Wasted effort? You're very enthusiastic about determining what other people should be doing with their time -- how would you feel if someone told you what to do with yours, and you didn't have a choice?
This effort is not wasted if the people expending the effort don't feel that it is. 'Wasted' is a value judgement that you're making, not an objective statement of fact.
Perhaps you'd have been happier if I used the word "redundant"? It is redundant effort and my post is a comment on the possible results of the release of Yet Another Free Office Suite. However, I never "told" anyone what to do. Reread my post: I say here is a possible outcome of this kind of community dilution. If people have suddenly decided to take my opinions on what the future holds as orders for how to run their lives, then it sure doesn't manifest itself very often. I could see that on the highway to work this morning...they all blithely ignored my suggestions for better driving.
And, quite frankly, I do think we should criticize the things we get for "free". I complain about how my taxes are spent on "free" services for myself and other citizens every day. And my vote is my key to push those free things towards the places I think they're necessary. Coming here to/. and expressing my opinion and then voting with my download and bug reports and (if it comes to it) my code patches is how I'll vote for my favorite free office software.
So yes I've got balls to complain about free stuff. Do you? Or are you simply another one of those sheeple that feels that free software is also "free" of fault simply because it's got a free license?
If we, the free software community, aren't critical of ourselves and take appropriate actions then surely others will be, and they will be a lot less constructive about it.
One common complaint about free software development is the waste of effort reproducing functionality with different, distinct projects that rarely share code. Text editors, desktop environments, browsers, window managers....there are tons of each, ostensibly to fit individual's needs. Unfortunately, it seems to me that only a handful, probably two, actually end up with the majority of users in each category. Either vim or Emacs. GNOME or KDE. Konqueror or Mozilla. Windows managers...well there are more, but there are certainly a ton of window managers that got (half-)developed that hardly anyone uses. Why we didn't stop with twm, I'll never understand!;^)
Now, we have OpenOffice, GNOME Office, KOffice, and eventually this project it seems. At least two of these, OpenOffice and the new Gobe guy, have some commercial push behind them. Not all of these can possibly pull in the full benefit that the GPL (or other free licenses...I seem to recall that OO might be a mixed license) would normally grant them as they try to draw from the community. That pool of potential eyeballs all checking source and potential fingers typing in patches and extra functionality...it's all going to be split up.
Heck, just look at the Mozilla project. It's been my impression that most code is getting done by the paid professionals and that Mozilla draws on the community primarily for bug testing and evangelism.
Anyway, this is all to say that two years ago I might have cheered a company with commercial backing buying up the source to a decent office suite and releasing it. (In fact, I was happy to have Sun take over StarOffice, and moreso when they freed the source.) But now this Free Radical could be just one more company that goes down the tubes basing their product on a GPLed source code. They can blame the community for not helping out and the cheap-ass users for not paying for the product that could be had for free. Other than that negative press, the net result will have been that resources (users, coding, testing, time) would have been diluted, being split up among this and the other projects, and those projects that did survive would be less well-developed as a result. Cooperation is needed to guarantee that GPL source that lives forever is actually useful source that lives forever. Modules that can be picked up and shared, like one that imports and exports MS DOC format files.
Not that it'll do any good for me to be a nattering naybob of negativity on this subject. Someone probably just filed a new window manager on freshmeat as I was typing this.
Mega-Geek March = a march of gigantic (or important geeks)
Mega Geek-March = large turnout of geeks, not necessarily important or large, for a march (although, knowing the eating habits of many geeks, I can guess about the "large geek" part)
Perhaps there need to be extra spaces and such: Meg, a geek march! Me gag! Geek, march!
I guess I'm a little punchy after I just wake up...
"Such an effort is increasingly important as online theft of our nation's creative works is a growing threat to our culture and economy," the letter said.
Unless they mean "our destructive corporate culture that is increasingly abusive to the public", I fail to see how they can claim that this threatens our "culture".
The ongoing erosion of the public domain because of copyright extension...now THERE is a threat to our culture. I wonder why they don't do something about that...:^|
Look, we've got some bad laws on the books. Those who read/. are aware of the problems but aren't a powerful enough or mobilized enough group (Slashdotting of weak servers notwithstanding) to get things changed significantly politically. Other countries can help the situation not by playing isolationist but by simply refusing to recognize clearly ludicrous U.S. laws. A private network is not the way to go.
As we often tell people to let the marketplace decide things, we should let the governing marketplace decide things as well. If the U.S. laws are cramping your country's style, then tell the U.S. politicians and companies politely that they can take a long walk on a short pier, and you'll deal with them when they have reasonable laws. If the U.S. wants to stay engaged, then it'll clean up its act.
In short: we'll oppose the draconian crap from the inside, and y'all do it from the outside, and eventually things will change.
A while back I tried burning the Yellow Dog ISO images using a Linux x86 machine, but had a real painful time and never did get it to work. The image seemed to burn fine, but they weren't bootable on my Mac (9500/150).
I looked at Mandrake's stuff and they had a special statically built version of cdrecord that dealt with HFS+ support, or something like that. Still couldn't get it to fly. (I suppose I'd have the same problem with Mandrake, but I had really wanted to try Yellow Dog.)
Anyone know what the trick is to get bootable Yellow Dog CDs by burning them on an x86 Linux machine?
He's not a real tech guy, as I sometimes imagine myself to be. So he's confused about the pressure to move to digital. His bigest gripe? He watches a lot of public television and during the last funding drive they were talking about the wonders of digital as part of their pitch.
He asked me: "When did we, the public, without which public television would not exist, vote that we wanted to move to digital television? How is it in the public interest to move public programming to a new standard for which most people don't have televisions and which will eventually necessitate the the purchase of a new set?"
Good questions, and he's starting to understand some of what is going on in the name of progress that is starting to encroach on the public good that he, and really all of us, are used to.
The nightmare scenario for him, of course, would be that he couldn't be able to time-shift News Hour, Washington Week, and The McLaughlin Group because of digital no-record flags. He tells me that the majority of the TV he watches is recorded with only a small portion being live.
Of course, my dad also says that the problem with TV isn't that there is too little good stuff to watch, but rather that there is really too much. He loves his TV.:^)
I'm teaching "scientific computing" for the second time at my university this fall and we're going to be using FORTRAN with some C (and C++ if that's your cup of tea). The department here is somewhat slanted towards FORTRAN and C instead of scripted environments and there is some outright dislike of Matlab. In this sense, FORTRAN was worth knowing around here and I had to brush up on my skills, since I'd not touched it since spring of 1992.
The course mainly focusses on solving machine numbers, solving linear systems (direct and iterative methods), solving non-linear systems (mostly Newton-type methods), and solving eigenvalue/vector problems. The codes that students wrote last year started from scratch with early assignments. Then, I allowed them to incorporate Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms (BLAS) into their codes. Then they were allowed to use LAPACK for the rest of the semester. They were free to use the C interface, but most chose to use the FORTRAN examples, probably because of the skeleton code that I provided.
Given the tremendous amount of code that is already out there, I agree that knowing FORTRAN is an asset. And since it's not hard to learn, why the heck not, right?
On a side note, they had to use Makefiles, LaTeX their assignments, and send everything to me electronically in a gzipped tarball. They got quite a workout in console tools. For reference, I had some that were quite familiar with the system and some that had had BASIC at some level and that's it. Lots of help was needed as the semester reached the final weeks.
Matlab was used for visualization and graph creation, but I am considering using GNUPlot this year, if it is up to the task. (I think it probably is.) I may also encourage the use of Octave, where possible.
For reference, the class website (which will soon be updated for the new semester) is here: Math 224.
As a kid, I used to accompany my granddad or my mom to the store to get groceries and occasionally I'd get a dime (that's right, 10) to play a pinball game that sat near the front, near the magazine rack. That machine had a mechanical scoreboard, unlike the LED boards I saw later in life. I recall being absorbed by the lights and the idea of trying to keep the ball in play with those little bumpers (hey, I was easily amused). After a while my mom stopped going to that store and pinball just about left my life for good.
Flash forward 20+ years and a fellow grad student, Joerg, started going to get pizza at a little college-quality Italian place over by the campus. The great arcade next door had closed, mostly, but some of the games had stayed to soak up quarters from the pizza eating patrons. As it turns out Joerg was a real fan of pinball and he enticed me into playing and I got hooked. It was really cool to finally be a bit coordinated and to have the cash to spend to actually get to know a machine. In this case, it was The Addams Family, with little audio clips from the movie. ("The Mamushka!" was my favorite.) Although I never measured up to Joerg's mastery of the game, I found truly irresistible the tactile feedback and use of real, honest-to-physics english that goes into working the table. Sure, feeling the kickback of the gun in Time Crisis is cool, but not like pinball.
Now, that Italian place is gone and the games are gone for good. While I still plan to get a Robotron machine first, I'm thinking of adding a pinball machine to my computer and work room when we finally get time to get a real home. They really are awesome.
If you haven't ever played a pinball machine and you get the chance, just remember that those quarters are pretty well-spent, even if just to say that you played pinball for a bit. I bet you'll find you enjoy it, to boot.:^)
At least pick good music
on
Atari 2600 Hacks
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
...console-perfect pitfall music...
Yeesh. That's a terrible choice. The 'music' in Pitfall consisted mostly of Pitfall Harry doing a Tarzan yodel over on a vine, right? Maybe there was some bit of music when you started the game, but it was minimal.
If you want to talk real Atari 2600 music, then at least pick something cool like California Games ('Louie, Louie' and 'Wipeout') or BMX Airmaster. Heck, even Pressure Cooker had a catchy freakin' tune that puts Pitfall to shame.
If by Pitfall you really mean Pitfall II, then that wasn't really the Atari 2600 doing all the sound. That was a special chip on the cartridge (similar to the hack done with Ballblazer on the Atari 7800) that was handlin the cool music. It was awesome, that I'll admit, but it really isn't the 2600 doing the work and the emulators that support it had to add specific support for that particular cartridge to make the music work correctly.
Unless it's as exciting as Defender of the Crown's sword fighting, I dont' care. Remember, that means there has to be a late-night rendezvous with a recently-rescued fair maiden, all in glorious 16 colors at a 160x240 resolution, as the reward for the winner.;^)
Sure, the Amiga version was higher resolution and more colors, but the Commodore 64 was first.:^D
Why is a government official stumping for the interests of a single company? Yeah, they can play it off as if they were talking about a whole industry, but it is obvious that there is really only one company with real political and money interests that is making waves here.
It used to be that the U.S. was known for promoting freedom, in the guise of democracy and free markets, to other countries. Now, we have our diplomats promoting to keep those same countries in the grasp of a predatory monopolist that we ourselves convicted.
They can say they're not against free software all they want, but the industry they're promoting is not one that is known for giving freedoms to its users and it one that is clearly afraid of the true freedom that free software can give.
The positive by NVIDIA so far is that they licensed technology from someone else to construct their drivers and hardware, and they are not at liberty to release open drivers. Fine, that's something I can accept for now.
What I'd really like to know is, as they move forward to new hardware and new drivers and new technologies, will they do so with the free software philosophy in mind, so that they can be more open about their work, and help the community adopt their hardware on other platforms than Windows, Linux, and MacOS.
Certainly, if they release this compiler under a free license, then that's a good first step, because it could mean that they recoginize the value of free software and how it aids the spread of technologies to new platforms, not to mention how good free interfaces can become standards. Seems clear that NVIDIA would like to be the new SGI, settings the standard by which graphic innovation is defined.
Step 1: Make a name for yourself in the market Step 2: Microsoft steps in and begins to eat up your market with their desktop integration Step 3: Struggle. Squirm. Step 4: Release source to your application.
Granted, this might not be all of Real's assets in the way that Netscape released their browser source, but it could be the leg up that free software needs to get into the streaming and streaming client market. Also, it bears noting that Netscape (i.e. AOL/TW) invested tons of money to make the product work after they released the source. The Mozilla project certainly wouldn't be where it is today without that investment.
Now, how would it proceed?
Step 5: Company is marginalized, possibly dies. Step 6: Free software product lives on.
We've already seen Nautilus from Eazel do this on the GNOME desktop (although some people seem to dislike the bloated desktop). It certainly is a possibility with Netscape, given the recent troubles at AOL/Time Warner. And I can't remember the time I read a positive article about Real, but then again, I might just be missing out.
Ah, good to know. I really liked the Apple ][ but we just couldn't afford one. Even when I got a C=64, it was a hand-me-down from my dad's office equipment.
I don't recall that Music Construction Set could make stand-alone music executables. Maybe I've got it wrong.
The other biggie, Adventure Construction Set, I believe also required an original disk to play.
Not that these were hard to come by. I owned originals of both, but they were trivial to copy and distribute, i.e. pirate.
The exception that I'm aware of is Garry Kitchen's Gamemaker (by one of the Kitchen brothers of Activision fame). This could be used to create stand-alone games and it was really a pretty freaking intricate design system that they came up with. It had scripting, sprite editing, background design, music design, and sound effects. Out of the box, you could create a fully functional reproduction of Pitfall! and use that as a basis to learn the system. Amazing stuff for the time.
Incidentally, all of the above is based on my recollection of the C=64 world. Other platforms may have had different limitations, but I recall ACS and Gamemaker as both being C=64 only. Perhaps I'm forgetting details in my old age.;^)
"The steam engine... probably transformed American law, but the 'law of the steam engine' never existed,"
What kind of lame comparison is that? The steam engine is not a form of expression. The steam engine was not responsible for a mass communication at all levels (individual to individual, group to individual, etc.) that retains massive amounts of information, experiences, and ideas across geographical boundaries. Sure, it changed a lot of things, but it's influence falls in a completely different realm of human experience. Do we have special laws governing expression and speech? Sure we do, and we don't generally compare them to laws that govern commerce, as we might with the steam engine.
The skeptics start by questioning the very existence of cyberspace, which they say is no more real than a "phone space" involving all the people on the telephone at a given time.
Um...hello!? Just about all laws are based on mental constructs that we collectively decide upon as a community. The community feels that cybersapce is something different, and these guys don't get to tell us otherwise. Also, the nature of communication over a phone is of such a different nature that to compare them is terribly short-sighted.
Sorry, but these guys sound like they just want to be contrarians, staking out a radical position for the sake of academic interest.
Throughout history, we have expanded the definition of what "rights" one is entitled to. This ruling could be a move towards defining a right for Americans to have free and open access to information and from there towards making it a basic human right. This line from the CNN article at least seems to have this flavor:
They [the judges] say it denies poor people without home computers the same full access to information as their wealthier neighbors.
Eben Moglen came and gave a talk to our LUG (and other groups) here and one question he asked that has stuck with me is this: "If all the human race's collected information could be made available to anyone, anywhere, at any time, for marginal cost, would it be moral to restrict access to that informtion?"
Perhaps the courts are saying the answer is "No, everyone should have access to all the information that can be provided for them."
What are they going to do about the ultimate analog hole? You know the one, you all have it.
It's the "analog hole" that runs out of the speakers, into the air, across the room, and into your ears.
Or off the screen, into the air, and smacks into your eyes.
That's one big fooking hole right there, and I know for a fact that unprotected digital music and video are passing through that hole every day. Just the other day I was in a room where Star Wars: Attack of the Clones was flowing right through the hole, unencrypted, right into the eyes of about 150 other people besides me.
This hole must be plugged. I hope they're drawing up the legislation and mapping out the new devices right now. In fact, I saw such devices being used just the other day on Star Trek...this advanced race has these cool so-called "borg implants".
I have been working with javascript, DOM, CSS2 for fun in the evenings, and so far Opera doesn't do enough of what I want it to do. Mozilla seems to be the only browser that supports the DOM as outlined by the W3C, and for that reason, I won't be using it, regardless of how fast it is.
See an example of what I've been doing with Mozilla here. It's a card game that I enjoy on my Handspring Visor and "ported". Works great in Mozilla, but dies in every other browser I've tried.
They have a page to thank some of their users. See it here. (For the goatse.cx wary, that's how the page really sets the address in the location bar. Just an IP address. Nice, eh?)
What really surprised me was the part at the end of the thanks note:
[snip list of registered users] Sincerely Yours RadLight Team
PS. HA-HA! SUCKERZZZZZZZZ!
Ok, maybe not, but I half expected that, when I saw the "thanks" page.;^)
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps you'd have been happier if I used the word "redundant"? It is redundant effort and my post is a comment on the possible results of the release of Yet Another Free Office Suite. However, I never "told" anyone what to do. Reread my post: I say here is a possible outcome of this kind of community dilution. If people have suddenly decided to take my opinions on what the future holds as orders for how to run their lives, then it sure doesn't manifest itself very often. I could see that on the highway to work this morning...they all blithely ignored my suggestions for better driving.
And, quite frankly, I do think we should criticize the things we get for "free". I complain about how my taxes are spent on "free" services for myself and other citizens every day. And my vote is my key to push those free things towards the places I think they're necessary. Coming here to
So yes I've got balls to complain about free stuff. Do you? Or are you simply another one of those sheeple that feels that free software is also "free" of fault simply because it's got a free license?
If we, the free software community, aren't critical of ourselves and take appropriate actions then surely others will be, and they will be a lot less constructive about it.
One common complaint about free software development is the waste of effort reproducing functionality with different, distinct projects that rarely share code. Text editors, desktop environments, browsers, window managers....there are tons of each, ostensibly to fit individual's needs. Unfortunately, it seems to me that only a handful, probably two, actually end up with the majority of users in each category. Either vim or Emacs. GNOME or KDE. Konqueror or Mozilla. Windows managers...well there are more, but there are certainly a ton of window managers that got (half-)developed that hardly anyone uses. Why we didn't stop with twm, I'll never understand! ;^)
Now, we have OpenOffice, GNOME Office, KOffice, and eventually this project it seems. At least two of these, OpenOffice and the new Gobe guy, have some commercial push behind them. Not all of these can possibly pull in the full benefit that the GPL (or other free licenses...I seem to recall that OO might be a mixed license) would normally grant them as they try to draw from the community. That pool of potential eyeballs all checking source and potential fingers typing in patches and extra functionality...it's all going to be split up.
Heck, just look at the Mozilla project. It's been my impression that most code is getting done by the paid professionals and that Mozilla draws on the community primarily for bug testing and evangelism.
Anyway, this is all to say that two years ago I might have cheered a company with commercial backing buying up the source to a decent office suite and releasing it. (In fact, I was happy to have Sun take over StarOffice, and moreso when they freed the source.) But now this Free Radical could be just one more company that goes down the tubes basing their product on a GPLed source code. They can blame the community for not helping out and the cheap-ass users for not paying for the product that could be had for free. Other than that negative press, the net result will have been that resources (users, coding, testing, time) would have been diluted, being split up among this and the other projects, and those projects that did survive would be less well-developed as a result. Cooperation is needed to guarantee that GPL source that lives forever is actually useful source that lives forever. Modules that can be picked up and shared, like one that imports and exports MS DOC format files.
Not that it'll do any good for me to be a nattering naybob of negativity on this subject. Someone probably just filed a new window manager on freshmeat as I was typing this.
Mega-Geek March = a march of gigantic (or important geeks)
Mega Geek-March = large turnout of geeks, not necessarily important or large, for a march (although, knowing the eating habits of many geeks, I can guess about the "large geek" part)
Perhaps there need to be extra spaces and such:
Meg, a geek march!
Me gag! Geek, march!
I guess I'm a little punchy after I just wake up...
Unless they mean "our destructive corporate culture that is increasingly abusive to the public", I fail to see how they can claim that this threatens our "culture".
The ongoing erosion of the public domain because of copyright extension...now THERE is a threat to our culture. I wonder why they don't do something about that...
How about a cute name like NINA: NINA is not American? ;^)
I don't have $100/mo to give as you do, but you are right that I should be giving something.
Look, we've got some bad laws on the books. Those who read /. are aware of the problems but aren't a powerful enough or mobilized enough group (Slashdotting of weak servers notwithstanding) to get things changed significantly politically. Other countries can help the situation not by playing isolationist but by simply refusing to recognize clearly ludicrous U.S. laws. A private network is not the way to go.
As we often tell people to let the marketplace decide things, we should let the governing marketplace decide things as well. If the U.S. laws are cramping your country's style, then tell the U.S. politicians and companies politely that they can take a long walk on a short pier, and you'll deal with them when they have reasonable laws. If the U.S. wants to stay engaged, then it'll clean up its act.
In short: we'll oppose the draconian crap from the inside, and y'all do it from the outside, and eventually things will change.
A while back I tried burning the Yellow Dog ISO images using a Linux x86 machine, but had a real painful time and never did get it to work. The image seemed to burn fine, but they weren't bootable on my Mac (9500/150).
I looked at Mandrake's stuff and they had a special statically built version of cdrecord that dealt with HFS+ support, or something like that. Still couldn't get it to fly. (I suppose I'd have the same problem with Mandrake, but I had really wanted to try Yellow Dog.)
Anyone know what the trick is to get bootable Yellow Dog CDs by burning them on an x86 Linux machine?
He asked me: "When did we, the public, without which public television would not exist, vote that we wanted to move to digital television? How is it in the public interest to move public programming to a new standard for which most people don't have televisions and which will eventually necessitate the the purchase of a new set?"
Good questions, and he's starting to understand some of what is going on in the name of progress that is starting to encroach on the public good that he, and really all of us, are used to.
The nightmare scenario for him, of course, would be that he couldn't be able to time-shift News Hour, Washington Week, and The McLaughlin Group because of digital no-record flags. He tells me that the majority of the TV he watches is recorded with only a small portion being live.
Of course, my dad also says that the problem with TV isn't that there is too little good stuff to watch, but rather that there is really too much. He loves his TV.
The course mainly focusses on solving machine numbers, solving linear systems (direct and iterative methods), solving non-linear systems (mostly Newton-type methods), and solving eigenvalue/vector problems. The codes that students wrote last year started from scratch with early assignments. Then, I allowed them to incorporate Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms (BLAS) into their codes. Then they were allowed to use LAPACK for the rest of the semester. They were free to use the C interface, but most chose to use the FORTRAN examples, probably because of the skeleton code that I provided.
Given the tremendous amount of code that is already out there, I agree that knowing FORTRAN is an asset. And since it's not hard to learn, why the heck not, right?
On a side note, they had to use Makefiles, LaTeX their assignments, and send everything to me electronically in a gzipped tarball. They got quite a workout in console tools. For reference, I had some that were quite familiar with the system and some that had had BASIC at some level and that's it. Lots of help was needed as the semester reached the final weeks.
Matlab was used for visualization and graph creation, but I am considering using GNUPlot this year, if it is up to the task. (I think it probably is.) I may also encourage the use of Octave, where possible.
For reference, the class website (which will soon be updated for the new semester) is here: Math 224.
Too late in life I rediscovered pinball.
:^)
As a kid, I used to accompany my granddad or my mom to the store to get groceries and occasionally I'd get a dime (that's right, 10) to play a pinball game that sat near the front, near the magazine rack. That machine had a mechanical scoreboard, unlike the LED boards I saw later in life. I recall being absorbed by the lights and the idea of trying to keep the ball in play with those little bumpers (hey, I was easily amused). After a while my mom stopped going to that store and pinball just about left my life for good.
Flash forward 20+ years and a fellow grad student, Joerg, started going to get pizza at a little college-quality Italian place over by the campus. The great arcade next door had closed, mostly, but some of the games had stayed to soak up quarters from the pizza eating patrons. As it turns out Joerg was a real fan of pinball and he enticed me into playing and I got hooked. It was really cool to finally be a bit coordinated and to have the cash to spend to actually get to know a machine. In this case, it was The Addams Family, with little audio clips from the movie. ("The Mamushka!" was my favorite.) Although I never measured up to Joerg's mastery of the game, I found truly irresistible the tactile feedback and use of real, honest-to-physics english that goes into working the table. Sure, feeling the kickback of the gun in Time Crisis is cool, but not like pinball.
Now, that Italian place is gone and the games are gone for good. While I still plan to get a Robotron machine first, I'm thinking of adding a pinball machine to my computer and work room when we finally get time to get a real home. They really are awesome.
If you haven't ever played a pinball machine and you get the chance, just remember that those quarters are pretty well-spent, even if just to say that you played pinball for a bit. I bet you'll find you enjoy it, to boot.
If you want to talk real Atari 2600 music, then at least pick something cool like California Games ('Louie, Louie' and 'Wipeout') or BMX Airmaster. Heck, even Pressure Cooker had a catchy freakin' tune that puts Pitfall to shame.
If by Pitfall you really mean Pitfall II, then that wasn't really the Atari 2600 doing all the sound. That was a special chip on the cartridge (similar to the hack done with Ballblazer on the Atari 7800) that was handlin the cool music. It was awesome, that I'll admit, but it really isn't the 2600 doing the work and the emulators that support it had to add specific support for that particular cartridge to make the music work correctly.
Sure, the Amiga version was higher resolution and more colors, but the Commodore 64 was first. :^D
It used to be that the U.S. was known for promoting freedom, in the guise of democracy and free markets, to other countries. Now, we have our diplomats promoting to keep those same countries in the grasp of a predatory monopolist that we ourselves convicted.
They can say they're not against free software all they want, but the industry they're promoting is not one that is known for giving freedoms to its users and it one that is clearly afraid of the true freedom that free software can give.
The positive by NVIDIA so far is that they licensed technology from someone else to construct their drivers and hardware, and they are not at liberty to release open drivers. Fine, that's something I can accept for now.
What I'd really like to know is, as they move forward to new hardware and new drivers and new technologies, will they do so with the free software philosophy in mind, so that they can be more open about their work, and help the community adopt their hardware on other platforms than Windows, Linux, and MacOS.
Certainly, if they release this compiler under a free license, then that's a good first step, because it could mean that they recoginize the value of free software and how it aids the spread of technologies to new platforms, not to mention how good free interfaces can become standards. Seems clear that NVIDIA would like to be the new SGI, settings the standard by which graphic innovation is defined.
Step 1: Make a name for yourself in the market
;^)
Step 2: Microsoft steps in and begins to eat up your market with their desktop integration
Step 3: Struggle. Squirm.
Step 4: Release source to your application.
Granted, this might not be all of Real's assets in the way that Netscape released their browser source, but it could be the leg up that free software needs to get into the streaming and streaming client market. Also, it bears noting that Netscape (i.e. AOL/TW) invested tons of money to make the product work after they released the source. The Mozilla project certainly wouldn't be where it is today without that investment.
Now, how would it proceed?
Step 5: Company is marginalized, possibly dies.
Step 6: Free software product lives on.
We've already seen Nautilus from Eazel do this on the GNOME desktop (although some people seem to dislike the bloated desktop). It certainly is a possibility with Netscape, given the recent troubles at AOL/Time Warner. And I can't remember the time I read a positive article about Real, but then again, I might just be missing out.
Now, I guess I should read the CNN article...
I don't recall that Music Construction Set could make stand-alone music executables. Maybe I've got it wrong.
;^)
The other biggie, Adventure Construction Set, I believe also required an original disk to play.
Not that these were hard to come by. I owned originals of both, but they were trivial to copy and distribute, i.e. pirate.
The exception that I'm aware of is Garry Kitchen's Gamemaker (by one of the Kitchen brothers of Activision fame). This could be used to create stand-alone games and it was really a pretty freaking intricate design system that they came up with. It had scripting, sprite editing, background design, music design, and sound effects. Out of the box, you could create a fully functional reproduction of Pitfall! and use that as a basis to learn the system. Amazing stuff for the time.
Incidentally, all of the above is based on my recollection of the C=64 world. Other platforms may have had different limitations, but I recall ACS and Gamemaker as both being C=64 only. Perhaps I'm forgetting details in my old age.
What kind of lame comparison is that? The steam engine is not a form of expression. The steam engine was not responsible for a mass communication at all levels (individual to individual, group to individual, etc.) that retains massive amounts of information, experiences, and ideas across geographical boundaries. Sure, it changed a lot of things, but it's influence falls in a completely different realm of human experience. Do we have special laws governing expression and speech? Sure we do, and we don't generally compare them to laws that govern commerce, as we might with the steam engine.
Um...hello!? Just about all laws are based on mental constructs that we collectively decide upon as a community. The community feels that cybersapce is something different, and these guys don't get to tell us otherwise. Also, the nature of communication over a phone is of such a different nature that to compare them is terribly short-sighted.
Sorry, but these guys sound like they just want to be contrarians, staking out a radical position for the sake of academic interest.
Eben Moglen came and gave a talk to our LUG (and other groups) here and one question he asked that has stuck with me is this: "If all the human race's collected information could be made available to anyone, anywhere, at any time, for marginal cost, would it be moral to restrict access to that informtion?"
Perhaps the courts are saying the answer is "No, everyone should have access to all the information that can be provided for them."
Of course, one has to observe that goatse.cx has both an o and a c in it...
Yes, I know that the c is in the extension, but still...
What are they going to do about the ultimate analog hole? You know the one, you all have it.
It's the "analog hole" that runs out of the speakers, into the air, across the room, and into your ears.
Or off the screen, into the air, and smacks into your eyes.
That's one big fooking hole right there, and I know for a fact that unprotected digital music and video are passing through that hole every day. Just the other day I was in a room where Star Wars: Attack of the Clones was flowing right through the hole, unencrypted, right into the eyes of about 150 other people besides me.
This hole must be plugged. I hope they're drawing up the legislation and mapping out the new devices right now. In fact, I saw such devices being used just the other day on Star Trek...this advanced race has these cool so-called "borg implants".
I have been working with javascript, DOM, CSS2 for fun in the evenings, and so far Opera doesn't do enough of what I want it to do. Mozilla seems to be the only browser that supports the DOM as outlined by the W3C, and for that reason, I won't be using it, regardless of how fast it is.
See an example of what I've been doing with Mozilla here. It's a card game that I enjoy on my Handspring Visor and "ported". Works great in Mozilla, but dies in every other browser I've tried.
Ah well. Go Moz!
I do believe that's what the Enron execs are going to get nailed for. Wrong corporate behemoth, but I can understand getting them mixed up.
What really surprised me was the part at the end of the thanks note:
Ok, maybe not, but I half expected that, when I saw the "thanks" page.