bad happens, but that's far from everyone. C++ is often a choice because of its performance.
Third, removing support for old-fashion arrays would make C++ much harder to use on embedded platforms which are short on memory and/or have no memory allocation scheme. If you then have to write a custom allocator, nothing is gained. And why use vector when all you need is a fixed-size array as automatic storage. The construction overhead of a vector is rarely a problem compared to a old-fashioned array, but it can be.
Not much. With timed napalm bombs strapped to their bodies however: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bat_bomb
One of the more obscure (but still awesome) weapons made during the second world war.
In the later years in Counter-Strike, (when they went retail) some wiseguys made their own rules regarding what was allowed settings for the client network configuration, which they simply coined as "rates", claiming that lower settings made players more difficult to hit thus gaining an advantage. This had of course no merit what so ever, but it didn't stop this totally laughable rule to become a dogma in the community. "Fix your rates!", or "Your rates are wrong, you cheat!" became clichès in the ingame chat. Another similar claim without any merit was that using a 16-bit color depth did alpha blending differently compared to 32-bit true color, thus letting players see better through smoke from smoke grenades. This also gained a following. And let us not forget the made up rules regarding overpowered weapons like the AWP rifle. A lot of servers banned it alltogether, or capped it with metamod plugins, so only one player on each team could have one. And while they were at it, the majority of servers started kicking clients with more than 90 ms latency, even if the game played fine with up to 250 ms. This happened even before the "rate" rule gained popularity.
What I mean to demonstrate with these examples is that if a game purposely let me set configurate settings to my liking or use a certain tactic or strategy as a part of the game, I don't care jack shit what made up rules a community has. I play my games as intended by the gameplay. The fact that CS gamers don't know what they talked about, only helps fuel my hopelessness I feel for the community.
If you are fed up with actual exploits, file a bug report. If you think a game mechanic is cheap, work around it, or don't play the game at all. Don't impose restrictions on others. It confuses newcomers and makes the game rules overly complex.
P.S The online community I played on was Norway/Europe. I don't know if this spread to other server regions.
Why the heck didn't you just buy one copy and use the Spawn install feature?
The fact that one could play up to eight people in multiplayer by using just one CD, was one of the big selling points of Starcraft in my honest opinion.
copy(alist.begin(), alist.end(), std::ostream_iterator(cout));
Not to mention std::for_each and std::transform from.
Probably just me, but I find your C++ example code slightly unfair.
..It's a kernel. The different distributions are operative systems. Here's a list of distros: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Linux_distributions
Yes, that is a lot of distros, and the very reason why simply reaching consensus on which APIs to use won't work and is against the whole point with the Linux kernel in the first place. Because there is not even a potential lowest common denominator for all of them. The only one thing Linux distros have in common is a version of the kernel. That is a slight exaggeration, but not too far from the truth. Again, this is one of Linux strengths, not weaknesses. Anyone can start their own distro, given enough persistency and time. Making client software which supports all the different distros is hard if not downright impossible, and not worth the hassle in my opinion.
Doing what a lot of people do here and ask for a streamlined API across distros limits people's freedom, and misunderstands what Linux is. If you want to support "Linux", go for the big ones, Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora and Redhat. If you want to support the more obscure ones, then don't complain about too much choice, it makes you look like an idiot.
Who ever complained that Mac and Windows have different ABIs, APIs and kernels?
Maybe the price point has nothing to do with it. Speaking from myself, I know that I expect *some* minimum quality standard for computer, phone and console games, in particular length, replayability and how fun it is. If it doesn't live up to that, the price point is irrelevant. Neither would I fight over the difference between 1 USD or 10 USD. If a game fails to live up to my expectations, it could be free and I would still not waste time on it.
So next time, perhaps you would benefit from making the game a bit longer, and selling it for 10 bucks instead?
I have a few of the refurbished classics on Xbox Live Arcade, and the graphics look washed out. I don't know what they use for filtering in for example Street Fighter II, but I guess it's billinear. It looks absolutely horrible. When you use sprites, you need one version made for each resolution, in my opinion. Simple using linear interpolation on it, is sloppy work and removes details like edges. I also believe that the pixelated look which these old games had due to the low resolution, is a part of the overall graphics theme. Using texture filtering does neither give a good approximation for TV scanlines, nor for low resolutions. Either go for a faithful replication of the original, or adjust the artwork to today's resolutions without using lazy upscaling tricks.
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Java, or link to the Cygwin library. The latter gives you a kind of POSIX API wrapper for your windows applications. So you can use POSIX threads and IPC stuff if you want. I'm not sure how efficient that is though, or how stable the general Cygwin API is.
Yes, and more safe (less certain) for those who can't do simple arithmetic ;-)
So this legal issue works just like with emulator BIOS files. In order for some emulators to work, you need the system's firmware (Playstation, Amiga, Gameboy Advance), which is copyrighted and isn't bundled. If you acquire it from your device yourself, you're in the green however.
So.. nothing new here.
No, there is no difference. And no it isn't stealing; it is copyright infringement and you know that, so why use that stupid analogy?
Still I think OSS software abuse is slightly more serious than private filesharing, notably because OSS software makers rarely make any money from their work. Licensees honouring the license is their "pay for the effort" sort to speak.
Abiding by an OSS license doesn't cost you a dime. Only a bit of extra effort and the occasional e-mail/snailmail received or webserver bandwidth in the case of GPL, or simply making sure that header files are intact for MIT/BSD variants.
That's why I put OSS 'freeloaders' even lower than people who infringe copyright by downloading songs/movies/games. In my opinion stealing someones acknowledgement/due credit is way more insulting than causing a potential lost sale.
But this is absolute madness, Ambassador! Why should you build such a thing?
<Ambassador de Sadesky: > There were those of us who fought against it, but in the end we could not keep up with the expense involved in the arms race, the space race, and the peace race. At the same time our people grumbled for more nylons and washing machines. Our doomsday scheme cost us just a small fraction of what we had been spending on defense in a single year. The deciding factor was when we learned that your country was working along similar lines, and we were afraid of a doomsday gap.
<President Merkin Muffley: > This is preposterous. I've never approved of anything like that.
<Ambassador de Sadesky: > Our source was the New York Times.
<Dr. Strangelove: > Based on the findings of the report, my conclusion was that this idea was not a practical deterrent for reasons which at this moment must be all too obvious.
[citation needed]
Creator's Club is simply nothing like the OtherOS support Sony had. One is for developing XNA framework games and selling them on Xbox Live, the other is for turning your PS3 into a slightly gimped Linux box (gimped as in no direct access to GPU). They're targeted at completely different people and don't even serve remotely the same purpose.
I second this. Not to mention that the Creators Club subscription costs money, and is needed in order to debug and upload applications to the XBox360. While installing Linux on the PS3 is completely free with no strings attached.
Say goodbye to a lot of software inventions. Why should other fields of technology enjoy patent protection, but not software?
The idea of being able to patent algorithms or mathematical equations is preposterous, no matter how obvious the algorithm is or not. Code belongs under copyright, not patents. I like to play around with code and math *without* worrying about infringing patents.
Protect the implementation, fine. But leave the concept free for everyone.
Bush was a huge asshat who increased the size of government and spent like a drunken sailor. Screw him. But if you are pissed at Bush for his poor policies, how can you turn around and embrace Obama who has already outspent Bush in just 6 months?
IIRC, Bush happened to spend money on two needless wars, unless you think revenge was a fair motive. Obama on the other hand got a recession to take care of just when he entered office. You think those two events can be compared directly and fairly when it comes to government spending?
That's true, and is due to the Halting problem: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem
Just about the only thing I can immediately think of that should be GPL is standard libraries for a programming language (C++ STL for example).
I doubt you understand the consequences of your preposition. The C++ standard library is based on templates, so you can't link dynamically to it. Translation units need the whole template definition and declaration in order to successfully instantiate an object or function based on a templated type. If this was the case, all code which used your C++ standard library implementation would have to be released under GPL. Not even LGPL would work here. This is why even GNU does an exception for their implementations of libc and C++ libraries.
People talk about "code freedom". It seems ridiculous (to me) for code to have freedom. What about my freedom? If I make something awesome with a library that is GPL and I'm feeling altruistic, I can't let people sell it without distributing source? That's ridiculous.
You don't have an inherent right to use GPL code without abiding to the license conditions any more than you have the right to breach copyright on other works. No one forces GPL down your throat. You can choose not to use it. If you feel so altruistic, code your own implementation of whatever library you find licensed under GPL and release your code under MIT or BSD.
Yeah, Digital Fortress *really* sucked. I mean, it was so dumb and full of flaws I found it insulting. The protagonist (a cryptographer) didn't even understand an obvious anagram clue until the very end of the book. And failing cooling systems made a computer explode. Brown also seems confused regarding the difference between bits and bytes. They also put machines to work on decrypting something without knowing which algorithm to use. It's quite sad.
I couldn't agree more.
Most of my friends who I tried to teach C programming showed a nasty lack of imagination. "What the hell can I do with just the standard library? I can't make GUI windows or fancy graphics!" All but one was put off, even when I gave them pretty decent suggestions.
With just a R/W file handle I've coded raytracers, triangle rasterizers, maze generators, file parsers and miscellaneous effects. The graphics stuff was dumped as a still frame in the TGA format (Targa), or several if it was an animation. Hell, even my ARM emulator can run code with no other dependancies except the C standard libraries. SDL is used for the psuedo-peripherals like audio and displaying the framebuffer, which isn't needed for just running pure code and emulate a communication port.
I assume you have an even larger standard library in Python than in C.
If this is true, why are console games nowadays still made with coupled game state and graphics state? Any game developer worth his/her salt will decouple game state updates and input polling from the actual rendering. On the Xbox 360 and PS3 you have several cores. Use them by creating hardware threads goddamnit!
Glenn Fiedler wrote a pretty decent (though a bit dumbed down) article about this years ago: Fix your timestep
In the old days of Atari/NES/SNES/SEGA MS/SEGA Genesis, this was less common due to the nature of the development environment. Interrupts for vertical blanks and horisontal blanks were used for timing (instead of an RTC) and for frame-based effects.
Yeah, I also agree that five years is way too short. However, with a shorter copyright protection, (say 12 - 20 years) I'd say GPL lose some of its meaning, as works *would* enter the public domain after that period and hopefully not be outdated. With the current status quo of 70 years after the author's death, it is not the case. Sure, works in the public domain is not the same freedom as Stallman advocates, and I guess that's exactly what he is concerned about.
Since proprietary software makers rarely release the source code, one could claim that copyright as it works today treats GPL unfairly compared to proprietary code. There is no enforcement to release software when the copyright expires. It's simply available or "lost".
I strongly disagree.
First off, you write C++ the moment your code is C++ standard compliant. C++ is a multi-purpose language, almost like a swiss army knife. People have different styles, and there are tons of ways to approach one single problem. Just because one is reluctant to use inheritance, RTTI and other features doesn't make ones code less C++'ish. I use C++ mostly for template and procedural programming, but I do use other features when they make the most sense as a solution.
"If you don't use keyword/language semantic X, then you don't really *use* the language" is utter crap. Sorry.
Second, your claim that you can avoid buffer overflows is theoretical at best. You don't seem to take performance into account. Sure, some people have the luxury to check the ranges in the overloaded subscript operator and throw std::out_of_range exceptions when something bad happens, but that's far from everyone. C++ is often a choice because of its performance.
Third, removing support for old-fashion arrays would make C++ much harder to use on embedded platforms which are short on memory and/or have no memory allocation scheme. If you then have to write a custom allocator, nothing is gained. And why use vector when all you need is a fixed-size array as automatic storage. The construction overhead of a vector is rarely a problem compared to a old-fashioned array, but it can be.
Not much. With timed napalm bombs strapped to their bodies however: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bat_bomb One of the more obscure (but still awesome) weapons made during the second world war.
In the later years in Counter-Strike, (when they went retail) some wiseguys made their own rules regarding what was allowed settings for the client network configuration, which they simply coined as "rates", claiming that lower settings made players more difficult to hit thus gaining an advantage. This had of course no merit what so ever, but it didn't stop this totally laughable rule to become a dogma in the community. "Fix your rates!", or "Your rates are wrong, you cheat!" became clichès in the ingame chat. Another similar claim without any merit was that using a 16-bit color depth did alpha blending differently compared to 32-bit true color, thus letting players see better through smoke from smoke grenades. This also gained a following. And let us not forget the made up rules regarding overpowered weapons like the AWP rifle. A lot of servers banned it alltogether, or capped it with metamod plugins, so only one player on each team could have one. And while they were at it, the majority of servers started kicking clients with more than 90 ms latency, even if the game played fine with up to 250 ms. This happened even before the "rate" rule gained popularity.
What I mean to demonstrate with these examples is that if a game purposely let me set configurate settings to my liking or use a certain tactic or strategy as a part of the game, I don't care jack shit what made up rules a community has. I play my games as intended by the gameplay. The fact that CS gamers don't know what they talked about, only helps fuel my hopelessness I feel for the community.
If you are fed up with actual exploits, file a bug report. If you think a game mechanic is cheap, work around it, or don't play the game at all. Don't impose restrictions on others. It confuses newcomers and makes the game rules overly complex.
P.S The online community I played on was Norway/Europe. I don't know if this spread to other server regions.
Why the heck didn't you just buy one copy and use the Spawn install feature?
The fact that one could play up to eight people in multiplayer by using just one CD, was one of the big selling points of Starcraft in my honest opinion.
Eh.. I used HTML in the last post, so "" didn't show up due to the . My bad.
copy(alist.begin(), alist.end(), std::ostream_iterator(cout)); .
Not to mention std::for_each and std::transform from
Probably just me, but I find your C++ example code slightly unfair.
..It's a kernel. The different distributions are operative systems. Here's a list of distros: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Linux_distributions
Yes, that is a lot of distros, and the very reason why simply reaching consensus on which APIs to use won't work and is against the whole point with the Linux kernel in the first place. Because there is not even a potential lowest common denominator for all of them. The only one thing Linux distros have in common is a version of the kernel. That is a slight exaggeration, but not too far from the truth. Again, this is one of Linux strengths, not weaknesses. Anyone can start their own distro, given enough persistency and time. Making client software which supports all the different distros is hard if not downright impossible, and not worth the hassle in my opinion.
Doing what a lot of people do here and ask for a streamlined API across distros limits people's freedom, and misunderstands what Linux is. If you want to support "Linux", go for the big ones, Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora and Redhat. If you want to support the more obscure ones, then don't complain about too much choice, it makes you look like an idiot.
Who ever complained that Mac and Windows have different ABIs, APIs and kernels?
Maybe the price point has nothing to do with it.
Speaking from myself, I know that I expect *some* minimum quality standard for computer, phone and console games, in particular length, replayability and how fun it is. If it doesn't live up to that, the price point is irrelevant. Neither would I fight over the difference between 1 USD or 10 USD. If a game fails to live up to my expectations, it could be free and I would still not waste time on it.
So next time, perhaps you would benefit from making the game a bit longer, and selling it for 10 bucks instead?
Speaking of which, Dark Colony (1997) comes to mind: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Colony Fun to play, but not much diversity to speak of.
I have a few of the refurbished classics on Xbox Live Arcade, and the graphics look washed out.
I don't know what they use for filtering in for example Street Fighter II, but I guess it's billinear. It looks absolutely horrible.
When you use sprites, you need one version made for each resolution, in my opinion. Simple using linear interpolation on it, is sloppy work and removes details like edges. I also believe that the pixelated look which these old games had due to the low resolution, is a part of the overall graphics theme. Using texture filtering does neither give a good approximation for TV scanlines, nor for low resolutions.
Either go for a faithful replication of the original, or adjust the artwork to today's resolutions without using lazy upscaling tricks.