how would you recommend funding the development of a freely licensed, non-MMO video game?
Open the engine source, sell the art/music/map/skins/other data packages. Reap the benefits of not having to support your code on a Linux distro. Atleast that's how I'd do it...
There are lots and lots of things wrong with SDL. I agree with the grandparent. IIRC, the last time i tried it I found these faults:
* Slow implementations leading to unneccessary latency in both input and audio/video desynchronization * Thread unsafe * Generally feels icky
It was years and years ago I tried SDL though, so I don't remember exactly what was wrong with it. But I do remember it did not meet my needs at the time, in fact falling far short of them. One problem, I think, was that it was too simple, and, since I used OpenAL for audio and OpenGL for graphics, all I really needed besides that was some sort of input library. Eventually I found one with less lag than SDL and settled for that. A couple months later my team fell apart and I threw the code in the bit bucket, but that's a story for another time...
Anyhow, moral of the story: SDL left a bitter aftertaste in my mouth, simple as that.
Remember that to get gold you need to provide gold. In other words, yes you will be able to produce a gold bar, but only if you first grind some gold you already have into a fine dust.
Not *all* manufacturing will cease, certainly, but for small and non-complex things, it will cease.
Unfortunately this will also make coin forgery *very* hard to detect, meaning we will need either a new way to handle cash (BitCoin or other viable currency), or get rid of coins and only rely on bills.
Likewise we pay large fees to telcos for connectivity. Without government harrasment, we could easily string our own internet together cheaply, but it comes down to "resource consent" meaning the telco is allowed to build data networks, where-as the citizens are not.
Meanwhile, in communist Europe, I have a 100/10 Mbit shared broadband for $25/mo, and a cellphone plan complete with 10 GB dataplan (use for smartphone and laptop, barely go above 3GB) and virtually unlimited calls and texting for $45. $70 in total in a country where the mean average income is about $20k/mo isn't exactly what I'd call expensive, although not dirt-cheap either.
Over the past decade, increases in patents have been matched by growth in the biotech and pharmaceutical sectors in India, Brazil, Singapore and other countries with emerging economies.
The way I read it: biotech growth has kept up with IP growth DESPITE the harm IP does to the industry.
The author does not seem to know, for instance, the difference between "protected" and "private" keywords in class-based OOP languages (protected is available to all inherited objects, private is not; the example he gives works in C++ and Java too).
PHP does have it's warts, yes, but that page more points out the author's own lack of understanding than PHP warts.
No, but companies are. Specificly, carriers and cellphone manufacturers.
In one corner you have Apple-controlled iPhone. Cellphone manufacturers can't compete with Apple on the features and merits of the iPhone/IOS by their own, and they know it. However Apple as usual go for the high-end and ignore the low end, leaving a very large market segment virtually untouched.
In the opposite corner, there's Android. Smartphones are still rather high-end, but more and more are coming to the low-end by their carriers. Android however has multiple problems; it's sorta-but-not-quite open, fragmented market, malware, build quality varies quite a bit... Apple may be expensive, but atleast it's quality.
In a third corner there's Maemo/Meego/Tizen; The promising underdog. The N9 is a fantastic device, it's much more open than Android, and the Nokia developers have truly shown that Meego can and will kick ass. Buuuut, despite all the wonderful things about it, there's still a lot of problems, and no major manufacturers wants to get on the train.
Finally, there is Windows Phone 7. It's sporting an impressive backing from one of the real heavyweights in the Cellphone market (Nokia), and also backed by one of the most successful software companies in the world (Microsoft). However, it's the most cumbersome to develop apps for, and it's business model with the closed app and fragmented market makes me feel it's a mix of the worst ideas of Android and iPhone.
So there you have it, four contenders, who will win? Up to the future.:)
If I read TFA correctly from the google translate, they slashed a third of their IT costs total, despite adding 1.500 more clients. That's freakin' awesome!:)
The only fair solution is a balance for everyone concerned--a limited copyright that lets businesses recoup their investment without keeping works hostage to private interests for eternity. I am just as frustrated with the "all information should be free" crowd as I am with the "all free information is stealing" crowd, since neither has a lasting solution to the problem.
I personally very much favor this solution;
0. All copyright must be global. No exceptions. 1. Everyone gets a basic copyright term of X years from release date, where X is a number between 5 and 20. 2. After X years, the works is released to public domain, unless... 3. The rights holder pay a fee to their respective native government each year to maintain copyright. 4. The fee should have a minimum threshold, say, $5,000 USD, or alternatively 5% of total earnings. 5. The reason for this fee is that society grants copyright in order to promote useful arts, pretty much like patents. If you want indefinite copyright, I see no problems with that, as long as you pay the fee. 6. Failure to pay the fee will result in a non-revocable release into the public domain for the work.
Such a model comes with quite a few advantages;
1. No need to extend basic copyright terms every 20th year or so a la Disney. 2. Orphan works automaticly end up in public domain (noone to pay their fee makes them public domain) 3. Very easy to know if a work is still under copyright law (today you need to know the death date of the author and count 70 years from there; here you just need to know the release date, and if it's bigger than X years, check the open register compiled and released every year) 4. Rights holders are actively encouraged to release their works to Public Domain 5. Markets dictate when a work is no longer profitable enough to keep copyright
But the chances of this middle road ever happening is slim...:/
Oh, I do understand the concept of a kickstarter campaign. But I was under the impression kickstarter was just for funding the game creation, not ongoing costs post-release?
It's still 10k of 900k for a cross-platform game (as opposed to DirectX) that can run on Wii, PS3, Android, iPhone, Mac and Linux as well as Windows and XBox 360, and it requires very little extra money. Sure, you need to invest in a couple of extra drivers and add an abstraction layer, but today you add that abstraction layer in either case, making porting a snap.
That mac expert will not work for free, no. Nor is he expected to. He will cost around USD 10 000 - which is peanuts compared to 50-100% increased revenue.
3. Develop for Mac and Windows simultaneously. It's not even hard. Write OpenAL and OpenGL plugins to your game engine, a few cocoa-specific parts so the program behaves nice in an iOS environment, problem solved! And Linux port is then even easier (since OpenAL/OpenGL already exists, all you need are a few Linux-specific hooks). I bet both would take one Mac expert about 2 months of work to write new plugins to the engine, at the maximum.
It's not an either-or proposition, and it does bring quite a few advantages. One of those being, you don't rely on rarely-used, soon-to-be deprecated functions from a proprietary library, and thus get less bugs, cleaner code and better code separation.
Problem is, even if you're a pirate you're contributing to the demand and popularity of Sony.
A vegetarian is often eating a strict vegetarian diet because he or she does not wish to support the "unethical" meat factory practices. And yeah, those practices are by neccessity messy. Now, the pirate is like the almost-vegetarian (doesn't eat meat... Except for Salami. And a bit ham sometimes. And salmon). Still contributing to the problem you're saying you're against.
A true boycott must mean an across-the-bord/ignore. Not just pirate it. Complete and utter ignorance.
I envision a future where the TV has a gaming module interface in the back. TV handles all the icky non-gaming parts (controllers via Bluetooth, firmware, network connection, IM/social networking, harddrives, USB sticks etc), and the gaming module is essentially a glorified graphics card with a general-purpose CPU tacked on top of it. Also, make it possible to connect your smartphone as a controller.
However, while I know many, many people who would buy this and love it, I know very few companies willing to design it. Therefore it will remain but a dream. *sigh*
I agree that the police needs to have checks and balances, therefore ALL their radio communication should be saved and be publicly available for atleast 3 months, maybe longer. However, letting the police have an encrypted channel plus a few relay stations for the media sounds like a good solution to the problem IMO.
Always remember, there is more to the world than the US.
If the US is stupid enough to kill off the internet, a new one will be born that excludes the US. After that, it'll just be a matter of time. Fifty years after the US killed off the internet, the rest of the world have evolved at a breakneck pace, most notably BRIC countries, while the US will be stuck by what is essentially the same tech we have today. Once that happens... Oh man, they are going to be so pissed when they realise their tech will be lagging after by decades.:)
F2P (Free To Play) does NOT equal P2W (Pay To Win).
League of Legends is doing it right; it's free to play, and everything except skins are obtainable, though paying makes you get those faster. I have no problem with that kind of model and have invested about €100 so far over the course of two years.
Battlefield Heroes on the other hand, now there's a game that's pure P2W. Sometimes I play it for a few rounds just to see if it has improved; everytime I find it worse than before. It used to be an awesome game. Nowadays, it's all about how much money you can spend on those über weapons... Makes me sad.:(
Windows 7 isn't consistent with itself either - not even with the apps MS produce. You can find lots of examples of good UIs/bad UIs in both open source and proprietary software, from all sides of the spectrum. However, UI is one of those things that's both hard to get right and ungrateful, because no matter what changes you do, *someone* will complain. And if you do no changes users complain about that, too.
Paying a specialist for it is about the only way to get it right though, unless you happen to have a person on the team with a knack for great UIs. But proprietary makes inherently better UIs because it's proprietary? Demonstrably false.
Slashdot Mirror
Open the engine source, sell the art/music/map/skins/other data packages. Reap the benefits of not having to support your code on a Linux distro. Atleast that's how I'd do it...
There are lots and lots of things wrong with SDL. I agree with the grandparent. IIRC, the last time i tried it I found these faults:
* Slow implementations leading to unneccessary latency in both input and audio/video desynchronization
* Thread unsafe
* Generally feels icky
It was years and years ago I tried SDL though, so I don't remember exactly what was wrong with it. But I do remember it did not meet my needs at the time, in fact falling far short of them. One problem, I think, was that it was too simple, and, since I used OpenAL for audio and OpenGL for graphics, all I really needed besides that was some sort of input library. Eventually I found one with less lag than SDL and settled for that. A couple months later my team fell apart and I threw the code in the bit bucket, but that's a story for another time...
Anyhow, moral of the story: SDL left a bitter aftertaste in my mouth, simple as that.
Remember that to get gold you need to provide gold. In other words, yes you will be able to produce a gold bar, but only if you first grind some gold you already have into a fine dust.
Not *all* manufacturing will cease, certainly, but for small and non-complex things, it will cease.
Unfortunately this will also make coin forgery *very* hard to detect, meaning we will need either a new way to handle cash (BitCoin or other viable currency), or get rid of coins and only rely on bills.
Ah yes, sorry about that. I meant average income is about $2k... Off by a zero, conversion error. :)
Meanwhile, in communist Europe, I have a 100/10 Mbit shared broadband for $25/mo, and a cellphone plan complete with 10 GB dataplan (use for smartphone and laptop, barely go above 3GB) and virtually unlimited calls and texting for $45. $70 in total in a country where the mean average income is about $20k/mo isn't exactly what I'd call expensive, although not dirt-cheap either.
Over the past decade, increases in patents have been matched by growth in the biotech and pharmaceutical sectors in India, Brazil, Singapore and other countries with emerging economies.
The way I read it: biotech growth has kept up with IP growth DESPITE the harm IP does to the industry.
That page is really, really dumb.
The author does not seem to know, for instance, the difference between "protected" and "private" keywords in class-based OOP languages (protected is available to all inherited objects, private is not; the example he gives works in C++ and Java too).
PHP does have it's warts, yes, but that page more points out the author's own lack of understanding than PHP warts.
Only one problem; Flash sticks tend to die frequently.
Except that Facebook IS XMPP, and so is MSN these days. They just don't federate with rest of world. :P
No, but companies are. Specificly, carriers and cellphone manufacturers.
In one corner you have Apple-controlled iPhone. Cellphone manufacturers can't compete with Apple on the features and merits of the iPhone/IOS by their own, and they know it. However Apple as usual go for the high-end and ignore the low end, leaving a very large market segment virtually untouched.
In the opposite corner, there's Android. Smartphones are still rather high-end, but more and more are coming to the low-end by their carriers. Android however has multiple problems; it's sorta-but-not-quite open, fragmented market, malware, build quality varies quite a bit... Apple may be expensive, but atleast it's quality.
In a third corner there's Maemo/Meego/Tizen; The promising underdog. The N9 is a fantastic device, it's much more open than Android, and the Nokia developers have truly shown that Meego can and will kick ass. Buuuut, despite all the wonderful things about it, there's still a lot of problems, and no major manufacturers wants to get on the train.
Finally, there is Windows Phone 7. It's sporting an impressive backing from one of the real heavyweights in the Cellphone market (Nokia), and also backed by one of the most successful software companies in the world (Microsoft). However, it's the most cumbersome to develop apps for, and it's business model with the closed app and fragmented market makes me feel it's a mix of the worst ideas of Android and iPhone.
So there you have it, four contenders, who will win? Up to the future. :)
If I read TFA correctly from the google translate, they slashed a third of their IT costs total, despite adding 1.500 more clients. That's freakin' awesome! :)
The only fair solution is a balance for everyone concerned--a limited copyright that lets businesses recoup their investment without keeping works hostage to private interests for eternity. I am just as frustrated with the "all information should be free" crowd as I am with the "all free information is stealing" crowd, since neither has a lasting solution to the problem.
I personally very much favor this solution;
0. All copyright must be global. No exceptions.
1. Everyone gets a basic copyright term of X years from release date, where X is a number between 5 and 20.
2. After X years, the works is released to public domain, unless...
3. The rights holder pay a fee to their respective native government each year to maintain copyright.
4. The fee should have a minimum threshold, say, $5,000 USD, or alternatively 5% of total earnings.
5. The reason for this fee is that society grants copyright in order to promote useful arts, pretty much like patents. If you want indefinite copyright, I see no problems with that, as long as you pay the fee.
6. Failure to pay the fee will result in a non-revocable release into the public domain for the work.
Such a model comes with quite a few advantages;
1. No need to extend basic copyright terms every 20th year or so a la Disney.
2. Orphan works automaticly end up in public domain (noone to pay their fee makes them public domain)
3. Very easy to know if a work is still under copyright law (today you need to know the death date of the author and count 70 years from there; here you just need to know the release date, and if it's bigger than X years, check the open register compiled and released every year)
4. Rights holders are actively encouraged to release their works to Public Domain
5. Markets dictate when a work is no longer profitable enough to keep copyright
But the chances of this middle road ever happening is slim... :/
Oh, I do understand the concept of a kickstarter campaign. But I was under the impression kickstarter was just for funding the game creation, not ongoing costs post-release?
It's still 10k of 900k for a cross-platform game (as opposed to DirectX) that can run on Wii, PS3, Android, iPhone, Mac and Linux as well as Windows and XBox 360, and it requires very little extra money. Sure, you need to invest in a couple of extra drivers and add an abstraction layer, but today you add that abstraction layer in either case, making porting a snap.
"I recognize that the metric system is superior mathematically, but I cannot think in metric having grown up with the English system."
Thing is, if you don't switch, why should your children switch?
That mac expert will not work for free, no. Nor is he expected to. He will cost around USD 10 000 - which is peanuts compared to 50-100% increased revenue.
No, he's saying that they should:
3. Develop for Mac and Windows simultaneously. It's not even hard. Write OpenAL and OpenGL plugins to your game engine, a few cocoa-specific parts so the program behaves nice in an iOS environment, problem solved! And Linux port is then even easier (since OpenAL/OpenGL already exists, all you need are a few Linux-specific hooks). I bet both would take one Mac expert about 2 months of work to write new plugins to the engine, at the maximum.
It's not an either-or proposition, and it does bring quite a few advantages. One of those being, you don't rely on rarely-used, soon-to-be deprecated functions from a proprietary library, and thus get less bugs, cleaner code and better code separation.
Well, there's already one solution available...
Problem is, even if you're a pirate you're contributing to the demand and popularity of Sony.
A vegetarian is often eating a strict vegetarian diet because he or she does not wish to support the "unethical" meat factory practices. And yeah, those practices are by neccessity messy. Now, the pirate is like the almost-vegetarian (doesn't eat meat... Except for Salami. And a bit ham sometimes. And salmon). Still contributing to the problem you're saying you're against.
A true boycott must mean an across-the-bord /ignore. Not just pirate it. Complete and utter ignorance.
I envision a future where the TV has a gaming module interface in the back. TV handles all the icky non-gaming parts (controllers via Bluetooth, firmware, network connection, IM/social networking, harddrives, USB sticks etc), and the gaming module is essentially a glorified graphics card with a general-purpose CPU tacked on top of it. Also, make it possible to connect your smartphone as a controller.
However, while I know many, many people who would buy this and love it, I know very few companies willing to design it. Therefore it will remain but a dream. *sigh*
I agree that the police needs to have checks and balances, therefore ALL their radio communication should be saved and be publicly available for atleast 3 months, maybe longer. However, letting the police have an encrypted channel plus a few relay stations for the media sounds like a good solution to the problem IMO.
Always remember, there is more to the world than the US.
If the US is stupid enough to kill off the internet, a new one will be born that excludes the US. After that, it'll just be a matter of time. Fifty years after the US killed off the internet, the rest of the world have evolved at a breakneck pace, most notably BRIC countries, while the US will be stuck by what is essentially the same tech we have today. Once that happens... Oh man, they are going to be so pissed when they realise their tech will be lagging after by decades. :)
F2P (Free To Play) does NOT equal P2W (Pay To Win).
League of Legends is doing it right; it's free to play, and everything except skins are obtainable, though paying makes you get those faster. I have no problem with that kind of model and have invested about €100 so far over the course of two years.
Battlefield Heroes on the other hand, now there's a game that's pure P2W. Sometimes I play it for a few rounds just to see if it has improved; everytime I find it worse than before. It used to be an awesome game. Nowadays, it's all about how much money you can spend on those über weapons... Makes me sad. :(
Stop being isolated islands. Google could use your data, but you won't supply it on an open, federated basis. So what should Google do about that?
Windows 7 isn't consistent with itself either - not even with the apps MS produce. You can find lots of examples of good UIs/bad UIs in both open source and proprietary software, from all sides of the spectrum. However, UI is one of those things that's both hard to get right and ungrateful, because no matter what changes you do, *someone* will complain. And if you do no changes users complain about that, too.
Paying a specialist for it is about the only way to get it right though, unless you happen to have a person on the team with a knack for great UIs. But proprietary makes inherently better UIs because it's proprietary? Demonstrably false.
What about no USB sticks and running coreboot directly from the metal?