IANAL In the UK an auction is partly a clearing house for possibly stolen goods that third parties have acquired not knowing if they were stolen or not. The auctioneer needs to publicly state that there will be an auction in a fixed place, at a fixed time. It is then your responsibility, if you have had items stolen, to attend the auction to see if any of your goods are on sale. If there are you can have them back (not sure what the burden of proof is). If they are sold then the person buying them is secure in the knowledge that you cannot go to their house and say "hey that's mine - I'm having it back". It's a system that dates back to long ago when I suppose everybody in the neighbourhood would attend and get their stolen turnip back. In that case it's not a concern of the auction house if things are stolen.
However someone who duplicates CD's is breaking copyright not stealing. There are laws to prevent counterfeiting which auctioneering is not protected from. One thing that does puzzle me though is why the game companies are involved at all. In the UK cases concerning counterfeiting are generally the handled by a joint operation between the police and the local trading standards office (a local govt. body). In this way the injured parties are abstracted from the process. It is supposed that the purchaser is also a victim rather than a criminal. If I buy copied products I have been swindled out of my belief that I was buying an original. The buyer is expected to act with due dilligence (no Gucci suits for $30) but I'm not sure of the penalty for not being 'dilligent'.
That does leave me with one question though. When I go to Spain and buy my Game128 and put in my Gameboy it doesn't present me with any license agreement. The packaging looks professional and of the 128 games in the cartridge I have only seen the names of a couple of them before. Am I free to go ahead without fear of penalty believing it to be a legitimately licensed product?
despite the fact that it's great fun watching people find outlets for their high horse talk, heck I'm one of 'em.
I've never used AOL or had any problem with any of it's users. What I do know is that it's using it's muscle in the UK for force down the price of access. They are attempting to expand in the UK not by simply wooing competitors customers but by expanding the market. In this way even maintaining market share - or even losing some - is still a win. When players such as Freeserve haven't turned a profit but derive their huge revenue from bloated cost of access they are still vulnerable to the next wave. AOL was the first major company to move to a 1p a minute 24 hour access. Previously it was 4p per minute for daytime modem access (8am-6pm). Others have quickly followed (ntl: for instance) and now we are beginning to see flat rate 24/7 access finally arrive. The UK is finally going to come alive net wise so expect plenty more AOL users to come aboard. .oO0Oo.
The fact that you have the source available doesn't affect any of the factors you mention. you are correct to state that just hacking about would probably not generate an Enterprise level RDBMS but who actually thinks that it would. It is not a flaw in Open Source. Open source means that the people who write it let you have access to the source code. It doesn't mean it's free as in beer. Releasing the source code doesn't turn your product into an overnight hack. .oO0Oo.
I did enjoy Borland's Turbo C back in the DOS days. God how I hated OWL when Borland went windows. I also hated their horrible dialog buttons so switched to M$. I've grown up on the M$ IDE really. I keep threatening to have a bash at Emacs but time is always a factor round here. We tend to write and test with VC and once it works compile it with gcc and off we go. I'm contemplating Java for my *nix gui based development as we use a mix of BSDi, freeBSD, Linux and Win* and it might be useful to cross platform the gui part. I got on with java but didn't like AWT much but I gather it's changed a bit since 1.1. Although it was a bit slow I used java for graphics filtering in the video we made for the Boo Radleys. Check my web site for some artwork. .oO0Oo.
not really my experience here in the UK. Mind you I did spend most of the time a 2Mbps link Most of the main Uk servers - barrys, demon, evil.to, can't remeber more names but there were plenty offered great connectivity and were always full. I used to run two servers on our 2M link. they were so popular I would ramp them up to 26 players each. Even though they would sometimes crawl there were always, always full. When TFC hit the stands we were overwhelmed. From 7pm to 5am they were full. For weeks. And one of them had friendly fire turned on! Sometimes I had to kick ppl just to get a 5ping game (slap my wrist!) .oO0Oo.
i remember being on a pr0n site on geocities where the perosn had thoughtfully put thumbnails of all the picture on one page with a click for larger version. Unfortunately they had simply used the full size image with width=100 height=100 in the tag. Very painful .oO0Oo.
>well pointers just suck badly If you can't get your head around pointers and how and why you use them then you really shouldn't be using C and should certainly steer clear of C++. Stick to something where pointers are removed from the programmers frame of reference. Crikey even VB gives you a choice in function calls to use a pointer or the stack. .oO0Oo.
>the server availability for Half-Life was abysmal until Sierra finally got the server port out, and now it's the most popular game online.
Such utter rubbish. Multiplayer HL was mega popular for ages before the Linux server came out.
It's popular because it's a good game not because of server ability. It became a best seller partly due to the userID you needed to play online - unlike fps's before it so for the most part buying your own copy was easier than getting a pirate to keep working.
The probable reason the Linux servers became more popular was because when the Win version falls over it just gives a dirty error message box. There's no way to automate it restarting. (Well we did manage it with a hardware resetter polling the game for activity). On the Linux version crashed games don't tend to hang around in the process list so looking for their PID and spawning another copy if not present and writing fails to a log is a good way of maintaining server up time. Well that and performance. The linux server responds quicker than the NT server and consumes less resources.
Whatever the reason you are still confusing the client with the server. I've not seen Half-life for Linux down at PC World.
yeah you're right. My 'nix box is for networking things - servers of all kinds. Maybe my client machine should be more streamlined. It's the mainframe / terminal argument all over again. PC's brought power to the desktop. The Web kind of put it back in the power of the server again. Maybe what we need is a kind of thin client for games and the like. Just because it's a Turing machine doesn't mean it should try and do _everything_. And we should call it the TuX-Box and get it out the door before the beast of Redmond make's theirs! .oO0Oo.
In Nottingham the decision as to whether you went to Australia or not was whether you stole less or more than a shilling. More than a shilling and it was off to the gallows, less and it was off to the boats.
Either way the reality was a peasant holocaust.
Successive governments have successfully washed over it with the penal colony crap but it was really an efficient way of clearing out the overpopulated inner cities after the farming land was cleared by the increasingly powerful land owners.
To use the popular misconception of criminality is a major travesty to those who were transported. Think most survived the trip?
The goverment officials that went with them were generally not of the highest calibre either. The dregs of the army/navy in charge of the poorest and most downtrodden members of society.
A fucking tragedy that virtually no-ones knows or cares about 200 years later.
So it wasn't based on just the genocide of the indigenous population (an attribute that virtually *every* human settlement shares anyway) but a more sinister and evil basis.
My personal visit to (western) Australia gave me the impression that it's pretty socially fskd-up anyway. Many people I met were openly racist and sexist. It was like visiting one of the films I'd seen from Alabama in the 50s.
it's 200 if i want an internet gateway but as i'm an isp I've got a 2mb link at the office. i've got 64kbps isdn over centrex (no call charges) connected to my office. BT sux .oO0Oo.
The printing press brought about much that was positive for human development. It turned humans into individuals. The ability to transmit ideas wrenched us away from the fields. Anonymity from the prevelent murderous monarchy had the power to pitch brother against brother in a bloody war. We continue that struggle to be free from those that would like to control our ideas and behaviour for their convenience at the expense of the misery of their fellows. If the system tried to distribute happiness instead of generating ever increasing levels of misery then we wouldn't need protecting from each other quite so much. Dogs in the ring fight each other not the crowd.
If you post on slashdot because you prefer the way./ looks to other online discussion forums then you are in danger of being enticed by other nice looking things.
If you post here because you like what other people post, be it F1r57 p057, hot grits, Bruce Perens or whatever then whoever can imitate those may entice you.
If you post here because this was the first one you found you may never leave except to post./ is best *. is crap in all the newsgroups.
I've got an mp3 server. It's stacked with my cd and record collection all put on to mp3. My friend has bought some cd's and knows I have them on my mp3 server. He asks if he can have access to those cds. I write a user interface for it so that both he and I can choose what to hear. Before long the bandwidth he's using starts costing me money so I ask him to chip cash in for it. "Sure," he says, "and to reward you for taking the time and effort for setting up the server I'll buy you dinner sometime." "Great," I reply. At dinner he says that a friend of his would like to use my server to and would pay $ for it. I go for it. Before too long he send's me a few CD's to rip for him and put on the server. After a week or so I send them back. The next time he feels like sending some he just send's me the cash to buy them the next time I'm in town. Seeing what artists he likes I notice a new CD from one of this guy's favourites (guess who) and buy it as well. I rip it and e-mail to say as soon as he buy's it too I'll give him access. Paul McCartney and his friends show up and take me to court. I wind up penniless and destitute. All for doing someone a favour and taking a few $ for my time.
As I sit here day after day listening to the music I've bought or been given by my musician friends I record them on to mp3. If every home I went to had broadband access then I could listen to my mp3's wherever I was because I would be running my own mp3 server at home just waiting for me to connect. Oh, I have and I do and it's marvellous. Come on Paul McCartney. I'll eat your Linda's vegetarian sausages and pies but you can spin if you think I'm scared of you.
The crack's worn off. Yeah I agree, what I said was rubbish. The scripting host system allows just the same flexibility as VB Script. I should only post in the afternoon! .oO0Oo.
This is a particular feature I would like to very much see sorted out. A lovely IDE for php on X would be a godsend. I'll pop it on me todo list! .oO0Oo.
Well yeah you're correct you can use php etc. as your active server pages I'm no novice I've been developing on the Windows platform since 3.1. The only way to get to the features of the OS is by using VBScript. And then you discover that the features of the OS weren't really worth it. For the last two years I've worked in a mixed OS environment at an ISP. Maintaining an NT box for multiple customers can be a real headache. Big time. Keeping all of your configuration in one big unreadable binary file is great while you're using the GUI. Until disaster happens. We had 950 web sites on one IIS box. One day after one of the regular reboots Microsoft Management Console decided it didn't want to read the config and no web sites were running. It's 4pm on a Friday. Nine hours later we had laboriously reconfigured the box. We were lucky we kept a separate database of what each customer had.
Plus the asp.dll regularly crashes too. No scripted web pages work and no error is reported anywhere just blank pages. Cure: reboot. I would say that Apache on *Nix is a much better bet. Text file configuration is superior because you can use other text as an example of what you need to put. The net has so much information for *Nix configuration and administration esp. for Linux. The culture of openness means that when you're stuck the chance is that somebody else was too and there's probably a mini-howto somewhere. And because everything is there at the start - cgi/perl/c/c++/python/php + many more you can experiment as you learn. Wanna try Perl on your IIS box - get installing and rebooting.
Slashdot Mirror
Intel Inside
.oO0Oo.
Brown out
Log
perhaps my house is deemed to be educational
.oO0Oo.
if not then it should be, baby!
growl
IANAL
.oO0Oo.
In the UK an auction is partly a clearing house for possibly stolen goods that third parties have acquired not knowing if they were stolen or not.
The auctioneer needs to publicly state that there will be an auction in a fixed place, at a fixed time.
It is then your responsibility, if you have had items stolen, to attend the auction to see if any of your goods are on sale. If there are you can have them back (not sure what the burden of proof is). If they are sold then the person buying them is secure in the knowledge that you cannot go to their house and say "hey that's mine - I'm having it back".
It's a system that dates back to long ago when I suppose everybody in the neighbourhood would attend and get their stolen turnip back.
In that case it's not a concern of the auction house if things are stolen.
However someone who duplicates CD's is breaking copyright not stealing. There are laws to prevent counterfeiting which auctioneering is not protected from.
One thing that does puzzle me though is why the game companies are involved at all. In the UK cases concerning counterfeiting are generally the handled by a joint operation between the police and the local trading standards office (a local govt. body). In this way the injured parties are abstracted from the process.
It is supposed that the purchaser is also a victim rather than a criminal. If I buy copied products I have been swindled out of my belief that I was buying an original. The buyer is expected to act with due dilligence (no Gucci suits for $30) but I'm not sure of the penalty for not being 'dilligent'.
That does leave me with one question though. When I go to Spain and buy my Game128 and put in my Gameboy it doesn't present me with any license agreement. The packaging looks professional and of the 128 games in the cartridge I have only seen the names of a couple of them before. Am I free to go ahead without fear of penalty believing it to be a legitimately licensed product?
despite the fact that it's great fun watching people find outlets for their high horse talk, heck I'm one of 'em.
.oO0Oo.
I've never used AOL or had any problem with any of it's users. What I do know is that it's using it's muscle in the UK for force down the price of access. They are attempting to expand in the UK not by simply wooing competitors customers but by expanding the market. In this way even maintaining market share - or even losing some - is still a win. When players such as Freeserve haven't turned a profit but derive their huge revenue from bloated cost of access they are still vulnerable to the next wave.
AOL was the first major company to move to a 1p a minute 24 hour access. Previously it was 4p per minute for daytime modem access (8am-6pm). Others have quickly followed (ntl: for instance) and now we are beginning to see flat rate 24/7 access finally arrive.
The UK is finally going to come alive net wise so expect plenty more AOL users to come aboard.
nt
.oO0Oo.
The fact that you have the source available doesn't affect any of the factors you mention.
.oO0Oo.
you are correct to state that just hacking about would probably not generate an Enterprise level RDBMS but who actually thinks that it would.
It is not a flaw in Open Source. Open source means that the people who write it let you have access to the source code.
It doesn't mean it's free as in beer.
Releasing the source code doesn't turn your product into an overnight hack.
really,
.oO0Oo.
what's your set of programming tools?
I did enjoy Borland's Turbo C back in the DOS days.
God how I hated OWL when Borland went windows.
I also hated their horrible dialog buttons so switched to M$. I've grown up on the M$ IDE really.
I keep threatening to have a bash at Emacs but time is always a factor round here. We tend to write and test with VC and once it works compile it with gcc and off we go.
I'm contemplating Java for my *nix gui based development as we use a mix of BSDi, freeBSD, Linux and Win* and it might be useful to cross platform the gui part. I got on with java but didn't like AWT much but I gather it's changed a bit since 1.1. Although it was a bit slow I used java for graphics filtering in the video we made for the Boo Radleys. Check my web site for some artwork.
not really my experience here in the UK.
.oO0Oo.
Mind you I did spend most of the time a 2Mbps link
Most of the main Uk servers - barrys, demon, evil.to, can't remeber more names but there were plenty offered great connectivity and were always full.
I used to run two servers on our 2M link. they were so popular I would ramp them up to 26 players each. Even though they would sometimes crawl there were always, always full. When TFC hit the stands we were overwhelmed. From 7pm to 5am they were full. For weeks. And one of them had friendly fire turned on! Sometimes I had to kick ppl just to get a 5ping game (slap my wrist!)
i remember being on a pr0n site on geocities where the perosn had thoughtfully put thumbnails of all the picture on one page with a click for larger version. Unfortunately they had simply used the full size image with width=100 height=100 in the tag. Very painful
.oO0Oo.
Some people would say that KDevelop is KDE's Killer app.
.oO0Oo.
Any plans to wow the crowd with a "copy" Visual C++ since you've done such a great job with GnuExcel?
>well pointers just suck badly
.oO0Oo.
If you can't get your head around pointers and how and why you use them then you really shouldn't be using C and should certainly steer clear of C++.
Stick to something where pointers are removed from the programmers frame of reference. Crikey even VB gives you a choice in function calls to use a pointer or the stack.
Such utter rubbish. Multiplayer HL was mega popular for ages before the Linux server came out.
It's popular because it's a good game not because of server ability. It became a best seller partly due to the userID you needed to play online - unlike fps's before it so for the most part buying your own copy was easier than getting a pirate to keep working.
The probable reason the Linux servers became more popular was because when the Win version falls over it just gives a dirty error message box. There's no way to automate it restarting. (Well we did manage it with a hardware resetter polling the game for activity). On the Linux version crashed games don't tend to hang around in the process list so looking for their PID and spawning another copy if not present and writing fails to a log is a good way of maintaining server up time.
Well that and performance. The linux server responds quicker than the NT server and consumes less resources.
Whatever the reason you are still confusing the client with the server. I've not seen Half-life for Linux down at PC World.
yeah you're right. My 'nix box is for networking things - servers of all kinds.
.oO0Oo.
Maybe my client machine should be more streamlined.
It's the mainframe / terminal argument all over again. PC's brought power to the desktop.
The Web kind of put it back in the power of the server again.
Maybe what we need is a kind of thin client for games and the like. Just because it's a Turing machine doesn't mean it should try and do _everything_.
And we should call it the TuX-Box and get it out the door before the beast of Redmond make's theirs!
during that time "real" criminals were hung.
.oO0Oo.
In Nottingham the decision as to whether you went to Australia or not was whether you stole less or more than a shilling. More than a shilling and it was off to the gallows, less and it was off to the boats.
Either way the reality was a peasant holocaust.
Successive governments have successfully washed over it with the penal colony crap but it was really an efficient way of clearing out the overpopulated inner cities after the farming land was cleared by the increasingly powerful land owners.
To use the popular misconception of criminality is a major travesty to those who were transported. Think most survived the trip?
The goverment officials that went with them were generally not of the highest calibre either. The dregs of the army/navy in charge of the poorest and most downtrodden members of society.
A fucking tragedy that virtually no-ones knows or cares about 200 years later.
So it wasn't based on just the genocide of the indigenous population (an attribute that virtually *every* human settlement shares anyway) but a more sinister and evil basis.
My personal visit to (western) Australia gave me the impression that it's pretty socially fskd-up anyway. Many people I met were openly racist and sexist. It was like visiting one of the films I'd seen from Alabama in the 50s.
it's 200 if i want an internet gateway but as i'm an isp I've got a 2mb link at the office.
.oO0Oo.
i've got 64kbps isdn over centrex (no call charges) connected to my office.
BT sux
Is bound to end in tears.
.oO0Oo.
The printing press brought about much that was positive for human development.
It turned humans into individuals.
The ability to transmit ideas wrenched us away from the fields.
Anonymity from the prevelent murderous monarchy had the power to pitch brother against brother in a bloody war.
We continue that struggle to be free from those that would like to control our ideas and behaviour for their convenience at the expense of the misery of their fellows.
If the system tried to distribute happiness instead of generating ever increasing levels of misery then we wouldn't need protecting from each other quite so much.
Dogs in the ring fight each other not the crowd.
If you post on slashdot because you prefer the way ./ looks to other online discussion forums then you are in danger of being enticed by other nice looking things.
./ is best *. is crap in all the newsgroups.
.oO0Oo.
If you post here because you like what other people post, be it F1r57 p057, hot grits, Bruce Perens or whatever then whoever can imitate those may entice you.
If you post here because this was the first one you found you may never leave except to post
I've got an mp3 server. It's stacked with my cd and record collection all put on to mp3.
.oO0Oo.
My friend has bought some cd's and knows I have them on my mp3 server. He asks if he can have access to those cds. I write a user interface for it so that both he and I can choose what to hear. Before long the bandwidth he's using starts costing me money so I ask him to chip cash in for it.
"Sure," he says, "and to reward you for taking the time and effort for setting up the server I'll buy you dinner sometime."
"Great," I reply.
At dinner he says that a friend of his would like to use my server to and would pay $ for it. I go for it.
Before too long he send's me a few CD's to rip for him and put on the server. After a week or so I send them back. The next time he feels like sending some he just send's me the cash to buy them the next time I'm in town.
Seeing what artists he likes I notice a new CD from one of this guy's favourites (guess who) and buy it as well. I rip it and e-mail to say as soon as he buy's it too I'll give him access.
Paul McCartney and his friends show up and take me to court.
I wind up penniless and destitute.
All for doing someone a favour and taking a few $ for my time.
but you can give them to the birds and bees. I want money.....
.oO0Oo.
As I sit here day after day listening to the music I've bought or been given by my musician friends I record them on to mp3.
.oO0Oo.
If every home I went to had broadband access then I could listen to my mp3's wherever I was because I would be running my own mp3 server at home just waiting for me to connect.
Oh, I have and I do and it's marvellous.
Come on Paul McCartney. I'll eat your Linda's vegetarian sausages and pies but you can spin if you think I'm scared of you.
We use it for techno / house arrangements,
.....
.oO0Oo.
We sell an average of one tune a week to various record labels in the UK
blows the socks off of our previous midi equipment filled studio.
chuck in resonator and some other synth tools and you've got the lot
only thing it's lacking is
nope can't think of anything except the penguin
The crack's worn off. Yeah I agree, what I said was rubbish. The scripting host system allows just the same flexibility as VB Script. I should only post in the afternoon!
.oO0Oo.
This is a particular feature I would like to very much see sorted out.
.oO0Oo.
A lovely IDE for php on X would be a godsend.
I'll pop it on me todo list!
Well yeah you're correct you can use php etc. as your active server pages
.oO0Oo.
I'm no novice I've been developing on the Windows platform since 3.1. The only way to get to the features of the OS is by using VBScript. And then you discover that the features of the OS weren't really worth it.
For the last two years I've worked in a mixed OS environment at an ISP. Maintaining an NT box for multiple customers can be a real headache. Big time. Keeping all of your configuration in one big unreadable binary file is great while you're using the GUI. Until disaster happens. We had 950 web sites on one IIS box. One day after one of the regular reboots Microsoft Management Console decided it didn't want to read the config and no web sites were running. It's 4pm on a Friday. Nine hours later we had laboriously reconfigured the box. We were lucky we kept a separate database of what each customer had.
Plus the asp.dll regularly crashes too. No scripted web pages work and no error is reported anywhere just blank pages. Cure: reboot.
I would say that Apache on *Nix is a much better bet. Text file configuration is superior because you can use other text as an example of what you need to put. The net has so much information for *Nix configuration and administration esp. for Linux. The culture of openness means that when you're stuck the chance is that somebody else was too and there's probably a mini-howto somewhere.
And because everything is there at the start - cgi/perl/c/c++/python/php + many more you can experiment as you learn. Wanna try Perl on your IIS box - get installing and rebooting.
runequest
.oO0Oo.
thw one tru way
d&d is 4 orcsz