I've used Voodoo library wrappers before to get Voodoo games running well. Diablo II, for instance, only "supported" (it was really a Voodoo trick) running at 1600x1200 if you used Voodoo instead of DirectX, and I installed a Voodoo to DirectX wrapper to make this work.
Ultima IV was in the unofficial category of Abandonware, which essentially means, "It's not technically legal to distribute it, but it is no longer being sold and the copyright owner so far seems not to care if you download it, so go ahead."
I think this is a good point. It's basically "We'll just look the other way"-ware.
Since when can EA assume that I agree with their (new) terms just because they bought the company
It depends on what terms we're talking about here. When one company buys another, it IS the bought company. You can say "Ah, but I never made an agreement with EA." But EA is Origin. It can be both, at once. And you didn't make an agreement with Richard Garriot, you made a deal with Origin (hypothetically speaking, of course).
This moot, since the 'rights' being talked about here (basic copyright) don't require any acceptance or agreement on your part.
You don't need to be a multi-millionaire to have a real 'movie room' in your house, especially if you only want to equal or surpass the iffy quality of the standard multiplex. If you want to equal the quality of a very good theater though things get very expensive very quickly.
$10,000 or so will buy you a decent projector (The Epson Home Cinema series is quite bright and HD quality) and screen, a PS3 (still one of the better consumer Blu-Ray players on the market), a receiver, decent (but not spectacular) speakers, and professional installation.
The biggest barrier isn't installation, or finding the right components... It's wife-aggro (or husband). Getting someone to put up with all that until they see the results, and the loss of the room to be dedicated to media.
The thing that mostly makes them expensive is the ten years of approval process and the five years of meetings you have to have with the NIMBYs to eventually get to build one.
Yes, let's abolish thorough approval processes for nuclear reactors! Because the fact that they manage to screw them up WITH regulation bodes so well for how they will perform WITHOUT it.
Personally I'm getting sick of the knee-jerk blame-the-regulators talk. It is so tiresome and I wish we could move beyond it.
Useful regulation (like safety regulations) is fine. Regulation whose point is merely to delay and prevent anything from occurring is not. It's been used very successfully in the past 40 years by the anti-nuke crowd not to ensure the construction of safe nuclear reactors, but to completely stop nuclear plant generation because they hate nuclear power and wish to stop it completely.
And that's not necessarily the "regulators'" fault either, it's the environmental lobby and the politicians beholden to them.
Label them critical national infrastructure and put the military in charge of building, maintaining, and operating them
Then you'll get the crowd that likes to claim the government is totally incapable of doing anything right and that the power grid should be fully privatized instead, since they'll run it better and more efficiently.
Though "having the military run it" might deflect those arguments, since the same folks who think the government is terrible at running things also think the military is exceptionally good at organizing. Maybe the Army Corps of Engineers?
For example, why did they have to run a wire in to run a pump? Why the hell aren't there easy 'pump electricity access points' where you can just roll up and hook to them? Or why couldn't they hook to the grid?
Why do you even need a pump at all? Radioactive stuff is hot. If you have something heating the water, you have a damn self-circulating pool of water if you make it big enough, you don't need a 'pump'. Okay, that's not practical for the reactors, but it's certainly practical for the spent-fuel rods. That should it a big pool a mile away that they just keep topped off, not a tiny pool next to the damn reactor that overheats too.
This is what gets me -- for some reason, with this reactor design, they were simply not allowed to have any sort of electrical hookup to allow the electricity generated by the plant itself to power the cooling system. Not even in an emergency. So even though the plant was melting down and no one cared about what regulations said, the hookups didn't exist to make that possible. That sort of thing just floors me.
So it's "free" as in "don't do that," then. Gotcha. That's fine. Just call it what it is instead of calling it freedom.
Freedom is not necessarily absolute. I have the freedom to plant the types of trees I want in my backyard, but if they drop apples into my neighbor's yard, it interferes with his rights as well. Sometimes one person's freedom will conflict with another person's, and the settling of those disputes doesn't mean that you're taking away the freedom of either.
If Apple really wanted Samba, they could have licensed a special version under different terms....
Hell, they only needed to fork the last GPLv2 release and work off of that. Assuming of course that they're interested in maintaining a fork of Samba from now until forever, rather than just doing it themselves, which it seems they've decided to.
They would be perfectly fine to continue using SAMBA (GPLv3), since there is not a single technical/legal reason against it with their current usage pattern.
Actually, the legal problem is that the GPLv3 may ban the use of GPLv3 software on non-free devices. It is, in fact, the reason for the GPL 2->3 changes in the first place, to prevent situations like Tivo where modifications to GPLed software were released back to the Free Software community, but the device enforces that code running on it be signed by Tivo. It's a direct assault from GNU on the practice of preventing the end-user from running 'unapproved' software on his own devices.
can't have it at all because a "freedom" advocate believes allowing me to have it would cause them some kind of harm...
No, you can't have it because Apple prevents you from installing software except through them.
Oh come on, how is the above comment a Troll? It's a statement of facts that is totally relevant to the discussion. A troll would include some subtle or less-than-subtle insult against Apple fanboys, Apple's wisdom in being the only supplier of iPad apps, or even just insultingly slamming Apple's App Store model in the first place.
They contributed code to the Samba project with the understanding it would be distributed under the GPL2
Well they made a faulty assumption unless we can see where the Samba development team officially said "we are not moving the GPLv3 at any point in the future."
Security holes for the company, not necessarily the user of the device.
IE, if the user is able to modify the code running on his device, it takes control of that device out of the realm of control of that company. They would see that as a security hole.
On a good day, Microsoft is perhaps the most closed of them all. On a bad day, they are, IMHO
Microsoft has nothing, nothing on the closed nature of the iPads.
So many in the industry are trumpeting the iPad as being the future of computing -- I can't think of any Microsoft-involved scenario that would be worse than that, sad to say.
The GPL is all about freedom. However, it is concerned about the absolute freedom of the software, not the user or developer. It's aimed to ensure that all versions of the software remain completely free, regardless of what others might wish to do with it.
the plant has its own backup generators which are useless when they are on-site.
And ones off site are useless if the connection to the plant is broken.
No, the point of the backup power generators is that they can be flown-in from offsite, which is what eventually happened when the US brought in a generator to the Fukushima plant at Japan's request.
Then again, is the entire country just 10m above sea level? I don't see why these plants were built so close to the ocean in the first place.
But AFAIK all mainstream variants have always thought it was a "curable" condition - confess your sins, join the club, behave well from now on, and you're in. But no rejections on the basis of the color of your skin or eyes, short people can go to Heaven, etc.
You can't cure sin, you can only try not to sin and ask for absolution when you've sinned.
So the official Christian response is "yes, those men are homosexual, but that doesn't mean they have to have to have sex with men. They can just have sex with women and raise a family, suppress those urges, and ask for forgiveness for sinful desires."
Yes, considering the ordering for that case would be BLGT (Bi people are less different, thus more accepted.)
I don't think that's true.
First, people in general just don't "get" bisexuality. At least with more social awareness of homosexuality there has come more understanding, and if not acceptance, at least more tolerance. Bisexuals however, often face prejudice from the homosexuality communities (who should know better) as well as straight people.
Again, the gender of the individual matters greatly -- straight males are far more likely to be accepting of a bisexual woman than a bisexual man.
Mmm, that's how it works on my Linux workstation at work. It resizes what a 12-point font is based on the monitor DPI, and it's when devices like switchers prevent the computer from reading the DPI that users start complaining that fonts are oddly sized.
You're quite right. Instead they're a corrupt group of bastards taking money from Microsoft in return for attacking Microsoft's competition. Not astroturfers at all, but collaborators.
Like most single-issue interest groups, the NFB cares about their issue to the exclusion of all others. If Microsoft has -better- support for blind users, then the NFB will support Microsoft over Google, and it doesn't matter what other issues might remain. Only accessibility matters to them, nothing else.
But the rate of evolution slows down as technology matures
But ours did not! It wasn't a stupid idea on the face of it, it was just a stupid idea in our world. It was important to the movie that it existed in our world, not a total fantasy creation. Independence Day wanted us to feel what it would be like for the regular world to be invaded and destroyed.
Slashdot Mirror
Nope! Well, yes, 2011 - 1997 = 14, but Ultima IV was published in 1985.
I've used Voodoo library wrappers before to get Voodoo games running well.
Diablo II, for instance, only "supported" (it was really a Voodoo trick) running at 1600x1200 if you used Voodoo instead of DirectX, and I installed a Voodoo to DirectX wrapper to make this work.
Ultima IV was in the unofficial category of Abandonware, which essentially means, "It's not technically legal to distribute it, but it is no longer being sold and the copyright owner so far seems not to care if you download it, so go ahead."
I think this is a good point. It's basically "We'll just look the other way"-ware.
Since when can EA assume that I agree with their (new) terms just because they bought the company
It depends on what terms we're talking about here. When one company buys another, it IS the bought company. You can say "Ah, but I never made an agreement with EA." But EA is Origin. It can be both, at once. And you didn't make an agreement with Richard Garriot, you made a deal with Origin (hypothetically speaking, of course).
This moot, since the 'rights' being talked about here (basic copyright) don't require any acceptance or agreement on your part.
You don't need to be a multi-millionaire to have a real 'movie room' in your house, especially if you only want to equal or surpass the iffy quality of the standard multiplex. If you want to equal the quality of a very good theater though things get very expensive very quickly.
$10,000 or so will buy you a decent projector (The Epson Home Cinema series is quite bright and HD quality) and screen, a PS3 (still one of the better consumer Blu-Ray players on the market), a receiver, decent (but not spectacular) speakers, and professional installation.
The biggest barrier isn't installation, or finding the right components...
It's wife-aggro (or husband). Getting someone to put up with all that until they see the results, and the loss of the room to be dedicated to media.
The thing that mostly makes them expensive is the ten years of approval process and the five years of meetings you have to have with the NIMBYs to eventually get to build one.
Yes, let's abolish thorough approval processes for nuclear reactors! Because the fact that they manage to screw them up WITH regulation bodes so well for how they will perform WITHOUT it.
Personally I'm getting sick of the knee-jerk blame-the-regulators talk. It is so tiresome and I wish we could move beyond it.
Useful regulation (like safety regulations) is fine. Regulation whose point is merely to delay and prevent anything from occurring is not.
It's been used very successfully in the past 40 years by the anti-nuke crowd not to ensure the construction of safe nuclear reactors, but to completely stop nuclear plant generation because they hate nuclear power and wish to stop it completely.
And that's not necessarily the "regulators'" fault either, it's the environmental lobby and the politicians beholden to them.
Label them critical national infrastructure and put the military in charge of building, maintaining, and operating them
Then you'll get the crowd that likes to claim the government is totally incapable of doing anything right and that the power grid should be fully privatized instead, since they'll run it better and more efficiently.
Though "having the military run it" might deflect those arguments, since the same folks who think the government is terrible at running things also think the military is exceptionally good at organizing.
Maybe the Army Corps of Engineers?
For example, why did they have to run a wire in to run a pump? Why the hell aren't there easy 'pump electricity access points' where you can just roll up and hook to them? Or why couldn't they hook to the grid?
Why do you even need a pump at all? Radioactive stuff is hot. If you have something heating the water, you have a damn self-circulating pool of water if you make it big enough, you don't need a 'pump'. Okay, that's not practical for the reactors, but it's certainly practical for the spent-fuel rods. That should it a big pool a mile away that they just keep topped off, not a tiny pool next to the damn reactor that overheats too.
This is what gets me -- for some reason, with this reactor design, they were simply not allowed to have any sort of electrical hookup to allow the electricity generated by the plant itself to power the cooling system. Not even in an emergency. So even though the plant was melting down and no one cared about what regulations said, the hookups didn't exist to make that possible. That sort of thing just floors me.
So it's "free" as in "don't do that," then. Gotcha. That's fine. Just call it what it is instead of calling it freedom.
Freedom is not necessarily absolute. I have the freedom to plant the types of trees I want in my backyard, but if they drop apples into my neighbor's yard, it interferes with his rights as well. Sometimes one person's freedom will conflict with another person's, and the settling of those disputes doesn't mean that you're taking away the freedom of either.
If Apple really wanted Samba, they could have licensed a special version under different terms....
Hell, they only needed to fork the last GPLv2 release and work off of that. Assuming of course that they're interested in maintaining a fork of Samba from now until forever, rather than just doing it themselves, which it seems they've decided to.
They would be perfectly fine to continue using SAMBA (GPLv3), since there is not a single technical/legal reason against it with their current usage pattern.
Actually, the legal problem is that the GPLv3 may ban the use of GPLv3 software on non-free devices. It is, in fact, the reason for the GPL 2->3 changes in the first place, to prevent situations like Tivo where modifications to GPLed software were released back to the Free Software community, but the device enforces that code running on it be signed by Tivo. It's a direct assault from GNU on the practice of preventing the end-user from running 'unapproved' software on his own devices.
can't have it at all because a "freedom" advocate believes allowing me to have it would cause them some kind of harm...
No, you can't have it because Apple prevents you from installing software except through them.
Oh come on, how is the above comment a Troll? It's a statement of facts that is totally relevant to the discussion. A troll would include some subtle or less-than-subtle insult against Apple fanboys, Apple's wisdom in being the only supplier of iPad apps, or even just insultingly slamming Apple's App Store model in the first place.
I want to use BSD code without crediting its original authors.
That's true, the only entirely-free license is public domain. ...
Assuming that the code does not run afoul of patents.
They contributed code to the Samba project with the understanding it would be distributed under the GPL2
Well they made a faulty assumption unless we can see where the Samba development team officially said "we are not moving the GPLv3 at any point in the future."
allows possible security holes
What?
Security holes for the company, not necessarily the user of the device.
IE, if the user is able to modify the code running on his device, it takes control of that device out of the realm of control of that company. They would see that as a security hole.
On a good day, Microsoft is perhaps the most closed of them all. On a bad day, they are, IMHO
Microsoft has nothing, nothing on the closed nature of the iPads.
So many in the industry are trumpeting the iPad as being the future of computing -- I can't think of any Microsoft-involved scenario that would be worse than that, sad to say.
The GPL is all about freedom. However, it is concerned about the absolute freedom of the software, not the user or developer. It's aimed to ensure that all versions of the software remain completely free, regardless of what others might wish to do with it.
the plant has its own backup generators which are useless when they are on-site.
And ones off site are useless if the connection to the plant is broken.
No, the point of the backup power generators is that they can be flown-in from offsite, which is what eventually happened when the US brought in a generator to the Fukushima plant at Japan's request.
Then again, is the entire country just 10m above sea level? I don't see why these plants were built so close to the ocean in the first place.
But AFAIK all mainstream variants have always thought it was a "curable" condition - confess your sins, join the club, behave well from now on, and you're in. But no rejections on the basis of the color of your skin or eyes, short people can go to Heaven, etc.
You can't cure sin, you can only try not to sin and ask for absolution when you've sinned.
So the official Christian response is "yes, those men are homosexual, but that doesn't mean they have to have to have sex with men. They can just have sex with women and raise a family, suppress those urges, and ask for forgiveness for sinful desires."
Sucks.
Homosexuality is unnatural, as in not a normal human trait
So is driving a car. So is living to 110. So is wearing polyester. So is plastic surgery, or even changing hair color. The point?
Yes, considering the ordering for that case would be BLGT (Bi people are less different, thus more accepted.)
I don't think that's true.
First, people in general just don't "get" bisexuality. At least with more social awareness of homosexuality there has come more understanding, and if not acceptance, at least more tolerance. Bisexuals however, often face prejudice from the homosexuality communities (who should know better) as well as straight people.
Again, the gender of the individual matters greatly -- straight males are far more likely to be accepting of a bisexual woman than a bisexual man.
Mmm, that's how it works on my Linux workstation at work. It resizes what a 12-point font is based on the monitor DPI, and it's when devices like switchers prevent the computer from reading the DPI that users start complaining that fonts are oddly sized.
You're quite right. Instead they're a corrupt group of bastards taking money from Microsoft in return for attacking Microsoft's competition. Not astroturfers at all, but collaborators.
Like most single-issue interest groups, the NFB cares about their issue to the exclusion of all others. If Microsoft has -better- support for blind users, then the NFB will support Microsoft over Google, and it doesn't matter what other issues might remain. Only accessibility matters to them, nothing else.
"Realistic" hacking was done in the Matrix Reloaded in a short scene and it worked out fine for the movie (now Zion...). It can happen.
But the rate of evolution slows down as technology matures
But ours did not!
It wasn't a stupid idea on the face of it, it was just a stupid idea in our world. It was important to the movie that it existed in our world, not a total fantasy creation. Independence Day wanted us to feel what it would be like for the regular world to be invaded and destroyed.