Parts of the UCITA that try to account for banning of reverse engineering AT THE STATE LEVEL are explicitly given by the DMCA AT THE FEDERAL LEVEL. Thus, UCITA in this regard automatically loses. State legislation cannot override federal laws or deny rights given by federal law.
In addition, click licenses are basically parts of interstate transport-- an area of judistriction that the state governments cannot control. (If you bought a CA-based program in CA as a CA resident, the state can affect you usually by sales tax, but not other way).
Some have suggested that UCITA may allow one company to introduce a new format (propriatary of course) into the next major release of the software, get it used by > 50%, then bait and switch, forcing they format as the defacto one for the entire industry, and as reverse engineering would be outlawed by UCITA, everyone else would be screwed. However, I cannot see how that would not be picked up by any monopoly watchers before it got to fruitation. And again, this relying on the inability to reverse engineer for interoperability.
However, that's only part of the issues with UCITA -- it's the loss of consumer protection that can come about if it's passed. I'd be more worried about this front than any other part of the UCITA.
Given the hoopla over streaming media, DVD playing, and etc due to the lack of players or decoders for Linux and other OSes is to get our own project going. Sure, that's the standard answer, but there's more to it.
First, at least in regards to streaming media, we must realize that there are no standards for it, unlike something like HTML, and thus we'll have to follow what the current trend is (and that is going the way of Windows Media). While some would probably agrue that Mpeg is the real standard, how many popular web sites use it?
Next, a group of programs need to get together with some commercial entity with a good interest in Linux (RedHat, Corel, Sun, etc..). The commercial interest is necessary, as I doubt that Microsoft would want to work with just a set of Linux programmers.
With that in mind, this collective group should approach the company that holds the defacto standard in question, and ask if they can have the APIs to the library that handled the translation of the streaming media to audio and visual elements. I suspect parts of the library itself are trade secrets or patented or something along those lines, and may include encryption and other details. Don't ask for the source to this library, just the APIs.
Then comes the tougher part. While the APIs can be easily used to make the client wrapper (and the GPL'd part), you'd also have to convience the company to recompile their library into the appropriate OS format. Now, take streaming media; if it's done properly by Microsoft (haha), the GUI code will be nowhere within the library, and the library should be nearly cross-platform, relying only on TCP/IP and data decryption algorythms. If this is not the case, then the commercial company should offer to go into a non-disclosure agreement, and work on making a cross-platform version of it available; the library would still be closed source, of course. (This is another reason why as just programmers, we can't do this alone).
FInally, once the library and the GUI wrapper is finished, you have a program that parts of can be released under the GPL, while the library is distributed as a binary and can only be redistrubted as a library.
The key thing is getting some commercial company into it. Money speaks louder than words in this case, although the above transactions should require no money to be spent. It has to be made clear to the company with the controlling standard that doing this would result in a wider acceptance of their standard, which means more money for them in the end (in the case of Windows Media, more WM users; in the case of DVDs, more DVDs bought, etc). In addition, any 'secret' parts of the library would be easier to get if there was another company with an interest in it, as opposed to a 'random group of hackers'.
While this is true, a while back , there was a discovered bug in Netscape (and IE, I believe) that affected many non-American users.
As you state, if you have a cookie set for domain.com, then the cookie will be accessable by www.domain.com, ftp.domain.com, and anything with that ending. Basically, a domain-level cookie is valid for all machines within that domain.
However, thanks to the Americanization of the web, Netscape didn't check the domain: they checked the last two fields for the match. So a cookie registered for demon.co.uk would work for all those machines, but a cookie set on co.uk would also be valid for *all* *.*.co.uk sites. This hole was used by a few malicious web masters, but I think it was quickly patched by Netscape.
Get Teraterm; not only is it free and is generally good, there's also a free addon that allows SSH connects with the program. A definite must-have Windows client.
It's not that easy to convert methane to methanol. However, the farm *is* still the right place for it: corn and other crops can be converted to alcohols, including methanol and ethanol and beer:-)
No, but one of the many things you had to do in the solo game was do a thing called "gernade jumping", which meant using the blast from a gernade launcher to propel yourself in the air (at a cost to your health, of course).
Actually, grenade jumping was not required in any of the Marathon triologies (although later 3rd party levels did require it). You *could* use it to get to secrets but it wasn't required.
If anything, there might have been a nod to System Shock by Marathon, but again, the plot elements of Marathon are not new (AI ideas from Neuromancer, and rumor has it that the Pfhor are based on the Buggers from Ender's Game, even with the brief mention of them).
However, I did that System Shock 2 (great game, wish it had a better rendering engine, thou) has some references to Marathon, of particular interest is that the alien species that take over the ship are picked up from Tau Ceti IV, the original planet that the Marathon colony ship was heading to.
Marathon was released to the Mac world around the time that Doom II was about, predating Duke Nukem by a few months and also before the first wisps of "vaporware" were circulating regarding Quake - about 6 years ago, roughly. I remember it's release well because someone accidently let an early beta through, and despite the fact that it was only one level ("Mars Needs Women"), every Mac gamer was playing the beta. Sales of the game skyrocketed when it actually hit the virtual shelves.
The storyline of Marathon is nothing new: one of the moons of Mars has been converted to a human colony ship and shot off to a new planet for colonization. Midroute, the ship is hijacked by an alien race called the "Pfhor" (pronounced 'four'), who begin to slaughter the humans. To make matters worse, one of the 3 AI, Durandal, apparently communicated with the alien ship, and has decided to do whatever possible to escape his computer prison.
You are the ships only hope as a security guard (your true identity is still a mystery through the remaining games).
At that time, the engine featured 8 player multiplay over Appletalk (not networkable:-/), a pseudo 3-D enviornoment: the maps were made of polygons in the x-y plane, with the ability to overlap polygons to achieve 4-D effects, but was limited in that no wall between polygons could have more than one opening), monsters and items were rendered as spirits, and various lighting effects. Liquids were only simulated, and floors and ceilings of each poly had to be horizontal and walls had to be vertical. Sure, that's a lot of limitations, but on basically 68030's, the game ran rock solid. Additionally, the ggame when beyond just shooting, providing a detailed story through terminals that you interacted with.
Marathon 2 did a lot of revamping of the engine, allowing larger and more colorful textures, liquids, transparent textures, and more lighting effects, but not much else. The plot of M2 took off where M1 ended: you've saved the colony ship, but have been abducted by the rogue AI Durandal, who is looking to save his butt before the universe collapses in 1x10^13 someodd years (paranoid, aint' he?). To do so, you visit the Pfhor homework as well as the homeworld of a race they have enslaved, the S'pht, looking for a device that might be able to transport planets across universes. As your survival is controlled by Durdanal, you have but little choice to follow him.
Marathon Infinity (the last of the trio) didn't do much to change the game engine, and mostly extended the story line and play to sort of wrap up the series... while the game play in Infinity is pretty good and the cleanest of the 3, the story at that point was a bit weak. IMO.
By this time, however Quake for the PC was out, Quake 2 was in the works, and MacSoft was working on getting Quake ported to the mac; the Marathon series had fulfilled its goals to fill in that FPS game that the mac players did not have. While people have begged Bungie to make a 4th Marathon sequel, they will probably not, as work with Myth and Halo continues. Oddly enough, people will be watching Halo carefully - the story in Marathon actually includes elements from a Wolvenstein clone that Bungie created called Pathways Into Darkness, and the players expect to see a drop or two of Marathon references in Halo and Oni.
One of the key things that made Marathon much better over Quake for me was the intelligence of the monsters: supposedly, the game adjusted the AI of the monsters as you continued depending on how well you played, and while it's hard to reproduce such events, I truely believe that is the case. Only recently has the AI of other games improved over Marathon's (that being Half Life), going above the basic 'charge the player'. The aliens in Marathon would seem to be able to cut around to your back if there was a way and get you trapped between two sets of them. They also seemed to know how to lurk well. Alot of this depended on the mapmaker's ability as well, but in general, the game was tough.
This is not true, based on a similar scam by an American company. (I was a victim, so I know this.)
A US group was randomly generating card numbers, and then tried to charge around $20 to the card via standard means. They didn't have any expery data, but apparently, the one checker they used did NOT require this information. The result: the company got about $20 charged (one time only) to a number of accounts, and collected that cash for themselves. They are still in operation, as far as I can tell, and are rather 'small time' for both credit card companies (who tend to only chase after $100 or more PER CARD scams) and the US govt (who tends to need $100k or more to put down the smack). Yes, they're illegal, but considered small time by the 'authorities'. At least, if you are smart enough to watch your CC statement, you'll notice the odd $20 charge and can dispute it.
I don't know about graphical viewers, but if you are using X, then two good newsreaders that work in *nix include slrn (command-line), and GNUS for the editor-cum-OS, EMACS. You might be able to wiggle some inline image viewing in GNUS, but I've only used it for text messages.
(And needless to say, HTML is NOT a USENET posting standard - thanks to Netscape for unleashing this travesty to the world, but fortunately, only about 2% of the posters I read use HTML in the first place.)
Reading USENET today requires a bit of patience, good newsreader software, and the 'right' groups.
You need patience, of course, to wade through junk posts, as well as the self-imposed week or so of lurking before posting rule. You need to find resources in the group, as most good NGs have FAQs about what and what not to ask. And you need to realize that reply times from USENet are much slower than other possible methods (IRC, web boards), but generally are going out to a much wider audience and will have a better chance to be answered correctly.
A newsreader with a killfile in today's USENET is a must. You also would like one with good filters that can rank messages based on subject or author. This helps highlight what you're interested in rather than wading through the rest.
But more importantly than the above is having a strong newsgroup to participate in. It takes a while for a ng to develop it's community, but once it's in place, most are pretty good. Examples that I read include comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html, rec.arts.tv.mst3k.misc, and rec.games.roguelike.nethack/.adom. On the other hand, if there is no clear leadership/common posters, or the like, or the subject matter is of the right type, you get groups that are mostly organized anarchy: alt.html, alt.tv.simpsons, alt.games.half-life, etc.
But in generally, most of the non-alt groups will be good; the regulars are knowledgable and will try to answer a well-worded question to the best of their ability.
Unfortunately, USENET is really only practical for those with T1 connections or shell accounts with their newsreader - most groups get 100+ messages a day, and if you wanted to read all the messages with a standard dialin and newsreader, it could easily take 10 minutes per newsgroup per day to download that information. That's why web discussion boards have gained popularity. However, IMO, it will not replace the quality of help I generally get from USENET.
Re:Redhat moving away from OpenSource?
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New CTO at Red Hat
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· Score: 3
Remember that OSS, as well as some other not-quite-open-source-but-still-free projects, you aren't paying for the software, but the support. This is RH's model, and in a similar vein, Borland released it's JBuilder Foundation for free (including a Linux version), but comes with no guarenteed tech support though they do offer ng's for community help.
I will argue, however, that RH is moving away from a system for the expert user and into the hands of corporate users, a good thing, but meaning that less and less RH is a good choice for your home box compared to other distros.
Re:First Down Line by Princeton Video Image
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Live or Memorex?
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· Score: 3
I think it lies with two parts: first, the camera that will have the shot of the first down line will be in a fixed position (though it's angle of view might change) at the start of the place, so the software can calculate based on camera angle and the appropriate yardage line where the FDL is at and where the camera is at to plop the line on screen. The second part is then just to block the line when players cross it, and since no uniform is green in the NFL (or significantly green), this is almost just doing a chromakey with a big fuzzy zone.
First, on the technology of changing a billboard in real time, I can believe it; if you've watched any pro football this year, you'll see the same technology used to digitally add a yellow strip across the field to show where the first down yardage is during the real time broadcast. In this case it is very useful.
What annoys me more is how much ads are being forced upon us in all aspects of life; tv, movies, the net, magazines, even in college textbooks. TV is the worse right now; it used to be that the end credits for most shows were just shown in full screen, no problem, but then someone got the idea to splitscreen them, to allow an ad to run along side the credits. This idea expanded everywhere, and now nearly no show has anything happen during the credits (one of the few I can think of is Frasier or Whose Line is it Anyway?). I remember one time a local station tried to do the same thing during the end credits of Voyager, which UPN had already splitscreen, such that one could not hear the preview of next week's episode, nor read any of the credits as they were 1/4th of the screen.
Why do we need ads pushed in our face as much as advertizers think we do? I'm sure I'm not the only one on/. that generally makes shopping purchases based on reviews and reports, rather than "I saw that on TV!". I would also suspect that up to 50% of such Americans are like that as well, being trained consumers rather than drop-of-the-hat buyers. Unforunately, I suspect that this group does not include the target of these commercials: the 15-21 and 22-30 demographics. These people tend to spend more on impluse purchases, as thus will be more prone to an ad than others.
And very much unfortunately, we have no way to stop this forced advertizing. We are the low end of the entertainment food chain, when it comes to consumers. The stations know they have our eyes, and the ads know they have our wallets. We have no real place to complain to except the FCC (as Americans, at least), and I'd suspect such cries would go unheard. Until we are at a point where there are 6 minutes of show vs 24 minutes of commercials.
Hopefully, what occured above may spark something, whether a law suit between two rival TV networks, or something pointing out that the press can no longer be considered to be biased. One question that might be asked is what version of a live shot might be archived away in the stations' vaults, the original or the modified? Can you imagine the shear power that a network press room might have if they can present their archived version (the one that was modified in real time) and use that as evidence in a major governmental scandal? Sure, there are telltale signs that the picture was modified, but technology will only get better to a point where you can't tell.
I do hope that the network media realizes they have journalistic morality to think of here. Even something as innocent as changing a sign to be an ad for yourself can lead down the road to trouble.
I'll agree that HW will generally adapt rather than originate. But the source they adapt from has changed considerable.
Look at Jurassic Park. Before JP, Michael Cricton was a practical nobody; maybe among geek circles, books like Andromeida Strain were popular, but nowhere near the popularity today. Spielberg saw JP as a movie, and it happened, and suddenly Cricton is HUGE. Bigger than big. We suddenly have remakes of his old books and books that are written for what seems like screenplay. I'd be hard pressed to say that this may have happened earlier than 1985 for any book (but this is my impression, it may not be fact). Generally, pre 1980 adaptions of books were merely taking something that was well written and adapting to the screen; the original author if alive rarely got an ego boost, and sequels were not important. At least, some movies today can still keep that (Contact, for example).
Another interesting example: The Man in the Iron Mask. I rented this during Christmas, and it was ok; then later that week, browsing the classic movie channels, I happened upon "The Fifth Musketeer", the same story but made in the 50s or 60s (forget the date). You had the same people die, the same resolution and all that, but there was something fundamentally better about the 50s version than the 90s one. The 90s version was flashier, and played down some of the interactions to make the movie more watchable for today's short attention span audience. The 50s version, on the other hand, keep me watching as some of the plot elements weren't fully explained. Sure, some of the sets looked poor, and it didn't have glitz, but it was a better movie overall, IMO.
Maybe this lack or originallity extends from filmmakers wanted to redo a story with *just* a bit of tweak here or there to fit how their idea of a film should be. This can make movies great, as in Contact, or terrible, as in Johnny Mnemonic. Let's hope that future book-based films like Ender's Game or Neuromancer or Hitchhiker's Guide don't fall into these problems.
Sure, by far, not a majority of movies that comes out of Hollywood is a remake of something prior, but it seems to me that there's much much more of these than in the 70s and early 80s. Remakes of comics, books, and previous movies have yet to give anything that is really worth remembering (Only a few come to mind: Maverick and Contact), and most are doomed to failure (Wild Wild West, Dudley Do-Right, Inspector Gadget)
Maybe it's because baby boomers who lived on these shows want more of them, and since they have a good amount of control in Hollywood, they have the ability to get these movies produced. They might be trying to revitalize a show, but often than naught, they want a last hurrah for the show
At least there have been films that have realized that such revitalizations are out there and they saturize on them, "Galaxy Quest" and "Mystery Men" come to mind). But personally, I'd rather see uniqueness in the theater with new characters and situations then trying to adopt something meant for the small screen to the large screen and failing miserably.
Now, as to Spiderman, I'm not sure about this; Marvel's about to tank, and the Spiderman cartoon as shown on FOX is (from what others have told me) rather out of character for Spiderman in general. I'm sure that this will end up as a typical summer blockbuster with lots of action scenes and the like -- but what about a plot? What aspect of Spiderman can they focus on in 2hrs and produce a good movie? Tim Burton did this excellently with the first Batman movie, using Batman's long-time foe The Joker, but Spiderman really doesn't have an equivalent equal -- all his enemies like Green Goblin, Dr Oct, and Venom, are just foes, but not a constant one. I don't see how you can pick one foe and still have a good Spiderman movie.
(However, this at least beats the rumors than Leo DeCaprio was going to play Parker/Spider, and with James Cameron directing).
Well, not the death of the Internet, but the death as we know it. When I started to use the net about 9-10 yrs ago, I saw it as a very useful tool, but something that was not to replace other aspects of my life.
But reading these press releases, both companies feel that they need to push the internet to be central in our lives. May I ask why?
Sure, in this day and age, not knowing the internet is going to hurt your job chances, but that's because doing research and some buying on the net is much faster than placing phone calls or snail mail. But there are still things that you cannot do on the net and will never be able to do on the net, such as grocery shopping, having a sincere discussion with a friend or loved one, and much more. Yet, like this AOL/TW deal, businesses think that it CAN replace all that.
What also bothers me about this is that companies are trying to define the way the internet works. Anyone else see those Nortel Network commercials "What do you want the Internet to be?" I'm sorry, but you nor a company nor a governement can define the purpose or behavior of the internet; it's a mass result of 6 billion people working together, and changes every single day. Sure, companies may try to map their little area of the network around to fit their goals, but there will always be anarchie and entropy on the internet. It's part of it's being.
More and more I'm reminded of the cyberspace scenes as described by Gibson. On the virtual world of the internet we have these larger and larger blocks representing big companies; they merge and migrate, and look very dominating over everything else on the landscape. But there will always be space between said blocks, and that space is the true stuff of the net - freedom of individual thought.
Now that I've finished going poetic...Some things that I don't worry about : Limited content: AOL already had this without TW's help. That part of the merger doesn't change anything as long as all other possible content that is non-AOL or TW remains untouched.
The merger itself - I may have missed this, but this is all pending FTC approval, right? I have a feeling that there may resistance from the FTC *AND* shareholders in this. So nothing's written in stone yet.
My suggestion was not that Aussie users would be limited to Aussie sites, just that by default, if you types in "www.bigbusiness.com" without any country modifier, you'd be sent first to www.bigbusiness.com.au. If you really wanted "www.bigbusiness.com.us", you'd just have to type that explicitly.
And yes, I do consider etoy.com and etoys.com to be a domain name problem. We should have had more TLD years ago before e-commerce got here, and thus, etoy.com would most likely be etoy.arts (or more appropriately, etoy.arts.ch). However, because 'we' waited, etoy.com had to stay. Mind you, I think etoyS.com is wrong in this case, but the distasterous state of the DNS system is partically at fault as well.
It should still be first come, first served. So if Joe Disney got disney.per fair and square, then Susan Disney has no grounds.
But,.per implies a personal page; say if Walt Dinsey was alive and got disney.per, but all it was was a redirect to disney.com, there are grounds for a lawsuit for squatting. On the other hand, if he had his personal home page there, that's different.
I strongly believe that with or without new TLD, there needs to be resistrictions on what domain names you can register either as an individual.
For example, if you read this article, one guy grabbed "e-.com", "e-.org", and "e-.net" for his e-commerce site. Hello, there's something wrong here:.org sites are supposed to be for non-profit organizations, not a commerce site.
We need to education both IT managers and the general public that there is a significant difference between a.com and a.net address. If that understand was in place across the planet, then there should be no confusion between sites such as "whitehouse.gov" and "whitehouse.com", or "apple.com" and "apple.org". But, because we *know* people are stupid, they feel they have to do this.
IF people were intelligent enough to recongize this, then the next step would be to prevent any person or group to own the same name in any more than one TLD, unless sufficient cause is show (and that cause does NOT include trademark infrindgement). With the above in place, anyone would recognize that "apple.org" is not Apple Corp, but some organization that might deal with apples or Apples. Therefore, Apple would not have to grab all the domains in every TLD.
Then, using internationally determined standards, the next step would be to limit the registration of certain TLDs to appropriate people..com and.biz to registered profit businesses,.net with the network infrastructure, etc.
Finally, and what I think is really important right now is to actively use the country code in domains. Browsers can easily be configured or patched to automatically end.com and the other TLD's in the appropriate country code (.us, etc) Yes, this means that by default, a person in the UK would have to go "www.apple.com.us", but this is necessary to remove the American-ization of the Internet, and would limit domain name disputes to within countries only (no etoys vs etoy problems).
But public education is the most important thing. I watch game shows which will generally have a higher cut of people than the rest, and it amazing me how dense they come to computer terms. They don't try to learn how it understands, they just want it to work. We need to actively promote education; I know that I will be trying to teach my mom the fundamentals of using her new computer rather than running through a simple list of steps just to type a letter. I'll try to apply the same to the internet stuff. But everyone needs to learn this. While we as the john doe internet surfer is still ignorant of how domain names work, IT managers are going to suck up all those domains for no real go reason.
Of course, the other option would be to increase the cost of registering domains, but this would hurt more than help.
I'd have to ask, how do you know they were repetitive from the very start?
Garfield was a very good strip in it's first 5 years. The perspective and setup was unique. Then Jim Davis was hit with "moichendizing". The cartoon show, tons of toys and books, etc. At that point, the strip began showing signs of being 'tired'. It's still going, almost 20 years later, but it's obviously nothing groundshaking now.
The same thing has happened to Scott Adams and Dilbert. Popularity and the TV show have really screwed up the fresh look of the comic.
I'd argue that we didn't see this with Bill Waterson or Gary Larson because they only allowed their work for books and the occasional promotional items; both were able to stay fresh for much longer, and rather than draw out and get repetitive, they quit the business on time.
Workbench icons were whatever size you wanted them: there was no fixed icon size for it, so tthat one icon could be 10x10, another 1000x1000. Of course, most smart people got icon sets back then that had consistant looks and sizes to make the desktop look unique.
It looks like Apple listened to the flak it got for the 'violation' of it's own HIG in the development of the Quicktime Movie Player, and has made amends in Mac OS X. QT 4's player, both on the mac and the PC side, was pointed out as a bad interface for trying to mimic a real world device when that was not appropriate. A specific example was that a visual thumbwheel was used for volume control, which on a real device makes sense, but is non-sensical on a computer screen. This screen shots shows that the volume control is now a normal slider. Also, the player control buttons are no longer the same color scheme as the background of the window, again a problem with the previous design.
The only thing that I'm concerned about is the amount of 'chrome effects' (not the chrome look, just anything above and beyond functionality). As long as one can turn them off or design their own, I'd be happy with that interface.
Technically, now that someone has the API, one could write a library that provides for all the API calls and functions as expected.
The question is of legality. Compare this to the mess when SB released the Unified drivers for their TNT cards that basically emulated 3dfx calls. They used the freely avaiable 3dfx API definitions, and wrapped the TNT calls with mapping functions to get a 3dfx library. 3dfx still tried to sue them but I believe they lost (or something happened, I've not heard what however.)
Same idea *could* be applied here, but it depends what level the API of the software is at.
Slashdot Mirror
Parts of the UCITA that try to account for banning of reverse engineering AT THE STATE LEVEL are explicitly given by the DMCA AT THE FEDERAL LEVEL. Thus, UCITA in this regard automatically loses. State legislation cannot override federal laws or deny rights given by federal law.
In addition, click licenses are basically parts of interstate transport-- an area of judistriction that the state governments cannot control. (If you bought a CA-based program in CA as a CA resident, the state can affect you usually by sales tax, but not other way).
Some have suggested that UCITA may allow one company to introduce a new format (propriatary of course) into the next major release of the software, get it used by > 50%, then bait and switch, forcing they format as the defacto one for the entire industry, and as reverse engineering would be outlawed by UCITA, everyone else would be screwed. However, I cannot see how that would not be picked up by any monopoly watchers before it got to fruitation. And again, this relying on the inability to reverse engineer for interoperability.
However, that's only part of the issues with UCITA -- it's the loss of consumer protection that can come about if it's passed. I'd be more worried about this front than any other part of the UCITA.
First, at least in regards to streaming media, we must realize that there are no standards for it, unlike something like HTML, and thus we'll have to follow what the current trend is (and that is going the way of Windows Media). While some would probably agrue that Mpeg is the real standard, how many popular web sites use it?
Next, a group of programs need to get together with some commercial entity with a good interest in Linux (RedHat, Corel, Sun, etc..). The commercial interest is necessary, as I doubt that Microsoft would want to work with just a set of Linux programmers.
With that in mind, this collective group should approach the company that holds the defacto standard in question, and ask if they can have the APIs to the library that handled the translation of the streaming media to audio and visual elements. I suspect parts of the library itself are trade secrets or patented or something along those lines, and may include encryption and other details. Don't ask for the source to this library, just the APIs.
Then comes the tougher part. While the APIs can be easily used to make the client wrapper (and the GPL'd part), you'd also have to convience the company to recompile their library into the appropriate OS format. Now, take streaming media; if it's done properly by Microsoft (haha), the GUI code will be nowhere within the library, and the library should be nearly cross-platform, relying only on TCP/IP and data decryption algorythms. If this is not the case, then the commercial company should offer to go into a non-disclosure agreement, and work on making a cross-platform version of it available; the library would still be closed source, of course. (This is another reason why as just programmers, we can't do this alone).
FInally, once the library and the GUI wrapper is finished, you have a program that parts of can be released under the GPL, while the library is distributed as a binary and can only be redistrubted as a library.
The key thing is getting some commercial company into it. Money speaks louder than words in this case, although the above transactions should require no money to be spent. It has to be made clear to the company with the controlling standard that doing this would result in a wider acceptance of their standard, which means more money for them in the end (in the case of Windows Media, more WM users; in the case of DVDs, more DVDs bought, etc). In addition, any 'secret' parts of the library would be easier to get if there was another company with an interest in it, as opposed to a 'random group of hackers'.
As you state, if you have a cookie set for domain.com, then the cookie will be accessable by www.domain.com, ftp.domain.com, and anything with that ending. Basically, a domain-level cookie is valid for all machines within that domain.
However, thanks to the Americanization of the web, Netscape didn't check the domain: they checked the last two fields for the match. So a cookie registered for demon.co.uk would work for all those machines, but a cookie set on co.uk would also be valid for *all* *.*.co.uk sites. This hole was used by a few malicious web masters, but I think it was quickly patched by Netscape.
Get Teraterm; not only is it free and is generally good, there's also a free addon that allows SSH connects with the program. A definite must-have Windows client.
If this isn't enough incentive for the FTC to block any merger of AOL with a media outlet, I don't know what is.
It's not that easy to convert methane to methanol. However, the farm *is* still the right place for it: corn and other crops can be converted to alcohols, including methanol and ethanol and beer :-)
No, but one of the many things you had to do in the solo game was do a thing called "gernade jumping", which meant using the blast from a gernade launcher to propel yourself in the air (at a cost to your health, of course).
Actually, grenade jumping was not required in any of the Marathon triologies (although later 3rd party levels did require it). You *could* use it to get to secrets but it wasn't required.However, I did that System Shock 2 (great game, wish it had a better rendering engine, thou) has some references to Marathon, of particular interest is that the alien species that take over the ship are picked up from Tau Ceti IV, the original planet that the Marathon colony ship was heading to.
The storyline of Marathon is nothing new: one of the moons of Mars has been converted to a human colony ship and shot off to a new planet for colonization. Midroute, the ship is hijacked by an alien race called the "Pfhor" (pronounced 'four'), who begin to slaughter the humans. To make matters worse, one of the 3 AI, Durandal, apparently communicated with the alien ship, and has decided to do whatever possible to escape his computer prison.
You are the ships only hope as a security guard (your true identity is still a mystery through the remaining games).
At that time, the engine featured 8 player multiplay over Appletalk (not networkable :-/), a pseudo 3-D enviornoment: the maps were made of polygons in the x-y plane, with the ability to overlap polygons to achieve 4-D effects, but was limited in that no wall between polygons could have more than one opening), monsters and items were rendered as spirits, and various lighting effects. Liquids were only simulated, and floors and ceilings of each poly had to be horizontal and walls had to be vertical. Sure, that's a lot of limitations, but on basically 68030's, the game ran rock solid. Additionally, the ggame when beyond just shooting, providing a detailed story through terminals that you interacted with.
Marathon 2 did a lot of revamping of the engine, allowing larger and more colorful textures, liquids, transparent textures, and more lighting effects, but not much else. The plot of M2 took off where M1 ended: you've saved the colony ship, but have been abducted by the rogue AI Durandal, who is looking to save his butt before the universe collapses in 1x10^13 someodd years (paranoid, aint' he?). To do so, you visit the Pfhor homework as well as the homeworld of a race they have enslaved, the S'pht, looking for a device that might be able to transport planets across universes. As your survival is controlled by Durdanal, you have but little choice to follow him.
Marathon Infinity (the last of the trio) didn't do much to change the game engine, and mostly extended the story line and play to sort of wrap up the series... while the game play in Infinity is pretty good and the cleanest of the 3, the story at that point was a bit weak. IMO.
By this time, however Quake for the PC was out, Quake 2 was in the works, and MacSoft was working on getting Quake ported to the mac; the Marathon series had fulfilled its goals to fill in that FPS game that the mac players did not have. While people have begged Bungie to make a 4th Marathon sequel, they will probably not, as work with Myth and Halo continues. Oddly enough, people will be watching Halo carefully - the story in Marathon actually includes elements from a Wolvenstein clone that Bungie created called Pathways Into Darkness, and the players expect to see a drop or two of Marathon references in Halo and Oni.
One of the key things that made Marathon much better over Quake for me was the intelligence of the monsters: supposedly, the game adjusted the AI of the monsters as you continued depending on how well you played, and while it's hard to reproduce such events, I truely believe that is the case. Only recently has the AI of other games improved over Marathon's (that being Half Life), going above the basic 'charge the player'. The aliens in Marathon would seem to be able to cut around to your back if there was a way and get you trapped between two sets of them. They also seemed to know how to lurk well. Alot of this depended on the mapmaker's ability as well, but in general, the game was tough.
A US group was randomly generating card numbers, and then tried to charge around $20 to the card via standard means. They didn't have any expery data, but apparently, the one checker they used did NOT require this information. The result: the company got about $20 charged (one time only) to a number of accounts, and collected that cash for themselves. They are still in operation, as far as I can tell, and are rather 'small time' for both credit card companies (who tend to only chase after $100 or more PER CARD scams) and the US govt (who tends to need $100k or more to put down the smack). Yes, they're illegal, but considered small time by the 'authorities'. At least, if you are smart enough to watch your CC statement, you'll notice the odd $20 charge and can dispute it.
(And needless to say, HTML is NOT a USENET posting standard - thanks to Netscape for unleashing this travesty to the world, but fortunately, only about 2% of the posters I read use HTML in the first place.)
You need patience, of course, to wade through junk posts, as well as the self-imposed week or so of lurking before posting rule. You need to find resources in the group, as most good NGs have FAQs about what and what not to ask. And you need to realize that reply times from USENet are much slower than other possible methods (IRC, web boards), but generally are going out to a much wider audience and will have a better chance to be answered correctly.
A newsreader with a killfile in today's USENET is a must. You also would like one with good filters that can rank messages based on subject or author. This helps highlight what you're interested in rather than wading through the rest.
But more importantly than the above is having a strong newsgroup to participate in. It takes a while for a ng to develop it's community, but once it's in place, most are pretty good. Examples that I read include comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html, rec.arts.tv.mst3k.misc, and rec.games.roguelike.nethack/.adom. On the other hand, if there is no clear leadership/common posters, or the like, or the subject matter is of the right type, you get groups that are mostly organized anarchy: alt.html, alt.tv.simpsons, alt.games.half-life, etc.
But in generally, most of the non-alt groups will be good; the regulars are knowledgable and will try to answer a well-worded question to the best of their ability.
Unfortunately, USENET is really only practical for those with T1 connections or shell accounts with their newsreader - most groups get 100+ messages a day, and if you wanted to read all the messages with a standard dialin and newsreader, it could easily take 10 minutes per newsgroup per day to download that information. That's why web discussion boards have gained popularity. However, IMO, it will not replace the quality of help I generally get from USENET.
I will argue, however, that RH is moving away from a system for the expert user and into the hands of corporate users, a good thing, but meaning that less and less RH is a good choice for your home box compared to other distros.
I think it lies with two parts: first, the camera that will have the shot of the first down line will be in a fixed position (though it's angle of view might change) at the start of the place, so the software can calculate based on camera angle and the appropriate yardage line where the FDL is at and where the camera is at to plop the line on screen. The second part is then just to block the line when players cross it, and since no uniform is green in the NFL (or significantly green), this is almost just doing a chromakey with a big fuzzy zone.
What annoys me more is how much ads are being forced upon us in all aspects of life; tv, movies, the net, magazines, even in college textbooks. TV is the worse right now; it used to be that the end credits for most shows were just shown in full screen, no problem, but then someone got the idea to splitscreen them, to allow an ad to run along side the credits. This idea expanded everywhere, and now nearly no show has anything happen during the credits (one of the few I can think of is Frasier or Whose Line is it Anyway?). I remember one time a local station tried to do the same thing during the end credits of Voyager, which UPN had already splitscreen, such that one could not hear the preview of next week's episode, nor read any of the credits as they were 1/4th of the screen.
Why do we need ads pushed in our face as much as advertizers think we do? I'm sure I'm not the only one on /. that generally makes shopping purchases based on reviews and reports, rather than "I saw that on TV!". I would also suspect that up to 50% of such Americans are like that as well, being trained consumers rather than drop-of-the-hat buyers. Unforunately, I suspect that this group does not include the target of these commercials: the 15-21 and 22-30 demographics. These people tend to spend more on impluse purchases, as thus will be more prone to an ad than others.
And very much unfortunately, we have no way to stop this forced advertizing. We are the low end of the entertainment food chain, when it comes to consumers. The stations know they have our eyes, and the ads know they have our wallets. We have no real place to complain to except the FCC (as Americans, at least), and I'd suspect such cries would go unheard. Until we are at a point where there are 6 minutes of show vs 24 minutes of commercials.
Hopefully, what occured above may spark something, whether a law suit between two rival TV networks, or something pointing out that the press can no longer be considered to be biased. One question that might be asked is what version of a live shot might be archived away in the stations' vaults, the original or the modified? Can you imagine the shear power that a network press room might have if they can present their archived version (the one that was modified in real time) and use that as evidence in a major governmental scandal? Sure, there are telltale signs that the picture was modified, but technology will only get better to a point where you can't tell.
I do hope that the network media realizes they have journalistic morality to think of here. Even something as innocent as changing a sign to be an ad for yourself can lead down the road to trouble.
Look at Jurassic Park. Before JP, Michael Cricton was a practical nobody; maybe among geek circles, books like Andromeida Strain were popular, but nowhere near the popularity today. Spielberg saw JP as a movie, and it happened, and suddenly Cricton is HUGE. Bigger than big. We suddenly have remakes of his old books and books that are written for what seems like screenplay. I'd be hard pressed to say that this may have happened earlier than 1985 for any book (but this is my impression, it may not be fact). Generally, pre 1980 adaptions of books were merely taking something that was well written and adapting to the screen; the original author if alive rarely got an ego boost, and sequels were not important. At least, some movies today can still keep that (Contact, for example).
Another interesting example: The Man in the Iron Mask. I rented this during Christmas, and it was ok; then later that week, browsing the classic movie channels, I happened upon "The Fifth Musketeer", the same story but made in the 50s or 60s (forget the date). You had the same people die, the same resolution and all that, but there was something fundamentally better about the 50s version than the 90s one. The 90s version was flashier, and played down some of the interactions to make the movie more watchable for today's short attention span audience. The 50s version, on the other hand, keep me watching as some of the plot elements weren't fully explained. Sure, some of the sets looked poor, and it didn't have glitz, but it was a better movie overall, IMO.
Maybe this lack or originallity extends from filmmakers wanted to redo a story with *just* a bit of tweak here or there to fit how their idea of a film should be. This can make movies great, as in Contact, or terrible, as in Johnny Mnemonic. Let's hope that future book-based films like Ender's Game or Neuromancer or Hitchhiker's Guide don't fall into these problems.
Maybe it's because baby boomers who lived on these shows want more of them, and since they have a good amount of control in Hollywood, they have the ability to get these movies produced. They might be trying to revitalize a show, but often than naught, they want a last hurrah for the show
At least there have been films that have realized that such revitalizations are out there and they saturize on them, "Galaxy Quest" and "Mystery Men" come to mind). But personally, I'd rather see uniqueness in the theater with new characters and situations then trying to adopt something meant for the small screen to the large screen and failing miserably.
Now, as to Spiderman, I'm not sure about this; Marvel's about to tank, and the Spiderman cartoon as shown on FOX is (from what others have told me) rather out of character for Spiderman in general. I'm sure that this will end up as a typical summer blockbuster with lots of action scenes and the like -- but what about a plot? What aspect of Spiderman can they focus on in 2hrs and produce a good movie? Tim Burton did this excellently with the first Batman movie, using Batman's long-time foe The Joker, but Spiderman really doesn't have an equivalent equal -- all his enemies like Green Goblin, Dr Oct, and Venom, are just foes, but not a constant one. I don't see how you can pick one foe and still have a good Spiderman movie.
(However, this at least beats the rumors than Leo DeCaprio was going to play Parker/Spider, and with James Cameron directing).
But reading these press releases, both companies feel that they need to push the internet to be central in our lives. May I ask why?
Sure, in this day and age, not knowing the internet is going to hurt your job chances, but that's because doing research and some buying on the net is much faster than placing phone calls or snail mail. But there are still things that you cannot do on the net and will never be able to do on the net, such as grocery shopping, having a sincere discussion with a friend or loved one, and much more. Yet, like this AOL/TW deal, businesses think that it CAN replace all that.
What also bothers me about this is that companies are trying to define the way the internet works. Anyone else see those Nortel Network commercials "What do you want the Internet to be?" I'm sorry, but you nor a company nor a governement can define the purpose or behavior of the internet; it's a mass result of 6 billion people working together, and changes every single day. Sure, companies may try to map their little area of the network around to fit their goals, but there will always be anarchie and entropy on the internet. It's part of it's being.
More and more I'm reminded of the cyberspace scenes as described by Gibson. On the virtual world of the internet we have these larger and larger blocks representing big companies; they merge and migrate, and look very dominating over everything else on the landscape. But there will always be space between said blocks, and that space is the true stuff of the net - freedom of individual thought.
Now that I've finished going poetic...Some things that I don't worry about : Limited content: AOL already had this without TW's help. That part of the merger doesn't change anything as long as all other possible content that is non-AOL or TW remains untouched.
The merger itself - I may have missed this, but this is all pending FTC approval, right? I have a feeling that there may resistance from the FTC *AND* shareholders in this. So nothing's written in stone yet.
And yes, I do consider etoy.com and etoys.com to be a domain name problem. We should have had more TLD years ago before e-commerce got here, and thus, etoy.com would most likely be etoy.arts (or more appropriately, etoy.arts.ch). However, because 'we' waited, etoy.com had to stay. Mind you, I think etoyS.com is wrong in this case, but the distasterous state of the DNS system is partically at fault as well.
But, .per implies a personal page; say if Walt Dinsey was alive and got disney.per, but all it was was a redirect to disney.com, there are grounds for a lawsuit for squatting. On the other hand, if he had his personal home page there, that's different.
For example, if you read this article, one guy grabbed "e-.com", "e-.org", and "e-.net" for his e-commerce site. Hello, there's something wrong here: .org sites are supposed to be for non-profit organizations, not a commerce site.
We need to education both IT managers and the general public that there is a significant difference between a .com and a .net address. If that understand was in place across the planet, then there should be no confusion between sites such as "whitehouse.gov" and "whitehouse.com", or "apple.com" and "apple.org". But, because we *know* people are stupid, they feel they have to do this.
IF people were intelligent enough to recongize this, then the next step would be to prevent any person or group to own the same name in any more than one TLD, unless sufficient cause is show (and that cause does NOT include trademark infrindgement). With the above in place, anyone would recognize that "apple.org" is not Apple Corp, but some organization that might deal with apples or Apples. Therefore, Apple would not have to grab all the domains in every TLD.
Then, using internationally determined standards, the next step would be to limit the registration of certain TLDs to appropriate people. .com and .biz to registered profit businesses, .net with the network infrastructure, etc.
Finally, and what I think is really important right now is to actively use the country code in domains. Browsers can easily be configured or patched to automatically end .com and the other TLD's in the appropriate country code (.us, etc) Yes, this means that by default, a person in the UK would have to go "www.apple.com.us", but this is necessary to remove the American-ization of the Internet, and would limit domain name disputes to within countries only (no etoys vs etoy problems).
But public education is the most important thing. I watch game shows which will generally have a higher cut of people than the rest, and it amazing me how dense they come to computer terms. They don't try to learn how it understands, they just want it to work. We need to actively promote education; I know that I will be trying to teach my mom the fundamentals of using her new computer rather than running through a simple list of steps just to type a letter. I'll try to apply the same to the internet stuff. But everyone needs to learn this. While we as the john doe internet surfer is still ignorant of how domain names work, IT managers are going to suck up all those domains for no real go reason.
Of course, the other option would be to increase the cost of registering domains, but this would hurt more than help.
Garfield was a very good strip in it's first 5 years. The perspective and setup was unique. Then Jim Davis was hit with "moichendizing". The cartoon show, tons of toys and books, etc. At that point, the strip began showing signs of being 'tired'. It's still going, almost 20 years later, but it's obviously nothing groundshaking now.
The same thing has happened to Scott Adams and Dilbert. Popularity and the TV show have really screwed up the fresh look of the comic.
I'd argue that we didn't see this with Bill Waterson or Gary Larson because they only allowed their work for books and the occasional promotional items; both were able to stay fresh for much longer, and rather than draw out and get repetitive, they quit the business on time.
Workbench icons were whatever size you wanted them: there was no fixed icon size for it, so tthat one icon could be 10x10, another 1000x1000. Of course, most smart people got icon sets back then that had consistant looks and sizes to make the desktop look unique.
The only thing that I'm concerned about is the amount of 'chrome effects' (not the chrome look, just anything above and beyond functionality). As long as one can turn them off or design their own, I'd be happy with that interface.
The question is of legality. Compare this to the mess when SB released the Unified drivers for their TNT cards that basically emulated 3dfx calls. They used the freely avaiable 3dfx API definitions, and wrapped the TNT calls with mapping functions to get a 3dfx library. 3dfx still tried to sue them but I believe they lost (or something happened, I've not heard what however.)
Same idea *could* be applied here, but it depends what level the API of the software is at.