A lot of independant game developers survive just fine. Depending on the game style you work with, a single person can do all the work - surviving then is a lot easier than a 40 person team. Most of my games have been single playerpuzzle games*. I have a day job, and do my game programming at night - it's trivial for my game company to 'survive' in that environment.
But when you get into monsters that require a team like Trajectory Zone (under development - havesomesamplescreenshots), then things change a lot. As a single person development team, it's easy to make all the choices, do the job, and not have to worry as much about timelines, depending on someone getting thier job done (or, just as important - you getting your job done on time.) And that's just doing it 'part-time' - IE, keeping a day job, and working on games at night. Try and do it full time, and it gets even more complicated - where's the next infusion of cash come from? Or more importantly, where's lunch come from?
That's not to say it's so complicated that people aren't doing it as Indies - they are. Heck, after Trajectory Zone ships, I'll finally move to full time game development instead of part-part time. (Funny words actually - "part-time" doesn't describe living, breathing, eating, and dreaming game development in all your "spare time.")
I always like readin' about games like Imperial Wars - nice to see someone doing' it. When I spoke at Indie Games Con 2002 my co-speaker was a full time Indie developer. Really cool to spend some time talkin' to someone who was doin' it full time, and find out how they managed to pull of what they have done so far. David Michael wasn't the only person there doing it full time, of course - there were others too, and talkin' to them ended up giving me a lot of insight. If you are really seriously interested in Indie game development, hit the next Indie Game Con - there's a lot to be learned there.
Oh, and for those interested - here's a transcript of the speach. It's got a lot of interesting stuff in it - oddly enough, the title of the speach is "Can I Make Money As An Indie Game Developer?" - very appropriate to this particular/. thread:-)
Another place to go look around at when it comes to Indie Game Development - Garage Games lots of people there working towards Indie game releases at the moment, and some people who have already completed thier current projects and moving to the next game. Look in the business section and the general sections for some really good discussion on the subject (note - just like anywhere else, gotta sift a bit to find the good stuff from the crud.)
(*Yes, some shameless self-promotion there. Sorry, it's totally nessisary:-)
Hm. Hadn't much thought about that. It would be dead simple for me to put un-timed options in most of my future puzzle games. I'll keep that in mind:-)
Reminds me of one o' my customers...
on
Snood, the Simple Game
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· Score: 4, Interesting
This kinda reminds me of one of my customers. I quite often talk to my game customers via email (Asking how to get past a level, needing a re-download after loosing the game, etc. Not all 'support' stuff really, but, kinda nice to talk to the people who enjoy the games, and find out what they want more of.) Anyway... one of my customers that contacted me had a serious problem. She was in her late 60's, I believe, and loved Tile Panic!, a fairly simple puzzle game that requires some quick thinking on higher levels.
Problem is, her daughter wouldn't let her play anymore. Apparently she had heart problems, and after a while, her blood pressure would go WAY up, and she'd have to quit playing.
Not wanting to be the death of nice little old ladies, I created a separate version for her that takes out the time-based element of the game. She's the only one I know who managed to actually play perfect games on more than one of the game difficulty levels! But the whole thought of someone refusing to give up playing the game dispite the health detrement because they like the game too much is both strange and encouraging;-)
(Eh - since I'm here, I'll plug one o' my other puzzle games, since that's a bit o' the discussion on this thread - go check out Tile Panic!, as mentioned above, and Boulder Panic! 2 DX. Or don't :-)
Um, it's a little more than just 'barely lifting your feet'. People who get into that game rarely stop without breaking a sweat. It'd certainly do me more good than the exercise bicycle that's covered in a protective layer of dust.
DDR is now one of my three forms of exersize. (The other two: A membership to the gym which I use for weightlifting, but can't stand things like the bikes. The other is my wife. *Nudge Nudge, Wink Wink*) It's pretty easy to become a Code Potato, setting there in front of the computer not getting any exersize. Working for a computer related company during the day, and owning a game company at night does bad things for your physique;-)
Anyway - it's a hell of a lot of exersize, even when you learn how to dance 'optimally'. When you start out, you're jumpin' all over the place, trying to get the beat, etc. Once you've got it, you tone it down a lot, but, you start moving faster and faster, picking more complicated songs to work with. I own my own home setup (modified some Playstation pads for use on the PC, and grabbed StepMania to use with it) rather than dump tons o' quarters into an arcade machine or buy a PS. Plus, and overweight 31 year old white guy tryin' to DDR is NOT a pretty sight. Luckly, it improves the more time you spend on the pads. (IE - less overweight, a little more coordinated. However, I'm still a 31 year old white guy lookin' like a dork;-)
For anyone who's wondered if it works for weightloss, keeping you in shape, etc... I have no real clue. I assume it does. I work up a hell of a sweat, and have a lot of fun doing it. But I've also got a membership to a gym four blocks from here, so, it's hard to tell what makes the most difference.
But I will say this in general for the idea o' workin' out and how it affects your coding skills - I always feel sharper and can work a lot farther into the night after I've been going to the gym consistently.:-)
Hm. I think you missed part of how the market works. The Product is definied by what they throw in. It's thier choice - if they throw in the source code, it's part of the product. If they don't throw in the source code, it's not part of the product. The end user does not determine the extent or limitations of a product, the producer of the product determines those things.
Now, the issue of if it SHOULD be part of the product - that's a different story. Putting it into the analogy of real-world products - What you want in this case is a set of blueprints, architectural drawings, etc. that went into producing the product. (Ok, VERY loose analogy - maybe what you want is the CNC code that went into running the machines that made the molds, and the automation code that went behind creating the product.)
Ok, I thought the first one was pretty off base and utopian in it's thinking, and I don't think this one-page update to the artice does anything to improve matters.
Now, before someone decides I'm an anti-Open Source type o' guy, forget it. I'm not - I use Mozilla (1. 2 - woohoo!) for my browsing and mail, and Open Office as a most-of-the-time replacement for MS-Office (*SIGH* I still have office loaded for a few oddball things OpenOffice doesn't do right.) I've got a nice firewall (linux) and fileserver (linux) all running open source operating systems.
So, consider that before markin' it as troll when I say... Oh, PUHHHLEEZ!
Look, makin' an application Open Source does not garantee quality. It does not reduce code bloat (in fact, I'm starting to believe that at it's core, the Open Source way of doing things is starting to increase code bloat. However, the really slick thing is bein' able to fix that on a personal level with a simple recompile most of the time! But, that's a totally different article to write...) It does not garantee an increase in quality - just because you can LOOK at a bridge's construction, do you fully inderstand the architect & engineer's design methodology? Would adding another bolt hole here and throwing a bolt through it increase or decrease stability of the bridge. You have to be a specialist in the field to truely understand (just being an engineer doesn't cut it - you need to understand BRIDGES before you work on a bridge:-)
Same applies to software engineering - while anyone could look at the source, and start hackin' at it, that does almost nothing for other people in the first place. You've got to redistribute the improvements, get it back into the source tree, and convince other people to re-compile before you do it. Most of the steps above require specialized knowladge of one form or another. (Before someone debates that point - no, not people don't understand how to run a compiler. I'm not talking about the/. crowd - we all know GCC or compiler of choice like the back of our hands. Or, for some, the palm of thier hands;-)
But, even then, some of this stuff is way above 75% of the/. crowd's heads part of the time (picking an arbitrary number here) So what point was it in handing the source for a accounting system to someone who who is a systems administrator? Parts and bits of it make sense, but, without the background in accounting systems, there's parts of it that could cause more grief than it's worth for a simple change.
There's also somehow the impression that this would "change things". That somehow, because of magically having the source code available, this would make products better. Well, it's not going to increase the quality of the code from the original company who released it. And unless there's a clearing house for everyone to update thier application, what's the point? Overall quality doesn't improve, only single installations (or corporate installations where someone made the nessisary change and distributed it on the desktops - which to be honest, DOES indeed provide some promise to the concepts he presents in his article. Corporate licensing would be handy.)
Tech support becomes a nightmare too - "Oh, sir? You changed that bit of code? Sorry, can't help ya..." Let's face it, it's hard enough to support an application and all it's versions - it's hard to support it when someone can make a simple change. Add a public code repository to it, and man it just gets worse. Once the code is touched, there's no support anymore. (But, of course, if you know enough to mess with it, is it a downside? *SHRUG*)
Licensing would become an even deeper nightmare. If companies are putting horribly restricting EULA's on compiled products, imagine what they are going to want to do with the source? Sure, he talks about how to protect it with copyrights and excluding certain modules (more on that in a moment), but, companies aren't happy with copyright now, how will that improve with source code involved?
And of course, there's this interesting idea that you could just exclude some modules. Well, that does a couple of interesting things. 1, it defeats part of the purpose (but not all of it.) So there's still parts of the code that's buggy and unreleased. Whoo... what exactly did we fix there? 2, it would be an absolute Haven or Hell for Open Source developers. Companies would fall very quickly prey to people who simply replaced that core module, and suddenly have a working application - no need for the original developer anymore, just release a new open source core for the program. Open Source developers are going through a lot of effort to copy the current functionality of an application - if there was an even shorter route to gettin' the job done, someone would end up doin' it. Of course, given the paranoia level of some companies, Open Source developers could end up having to deal with ELUA's that prevent you from having looked at another company's source tree and writing your own. MS is already attempting this with a couple o' items. Why would the situation improve?
While it's an interesting set of thoughts, to me it comes down to a combination of personal choice, and company motivation. If you want the source code to an application, then choose your application wisely - use Open Office over MS Office. Linux over Windows. Etc. Almost anything out there has an Open Source equivalant (almost, not quite.) Use it.
As for companies - it's up to them to decide what resources become available to the end user, and under what license. If I can get one more feature out of Mozilla (contact synching with Windows CE... er.... PalmPC machines, not just PalmOS machines) I'll begin moving everyone in our offices to it - the combination of MS's licensing and features -vs- Mozilla's Licensing and features will make it a logical choice. Companies are now starting to have to take that sort of thing into account already - I'm not the only commercial developer out there deciding how much of my application (games, in particular) source I'm going to be providing to the end user. If Collaborative Source, Shared Source, Open Source, or model of choice where the user gets the source code, is truely of importance to end users, we'll see it happen. And the companies that didn't follow that path will have a hard time - adapt or die.
I personally choose to have applications that have the source available, as long as everything involved fits my needs. And, not including the "Everything should be free" crowd, I think that' show most users will have to make thier choice anyway.
Hey Jack - I think your example is actually more bogus than what you are complaining about. Let me yank this one section out, and put things in perspective...
The goal of a programming language is to provide a machine with a set of instructions, not to sit down and read it a story. Do you expect your car to be made of parts which have little embedded notes explainging how they were engineered? Of course not, that's just silly
And, when you look at your compiled program, you don't see comments or documentation inside of it either. The compiler strips it out, as it should. However, when you code, you document. When a car builder designs a machine, they document it into such detail level it makes programming documentation look sparse (most of the time - I've seen it be overdone before;-) It doesn't matter what you do, building cars, wiring offices, or programming, you better be documenting what you do - and those who don't regret it later, and lack of planning up front causes serious issues.
I probably shouldn't pick on your example - but it was a really nasty example.
Now, I don't completely disagree with your opinion that it's gimmicky, but, this provides yet another process for people to adopt if they so choose to. Any method that people feel comfortable with for software engineering or documentation that gets them to DO IT, well, sounds like a good idea to me.
Actually, as a Torque licensee, the support has been pretty good. But because of the way the GG team has set things up, they don't have to answer all the questions - instead, you post to the forums online, and sometimes the community addresses the issue, sometimes the GG team does. All depends on who's fastest on the draw it seems. (I have, however, seen some newbie questions go unanswered - mainly because if they would have bothered using the 'search' function, they would have found the answer right off. RTFM & RTFW! Jeez people!)
I've been happy as hell with it all - it's worked great, I've definitely gotten more than $100 in value out of it, and both the community support and GG's support has been great.
Funny part is, you can take your pick of UI's for snort, on just about any platform (I run snort on WinNT on one network, and snort on Linux on another. And I've got a GUI for both of 'em;-)
In fact, if the file name say "MY WIFE NUDE.JPG", I don't recommend opening it. (Well, ok, if it was MY wife, no problem. Quite the cutie. But I know some people's wife who.... *SHUDDER*)
Lemmie start by saying I'm not that much of a Star Wars fan to begin with. I went to the 12:01 AM showing because a friend got tickets to it, and offered 'em to my wife and I. The only one in the series I liked up until this was The Empire Strikes Back. And personally, I think Lucas is a bit of a prick because of some of the crap he's pulled with the theaters, etc.
Yes, this has memorable scenes. You finally get to see what's so "wow" about a Jedi. 4, 5, & 6 the Jedi are some sort of BS plot thing with a cool sword. Luke tries to become one, and you know what - he ain't JACK compaired to this. Watching an actual battle with the Jedi is quite memorable. Finding out why Yoda is the master is quite memorable (Holy hell yes!)
I think Lucas burned everyone with Episode I, and critics are quick to not let a director live stuff like that down. Episode I didn't have any memorable scenes, IMHO. This one does.
Parts of the movie are still weak, however, but if Episode I had been as good as this, no one would have really been bitching nearly as much.
In that case, pay the $8.00 to see it. The lightsabre fights are more than just worth it - saw it at 12:01 AM today, and after a good morning's sleep, I can still vividly remember all the fight scenes.
Unluckly, the toys have changed. Now to get a complete set, you need the.museum,.pro,.aero, and the other new ones. And of course, you'll need the nessisary.prn to complete your set if this whole thing happens;-)
Take a look at Torque - it's basically the V12 engine from Tribes 2 with all the Tribes 2 Intellectual Property pulled out. What's left is a nice, fairly good engine. Here's the cool part:
If you want to just do modding, you don't have to BUY Torque, instead, just download the demo. The also have all sorts of community boards for ya to look at and interact with each other for questions. Pretty nice.
If you suddenly decide you want to write a commercial game with it, or, you need the source code - no problem. License the engine. For $100, and a distribution agreement for commercial sales. Not TOO bad.
There is a built-in terrain editor, world editor, etc - however, no actually map-building tools for interior locations. But, you can use Quark or WorldCraft (er... guess that's Valve's Hammersomethingorother now) to do that work.
I licensed the Torque engine to do Trajectory, and so far it's been wonderful. C++'ish scripting language built in, plus having the source for some further modifications that I can't do in scriptin is great.
Go check 'em out at Garage Games and download the demo or the RealmWars demo to check it out. Or, heck, play Tribes 2 a bit, and you know what to potentially expect;-)
I don't remember ever saying that I was going to boycott the RIAA or MPAA. Heck, I don't even remember a general consensus on Slashdot so far that said that the however many hundred thousand readers of Slashdot was going to boycott the MPAA.
Heck, I don't see a general consensus on/. about ANYTHING! That's why it's such a great place for discussion - otherwise CmdrTaco would post an article, we'd all agree with it, and move on. No discussion would be had. Instead we have tons of people with diverse beliefs and ideas exchanging them. Sometimes it's meaningful, sometimes it's just a flamewar.
Me personally, I go to the movies every weekend. I don't boycott the MPAA, because I know they will just use it for an example of how the "Evil Internet and P2P File Sharing Applications Are Killing The Industry". I spend effort instead with making sure people know what's going on, and contacting my Congresscritters (the people who make the laws that protect the MPAA), and encouraging others to do the same.
I somewhat boycott the RIAA, but, if I download an MP3, like it an enjoy it, I buy the CD. No need to FURTHER fuck the artist. Bad enough they don't make much money from the CD I purchase. Again, I spend my efforts differntly, trying to change the system with what little noise I can make.
I use both Open Source (OpenBSD and Linux) and Close Source (Windows 2000 and Amiga OS) Operating Systems. I write Closed Source applications, but, prefer Open Source tools (I'm a game developer by night, Industrial Automation programmer by day) I'm working towards the idea of decaying my games into GPL'ed code after a certain timeperiod so that others can continue to enjoy my games long after they have been released - but one of the important issues is making enough money to continue to make games, so up front Closed Source is an important issue. Long term, Open Source is also very important.
Ok, why the rambing additional information that has nothing to do with the MPAA Boycott? To illustrate something - people on/. are different from each other. Not all of us represent the same thing. Not all of us post our opinions on every article, agreeing or disagreeing with what's said (in fact, if we did, no one would bother to get any work done since there would be something like 200,000 reponses PER ARTICLE. Ouch. And the/. servers could hardly handle it!)
So don't stand up and make a blanket statment that all/. readers (or even editors. Yeah, it's rare that I stand up for them;-) agreed to the idea of boycotting the MPAA. Or the RIAA. Or Microsoft Products. Or... anything. Because we are all individuals, with different ideas, and damned well don't agree on ANYTHING!;-)
There is a security vulnerability in zlib 1.1.3 that can be exploited by
providing a specially crafted invalid compressed data stream to zlib's
decompression routines that results in zlib attempting to free the same
memory twice. On many systems, freeing the same memory twice will crash
the application. Such "double free" vulnerabilities can be used in
denial-of-service attacks, and it is remotely possible that the
vulnerability could be exploited in some application to execute
arbitrary code with that application's permissions. There have been no
reports of any exploitations of this problem, but the vulnerability
exists nevertheless.
It would take some pretty slick work to actually get something to execute arbitary code with this particular bug, but, it's possible. So it does raise the risk level back to what you originally stated, Garett.
Not everyone who uses grep and vi doesn't chew tobacco.:^)
ROTFLMAO! Ok, well, didn't expect to hear THAT! I'm a Kansas country boy (literally) who became a computer programmer. Guess I'm not the only farmboy to move on to computers - however, I'll pass on the vi and chew. I prefer Emacs or notepad and smoking:-)
And once it moves from the Elevator to the flour mill (a good number are built side by side for a very good reason:-) and passes through cleaning and tempering, it all starts moving through pneumatic blowlines.
And for longer distance moving under the elevators, ya got drag conveyors to move it, and elevator legs to move it upwards.
Nice to meet someone else who's been stuck doing Industrial Automation for Grain Elevators:-) (I've done *WAY* too many of them!)
If you don't like the DVD, you can recreate your own deadly 'Discs of Tron' game in real life!
Oh, great. See what you just made me do? I'm now having to waste my time playing Deadly Disks of Tron on MAME rather than work on writing the next game...
I'm using OpenBSD 3.0 (which means pf instead of ipf for the filtering) and set it up as an ethernet bridge that does firewalling (IE - this sucker has no IP address, and can't be hacked from the outside world - in fact, it's friggin invisible. What a wonderful setup!) The disadvantage for most people, however, is that if you do it this way there's no remote administration. That's fine with me - the firewall machine has monitored physical access (in other words, it's locked in a cabnet the sets in my office:-)
There's some oddness doing it this way, but, it's really worth while if you want a machine that can't be screwed with at all. And, vi sucks, but is survivable;-)
Oddly enough, all the docs I found on doing it this way were for previous OpenBSD versions, which used ipf for filtering. pf and ipf are close enough that the docs for doing it are still pretty close to in date - but there's just a few things that would have to change for it to be correct. A little searching through the pf man pages will show the differences.
Well, not to be one of those stick in the mud 'Read the %($#ING article' type people, KLAT2 is a reference to The Day The Earth Stood Still. Had you looked at the articles in question (particularly, the KLAT2 page) you would have discovered that indeed, they were intending the reference. Heck, go check it out - the poster they made up for it is worth the look!:-)
Slashdot Mirror
A lot of independant game developers survive just fine. Depending on the game style you work with, a single person can do all the work - surviving then is a lot easier than a 40 person team. Most of my games have been single player puzzle games *. I have a day job, and do my game programming at night - it's trivial for my game company to 'survive' in that environment.
But when you get into monsters that require a team like Trajectory Zone (under development - have some sample screen shots), then things change a lot. As a single person development team, it's easy to make all the choices, do the job, and not have to worry as much about timelines, depending on someone getting thier job done (or, just as important - you getting your job done on time.) And that's just doing it 'part-time' - IE, keeping a day job, and working on games at night. Try and do it full time, and it gets even more complicated - where's the next infusion of cash come from? Or more importantly, where's lunch come from?
That's not to say it's so complicated that people aren't doing it as Indies - they are. Heck, after Trajectory Zone ships, I'll finally move to full time game development instead of part-part time. (Funny words actually - "part-time" doesn't describe living, breathing, eating, and dreaming game development in all your "spare time.")
I always like readin' about games like Imperial Wars - nice to see someone doing' it. When I spoke at Indie Games Con 2002 my co-speaker was a full time Indie developer. Really cool to spend some time talkin' to someone who was doin' it full time, and find out how they managed to pull of what they have done so far. David Michael wasn't the only person there doing it full time, of course - there were others too, and talkin' to them ended up giving me a lot of insight. If you are really seriously interested in Indie game development, hit the next Indie Game Con - there's a lot to be learned there.
Oh, and for those interested - here's a transcript of the speach. It's got a lot of interesting stuff in it - oddly enough, the title of the speach is "Can I Make Money As An Indie Game Developer?" - very appropriate to this particular /. thread :-)
Another place to go look around at when it comes to Indie Game Development - Garage Games lots of people there working towards Indie game releases at the moment, and some people who have already completed thier current projects and moving to the next game. Look in the business section and the general sections for some really good discussion on the subject (note - just like anywhere else, gotta sift a bit to find the good stuff from the crud.)
(*Yes, some shameless self-promotion there. Sorry, it's totally nessisary :-)
Hm. Hadn't much thought about that. It would be dead simple for me to put un-timed options in most of my future puzzle games. I'll keep that in mind :-)
This kinda reminds me of one of my customers. I quite often talk to my game customers via email (Asking how to get past a level, needing a re-download after loosing the game, etc. Not all 'support' stuff really, but, kinda nice to talk to the people who enjoy the games, and find out what they want more of.) Anyway... one of my customers that contacted me had a serious problem. She was in her late 60's, I believe, and loved Tile Panic!, a fairly simple puzzle game that requires some quick thinking on higher levels.
Problem is, her daughter wouldn't let her play anymore. Apparently she had heart problems, and after a while, her blood pressure would go WAY up, and she'd have to quit playing.
Not wanting to be the death of nice little old ladies, I created a separate version for her that takes out the time-based element of the game. She's the only one I know who managed to actually play perfect games on more than one of the game difficulty levels! But the whole thought of someone refusing to give up playing the game dispite the health detrement because they like the game too much is both strange and encouraging ;-)
(Eh - since I'm here, I'll plug one o' my other puzzle games, since that's a bit o' the discussion on this thread - go check out Tile Panic!, as mentioned above, and Boulder Panic! 2 DX. Or don't :-)
Um, it's a little more than just 'barely lifting your feet'. People who get into that game rarely stop without breaking a sweat. It'd certainly do me more good than the exercise bicycle that's covered in a protective layer of dust.
DDR is now one of my three forms of exersize. (The other two: A membership to the gym which I use for weightlifting, but can't stand things like the bikes. The other is my wife. *Nudge Nudge, Wink Wink*) It's pretty easy to become a Code Potato, setting there in front of the computer not getting any exersize. Working for a computer related company during the day, and owning a game company at night does bad things for your physique ;-)
Anyway - it's a hell of a lot of exersize, even when you learn how to dance 'optimally'. When you start out, you're jumpin' all over the place, trying to get the beat, etc. Once you've got it, you tone it down a lot, but, you start moving faster and faster, picking more complicated songs to work with. I own my own home setup (modified some Playstation pads for use on the PC, and grabbed StepMania to use with it) rather than dump tons o' quarters into an arcade machine or buy a PS. Plus, and overweight 31 year old white guy tryin' to DDR is NOT a pretty sight. Luckly, it improves the more time you spend on the pads. (IE - less overweight, a little more coordinated. However, I'm still a 31 year old white guy lookin' like a dork ;-)
For anyone who's wondered if it works for weightloss, keeping you in shape, etc... I have no real clue. I assume it does. I work up a hell of a sweat, and have a lot of fun doing it. But I've also got a membership to a gym four blocks from here, so, it's hard to tell what makes the most difference.
But I will say this in general for the idea o' workin' out and how it affects your coding skills - I always feel sharper and can work a lot farther into the night after I've been going to the gym consistently. :-)
The source is part of the product.
Hm. I think you missed part of how the market works. The Product is definied by what they throw in. It's thier choice - if they throw in the source code, it's part of the product. If they don't throw in the source code, it's not part of the product. The end user does not determine the extent or limitations of a product, the producer of the product determines those things.
Now, the issue of if it SHOULD be part of the product - that's a different story. Putting it into the analogy of real-world products - What you want in this case is a set of blueprints, architectural drawings, etc. that went into producing the product. (Ok, VERY loose analogy - maybe what you want is the CNC code that went into running the machines that made the molds, and the automation code that went behind creating the product.)
Ok, I thought the first one was pretty off base and utopian in it's thinking, and I don't think this one-page update to the artice does anything to improve matters.
:-)
/. crowd - we all know GCC or compiler of choice like the back of our hands. Or, for some, the palm of thier hands ;-)
/. crowd's heads part of the time (picking an arbitrary number here) So what point was it in handing the source for a accounting system to someone who who is a systems administrator? Parts and bits of it make sense, but, without the background in accounting systems, there's parts of it that could cause more grief than it's worth for a simple change.
Now, before someone decides I'm an anti-Open Source type o' guy, forget it. I'm not - I use Mozilla (1. 2 - woohoo!) for my browsing and mail, and Open Office as a most-of-the-time replacement for MS-Office (*SIGH* I still have office loaded for a few oddball things OpenOffice doesn't do right.) I've got a nice firewall (linux) and fileserver (linux) all running open source operating systems.
So, consider that before markin' it as troll when I say... Oh, PUHHHLEEZ!
Look, makin' an application Open Source does not garantee quality. It does not reduce code bloat (in fact, I'm starting to believe that at it's core, the Open Source way of doing things is starting to increase code bloat. However, the really slick thing is bein' able to fix that on a personal level with a simple recompile most of the time! But, that's a totally different article to write...) It does not garantee an increase in quality - just because you can LOOK at a bridge's construction, do you fully inderstand the architect & engineer's design methodology? Would adding another bolt hole here and throwing a bolt through it increase or decrease stability of the bridge. You have to be a specialist in the field to truely understand (just being an engineer doesn't cut it - you need to understand BRIDGES before you work on a bridge
Same applies to software engineering - while anyone could look at the source, and start hackin' at it, that does almost nothing for other people in the first place. You've got to redistribute the improvements, get it back into the source tree, and convince other people to re-compile before you do it. Most of the steps above require specialized knowladge of one form or another. (Before someone debates that point - no, not people don't understand how to run a compiler. I'm not talking about the
But, even then, some of this stuff is way above 75% of the
There's also somehow the impression that this would "change things". That somehow, because of magically having the source code available, this would make products better. Well, it's not going to increase the quality of the code from the original company who released it. And unless there's a clearing house for everyone to update thier application, what's the point? Overall quality doesn't improve, only single installations (or corporate installations where someone made the nessisary change and distributed it on the desktops - which to be honest, DOES indeed provide some promise to the concepts he presents in his article. Corporate licensing would be handy.)
Tech support becomes a nightmare too - "Oh, sir? You changed that bit of code? Sorry, can't help ya..." Let's face it, it's hard enough to support an application and all it's versions - it's hard to support it when someone can make a simple change. Add a public code repository to it, and man it just gets worse. Once the code is touched, there's no support anymore. (But, of course, if you know enough to mess with it, is it a downside? *SHRUG*)
Licensing would become an even deeper nightmare. If companies are putting horribly restricting EULA's on compiled products, imagine what they are going to want to do with the source? Sure, he talks about how to protect it with copyrights and excluding certain modules (more on that in a moment), but, companies aren't happy with copyright now, how will that improve with source code involved?
And of course, there's this interesting idea that you could just exclude some modules. Well, that does a couple of interesting things. 1, it defeats part of the purpose (but not all of it.) So there's still parts of the code that's buggy and unreleased. Whoo... what exactly did we fix there? 2, it would be an absolute Haven or Hell for Open Source developers. Companies would fall very quickly prey to people who simply replaced that core module, and suddenly have a working application - no need for the original developer anymore, just release a new open source core for the program. Open Source developers are going through a lot of effort to copy the current functionality of an application - if there was an even shorter route to gettin' the job done, someone would end up doin' it. Of course, given the paranoia level of some companies, Open Source developers could end up having to deal with ELUA's that prevent you from having looked at another company's source tree and writing your own. MS is already attempting this with a couple o' items. Why would the situation improve?
While it's an interesting set of thoughts, to me it comes down to a combination of personal choice, and company motivation. If you want the source code to an application, then choose your application wisely - use Open Office over MS Office. Linux over Windows. Etc. Almost anything out there has an Open Source equivalant (almost, not quite.) Use it.
As for companies - it's up to them to decide what resources become available to the end user, and under what license. If I can get one more feature out of Mozilla (contact synching with Windows CE... er.... PalmPC machines, not just PalmOS machines) I'll begin moving everyone in our offices to it - the combination of MS's licensing and features -vs- Mozilla's Licensing and features will make it a logical choice. Companies are now starting to have to take that sort of thing into account already - I'm not the only commercial developer out there deciding how much of my application (games, in particular) source I'm going to be providing to the end user. If Collaborative Source, Shared Source, Open Source, or model of choice where the user gets the source code, is truely of importance to end users, we'll see it happen. And the companies that didn't follow that path will have a hard time - adapt or die.
I personally choose to have applications that have the source available, as long as everything involved fits my needs. And, not including the "Everything should be free" crowd, I think that' show most users will have to make thier choice anyway.
Why don't ya just hand it over to a needy developer. Like me :-)
What do you call a person who doesn't want to have to *look* at the remote?
A geek?
Hey Jack - I think your example is actually more bogus than what you are complaining about. Let me yank this one section out, and put things in perspective...
The goal of a programming language is to provide a machine with a set of instructions, not to sit down and read it a story. Do you expect your car to be made of parts which have little embedded notes explainging how they were engineered? Of course not, that's just silly
And, when you look at your compiled program, you don't see comments or documentation inside of it either. The compiler strips it out, as it should. However, when you code, you document. When a car builder designs a machine, they document it into such detail level it makes programming documentation look sparse (most of the time - I've seen it be overdone before ;-) It doesn't matter what you do, building cars, wiring offices, or programming, you better be documenting what you do - and those who don't regret it later, and lack of planning up front causes serious issues.
I probably shouldn't pick on your example - but it was a really nasty example.
Now, I don't completely disagree with your opinion that it's gimmicky, but, this provides yet another process for people to adopt if they so choose to. Any method that people feel comfortable with for software engineering or documentation that gets them to DO IT, well, sounds like a good idea to me.
Actually, as a Torque licensee, the support has been pretty good. But because of the way the GG team has set things up, they don't have to answer all the questions - instead, you post to the forums online, and sometimes the community addresses the issue, sometimes the GG team does. All depends on who's fastest on the draw it seems. (I have, however, seen some newbie questions go unanswered - mainly because if they would have bothered using the 'search' function, they would have found the answer right off. RTFM & RTFW! Jeez people!)
I've been happy as hell with it all - it's worked great, I've definitely gotten more than $100 in value out of it, and both the community support and GG's support has been great.
Funny part is, you can take your pick of UI's for snort, on just about any platform (I run snort on WinNT on one network, and snort on Linux on another. And I've got a GUI for both of 'em ;-)
If anyone else opens up MY WIFE NUDE.JPG, I'll have to kill them. After I interrogate them to find out where they got the pic
Somehow makes me think of that old joke... "Do you have any nude pictures of your wife? No? Want some?" ;-)
In fact, if the file name say "MY WIFE NUDE.JPG", I don't recommend opening it. (Well, ok, if it was MY wife, no problem. Quite the cutie. But I know some people's wife who.... *SHUDDER*)
Boba is Jango's clone, setup so that he's got his own perfect little kid.
Lemmie start by saying I'm not that much of a Star Wars fan to begin with. I went to the 12:01 AM showing because a friend got tickets to it, and offered 'em to my wife and I. The only one in the series I liked up until this was The Empire Strikes Back. And personally, I think Lucas is a bit of a prick because of some of the crap he's pulled with the theaters, etc.
Yes, this has memorable scenes. You finally get to see what's so "wow" about a Jedi. 4, 5, & 6 the Jedi are some sort of BS plot thing with a cool sword. Luke tries to become one, and you know what - he ain't JACK compaired to this. Watching an actual battle with the Jedi is quite memorable. Finding out why Yoda is the master is quite memorable (Holy hell yes!)
I think Lucas burned everyone with Episode I, and critics are quick to not let a director live stuff like that down. Episode I didn't have any memorable scenes, IMHO. This one does.
Parts of the movie are still weak, however, but if Episode I had been as good as this, no one would have really been bitching nearly as much.
In that case, pay the $8.00 to see it. The lightsabre fights are more than just worth it - saw it at 12:01 AM today, and after a good morning's sleep, I can still vividly remember all the fight scenes.
Unluckly, the toys have changed. Now to get a complete set, you need the .museum, .pro, .aero, and the other new ones. And of course, you'll need the nessisary .prn to complete your set if this whole thing happens ;-)
Take a look at Torque - it's basically the V12 engine from Tribes 2 with all the Tribes 2 Intellectual Property pulled out. What's left is a nice, fairly good engine. Here's the cool part:
If you want to just do modding, you don't have to BUY Torque, instead, just download the demo. The also have all sorts of community boards for ya to look at and interact with each other for questions. Pretty nice.
If you suddenly decide you want to write a commercial game with it, or, you need the source code - no problem. License the engine. For $100, and a distribution agreement for commercial sales. Not TOO bad.
There is a built-in terrain editor, world editor, etc - however, no actually map-building tools for interior locations. But, you can use Quark or WorldCraft (er... guess that's Valve's Hammersomethingorother now) to do that work.
I licensed the Torque engine to do Trajectory, and so far it's been wonderful. C++'ish scripting language built in, plus having the source for some further modifications that I can't do in scriptin is great.
Go check 'em out at Garage Games and download the demo or the RealmWars demo to check it out. Or, heck, play Tribes 2 a bit, and you know what to potentially expect ;-)
I don't remember ever saying that I was going to boycott the RIAA or MPAA. Heck, I don't even remember a general consensus on Slashdot so far that said that the however many hundred thousand readers of Slashdot was going to boycott the MPAA.
Heck, I don't see a general consensus on /. about ANYTHING! That's why it's such a great place for discussion - otherwise CmdrTaco would post an article, we'd all agree with it, and move on. No discussion would be had. Instead we have tons of people with diverse beliefs and ideas exchanging them. Sometimes it's meaningful, sometimes it's just a flamewar.
Me personally, I go to the movies every weekend. I don't boycott the MPAA, because I know they will just use it for an example of how the "Evil Internet and P2P File Sharing Applications Are Killing The Industry". I spend effort instead with making sure people know what's going on, and contacting my Congresscritters (the people who make the laws that protect the MPAA), and encouraging others to do the same.
I somewhat boycott the RIAA, but, if I download an MP3, like it an enjoy it, I buy the CD. No need to FURTHER fuck the artist. Bad enough they don't make much money from the CD I purchase. Again, I spend my efforts differntly, trying to change the system with what little noise I can make.
I use both Open Source (OpenBSD and Linux) and Close Source (Windows 2000 and Amiga OS) Operating Systems. I write Closed Source applications, but, prefer Open Source tools (I'm a game developer by night, Industrial Automation programmer by day) I'm working towards the idea of decaying my games into GPL'ed code after a certain timeperiod so that others can continue to enjoy my games long after they have been released - but one of the important issues is making enough money to continue to make games, so up front Closed Source is an important issue. Long term, Open Source is also very important.
Ok, why the rambing additional information that has nothing to do with the MPAA Boycott? To illustrate something - people on /. are different from each other. Not all of us represent the same thing. Not all of us post our opinions on every article, agreeing or disagreeing with what's said (in fact, if we did, no one would bother to get any work done since there would be something like 200,000 reponses PER ARTICLE. Ouch. And the /. servers could hardly handle it!)
So don't stand up and make a blanket statment that all /. readers (or even editors. Yeah, it's rare that I stand up for them ;-) agreed to the idea of boycotting the MPAA. Or the RIAA. Or Microsoft Products. Or... anything. Because we are all individuals, with different ideas, and damned well don't agree on ANYTHING! ;-)
From the ZLib page:
There is a security vulnerability in zlib 1.1.3 that can be exploited by providing a specially crafted invalid compressed data stream to zlib's decompression routines that results in zlib attempting to free the same memory twice. On many systems, freeing the same memory twice will crash the application. Such "double free" vulnerabilities can be used in denial-of-service attacks, and it is remotely possible that the vulnerability could be exploited in some application to execute arbitrary code with that application's permissions. There have been no reports of any exploitations of this problem, but the vulnerability exists nevertheless.
It would take some pretty slick work to actually get something to execute arbitary code with this particular bug, but, it's possible. So it does raise the risk level back to what you originally stated, Garett.
Not everyone who uses grep and vi doesn't chew tobacco. :^)
ROTFLMAO! Ok, well, didn't expect to hear THAT! I'm a Kansas country boy (literally) who became a computer programmer. Guess I'm not the only farmboy to move on to computers - however, I'll pass on the vi and chew. I prefer Emacs or notepad and smoking :-)
And once it moves from the Elevator to the flour mill (a good number are built side by side for a very good reason :-) and passes through cleaning and tempering, it all starts moving through pneumatic blowlines.
And for longer distance moving under the elevators, ya got drag conveyors to move it, and elevator legs to move it upwards.
Nice to meet someone else who's been stuck doing Industrial Automation for Grain Elevators :-) (I've done *WAY* too many of them!)
If you don't like the DVD, you can recreate your own deadly 'Discs of Tron' game in real life!
Oh, great. See what you just made me do? I'm now having to waste my time playing Deadly Disks of Tron on MAME rather than work on writing the next game...
I'm using OpenBSD 3.0 (which means pf instead of ipf for the filtering) and set it up as an ethernet bridge that does firewalling (IE - this sucker has no IP address, and can't be hacked from the outside world - in fact, it's friggin invisible. What a wonderful setup!) The disadvantage for most people, however, is that if you do it this way there's no remote administration. That's fine with me - the firewall machine has monitored physical access (in other words, it's locked in a cabnet the sets in my office :-)
There's some oddness doing it this way, but, it's really worth while if you want a machine that can't be screwed with at all. And, vi sucks, but is survivable ;-)
Oddly enough, all the docs I found on doing it this way were for previous OpenBSD versions, which used ipf for filtering. pf and ipf are close enough that the docs for doing it are still pretty close to in date - but there's just a few things that would have to change for it to be correct. A little searching through the pf man pages will show the differences.
Well, not to be one of those stick in the mud 'Read the %($#ING article' type people, KLAT2 is a reference to The Day The Earth Stood Still. Had you looked at the articles in question (particularly, the KLAT2 page) you would have discovered that indeed, they were intending the reference. Heck, go check it out - the poster they made up for it is worth the look! :-)