This is a perfect example not only showing that corporate greed is nothing new, but also showing that people, in their very basic ways, do not really change.
Oh no, the 15B moire pattern is pure assembler, no libs attached. I had a link somewhere, let me find it in a moment (crap internet connections suck!). You could say that it's cheating, using the MCGA 13h 320x200 256color mode (or for the pros out there - raping text mode's charset to produce something weird), but that's one step from declaring that the true form of demomaking is building your own hardware and coding effects for it with your own assembly. Which in itself would be immensely cool, but a bit overkill. As for the OpenGL/DirectX 4K stuff, it's just moving on with the times - every normally used computer out there has at least DirectX 8 and OpenGL 1.1 with compatible hardware on it, so it would be a shame not to use natural-environment libraries.
I remember doing school stuff in POV-Ray, simple things like cubes, spheres, intersecting cones and whatnot for my math geometry/stereometry classes. While not having heaps of experience like these guys, i think i can safely assume that, while requiring creativity and effort, these aren't truly that hard to make, since this is mostly 3d math, fractals and quadrics sprinkled a bit with randomness on the top. But i guess i just get my boner from creative software hacks (which, in turn, are too 3d/2d math, just hacked up beyond all recognition), not scripts. Oh well, different fetishes;) .
True that, but every time i see some size-coding competitions, I can't help but feel like they are some form of geeks' penis-measurement competitions. Thus, to satisfy my inner asshole, i like to point them to those demoscene productions, which, to the best of my knowledge, are indeed one of the smallest coded animations in the world. And the 256B limit is just traditional, there are animated moire patterns in 15B down there and four-kilobyte demos utilizing OpenGL and DirectX. Some of the OpenGL ones are for linux, too, with source.
Oh, and these renders might be prettier, but these are still just input files for a huge raytracer, so IMO, there's nothing really to cheer about. Make a 'tracer in 512 bytes, then I'll be impressed:) .
And yes, this post is really inflammatory, get off my lawn, you insensitive clod, etc. etc.
POV-Ray? Screw that, see what can be made in a 256B EXECUTABLE. Just to give some popular examples, tube/3SC, PHOBIA/ind. Yup, the demoscene was there a long time before, and still it churns out some beautiful code that boggles the mind. Nothing impressive to see here though, just a fat-ass raytracer with a small input file.
This reminds me of Stanislaw Lem's novel, The Chain of Chance, or "Katar" (literally "Rhinitis", thus "runny nose") as it is titled in polish. In this novel, a former astronaut works with police detectives to determine weird cases of suicide, which seem to perfectly fit in to a certain scheme (the astronaut's experience and age fitted in there as well, thus he was a perfect candidate for a simulation), but do not have any proof of the existence of this scheme. After the climax of the book, it is revealed that the people killed were self-subjected to a fear-inducing chemical mixed from lots of different more-or-less everyday usage stuff, colognes, hair-stylers and the like, which in the end led all victims to their often gory deaths.
Once again to you, mr. Lem - you damn smart bastard, it seems everything you wrote will come true in the end!:)
Copyright is a two-edged sword. As most of the comments already pointed out, 5 years is a bit short, more people think along the lines of 10-15. But even after the limit, anybody should be free to rape every last bit of code licenced under the GPL and sell it altogether with their spleens and families. This may sound harsh to all zealots out there, but it's just "right". The difference here between art and code is that code is extremely reusable, while art can only be refreshed (or raped, whichever side of the barricade you're on). Fourteen year old code is still damn fine and usable, and this can tell you every last guy who ever programmed a microcontroller. This is why the idea of relicencing springs to the mind. Take linux for example (ok, this is stretching, but so be it). The first release was 16,5 years ago. In my mind, companies should be free to use and abuse that codebase. Would it cause grief to GPL activists? Of course it would! But, lo and behold, the copyright, which they so fiercely fought all this time is actually useful to them at that precise moment. And they don't have it. All they can do is grit their teeth in anger, but nothing more. But is it fair? You bet it's fair, since in one and a half year we would get our hands on Windows 95 (one way or another) and some of the code or abstracts used to this day. Just as companies shouldn't have advantage, so shouldn't we. Thus the need of limiting copyright.
Ah, but note how I said "80's and early 90's". This is how it would be if there weren't any copyright extension plans of the Mickey Mouse kind. If i remember correctly, before the whole corporate assault on copyright law, the limit was 14 years. Just enough in my opinion. Thus I welcome the idea of limiting the time of copyrights, which I meant with my hope explosion there, but i just didn't write any additional opinions, since most of them were already present. Just to satisfy a certain me-too'ism of slashdot, I'll say that 5 years seem short, agreed, but it's loads better than 120.
If this passes (And I seriously doubt it, knowing the power of The Almighty Dollar), I'll literally shit myself from happiness. All this awesome art of the 80's and early 90's will finally be public domain for us to listen/watch and build upon as we please.
MacGuyver, A-Team, Miami Vice - once again, we will be reunited!:,)
You see, there is a certain difference between some happy shooting off colourful EGA pixels in 320x200 and a pretty detailed first person shooter. Yes, I can hear you cringing to this statement, but consider this: back in The Days of Yore, we had really low-res graphics (if we had them at all), which even with the brightest imagination couldn't be overturned into a bloody mess of pulsing organs and blood spewing. As kids, we saw this and thought somewhere along the lines of: "Oh, a game, cool". That, and, well, you've had parents who apparently knew how to raise a kid properly. Now imagine the same situation with newer games - they don't even have to be THAT new, for example, i dunno, Soldier of Fortune. We've got internal organs going out with a cut of a knife. No happy-pixelly fun, just pure brutality. Is this REALLY what you'd like your kid to see? As a parent, you have a duty to raise your offspring to an ethical code. The kid doesn't have to be made from a mould, like the government would like to have them, but just needs to follow simple rules like "Don't kill", "Don't hurt", and such. If you would like to permit your youngling to play such violent games, go ahead, but please make sure he understands what's going on, that he knows this is a game, not reality, that he should not ever even consider repeating such acts in real-life - and this gets increasingly hard with each new generation of computer graphics.
I think it's amazing that these rovers still keep going. Not that I doubt in engineering skills of people involved, but they "just keep on working", which I find pretty extraordinary. You'd think that any equipment left in such harsh conditions would turn into trash very soon. I was almost sure that at least one of them wouldn't survive the storms, but, fortunately, reality proved me wrong. Go NASA!
And that's exactly why I think movies have a bit of an advantage:) . They might not immerse you so totally like a game does, but they get both ends of the stick - they can both scare you in that BLAAARGHAGH!!!111 I AM A SCARY MONSTER! sort of way, AND they can create an incredible atmosphere. It's also exactly why making a good horror movie is a challenge - you need both the sense of immediate danger, and a good background to boot, which requires great writing and acting.
What I've meant is in-game you don't ever have the feeling of hopelessness that accompanies good horror movies. Let's take the monster in the lead to TFA for example:
In a movie: "OMG IT'S GONNA EAT HIM NOOOOOOOO!:(" In a game: "Ok, time to take out the good ol' Pump Action and try to fill it's belly with lead."
The difference here is that in a game you have a choice - to kill it, or get out of there as fast as you can, you rarely just sit there thinking "ohshitohshitohshit... maybe it's gone away now..." - most of the time cutscenes force you to do this. And this even includes sneakers like Thief - you learn to listen around corners for guards and things like that, and when they run after you and you hide, you hear exactly what they say while looking for you, giving you an idea when their heads decide you've hid good. You just sit tight in there, waiting for them to go away, no emotional strings attached.
To sum it up - straightforward danger almost never works in a game, but a certain build-up will make you twitchy.
I don't agree. While you're playing the game, you have some sort of an adrenaline rush, that effectively makes you immune to any kind of scare the developers might devise. That, and the inherent stupidity of the monsters you'll encounter surely makes them less of a threat.
But, on the bright side, it's easier to make a specific mood in a game, and make the player be afraid of that, for example - I was absolutely scared of playing Ultima Underworld alone when I was about ten or eleven. There was something in those dark corridors, bones lying around, and the music that provided the tension needed to scare the hell out of me. And it works today, too. Not in the way Doom3 would like us to have, but, for example, BioShock manages to capture the freaky atmosphere perfectly, making you look around your shoulder far more often.
Yes, what about that great ZX-Spectrum platformer? That game was nearly impossible to finish without either some pokes and peeks, or an emulator with save-states implemented.
Like we'll see citizens doing exactly that with their brand new camcorders. It's not like they'll run about with them all day just to catch some cops eating doughnuts. IMO, this is a waste of money (I'd put "taxpayers'" here, but this is just too cliche).
That, and I'd love to see this in the news sometime soon: a cop beating a guy for recording him while he was doing something... drastic... and destroying the cam.
There is also the problem of using these "only useful to hackers" tools to evaluate your security. If this is outlawed, how can you keep yourself secure legally, if these tools are basically churned off daily, with newer and newer methods of attacking? This is basically suicide for legal safety. If this law is passed, I can actually see German government websites being hacked on a daily basis not long from now.
So how they are going to distinguish hacking tools from security software? Nmap can be used as both, and I sincerely cannot imagine securing anything without it. Next, packet loggers. Will Ethereal be banned too? It's one of the best tools IMO that gives a user the power to see exactly what he is sending or receiving, showing potential problems and vurnabilities, but it, of course, can be also exploited beyond any limits. And it's the case with all the rest of popular networking software.
So ok, it is possible to do such an attack, but... is it viable enough as an attack vector? I mean, the attacker would have to sit 24/7 near an unsecure hotspot and/or an unsecure network to wait for a potential victim, and, as we know, firefox users aren't the majority, so this further narrows down the possibility of a successful attack. That's enough to call it improbable i think. Of course, since such an attack is possible, that can mean something, but, please, would anyone sit around coffee shops all day just to infect one person with spyware, when he could just, I dunno, send viruses or trojans through mail to computer illiterate people?
Slashdot Mirror
This is a perfect example not only showing that corporate greed is nothing new, but also showing that people, in their very basic ways, do not really change.
Oh no, the 15B moire pattern is pure assembler, no libs attached. I had a link somewhere, let me find it in a moment (crap internet connections suck!). You could say that it's cheating, using the MCGA 13h 320x200 256color mode (or for the pros out there - raping text mode's charset to produce something weird), but that's one step from declaring that the true form of demomaking is building your own hardware and coding effects for it with your own assembly. Which in itself would be immensely cool, but a bit overkill. As for the OpenGL/DirectX 4K stuff, it's just moving on with the times - every normally used computer out there has at least DirectX 8 and OpenGL 1.1 with compatible hardware on it, so it would be a shame not to use natural-environment libraries.
;) .
Couldn't find the 15B one, so here's a one-byte bigger thing: fr-016: bytes/Farbrausch.
I remember doing school stuff in POV-Ray, simple things like cubes, spheres, intersecting cones and whatnot for my math geometry/stereometry classes. While not having heaps of experience like these guys, i think i can safely assume that, while requiring creativity and effort, these aren't truly that hard to make, since this is mostly 3d math, fractals and quadrics sprinkled a bit with randomness on the top. But i guess i just get my boner from creative software hacks (which, in turn, are too 3d/2d math, just hacked up beyond all recognition), not scripts. Oh well, different fetishes
True that, but every time i see some size-coding competitions, I can't help but feel like they are some form of geeks' penis-measurement competitions. Thus, to satisfy my inner asshole, i like to point them to those demoscene productions, which, to the best of my knowledge, are indeed one of the smallest coded animations in the world. And the 256B limit is just traditional, there are animated moire patterns in 15B down there and four-kilobyte demos utilizing OpenGL and DirectX. Some of the OpenGL ones are for linux, too, with source.
:) .
Oh, and these renders might be prettier, but these are still just input files for a huge raytracer, so IMO, there's nothing really to cheer about. Make a 'tracer in 512 bytes, then I'll be impressed
And yes, this post is really inflammatory, get off my lawn, you insensitive clod, etc. etc.
Oh, wait, copy-paste screwup.
tube/3SC
POV-Ray? Screw that, see what can be made in a 256B EXECUTABLE. Just to give some popular examples, tube/3SC, PHOBIA/ind. Yup, the demoscene was there a long time before, and still it churns out some beautiful code that boggles the mind. Nothing impressive to see here though, just a fat-ass raytracer with a small input file.
This reminds me of Stanislaw Lem's novel, The Chain of Chance, or "Katar" (literally "Rhinitis", thus "runny nose") as it is titled in polish. In this novel, a former astronaut works with police detectives to determine weird cases of suicide, which seem to perfectly fit in to a certain scheme (the astronaut's experience and age fitted in there as well, thus he was a perfect candidate for a simulation), but do not have any proof of the existence of this scheme. After the climax of the book, it is revealed that the people killed were self-subjected to a fear-inducing chemical mixed from lots of different more-or-less everyday usage stuff, colognes, hair-stylers and the like, which in the end led all victims to their often gory deaths.
:)
Once again to you, mr. Lem - you damn smart bastard, it seems everything you wrote will come true in the end!
Copyright is a two-edged sword. As most of the comments already pointed out, 5 years is a bit short, more people think along the lines of 10-15. But even after the limit, anybody should be free to rape every last bit of code licenced under the GPL and sell it altogether with their spleens and families. This may sound harsh to all zealots out there, but it's just "right". The difference here between art and code is that code is extremely reusable, while art can only be refreshed (or raped, whichever side of the barricade you're on). Fourteen year old code is still damn fine and usable, and this can tell you every last guy who ever programmed a microcontroller. This is why the idea of relicencing springs to the mind. Take linux for example (ok, this is stretching, but so be it). The first release was 16,5 years ago. In my mind, companies should be free to use and abuse that codebase. Would it cause grief to GPL activists? Of course it would! But, lo and behold, the copyright, which they so fiercely fought all this time is actually useful to them at that precise moment. And they don't have it. All they can do is grit their teeth in anger, but nothing more. But is it fair? You bet it's fair, since in one and a half year we would get our hands on Windows 95 (one way or another) and some of the code or abstracts used to this day. Just as companies shouldn't have advantage, so shouldn't we. Thus the need of limiting copyright.
Ah, but note how I said "80's and early 90's". This is how it would be if there weren't any copyright extension plans of the Mickey Mouse kind. If i remember correctly, before the whole corporate assault on copyright law, the limit was 14 years. Just enough in my opinion. Thus I welcome the idea of limiting the time of copyrights, which I meant with my hope explosion there, but i just didn't write any additional opinions, since most of them were already present. Just to satisfy a certain me-too'ism of slashdot, I'll say that 5 years seem short, agreed, but it's loads better than 120.
Ahh, but these are CORPORATE copyrights. Personal copyright isn't mentioned, so I think it is still lifetime+50 years.
If this passes (And I seriously doubt it, knowing the power of The Almighty Dollar), I'll literally shit myself from happiness. All this awesome art of the 80's and early 90's will finally be public domain for us to listen/watch and build upon as we please.
:,)
MacGuyver, A-Team, Miami Vice - once again, we will be reunited!
You see, there is a certain difference between some happy shooting off colourful EGA pixels in 320x200 and a pretty detailed first person shooter. Yes, I can hear you cringing to this statement, but consider this: back in The Days of Yore, we had really low-res graphics (if we had them at all), which even with the brightest imagination couldn't be overturned into a bloody mess of pulsing organs and blood spewing. As kids, we saw this and thought somewhere along the lines of: "Oh, a game, cool". That, and, well, you've had parents who apparently knew how to raise a kid properly. Now imagine the same situation with newer games - they don't even have to be THAT new, for example, i dunno, Soldier of Fortune. We've got internal organs going out with a cut of a knife. No happy-pixelly fun, just pure brutality. Is this REALLY what you'd like your kid to see? As a parent, you have a duty to raise your offspring to an ethical code. The kid doesn't have to be made from a mould, like the government would like to have them, but just needs to follow simple rules like "Don't kill", "Don't hurt", and such. If you would like to permit your youngling to play such violent games, go ahead, but please make sure he understands what's going on, that he knows this is a game, not reality, that he should not ever even consider repeating such acts in real-life - and this gets increasingly hard with each new generation of computer graphics.
So your 3-year old kid already plays Counter Strike: Source?
That's some pretty good parenting, right there.
What? No songs about sodomy with incest?
Their humour is seriously going down the tubes these days.
I think it's amazing that these rovers still keep going. Not that I doubt in engineering skills of people involved, but they "just keep on working", which I find pretty extraordinary. You'd think that any equipment left in such harsh conditions would turn into trash very soon. I was almost sure that at least one of them wouldn't survive the storms, but, fortunately, reality proved me wrong. Go NASA!
And that's exactly why I think movies have a bit of an advantage :) . They might not immerse you so totally like a game does, but they get both ends of the stick - they can both scare you in that BLAAARGHAGH!!!111 I AM A SCARY MONSTER! sort of way, AND they can create an incredible atmosphere. It's also exactly why making a good horror movie is a challenge - you need both the sense of immediate danger, and a good background to boot, which requires great writing and acting.
What I've meant is in-game you don't ever have the feeling of hopelessness that accompanies good horror movies. Let's take the monster in the lead to TFA for example:
:("
In a movie: "OMG IT'S GONNA EAT HIM NOOOOOOOO!
In a game: "Ok, time to take out the good ol' Pump Action and try to fill it's belly with lead."
The difference here is that in a game you have a choice - to kill it, or get out of there as fast as you can, you rarely just sit there thinking "ohshitohshitohshit... maybe it's gone away now..." - most of the time cutscenes force you to do this. And this even includes sneakers like Thief - you learn to listen around corners for guards and things like that, and when they run after you and you hide, you hear exactly what they say while looking for you, giving you an idea when their heads decide you've hid good. You just sit tight in there, waiting for them to go away, no emotional strings attached.
To sum it up - straightforward danger almost never works in a game, but a certain build-up will make you twitchy.
I don't agree. While you're playing the game, you have some sort of an adrenaline rush, that effectively makes you immune to any kind of scare the developers might devise. That, and the inherent stupidity of the monsters you'll encounter surely makes them less of a threat.
But, on the bright side, it's easier to make a specific mood in a game, and make the player be afraid of that, for example - I was absolutely scared of playing Ultima Underworld alone when I was about ten or eleven. There was something in those dark corridors, bones lying around, and the music that provided the tension needed to scare the hell out of me. And it works today, too. Not in the way Doom3 would like us to have, but, for example, BioShock manages to capture the freaky atmosphere perfectly, making you look around your shoulder far more often.
Yes, what about that great ZX-Spectrum platformer? That game was nearly impossible to finish without either some pokes and peeks, or an emulator with save-states implemented.
...with the world being on the brink of an Oil Peak and everything...
Whoops, my bad... ...
I still think it's a waste of money.
Like we'll see citizens doing exactly that with their brand new camcorders. It's not like they'll run about with them all day just to catch some cops eating doughnuts. IMO, this is a waste of money (I'd put "taxpayers'" here, but this is just too cliche).
That, and I'd love to see this in the news sometime soon: a cop beating a guy for recording him while he was doing something... drastic... and destroying the cam.
Woo, a job well done.
There is also the problem of using these "only useful to hackers" tools to evaluate your security. If this is outlawed, how can you keep yourself secure legally, if these tools are basically churned off daily, with newer and newer methods of attacking? This is basically suicide for legal safety. If this law is passed, I can actually see German government websites being hacked on a daily basis not long from now.
So how they are going to distinguish hacking tools from security software? Nmap can be used as both, and I sincerely cannot imagine securing anything without it. Next, packet loggers. Will Ethereal be banned too? It's one of the best tools IMO that gives a user the power to see exactly what he is sending or receiving, showing potential problems and vurnabilities, but it, of course, can be also exploited beyond any limits. And it's the case with all the rest of popular networking software.
So ok, it is possible to do such an attack, but... is it viable enough as an attack vector? I mean, the attacker would have to sit 24/7 near an unsecure hotspot and/or an unsecure network to wait for a potential victim, and, as we know, firefox users aren't the majority, so this further narrows down the possibility of a successful attack. That's enough to call it improbable i think. Of course, since such an attack is possible, that can mean something, but, please, would anyone sit around coffee shops all day just to infect one person with spyware, when he could just, I dunno, send viruses or trojans through mail to computer illiterate people?