That's not what he claims; I've seen him (maybe in a Google tech talk?) claim that the parting was mostly amicable. He's also said that Linux is better because of the BK fiasco, since he and others were so much more efficient with it.
I may be wrong, but I vaguely remember Linus being unhappy with Tridgell. That's what I was referring to.
Furthermore, it was only about 40 days from when Linus decided to write git to when he turned it over to Junio Hamano, and a few more months (about 6 from initial start) until 1.0. I'm not sure exactly when they started using it for Linux, but it seems to me that even the lost time creating git wasn't that high.
Of course the whole thing wasn't that critical in the end, things were worked out.
The point I'm trying to make here is that in the end, the purist and pragmatist stances turned out to lead to pretty much the same place. The pragmatist way eventually ran into problems, and things went pretty much the same way the purist way would have probably gone, except with more arguments on the list and more drama.
I don't think things would have been that different without the BK mess. After all, Linus decided to try BK without having used a SCM before. The way I imagine things going is having Linus try say, Mercurial, then its technical issues leading to large improvements or the creation of Git anyway, except perhaps at a more relaxed pace due to a lack of a crisis.
Indeed, purists would have kept Linux using a tool like CVS or SVN because going to a distributed versioning system would have let them to giving up their principles.
I just re-read your comment, and got no clue what you mean by this.
The debate I saw is that Linux should use a Free SCM, to avoid precisely what happened with BitKeeper. I don't remember people speaking against the concept of a distributed SCM and don't see why would they.
IIRC, Mercurial for instance existed back then and was considered, but rejected because performance wasn't good enough.
Linus tried the pragmatic way. It worked for a while. Then it blew up in his face.
So he ended up having to do what the purist way would have required (writing a new SCM if none of the available ones were suitable), except that since events unfolded quite suddenly, there was no time for a smooth transition, and something had to be hacked up fast.
Git is certainly interesting, but I doubt half the people who use it really understand how it works. Maybe if it was started in less a dire situation it could have been more user friendly.
Why a terrible example? Linus had to drop what he was doing and deal with the political mess, and the practical consequences. And he was quite annoyed about it, IIRC.
Granted, something good came out of it, but it's not like SCM development would have stagnated. Even if Git wasn't created, improvements could have been made to existing systems.
For instance, take the whole mess with BitKeeper: The pragmatic option was to use a product with really obnoxious licensing terms, because it was good and worked at the time. Then one day Larry McVoy got really annoyed with Andrew Tridgell, and decided to refuse to even sell licenses to people associated with the OSDL, including Linus Torvalds.
That's the problem, while it works everything seems fine, but when the rug is suddenly pulled from under you, it suddenly creates a lot of complications that get in the way of getting useful things done. I think there's quite a lot of value in making sure that you'll be able to use tomorrow something you're using today.
I'd like to see MS do that, it'd give things to talk about for months.
Do you realize how monumentally stupid would that be? You're really suggesting that MS should throw away half its market share, lay off thousands of employees (disrupting projects in the US), and liquidate huge amounts of inventory over an issue that's a tiny thing in comparison with the consequences of pulling out?
If they did that, the shareholders would crucify whoever was responsible.
Europe wouldn't be that affected. Apple, Red Hat and Novell would throw a huge party, and without MS being present they couldn't defend its copyright, so everybody would just pirate their stuff with impunity.
No, you're the one confusing something. I'm using SL just for the sake of example, because it's something I'm personally familiar with, including licensing-wise.
My point is that yes, linking with random files you find in Windows can get you in trouble, and it's by no means exclusive to the GPL. Proprietary libraries have plenty licensing terms that are much nastier than the GPL, which require for instance to pay royalties. You can't just go and link to that without further consideration.
You can link to OS X libraries because Apple allows you to do so. If you tried to create an application that say, reused one of the libraries found in Photoshop without Adobe consenting to it, you can bet Adobe would be very unhappy about that, and would haul your ass into court.
your software doesn't become the property of Apple, for example.
Your software never becomes the property of anybody else, even if you link with a GPL (and not LGPL) library. What the FSF thinks is that linking with a GPL licensed library without complying with the GPL infringes on the GPL, and without the GPL allowing for distribution, it infringes on the library's copyright. But everybody still owns their own stuff.
For instance, if you take my GPL licensed code and integrate it into your non-GPL application you're not following the terms, and hence infringing on my copyright. But that doesn't make your code mine, and does not give me the ability to relicense your code (as I could if I had the copyright to it).
Some projects like the Linux kernel are all full of pieces of thousands of different copyright holders and effectively can't change the license because nobody owns the whole thing. Bits are owned by many different people, some of which will never consent to a license change, or are dead.
If you do that, it's quite possible you'll end up violating a license or two, yes.
Take a good look at the.ocx and.net libraries you have on your system. It's almost certain that at least a couple of those come from some program that you installed, and that can be only redistributed by the licensee, or require paying royalties.
So yeah, if you link against those, and the company that makes them finds out, you may end up in a lot of legal trouble.
For instance, the Second Life client comes with the Kakadu JPEG 2000 image library. But just because you downloaded SL for free, and that put the kakadu DLL on your system, doesn't mean you can take that library, make an application that uses it and redistribute it. See the license. Linden Labs has paid for Kakadu, but that license isn't transferrable, so it doesn't give you the right to use it.
You really have it good with the GPL, because releasing the source works for fixing the problem. Infringe on Microsoft's copyright and it's very doubtful you'll get away so cheaply. Most likely MS will get an injuction against you, and you'll have to pull your product from sale until the case is decided.
The GPL isn't getting tested because nobody's dumb enough to do so.
The GPL is the only thing that gives anybody the right to redistribute the code. So if for whatever reason the GPL was found not to apply, the code is still copyrighted, and that doesn't give them the right to redistribute somebody else's code. So at that point it turns into a very standard copyright infringement lawsuit.
Mkay, so you fall under the furry-trumpeting-the-praises-of-SL category, then. You wouldn't happen to be the guy with the fox-headed avatar I've seen pictures of in business mags?
Doubtful, unless the fox was blue and wearing a Debian shirt, or futuristic glowing armor.
I'm mostly involved in scripting and modding the SL viewer. I doubt business mags would find me interesting as I don't do anything business related.
SL is just a 3D freeform RP chat room. Don't make it out to be more than it is and there's no problem.
I don't really disagree for the most part, my main objection was to describing SL as a place full of flying dongs. IMO if you're really experiencing that, you're doing something wrong, as there are plenty places in SL that aren't like that. It's just like the rest of the internet, there are many places, not all of them are pleasant, but there are enough of them that you can find something that fits.
I'm not into the whole SL sex thing and like peace and quiet, so I found a place that was like that. I'd say the furriness can be almost considered as an aesthetic preference, as many conversations that happen there have nothing to do with what the people look like.
Case in point, this article: How in the hell is it better training to see a picture of an NPC choking and learn to push "A" to save their life, than it would be to ACTUALLY practice the skills you'd use to save someone's life on a dummy that you can pretend is choking?
The way I understand it, a medical dummy that doesn't just lie there, and actually reacts to what's being done to it, and can simulate choking, is a very complicated and expensive thing. SL isn't near as good as that of course, but it's a lot cheaper. SL also allows for a lot more complexity than "push A to save their life". Now, not being in the field, I can't really say whether this is of much use or not. I visited the schizophrenia simulating room and found it interesting though.
I completely agree that SL has its limitations, but I find it very interesting that people are trying to do things like this. It might not be there yet, but by pushing its limitations we can find what needs to be improved and fix it.
For instance, Google's office web applications were impossible back when the web consisted of static HTML, frames, and a few CGIs. But people pushed against those limits, came up with ideas to work around them, and made things advance. If nobody tried to do anything that was beyond the original scope of the web, it wouldn't have got better.
Like I said, I've been in SL for about 3 years, logging in mostly every day. I mostly hang out in Luskwood.
We've got a large staff of moderators (of which I'm one) that ensure we don't have "flying dongs" (never seen one actually), or "6-foot fox-like creatures with strap-ons" (actually I am a 6 foot fox-like creature, but it's a PG area, so we don't allow strap-ons or anything of the sort).
I've not found it necessary to pay for my own sim. Decent places in SL can be found if you look around a bit. It's just like IRC channels, web forums, or anything else. Many of those are full of annoying people, but there are plenty well managed ones.
My worry is that despite being user-designed and 3-d Second Life is nothing like the real world.
That SL is not RL is kind of the point of it, IMO.
Much like any chatroom or forum, people on SL will say or do anything without fear of repercussions because of the anonymity afforded them
Are you hanging out on/b or something?
There are plenty chats and web forums where there are repercusions, that being that people get banned when they go over the line. If you joined one where the owners don't care about what's going on, then that's your problem.
Nobody is talking about diagnosing patients on SL. They're talking about using for training, of the sort that's currently being performed on dummies. The supposed advantage is that in SL you can make a dummy that reacts to things being done to it much cheaper than a real one, which would need to have some fancy robotics installed into it.
I don't know if this is actually helpful or not, but it's got nothing to do with diagnosing people through SL.
I don't think you've actually been in SL recently, or at all.
I mean, "flying dongs", come on. That was pretty much of a one time trolling event, and not nothing normal, but roughly equivalent to people posting ASCII art of goatse on slashdot. I've only actually seen it on youtube and never seen it in person, despite logging in almost every day for 3 years.
So, if my intent is to take a photograph of a tree as accurately as possible, while making the choices required and using light and perspective creatively enough to achieve just that, it's not a creative, copyrightable work?
In 2D photography, what is "as accurately as possible" is very uncertain, as you have a lot of choices for something like a tree, so in most cases I'd say it's copyrightable.
If your task was something like "go along this path, stand at this precise point, and shoot every tree from the front at 10 AM, making it look the way it does at that time", then I would say it's not copyrightable. In this case you'd be performing a mechanic sort of work.
If your task was creating a 3D representation, then I'd say it's not copyrightable if you're trying to make a completely accurate representation of the tree.
Anaglyph stereo requires two different images. These are taking two identical ones and shifting one of them a bit to one side. This does not work.
For instance, in the video, look at the table's border. You'll see how the red border is the same thickness, from the part that's closest to the viewer to the part that is furthest.
Compare this with an image that does it right. Notice how the difference between the left and right eye changes depending on distance. You can clearly see in the stairs how the red and cyan channels get closer to each other with distance, join, then start separating. That's how it's supposed to look like.
Aha, well. This explains everything you just said. Second life is not really a GAME, per se, it's a 3d chat room
I didn't say it was a game, I said it was a MMO. It's Massive, Multiplayer and Online, even if it's not a game.
it's a 3d chat room with flying penises and simulated sex. Which is cool, if you're into that sort of thing. But not exactly the same sort of MMO as CO* or WoW.
I don't think you've ever been there, actually. The flying penises stuff is trolling, the equivalent of posting goatse links on slashdot. It gets dealt with quickly and not seen all that often.
And yeah, there's sex, but I stick to PG areas. There's plenty of those.
First, electric vehicles are more efficient, and need less energy for the same result.
Second, that electricity can come from any source. Some sources are cleaner than others.
Third, this centralizes production of power for cars. Instead of millions of small inefficient engines engines, you have thousands of huge and quite efficient power plants, which are also easier to regulate and to make cleaner.
How is the publisher going to react when their game has been reduced to a 3D chat room?
With delight, I imagine. If people are just standing around, chatting, and still pay for that, it's got to take a lot less server and network resources, which means higher profits.
Thinking cynically, most MMOs try to slow the player down. If the MMO has for instance 120 hours worth of content, and a player plays 2 hours per day, he'll finish it in two months. Make killing enemies take more time, slow down travel, make recovering from death take some time, and so on, and that same player might need 3 months to get through the same stuff. 50% extra revenue.
If the publisher advertises one thing, and it turns out to be a giant chat room, isn't that false advertising?
I figure if the game does what the publisher says it does, it'll be hard to complain effectively about that.
I'm glad I have you here then. I have a question: why don't you chat in a regular chat program instead of a game designed to be used for something else (I'll concede that, for the purposes of this discussion, Second Life essentially is a giant chat room, I haven't been able to detect any actual traditional gameplay)?
It's a chat with interesting extra stuff added. I mostly chat, but if I get bored of that or conversation isn't happening, I can script, build, explore, play games, etc.
SL also frees people from RL limitations. If in RL you can't walk, in SL nobody notices. If you're uncomfortable with your RL gender, you can be the one you want in SL (there's even a third party voice changer for voice chat).
For the plain chat, there are some differences. People can freely move around, and chat has a distance limit. This means that people can decide to move around to hear the people they want to hear. In SL you can make a channel but it's a more involved process. Gestures are much more interesting looking than the IRC version.
The ability to dress in any way you like, and user profiles gives people information about you, before you say a word. For instance, if you look like a Naruto or DBZ character, some people will assume you're retarded, while others will immediately see a fellow fan.
Then there's the sex industry. I stick to PG areas, but it's there for the people who want it. And you can actually put on a robe and wizard hat;-)
No, I don't think so, I'm going to kick those assholes off the court and, if they disagree, I'm going to call law enforcement into the matter.
I really doubt it would go your way. First, I doubt you'd go against 10 people or so, on your own. Second, if you actually did, you'd probably get your butt kicked. Third, law enforcement is very unlikely to be interested in a complaint about people not taking basketball seriously. If a fight gets started that will get the police's interest, but if you're the one who starts it, there are good chances you're the one that'll end up getting dragged away, and the other side will have plenty witnesses.
Mind that I'm not talking about what's fair or not here. The fact is that in any human group or society, openly going against the majority, especially with an "I'm going to kick those assholes" kind of attitude rarely ends well.
You understand the difference between a chat server and a game server, right?
Of course.
I'm just saying, that the purpose for which things are made originally, and the purpose for which people actually use them aren't necessarily the same. And if you're the one odd guy who disagrees and tries to force people to do it the right way, don't expect them to cooperate.
Something being different from RL doesn't mean it's completely separate from it.
When using a phone to communicate, it's not exactly like the real world. The distance becomes irrelevant. Ability to see who you're talking to disappears. Yet most people wouldn't think that just because they're talking to somebody on the phone it makes it "not real" somehow, and it would be perfectly fine to try to piss them off.
I use Second Life. It's very real world-like. Sure I can teleport at will, and pull a house out of nowhere, but ultimately it's still a place full of people who behave in a very RL-like manner. If you persistently stalk, stare, or push around somebody, sooner or later somebody will get annoyed.
Cmon now, look at how every single MMO is marketed.
It doesn't matter what the game is marketed as, but what the people who play it make it be.
The players ultimately make the rules. If the MMO's owner tries to force things in a way the players don't like, they leave.
I mean, is that what you really think MMOs have come to?
Yes, if the players decide to do so.
If 95% of WoW suddenly decided to stop grinding and just use it as a 3D chat room, it wouldn't be very smart for Blizzard to put something in place to prevent that, because pissing off most of the userbase is never a good thing.
The reason I prefer online games is so that I can play with intelligent people on my team supporting me or using my support. Not to stand around and chat with everyone. That's just stupid.
We're on opposite sides of this. My MMO of choice is Second Life, where standing around and chatting is what I do 95% of the time.
That said, a game is what the players make of it. If that's how you and your group play TF, that's fine. If some other group uses TF as a chatroom, that's fine too and I would expect them to kick you out if you try to protest.
Big deal. Obviously the other people there don't care about the game anyway. But they shouldn't stand in the way of people who do. In other words, if you don't want to play the game, get the hell off the court.
If both teams agreed that what they want to do is to sit on the court and discuss the weather, then it sucks for you, and you're the one who gets off the court.
It sounds more like a chat client where people might occasionally take an impromptu break to play a game. Which, again, is not what NCSoft is marketing as "City Of Heroes".
It doesn't matter what they market it as. What it matters is what people will pay for.
Many things are invented for one thing and then used for another. Kleenex was invented to remove makeup. The laryngoscope was invented by a singer to examine his vocal cords, and ended up being used for medicine. People who insist in their creations being used for the intended purpose instead of the one people actually want often end up losing money.
Slashdot Mirror
Now there's a reason to keep watch on asteroids, and to start coming up with ways of deflecting them, if there ever was one.
If something like that hits our planet, things are going to be very unpleasant.
I may be wrong, but I vaguely remember Linus being unhappy with Tridgell. That's what I was referring to.
Of course the whole thing wasn't that critical in the end, things were worked out.
The point I'm trying to make here is that in the end, the purist and pragmatist stances turned out to lead to pretty much the same place. The pragmatist way eventually ran into problems, and things went pretty much the same way the purist way would have probably gone, except with more arguments on the list and more drama.
I don't think things would have been that different without the BK mess. After all, Linus decided to try BK without having used a SCM before. The way I imagine things going is having Linus try say, Mercurial, then its technical issues leading to large improvements or the creation of Git anyway, except perhaps at a more relaxed pace due to a lack of a crisis.
I don't get you. Please explain.
I just re-read your comment, and got no clue what you mean by this.
The debate I saw is that Linux should use a Free SCM, to avoid precisely what happened with BitKeeper. I don't remember people speaking against the concept of a distributed SCM and don't see why would they.
IIRC, Mercurial for instance existed back then and was considered, but rejected because performance wasn't good enough.
See, I see it differently.
Linus tried the pragmatic way. It worked for a while. Then it blew up in his face.
So he ended up having to do what the purist way would have required (writing a new SCM if none of the available ones were suitable), except that since events unfolded quite suddenly, there was no time for a smooth transition, and something had to be hacked up fast.
Git is certainly interesting, but I doubt half the people who use it really understand how it works. Maybe if it was started in less a dire situation it could have been more user friendly.
Why a terrible example? Linus had to drop what he was doing and deal with the political mess, and the practical consequences. And he was quite annoyed about it, IIRC.
Granted, something good came out of it, but it's not like SCM development would have stagnated. Even if Git wasn't created, improvements could have been made to existing systems.
It can backfire.
For instance, take the whole mess with BitKeeper: The pragmatic option was to use a product with really obnoxious licensing terms, because it was good and worked at the time. Then one day Larry McVoy got really annoyed with Andrew Tridgell, and decided to refuse to even sell licenses to people associated with the OSDL, including Linus Torvalds.
That's the problem, while it works everything seems fine, but when the rug is suddenly pulled from under you, it suddenly creates a lot of complications that get in the way of getting useful things done. I think there's quite a lot of value in making sure that you'll be able to use tomorrow something you're using today.
I'd like to see MS do that, it'd give things to talk about for months.
Do you realize how monumentally stupid would that be? You're really suggesting that MS should throw away half its market share, lay off thousands of employees (disrupting projects in the US), and liquidate huge amounts of inventory over an issue that's a tiny thing in comparison with the consequences of pulling out?
If they did that, the shareholders would crucify whoever was responsible.
Europe wouldn't be that affected. Apple, Red Hat and Novell would throw a huge party, and without MS being present they couldn't defend its copyright, so everybody would just pirate their stuff with impunity.
In my understanding, the FSF simply couldn't sue for the infringement of a random person's license if they tried. They must have a personal grievance.
No, you're the one confusing something. I'm using SL just for the sake of example, because it's something I'm personally familiar with, including licensing-wise.
My point is that yes, linking with random files you find in Windows can get you in trouble, and it's by no means exclusive to the GPL. Proprietary libraries have plenty licensing terms that are much nastier than the GPL, which require for instance to pay royalties. You can't just go and link to that without further consideration.
You can link to OS X libraries because Apple allows you to do so. If you tried to create an application that say, reused one of the libraries found in Photoshop without Adobe consenting to it, you can bet Adobe would be very unhappy about that, and would haul your ass into court.
Your software never becomes the property of anybody else, even if you link with a GPL (and not LGPL) library. What the FSF thinks is that linking with a GPL licensed library without complying with the GPL infringes on the GPL, and without the GPL allowing for distribution, it infringes on the library's copyright. But everybody still owns their own stuff.
For instance, if you take my GPL licensed code and integrate it into your non-GPL application you're not following the terms, and hence infringing on my copyright. But that doesn't make your code mine, and does not give me the ability to relicense your code (as I could if I had the copyright to it).
Some projects like the Linux kernel are all full of pieces of thousands of different copyright holders and effectively can't change the license because nobody owns the whole thing. Bits are owned by many different people, some of which will never consent to a license change, or are dead.
If you do that, it's quite possible you'll end up violating a license or two, yes.
Take a good look at the .ocx and .net libraries you have on your system. It's almost certain that at least a couple of those come from some program that you installed, and that can be only redistributed by the licensee, or require paying royalties.
So yeah, if you link against those, and the company that makes them finds out, you may end up in a lot of legal trouble.
For instance, the Second Life client comes with the Kakadu JPEG 2000 image library. But just because you downloaded SL for free, and that put the kakadu DLL on your system, doesn't mean you can take that library, make an application that uses it and redistribute it. See the license. Linden Labs has paid for Kakadu, but that license isn't transferrable, so it doesn't give you the right to use it.
You really have it good with the GPL, because releasing the source works for fixing the problem. Infringe on Microsoft's copyright and it's very doubtful you'll get away so cheaply. Most likely MS will get an injuction against you, and you'll have to pull your product from sale until the case is decided.
The GPL isn't getting tested because nobody's dumb enough to do so.
The GPL is the only thing that gives anybody the right to redistribute the code. So if for whatever reason the GPL was found not to apply, the code is still copyrighted, and that doesn't give them the right to redistribute somebody else's code. So at that point it turns into a very standard copyright infringement lawsuit.
Doubtful, unless the fox was blue and wearing a Debian shirt, or futuristic glowing armor.
I'm mostly involved in scripting and modding the SL viewer. I doubt business mags would find me interesting as I don't do anything business related.
I don't really disagree for the most part, my main objection was to describing SL as a place full of flying dongs. IMO if you're really experiencing that, you're doing something wrong, as there are plenty places in SL that aren't like that. It's just like the rest of the internet, there are many places, not all of them are pleasant, but there are enough of them that you can find something that fits.
I'm not into the whole SL sex thing and like peace and quiet, so I found a place that was like that. I'd say the furriness can be almost considered as an aesthetic preference, as many conversations that happen there have nothing to do with what the people look like.
The way I understand it, a medical dummy that doesn't just lie there, and actually reacts to what's being done to it, and can simulate choking, is a very complicated and expensive thing. SL isn't near as good as that of course, but it's a lot cheaper. SL also allows for a lot more complexity than "push A to save their life". Now, not being in the field, I can't really say whether this is of much use or not. I visited the schizophrenia simulating room and found it interesting though.
I completely agree that SL has its limitations, but I find it very interesting that people are trying to do things like this. It might not be there yet, but by pushing its limitations we can find what needs to be improved and fix it.
For instance, Google's office web applications were impossible back when the web consisted of static HTML, frames, and a few CGIs. But people pushed against those limits, came up with ideas to work around them, and made things advance. If nobody tried to do anything that was beyond the original scope of the web, it wouldn't have got better.
Like I said, I've been in SL for about 3 years, logging in mostly every day. I mostly hang out in Luskwood.
We've got a large staff of moderators (of which I'm one) that ensure we don't have "flying dongs" (never seen one actually), or "6-foot fox-like creatures with strap-ons" (actually I am a 6 foot fox-like creature, but it's a PG area, so we don't allow strap-ons or anything of the sort).
I've not found it necessary to pay for my own sim. Decent places in SL can be found if you look around a bit. It's just like IRC channels, web forums, or anything else. Many of those are full of annoying people, but there are plenty well managed ones.
That SL is not RL is kind of the point of it, IMO.
Are you hanging out on /b or something?
There are plenty chats and web forums where there are repercusions, that being that people get banned when they go over the line. If you joined one where the owners don't care about what's going on, then that's your problem.
RTFA, or at least the submission.
Nobody is talking about diagnosing patients on SL. They're talking about using for training, of the sort that's currently being performed on dummies. The supposed advantage is that in SL you can make a dummy that reacts to things being done to it much cheaper than a real one, which would need to have some fancy robotics installed into it.
I don't know if this is actually helpful or not, but it's got nothing to do with diagnosing people through SL.
I don't think you've actually been in SL recently, or at all.
I mean, "flying dongs", come on. That was pretty much of a one time trolling event, and not nothing normal, but roughly equivalent to people posting ASCII art of goatse on slashdot. I've only actually seen it on youtube and never seen it in person, despite logging in almost every day for 3 years.
Yes.
And when a mad scientist finally creates furries in real life, the doctors will already be familiar with the anatomy.
In 2D photography, what is "as accurately as possible" is very uncertain, as you have a lot of choices for something like a tree, so in most cases I'd say it's copyrightable.
If your task was something like "go along this path, stand at this precise point, and shoot every tree from the front at 10 AM, making it look the way it does at that time", then I would say it's not copyrightable. In this case you'd be performing a mechanic sort of work.
If your task was creating a 3D representation, then I'd say it's not copyrightable if you're trying to make a completely accurate representation of the tree.
I got modpoints, and decided that maybe some sort of injustice had been committed.
Then I looked at your posts and found nothing worth modding up.
Mind that I'm a Linux user, and use Windows extremely infrequently from VMs.
Anaglyph stereo requires two different images. These are taking two identical ones and shifting one of them a bit to one side. This does not work.
For instance, in the video, look at the table's border. You'll see how the red border is the same thickness, from the part that's closest to the viewer to the part that is furthest.
Compare this with an image that does it right. Notice how the difference between the left and right eye changes depending on distance. You can clearly see in the stairs how the red and cyan channels get closer to each other with distance, join, then start separating. That's how it's supposed to look like.
I didn't say it was a game, I said it was a MMO. It's Massive, Multiplayer and Online, even if it's not a game.
I don't think you've ever been there, actually. The flying penises stuff is trolling, the equivalent of posting goatse links on slashdot. It gets dealt with quickly and not seen all that often.
And yeah, there's sex, but I stick to PG areas. There's plenty of those.
First, electric vehicles are more efficient, and need less energy for the same result.
Second, that electricity can come from any source. Some sources are cleaner than others.
Third, this centralizes production of power for cars. Instead of millions of small inefficient engines engines, you have thousands of huge and quite efficient power plants, which are also easier to regulate and to make cleaner.
With delight, I imagine. If people are just standing around, chatting, and still pay for that, it's got to take a lot less server and network resources, which means higher profits.
Thinking cynically, most MMOs try to slow the player down. If the MMO has for instance 120 hours worth of content, and a player plays 2 hours per day, he'll finish it in two months. Make killing enemies take more time, slow down travel, make recovering from death take some time, and so on, and that same player might need 3 months to get through the same stuff. 50% extra revenue.
I figure if the game does what the publisher says it does, it'll be hard to complain effectively about that.
It's a chat with interesting extra stuff added. I mostly chat, but if I get bored of that or conversation isn't happening, I can script, build, explore, play games, etc.
SL also frees people from RL limitations. If in RL you can't walk, in SL nobody notices. If you're uncomfortable with your RL gender, you can be the one you want in SL (there's even a third party voice changer for voice chat).
For the plain chat, there are some differences. People can freely move around, and chat has a distance limit. This means that people can decide to move around to hear the people they want to hear. In SL you can make a channel but it's a more involved process. Gestures are much more interesting looking than the IRC version.
The ability to dress in any way you like, and user profiles gives people information about you, before you say a word. For instance, if you look like a Naruto or DBZ character, some people will assume you're retarded, while others will immediately see a fellow fan.
Then there's the sex industry. I stick to PG areas, but it's there for the people who want it. And you can actually put on a robe and wizard hat ;-)
I really doubt it would go your way. First, I doubt you'd go against 10 people or so, on your own. Second, if you actually did, you'd probably get your butt kicked. Third, law enforcement is very unlikely to be interested in a complaint about people not taking basketball seriously. If a fight gets started that will get the police's interest, but if you're the one who starts it, there are good chances you're the one that'll end up getting dragged away, and the other side will have plenty witnesses.
Mind that I'm not talking about what's fair or not here. The fact is that in any human group or society, openly going against the majority, especially with an "I'm going to kick those assholes" kind of attitude rarely ends well.
Of course.
I'm just saying, that the purpose for which things are made originally, and the purpose for which people actually use them aren't necessarily the same. And if you're the one odd guy who disagrees and tries to force people to do it the right way, don't expect them to cooperate.
Something being different from RL doesn't mean it's completely separate from it.
When using a phone to communicate, it's not exactly like the real world. The distance becomes irrelevant. Ability to see who you're talking to disappears. Yet most people wouldn't think that just because they're talking to somebody on the phone it makes it "not real" somehow, and it would be perfectly fine to try to piss them off.
I use Second Life. It's very real world-like. Sure I can teleport at will, and pull a house out of nowhere, but ultimately it's still a place full of people who behave in a very RL-like manner. If you persistently stalk, stare, or push around somebody, sooner or later somebody will get annoyed.
It doesn't matter what the game is marketed as, but what the people who play it make it be.
The players ultimately make the rules. If the MMO's owner tries to force things in a way the players don't like, they leave.
Yes, if the players decide to do so.
If 95% of WoW suddenly decided to stop grinding and just use it as a 3D chat room, it wouldn't be very smart for Blizzard to put something in place to prevent that, because pissing off most of the userbase is never a good thing.
We're on opposite sides of this. My MMO of choice is Second Life, where standing around and chatting is what I do 95% of the time.
That said, a game is what the players make of it. If that's how you and your group play TF, that's fine. If some other group uses TF as a chatroom, that's fine too and I would expect them to kick you out if you try to protest.
If both teams agreed that what they want to do is to sit on the court and discuss the weather, then it sucks for you, and you're the one who gets off the court.
It doesn't matter what they market it as. What it matters is what people will pay for.
Many things are invented for one thing and then used for another. Kleenex was invented to remove makeup. The laryngoscope was invented by a singer to examine his vocal cords, and ended up being used for medicine. People who insist in their creations being used for the intended purpose instead of the one people actually want often end up losing money.