After Ultima IX flopped, Richard Garriott (Lord British) left Origin. Origin was then disbanded by EA. RG is pursuing interests at other studios, and EA is currently developing Ultima X, an online-only sort of game that isn't exactly an MMORPG, but is more in the vein of FFXI.
Considering the fact that EA has failed to go after any of these projects, some of which have been publicly announced for *years*, I doubt they'll choose to go after any of them now. Consider that:
- Many of the free UO servers such as Sphere have been in widespread use for several years now, and EA has not batted an eye, despite obvious terms of service violations.
- Reimplementations of early Ultimas are being distributed on the net, including all the games' original data files, and have been for some time. If this is a violation of EA's IP, Ultima IV is the exception, since it has been officially released into the public domain.
- Ultima map viewers are available, and contain most of the data files for the first six games.
- The Macintosh version of Ultima III is distributed as shareware, with a paid registration requred to unlock the full version.
Not only does this demonstrate that EA does not care about the license for the early Ultima games, it probably also gives them a very loose footing for enforcing their copyright should they ever choose to do so, since they've let it slide for so long. It is actually in EA's best interest to just let these things go. A loyal fanbase that keeps their IP in the public eye is probably their last hope for being able to get any more cash out of the franchise. The loss of the fan's goodwill would ruin the marketability of the Ultima franchise, especially since Lord British is no longer part of the company (though he does still show great interest in projects such as Lazarus. I also recall he had some very kind things to say about the GameBoy Color version of Ultima III.)
The demo has been a long time coming, and I'm glad to see that they've pulled it off. Congrats to Tiberius and the Lazarus Team!
Other Ultima remakes worth mentioning:
Ultima IV - The Dawn of Virtue, a recreation of Ultima IV using a custom engine, from the author of Nethack Falcon's Eye: http://www.hut.fi/~jtpelto2/ultima4/
Exult, a fully-playable reimplementation of the Ultima 7 engine that runs on Windows, Linux, and a few other platforms (Slashdot had better know all about this by now): http://exult.sourceforge.net/
The Ultima 6 project, which is developing their Dungeon Seige mod in cooperation with the Lazarus team: http://www.planetdungeonsiege.com/archon/ That will do to go on, but there are plenty of other such projects out there. AFAIK, every Ultima game but Ultima VIII is getting the remake treatment by someone.
OB Hawking (obscure?): [A cosmologist's] speech is interrupted by a little old lady who informs him that the universe rests on the back of a turtle. "Ah, yes, madame," the scientist replies, "but what does the turtle rest on?" The old lady shoots back: "You can't trick me, young man. It's nothing but turtles, turtles, turtles, all the way down."
Florida, minimum wage, having to going back for unpaid wages... I *thought* this story sounded a little familiar. Funny meeting you here, Ryan!
It's a bear market right now for developers. Every week I hear that some developer I know, or some developer in my family, has been involved in some kind of massive layoff somewhere. Even at my company, we've had to let a lot of engineers go, *good* engineers, because the VC money is just getting too scarce for small software shops. Some of them manage to find consulting gigs, but only a few find their way to full-time work, even the ones with dozens of years worth of experience.
"I have to say my Eeyore voice sounds a little like Marvin (the paranoid android)."
Douglas Adams' own mother made the same connection when she was introduced to the character of Marvin. She told Douglas that he must have based Marvin on Eeyore. (Source: Don't Panic by Neil Gaiman)
I hardly think this sort of thing puts us on a slippery slope. If anything, there is *already* an epidemic problem of people being able to patent stupid and obvious things. This particular patent is just one snowflake in the storm, and it's not going to singlehandedly bring about the patentability of even more of the same sort of crap that isn't already gumming up the wheels of progress.
I hope the patent stands and this particular kind of evil vanishes from the web. Then again, it's almost sure to be replaced by something even more insidious in short order. Maybe it's better to stick with the evil you know.
No, that would be "Affective" as in "Affect == Emotional Attachment." It is not a misspelling; it is a very *effective* pun. Effect (n), Effect (v), Affect (n) and Affect (v) are all different words, and they all mean different things. But they are all real words.
I suggest you spend some time away from the web and go read some real books. This isn't a very good place to pick up proper grammar and usage.
Of course, a game that runs poorly isn't going to produce flicker. Your monitor will happily keep chugging away at 75 Hz, or whatever your refresh rate is, no matter how often your graphics card updates the display buffer.
You forgot probably the best reason of all to have framerates about 24 FPS: Persistence of Vision.
The real world is updated continuously. Its framerate is infinite. That the infinite framerate of the real world looks better than a game running at 24 FPS is such a no brainer that I cannot believe anyone would take the position that anything over 24 FPS is superfluous. Even if the eye does not update faster than 24 FPS, because of persistence of vision, objects in motion appear blurred.
Movies look good even with their low framerate because of motion blur; when they are filmed, the camera shutter is left open for a small period of time each frame to capture the motion of objects during that frame, instead of just taking an instant static picture of the state of the world at the beginning of the frame and then not capturing information until 1/24 of a second later.
When a game has a higher framerate, even though your eye may not update your brain with the image of every single frame, it keeps recording what it sees. Your brain gets updated with a composite, motion-blurred image. To you, the user, it doesn't look like motion blur. Your brain interprets the motion blur as more fluid movement. And that's as it should be.
(Really, all you have to do is *look* at a game running at 24 FPS and 60 FPS and you'll see a difference. You can argue forever that the eye can't update the brain more at more than 24 FPS, but all those arguments amount to nothing next the solid evidence of actually seeing a game running at a high framerate.)
So the polygamists are still considered Mormons? By who? By the real LDS? By the non-LDS? They might think they're still Mormons themselves, but they're not. Are you implying that the LDS people only "officially" excommunicate polygamists but still invite them out to the potluck dinners and basketball games, so their excommunication doesn't count?
Polygamy is not considered OK in LDS culture. Only the weirdest of the weird have polygamist leanings or sympathies, even though many agree with the doctrine of polygamy in, say, a biblical or 19th century setting. That's why the polygamists all end up living in the sticks, like the AZ-UT border towns you mention -- because they are not accepted at all.
You forgot to mention that Utah taxpayers spend more on education than almost any other state. It's not a matter of not valuing education, as you suggest. Quite the opposite. Mormons value education more than just about any other religion you could name. But there is just not enough money to spend on so many kids.
As a graduate of BYU, I know that's completely false. Granted, BYU is a private, church-run university and they require single students to live in approved housing. But:
1) In Provo, Utah, there are lots and lots of apartment complexes that are not "BYU-approved," and non-BYU students can drink all they like there.
2) "Officials from the Mormon Church" do not search apartments. What do you think this is, a police state? Do you think the Mormon church, which has NO PAID CLERGY, is some big monolithic hierarchy of dogma-spewing vigilante cops? Get real.
3) In fact, there are no "searches" of apartments. Nobody comes into your private residence and ransacks your place looking for dirty magazines. In four years at that school, I never heard of such a thing. I felt that my privacy was respected just as much as it would have been at any other college.
4) The Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue is not going to get you evicted or kicked out of school. You might get a few dirty looks if you read it on campus, but it is not a controlled substance.
5) Nobody is going to evict you on a whim, as you suggest. Repeated, willful violation of the rules, however, will get you kicked out of any apartment, anywhere.
Now, it is true that non-LDS students have to abide by BYU's rules in off-campus housing, including the health code prohibiting coffee, alcohol, tobacco, etc. As a private university, they have every right to expect a high standard of conduct. But otherwise, your "Fun Utah Fact" is a baseless lie.
Yes, that is just what they're doing, and they shouldn't be doing it. Read it again and you'll get it.
But there is no contradiction between not telling them how to do their jobs, and mandating filtering. The difference is between telling librarians what to do and telling them how to do it.
Personally, I'm completely in favor of implementing filters on all computers at all libraries. I don't think it's censorship at all. The public library isn't obligated to provide you with Internet access at all, let alone access to indecent material. They don't owe you anything. It doesn't interfere with your free speech if you can't get to some site at the library when you could always go access it from your computer at home, or at some kind of Internet cafe or something. The library can do whatever it wants.
The real problem with this bill is that the state is trying to impose a uniform filtering system without giving each library the decision of how to implement or manage the filter themselves. The filtering system that the state is recommending is, as has been stated, shoddy and consistently blocks access to perfectly harmless sites. Local libraries should be allowed to make informed decisions on their own. That's not to say the state can't mandate filtering of some kind -- they just shouldn't be presuming to tell the librarians how to do their jobs.
As a resident of Utah, I feel that this bill is better than nothing, though, and I'd support it. I don't want my kids going to the library to look at pornography. Having no filters at the library only makes my job as a parent harder. I believe making smut available to the public for free infringes on my rights as a parent. And to me, my rights as a parent are a whole lot more important than your right to get something for free.
You want porn? Or even a perfectly legit page that the filter is blocking? Go pay for your own Internet access like everyone else.
Hmmm... Now that I think about it, you're right. Valve did license Quake 2 and there are bits of the code in HL. But the vast majority of the Quake code is Q1. Not surprising since Q2 itself is a hacked-up Q1 game.
> I believe its actually based on the Quake 2 engine.
Nope. Half-Life is built on the engine from the original Quake -- this same gem we were just handed -- and not Quake 2. Even though HL was released well after Quake 2's release, the programmers at Valve had already implemented many of the improvements from Q1-Q2 in their own code, so there was no need for them to license Q2 and upgrade. HL is a Q1-derived game. Improvements to the engine include:
* Skeletal animation (Q1 was frame-based, Q2 was frame-interpolated) * 16-bit colored textures (Q1-Q2 supported only 8-bit textures) * Colored lighting effects (Q2 added this, but HL had it already) * Direct3D rendering (Quake only supported OpenGL in hardware; HL supported both OGL and D3D) * A bunch of scripting stuff * blah blah blah
Point is, Quake 2 didn't bring anything to the table that Valve hadn't already surpassed, so they went with their own technology. Sin, OTOH, is a Quake 2 TC right down to its frame-interpolated toes.
Not that Quake 2 is a shoddy product for not having improved over Quake as much as Half-Life. Remember that Quake 2 was the only the second Quake-derived game to market. Given a development cycle as long as Half-Life's, id could have done miracles with that engine.
I can't think of any other games based on only Quake I, other than Hexen II -- Raven is always to first to market with their id-derived games. There were some other games announced from Quake technology when Hexen II hit. HL, Sin, Daikatana, and (of all games) Golgotha. HL released based on Quake I. Sin and Daikatana switched to Q2. Golgotha changed its engine entirely -- I don't remember reading why. Its source is of course now available but nothing much is going on with the project. Correct me if I'm wrong on that one.
This move by Carmack to release the code surprises me. I once remember reading that he had planned not to release until the last Quake engine game shipped. But we're still waiting on Daikatana. (I think the upcoming Soldier of Fortune is also Q2-based). I wonder how Romero's taking this?
Our company recently changed its name, too. We went through weeks of focus groups and marketing fitzpah to come up with a dismal dozen names that the employees got to vote on. Not that our votes counted, anyway. Winners like Odin, Motivity, Intrinsic and -- oh, they were all terrible, and all the domain names were already taken. Many of the engineers were hoping they would give up and keep our old name, but alas...
This month we will become Inari. You mention that your ISP could double as a pr0n site. Well, after the name was announced a few enterprising people at our company learned that our new company name was already taken by some pr0n queen. But she didn't own the domain name, so it's going through.
This naming silliness has got to stop. It's a good thing Linux isn't owned by anyone, or they might rename it to Aplombux or something equally odd.
Does anyone else here see the irony of this message thread? Somebody uses the words "for dummies" as a message title in a discussion. The lawyers pounce on the site and demand that the thread be renamed or removed.
And yet here we are, all merrily commenting away on a discussion board, using the phrase "for dummies," just begging the Dummies company to come after Slashdot. I wonder if this thread will be accessible in the archives a month from now...
As far as protecting their trademark goes, I think going after some webmaster because his users were talking about the "Dummies" books is just plain silly. Sure companies have the right to protect their trademark, but does that include stopping people from talking about the trademark? What about parody/satire?
Guess I'll be hearing from IDG sometime soon... Maybe I should have titled this post "Slashdotting for Useless Bloody Loonies".
A lot of posts on this board seem to think that sending network signals over powerline is a brand new idea, or that it is impossible or requires special insulation on the wires. The company I work for (Intelogis) has had a product out for nearly a year now that is a cheap, albiet slow, powerline network.
There are a few problems with powerline networking that people have brought up. I'm just a software guy at this company, but I'll try and address some issues that have been brought up here.
1) It can't go over transformers
Well, no. A transformer is the physical limit of any kind of powerline network, since it gibbers up the signal so much. Powerline can be used to distribute broadband once it reaches the home, but it can't carry the signal TO the home.
2) Nearby street lights broadcast the signal
Um... this is just plain silly. But the signal can be snooped by your neighbors who share your transformer. So we encrypt the data. Problem solved.
3) It's too slow
Yes. Our current product only runs at 350K, making it a bad solution for technology shops. It's primarily aimed at the home office or the small office. We don't use it ourselves here at work since we have bigger bandwidth needs than that. But we are going to be releasing a 2 megabit product later this year, and hopefully a 10 megabit product soon. That's nowhere near the gigabit range this company in the article is claiming. Personally, I think it's all hype. They'll milk their shareholders for a year or two, and then call it quits. (Our company, on the other hand, has had a working example of a powerline network on store shelves for a year.)
4) Light dimmers will spike the signal.
A lot of things will cause the network to drop packets. Our current product will detect that and just re-send whatever packets were dropped, same as any other network protocol. Our next product has a lot more redundancy built into it; we send multiple signals at different frequencies, and they don't all get disrupted at once.
5) There is a lot of bandwidth in the power grid that we could be using
Yes. But to send a signal over powerline, you have to send it at such a high frequency to avoid interference over the wire that the signal tends to bleed off. (I don't understand all the physics behind it myself...) Power lines are noisy, but they can carry some signal. They are not practical for connecting a whole city block to the Internet. Powerlines really are not a good solution for getting broadband to your home. But power companies could use other ways to get a broadband signal at least to the transformer and from there pump it into the home with powerline.
6) Star Wars Episode I isn't making any money.
Ha! Star Wars is cleaning up at the box office right now. Where did you read this? CNN or some other similar trash network?
If anyone's interested in checking out our product, we've open sourced our drivers. You can get them at:
Slashdot Mirror
That is true. Wasn't that because Peroxide had commercial aspirations for their project, though? I don't remember.
After Ultima IX flopped, Richard Garriott (Lord British) left Origin. Origin was then disbanded by EA. RG is pursuing interests at other studios, and EA is currently developing Ultima X, an online-only sort of game that isn't exactly an MMORPG, but is more in the vein of FFXI.
Considering the fact that EA has failed to go after any of these projects, some of which have been publicly announced for *years*, I doubt they'll choose to go after any of them now. Consider that:
- Many of the free UO servers such as Sphere have been in widespread use for several years now, and EA has not batted an eye, despite obvious terms of service violations.
- Reimplementations of early Ultimas are being distributed on the net, including all the games' original data files, and have been for some time. If this is a violation of EA's IP, Ultima IV is the exception, since it has been officially released into the public domain.
- Ultima map viewers are available, and contain most of the data files for the first six games.
- The Macintosh version of Ultima III is distributed as shareware, with a paid registration requred to unlock the full version.
Not only does this demonstrate that EA does not care about the license for the early Ultima games, it probably also gives them a very loose footing for enforcing their copyright should they ever choose to do so, since they've let it slide for so long. It is actually in EA's best interest to just let these things go. A loyal fanbase that keeps their IP in the public eye is probably their last hope for being able to get any more cash out of the franchise. The loss of the fan's goodwill would ruin the marketability of the Ultima franchise, especially since Lord British is no longer part of the company (though he does still show great interest in projects such as Lazarus. I also recall he had some very kind things to say about the GameBoy Color version of Ultima III.)
The demo has been a long time coming, and I'm glad to see that they've pulled it off. Congrats to Tiberius and the Lazarus Team!
Other Ultima remakes worth mentioning:
Ultima IV - The Dawn of Virtue, a recreation of Ultima IV using a custom engine, from the author of Nethack Falcon's Eye:
http://www.hut.fi/~jtpelto2/ultima4/
Exult, a fully-playable reimplementation of the Ultima 7 engine that runs on Windows, Linux, and a few other platforms (Slashdot had better know all about this by now):
http://exult.sourceforge.net/
The Ultima 6 project, which is developing their Dungeon Seige mod in cooperation with the Lazarus team:
http://www.planetdungeonsiege.com/archon/
That will do to go on, but there are plenty of other such projects out there. AFAIK, every Ultima game but Ultima VIII is getting the remake treatment by someone.
OB Hawking (obscure?): [A cosmologist's] speech is interrupted by a little old lady who informs him that the universe rests on the back of a turtle. "Ah, yes, madame," the scientist replies, "but what does the turtle rest on?" The old lady shoots back: "You can't trick me, young man. It's nothing but turtles, turtles, turtles, all the way down."
Florida, minimum wage, having to going back for unpaid wages... I *thought* this story sounded a little familiar. Funny meeting you here, Ryan!
It's a bear market right now for developers. Every week I hear that some developer I know, or some developer in my family, has been involved in some kind of massive layoff somewhere. Even at my company, we've had to let a lot of engineers go, *good* engineers, because the VC money is just getting too scarce for small software shops. Some of them manage to find consulting gigs, but only a few find their way to full-time work, even the ones with dozens of years worth of experience.
Best of luck to you.
"I have to say my Eeyore voice sounds a little like Marvin (the paranoid android)."
Douglas Adams' own mother made the same connection when she was introduced to the character of Marvin. She told Douglas that he must have based Marvin on Eeyore. (Source: Don't Panic by Neil Gaiman)
I hardly think this sort of thing puts us on a slippery slope. If anything, there is *already* an epidemic problem of people being able to patent stupid and obvious things. This particular patent is just one snowflake in the storm, and it's not going to singlehandedly bring about the patentability of even more of the same sort of crap that isn't already gumming up the wheels of progress.
I hope the patent stands and this particular kind of evil vanishes from the web. Then again, it's almost sure to be replaced by something even more insidious in short order. Maybe it's better to stick with the evil you know.
No, that would be "Affective" as in "Affect == Emotional Attachment." It is not a misspelling; it is a very *effective* pun. Effect (n), Effect (v), Affect (n) and Affect (v) are all different words, and they all mean different things. But they are all real words.
I suggest you spend some time away from the web and go read some real books. This isn't a very good place to pick up proper grammar and usage.
Of course, a game that runs poorly isn't going to produce flicker. Your monitor will happily keep chugging away at 75 Hz, or whatever your refresh rate is, no matter how often your graphics card updates the display buffer.
You forgot probably the best reason of all to have framerates about 24 FPS: Persistence of Vision.
The real world is updated continuously. Its framerate is infinite. That the infinite framerate of the real world looks better than a game running at 24 FPS is such a no brainer that I cannot believe anyone would take the position that anything over 24 FPS is superfluous. Even if the eye does not update faster than 24 FPS, because of persistence of vision, objects in motion appear blurred.
Movies look good even with their low framerate because of motion blur; when they are filmed, the camera shutter is left open for a small period of time each frame to capture the motion of objects during that frame, instead of just taking an instant static picture of the state of the world at the beginning of the frame and then not capturing information until 1/24 of a second later.
When a game has a higher framerate, even though your eye may not update your brain with the image of every single frame, it keeps recording what it sees. Your brain gets updated with a composite, motion-blurred image. To you, the user, it doesn't look like motion blur. Your brain interprets the motion blur as more fluid movement. And that's as it should be.
(Really, all you have to do is *look* at a game running at 24 FPS and 60 FPS and you'll see a difference. You can argue forever that the eye can't update the brain more at more than 24 FPS, but all those arguments amount to nothing next the solid evidence of actually seeing a game running at a high framerate.)
So the polygamists are still considered Mormons? By who? By the real LDS? By the non-LDS? They might think they're still Mormons themselves, but they're not. Are you implying that the LDS people only "officially" excommunicate polygamists but still invite them out to the potluck dinners and basketball games, so their excommunication doesn't count?
Polygamy is not considered OK in LDS culture. Only the weirdest of the weird have polygamist leanings or sympathies, even though many agree with the doctrine of polygamy in, say, a biblical or 19th century setting. That's why the polygamists all end up living in the sticks, like the AZ-UT border towns you mention -- because they are not accepted at all.
You forgot to mention that Utah taxpayers spend more on education than almost any other state. It's not a matter of not valuing education, as you suggest. Quite the opposite. Mormons value education more than just about any other religion you could name. But there is just not enough money to spend on so many kids.
As a graduate of BYU, I know that's completely false. Granted, BYU is a private, church-run university and they require single students to live in approved housing. But:
1) In Provo, Utah, there are lots and lots of apartment complexes that are not "BYU-approved," and non-BYU students can drink all they like there.
2) "Officials from the Mormon Church" do not search apartments. What do you think this is, a police state? Do you think the Mormon church, which has NO PAID CLERGY, is some big monolithic hierarchy of dogma-spewing vigilante cops? Get real.
3) In fact, there are no "searches" of apartments. Nobody comes into your private residence and ransacks your place looking for dirty magazines. In four years at that school, I never heard of such a thing. I felt that my privacy was respected just as much as it would have been at any other college.
4) The Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue is not going to get you evicted or kicked out of school. You might get a few dirty looks if you read it on campus, but it is not a controlled substance.
5) Nobody is going to evict you on a whim, as you suggest. Repeated, willful violation of the rules, however, will get you kicked out of any apartment, anywhere.
Now, it is true that non-LDS students have to abide by BYU's rules in off-campus housing, including the health code prohibiting coffee, alcohol, tobacco, etc. As a private university, they have every right to expect a high standard of conduct. But otherwise, your "Fun Utah Fact" is a baseless lie.
Yes, that is just what they're doing, and they shouldn't be doing it. Read it again and you'll get it.
But there is no contradiction between not telling them how to do their jobs, and mandating filtering. The difference is between telling librarians what to do and telling them how to do it.
Personally, I'm completely in favor of implementing filters on all computers at all libraries. I don't think it's censorship at all. The public library isn't obligated to provide you with Internet access at all, let alone access to indecent material. They don't owe you anything. It doesn't interfere with your free speech if you can't get to some site at the library when you could always go access it from your computer at home, or at some kind of Internet cafe or something. The library can do whatever it wants.
The real problem with this bill is that the state is trying to impose a uniform filtering system without giving each library the decision of how to implement or manage the filter themselves. The filtering system that the state is recommending is, as has been stated, shoddy and consistently blocks access to perfectly harmless sites. Local libraries should be allowed to make informed decisions on their own. That's not to say the state can't mandate filtering of some kind -- they just shouldn't be presuming to tell the librarians how to do their jobs.
As a resident of Utah, I feel that this bill is better than nothing, though, and I'd support it. I don't want my kids going to the library to look at pornography. Having no filters at the library only makes my job as a parent harder. I believe making smut available to the public for free infringes on my rights as a parent. And to me, my rights as a parent are a whole lot more important than your right to get something for free.
You want porn? Or even a perfectly legit page that the filter is blocking? Go pay for your own Internet access like everyone else.
Hmmm... Now that I think about it, you're right. Valve did license Quake 2 and there are bits of the code in HL. But the vast majority of the Quake code is Q1. Not surprising since Q2 itself is a hacked-up Q1 game.
Daikatana is still a POS.
> I believe its actually based on the Quake 2 engine.
Nope. Half-Life is built on the engine from the original Quake -- this same gem we were just handed -- and not Quake 2. Even though HL was released well after Quake 2's release, the programmers at Valve had already implemented many of the improvements from Q1-Q2 in their own code, so there was no need for them to license Q2 and upgrade. HL is a Q1-derived game. Improvements to the engine include:
* Skeletal animation (Q1 was frame-based, Q2 was frame-interpolated)
* 16-bit colored textures (Q1-Q2 supported only 8-bit textures)
* Colored lighting effects (Q2 added this, but HL had it already)
* Direct3D rendering (Quake only supported OpenGL in hardware; HL supported both OGL and D3D)
* A bunch of scripting stuff
* blah blah blah
Point is, Quake 2 didn't bring anything to the table that Valve hadn't already surpassed, so they went with their own technology. Sin, OTOH, is a Quake 2 TC right down to its frame-interpolated toes.
Not that Quake 2 is a shoddy product for not having improved over Quake as much as Half-Life. Remember that Quake 2 was the only the second Quake-derived game to market. Given a development cycle as long as Half-Life's, id could have done miracles with that engine.
I can't think of any other games based on only Quake I, other than Hexen II -- Raven is always to first to market with their id-derived games. There were some other games announced from Quake technology when Hexen II hit. HL, Sin, Daikatana, and (of all games) Golgotha. HL released based on Quake I. Sin and Daikatana switched to Q2. Golgotha changed its engine entirely -- I don't remember reading why. Its source is of course now available but nothing much is going on with the project. Correct me if I'm wrong on that one.
This move by Carmack to release the code surprises me. I once remember reading that he had planned not to release until the last Quake engine game shipped. But we're still waiting on Daikatana. (I think the upcoming Soldier of Fortune is also Q2-based). I wonder how Romero's taking this?
Our company recently changed its name, too. We went through weeks of focus groups and marketing fitzpah to come up with a dismal dozen names that the employees got to vote on. Not that our votes counted, anyway. Winners like Odin, Motivity, Intrinsic and -- oh, they were all terrible, and all the domain names were already taken. Many of the engineers were hoping they would give up and keep our old name, but alas...
This month we will become Inari. You mention that your ISP could double as a pr0n site. Well, after the name was announced a few enterprising people at our company learned that our new company name was already taken by some pr0n queen. But she didn't own the domain name, so it's going through.
This naming silliness has got to stop. It's a good thing Linux isn't owned by anyone, or they might rename it to Aplombux or something equally odd.
Does anyone else here see the irony of this message thread? Somebody uses the words "for dummies" as a message title in a discussion. The lawyers pounce on the site and demand that the thread be renamed or removed.
And yet here we are, all merrily commenting away on a discussion board, using the phrase "for dummies," just begging the Dummies company to come after Slashdot. I wonder if this thread will be accessible in the archives a month from now...
As far as protecting their trademark goes, I think going after some webmaster because his users were talking about the "Dummies" books is just plain silly. Sure companies have the right to protect their trademark, but does that include stopping people from talking about the trademark? What about parody/satire?
Guess I'll be hearing from IDG sometime soon... Maybe I should have titled this post "Slashdotting for Useless Bloody Loonies".
You might, but DVD players can't read CDRs. Guess you're stuck watching movies on your monitor. Break out the comfy chair...
-Render.
A lot of posts on this board seem to think that sending network signals over powerline is a brand new idea, or that it is impossible or requires special insulation on the wires. The company I work for (Intelogis) has had a product out for nearly a year now that is a cheap, albiet slow, powerline network.
There are a few problems with powerline networking that people have brought up. I'm just a software guy at this company, but I'll try and address some issues that have been brought up here.
1) It can't go over transformers
Well, no. A transformer is the physical limit of any kind of powerline network, since it gibbers up the signal so much. Powerline can be used to distribute broadband once it reaches the home, but it can't carry the signal TO the home.
2) Nearby street lights broadcast the signal
Um... this is just plain silly. But the signal can be snooped by your neighbors who share your transformer. So we encrypt the data. Problem solved.
3) It's too slow
Yes. Our current product only runs at 350K, making it a bad solution for technology shops. It's primarily aimed at the home office or the small office. We don't use it ourselves here at work since we have bigger bandwidth needs than that. But we are going to be releasing a 2 megabit product later this year, and hopefully a 10 megabit product soon. That's nowhere near the gigabit range this company in the article is claiming. Personally, I think it's all hype. They'll milk their shareholders for a year or two, and then call it quits. (Our company, on the other hand, has had a working example of a powerline network on store shelves for a year.)
4) Light dimmers will spike the signal.
A lot of things will cause the network to drop packets. Our current product will detect that and just re-send whatever packets were dropped, same as any other network protocol. Our next product has a lot more redundancy built into it; we send multiple signals at different frequencies, and they don't all get disrupted at once.
5) There is a lot of bandwidth in the power grid that we could be using
Yes. But to send a signal over powerline, you have to send it at such a high frequency to avoid interference over the wire that the signal tends to bleed off. (I don't understand all the physics behind it myself...) Power lines are noisy, but they can carry some signal. They are not practical for connecting a whole city block to the Internet. Powerlines really are not a good solution for getting broadband to your home. But power companies could use other ways to get a broadband signal at least to the transformer and from there pump it into the home with powerline.
6) Star Wars Episode I isn't making any money.
Ha! Star Wars is cleaning up at the box office right now. Where did you read this? CNN or some other similar trash network?
If anyone's interested in checking out our product, we've open sourced our drivers. You can get them at:
http://www.intelogis.com/opensource/
(Render sits back and waits for the flames...)