I just returned from the supermarket with a few bottles of Evian spring water. Taking a long, cool chug of this refreshing beverage reminded me of the ongoing controversy about Napster and the spread of MP3 music online.
Back before the internet, music was a scarce commodity. Sure, you could walk over to your friend's house and tape his Floyd album, but for the most part, the supply of music was limited by the number of records, cassettes, and CD's a distributor could produce and send out to the world. The law of supply and demand ensured that each piece of music in existance would have some quantifiable worth.
Along comes the PC and the Internet. All of a sudden, humanity has a tool capable of making exact duplicates of artwork, documents and computer programs, and another tool capable of transmitting this informaton to anyone in the world. Limited only by the speed of light and the sophistication of their storage equipment, anyone could take a piece of scientific or artistic work and generate an infinite supply of it. Elementary economics, where the worth of a good is inversely proportional to its supply, still applies in the digital world. As a result of a near infinite supply, digital media now has close to zero worth, and record and film companies are slowly beginning to realize this. "The music and movie industry is doomed!" these huge corporate conglomerates shout, "With all these pirates stealing our music, artists no longer have incentive to produce!"
Why do I buy bottled water? Water is a resource of infinite supply in most of the industrialized world--it comes out of the tap in my kitchen! Yet, I don't predict the bottlers will go out of business any time soon. The water I get for free from my kitchen sink is so full of chemicals and impurities that I am willing to pay for the luxury of clean water. But by offering water that is fresh and clean, the companies that produce bottled water give extra value to an inherently worthless product.
To put to rest another tired argument, think about this: Am I stealing from bottling companies if I decide to use tap water to wash my dishes? Am I a water pirate? Of course not! The suggestion that I am stealing by making use of an infinite resource, whether it be tap water or the digital version of the Backstreet Boys' latest single, is absurd.
To all you starving artists out there, I am sorry to say it but the digital cat is out of the bag--you're going to have to learn to live with it. Give your customers some motivation to pay for your product, or find a new job--that is, after all, how business works. You need to first decide whether your art is Evian or tap water, before you decide whether or not it's worth selling. ________________________________
Boy, I must have missed that memo. Let's see do corportations:
Take taxes from you?
Of course they do. Ever heard of product bundling? Price gouging? Monopolies? These are all legal ways of extracting as much cash as possible from their customers, giving them basically no alternative choice.
Start wars?
What do you think the Persian Gulf war was about? If you don't think oil companies were behind that you need to remove your head from your ass. Corporate interests also frequently influence our policy-makers to enact tarrifs on foreign goods and harsh trade sanctions, which if you happen to live in one of those other companies you'd understand is worse on their economy than war!
Engage in gross acts of waste?
I need only remind you of the Exxon oil spill in Alaska, and the many many cost-saving acts chemical plants are known to do which destroy the environment and/or directly harm their customers.
Berners-Lee starts thinking about what has happened to the Web since he dreamed it up: e-commerce, big corporations, money. "Libertarians are used to fighting the government," he says, "and not corporations..."
What Berners-Lee is forgetting, is that today, corporations ARE the government. Sure we may wave our hands around about "democracy" and elect "representatives", but who are we kidding? We all know that our politicians are for sale to the highest bidder, and the highest bidders are the huge, multinational corporations.
So things haven't changed. Libertarians are still fighting big government, today in the form of big corporations. ________________________________
Right. DirectPlay is for networking, and DirectInput is for input devices (joysticks, etc).
For graphics, the times of requiring direct framebuffer access are over, which basically makes DirectDraw useful only as a memory manager for offscreen and agp memory.
Direct3D Retained mode is useful for simple modeling apps and not much more.
Direct3D Immediate mode is basically a (poor) mirror of functionality already in OpenGL. The only reason for D3D IM is MS politics of embrace and extend.
For networking, we have and always have had sockets. The sockets API is low-level enough for games, cross-platform, and easy to program in. DirectPlay, again, is an API created for purely embrace-and-extend reasons.
For input devices and sound, MS has Linux beat fair and square. Although they are twisted and contorted APIs, DirectInput and DirectSound fill holes that haven't yet been filled on Linux. ________________________________
You point out the one edge that DirectX so far has over OpenGL, which is the ability to detect which features are implemented in hardware. There are, however, 3rd party libraries available for OpenGL that do the same thing--but really it should be part of the API.
I've done DirectX programming, and I don't really see how the various components (DirectDraw, DirectSound, DirectInput, etc.) are integrated in any way, besides the fact that they all use COM, require Windows, and have "Direct" in their names.
Anyway when comparing 3D graphics API's it's only fair to compare Direct3D Immediate mode with OpenGL. Sound and input libraries are important, and I wish Linux got up to speed in that department, but they don't really have anything to do with 3D graphics API's.
As for DirectX being faster for emulating features in software, this is not entirely true-- it is implementation-specific. It is up to the vendors like NVidia or Matrox to optimize their software fallback paths in OpenGL, whereas you are stuck with Microsoft code (which is reasonably fast anyway) for DirectX. ________________________________
I can't tell if this is a troll or just an uninformed opinion.
Please explain in detail what it is about OpenGL that makes it unsuitable for games.
Please explain in detail what it is about DirectX that makes it superior in ANY way to OpenGL for gaming purposes. Remember, we are comparing API's, not implementations. ________________________________
Although the common Joe or Jane user doesn't really care about WinMark, WinBench, 3DBench, etc. scores, these are very important to OEM's and companies who purchase large volumes of PC's and peripherals.
If the community's goal is to get Linux adopted by more mainstream companies (note I said _IF_) a standardized performance testing suite is definitely going to have to be put together.
As far as video cards go, comparing Quake 3 scores is a start, but it's not the final word in 3D performance. There are very comprehensive test suites out there for 3D implementations that need to be ported or replaced on Linux.
We already have Viewperf (sorry, I can't find the link) which is an excellent cross-platform 3D benchmark. I believe its results much more accurately reflect the quality of a 3D implementation than, for instance Quake, which is heavily biased towards fast texture-mapped triangles (yes there is a 3D world out there besides texture-mapped triangles!)
A test similar to the OpenGL conformance test would also be nice, to make sure that 3D implementations out there for Linux are not "cheating". ________________________________
Your point is taken, however I would argue that whereas it is pretty simple to determine what constitutes "harmed" (a victim undergoing some kind of monitary or physical loss), determining what is "wrong" is much more difficult:) I guess that is what the law and the will of the government/people is for. Either way, this will be an interesting case. ________________________________
*Oh*, you mean the file exchange/chat client software is the service? Does that make ICQ a service provider?
Yes.
How about AOL IM?
Yes.
Hey, I can post messages on slashdot. Are they a service provider too?
Yes. You made teriffic arguments for Napster's side, you know. Neither ICQ, AIM, nor Slashdot are responsible for the content provided by individual users. They are basically common carriers.
Internet Service Provider != Bank of modems that allow you to connect to the internet. ________________________________
If your corporation's business model stops being profitable in the face of new technology, it should NOT be the government's job to squash the technology in order to give your corporation a helping hand.
Unprofitable business models should follow the laws of nature: adapt or become extinct. ________________________________
Your argument is baseless because you are starting from the contrived assumption that when I make a digital copy of something, that constitutes stealing.
You throw around strong words like "stealing" and "theft" but what is theft? Is making a digital copy of something theft?
If I invite you to my home to listen to one of my CD's, are you a thief? Whose goods have been stolen? Who is now missing something they once had?
If I lend you my album to listen to, and after giving it back to me you still remember the song, are you a thief? (repeat above questions)
If you made a digital copy of said album before giving it back to me, but (hypothetically) only listen to it when I am not listening to mine, are you a thief?
If you decide you want to listen to it whenever you want, are you a thief?
Where do you cross the line between listening to what's playing in my home, and becoming a THIEF?
Moderate me down if you will, but I just have to voice my criticism of the horrible computer generated effects in this series! B5 had an awesome story, and complex characters, but you'd think they'd be able to spend some more to get realistic looking spacecraft!
Take a look at the space station in any given episode. Extremely simplistic specular lighting, artificial looking material! Most of the craft in the show look like they were made by a 12 year old kid experimenting with 3D Studio Max!
Just my opinion... moderate me accordingly! ________________________________
IO performance has always been a problem with PC's. We've had PC's around for how long... and all we have to show for it is AGP 4X????
While CPU horsepower has been following Moore's law pretty well, the PC world has lagged behind in terms of bus bandwidth. "100GB/sec" peripherals are useless when your bus runs at 133Mhz.
Let's start pushing chipset and memory manufacturers to start putting out faster busses and memory subsystems, and then PC's will finally begin to approach supercomputer-level performance. ________________________________
The government (i.e. multinational corporations) is constantly spying on its citizens. Only the regular and widespread use of cryptography gives private citizens any hope of avoiding prying eyes. ________________________________
Perhaps "incompetant management" would be a better description. Being part of the computer industry I've seen many cases where the engineers and coders want to do "the right thing", but management decides that they should do "the lazy thing" because it costs less or takes less time.
Latency is a part of internet games. It is and always will be. Giving clients extra information in an attempt to hide it is just asking for trouble. In general a game client really should just be a dumb terminal, periodically receiving state updates from a server, and never being trusted. The problem of client trust is way beyond the scope of this slashdot article, but for the purposes of a game, the basic idea is that "The Client Can Never Be Trusted".
When you assume a client is trustworthy, for whatever reason (trying to reduce the appearance of lag) you open yourself up to cheating. This is a choice Verant made when they developed the game, and one they should now accept and deal with. ________________________________
Argh. It's this "If I'm not doing anything wrong, what do I have to hide" attitude that is giving companies and governments more and more control over our privacy every day. Let me state for the record, and put it in bold so everyone can read it:
ANY COMPANY THAT WOULD EVEN THINK ABOUT SCANNING THEIR USERS' PROCESS LIST, REGISTRY OR HARD DRIVE, FOR ANY REASON WHATSOEVER, DESERVES TO GET TRASHED IN THE COURT OF PUBLIC OPINION.
This is a totally unacceptable solution to a problem that the game programmers brought upon themselves. If they weren't sending information that would give players an edge, they wouldnt have to worry about people "sniffing" it.
Violating a user's privacy is not an acceptable way to make up for incompetant coders. ________________________________
You should be ashamed of yourself for having so little concern about your own privacy. Since you have no problem allowing Verant to search your hard drive remotely, lets see how far you will go...
Would you agree to allow Verant to send people to search your computer in person?
Would you allow them to search your home for books and tools related to reverse engineering?
Would you allow them to search through a record of your recent purchases (looking for hacking-related products)?
Silly, you say, but once you start down that path, you can say goodbye to any privacy you think you have. ________________________________
What is with these installers these days? You download a tiny instalation EXE which then in turn tries to download the actual software package. The hell with you if you are actually behind a firewall or proxy that the "smart" installer doesn't know about!
What happened to the days when you just download the setup EXE, run it, and the software was installed???
RANT MODE OFF
Anyway, if anyone knows how to install the Windoze version of this on a machine behind a proxy let me know! ________________________________
Ultima 5 was by far the BEST Ultima! They all pretty much went downhill from there. I'd like to see him do a re-make of this masterpiece with updated graphics and sound and maybe some extras! ________________________________
Slashdot Mirror
I just returned from the supermarket with a few bottles of Evian spring water. Taking a long, cool chug of this refreshing beverage reminded me of the ongoing controversy about Napster and the spread of MP3 music online.
Back before the internet, music was a scarce commodity. Sure, you could walk over to your friend's house and tape his Floyd album, but for the most part, the supply of music was limited by the number of records, cassettes, and CD's a distributor could produce and send out to the world. The law of supply and demand ensured that each piece of music in existance would have some quantifiable worth.
Along comes the PC and the Internet. All of a sudden, humanity has a tool capable of making exact duplicates of artwork, documents and computer programs, and another tool capable of transmitting this informaton to anyone in the world. Limited only by the speed of light and the sophistication of their storage equipment, anyone could take a piece of scientific or artistic work and generate an infinite supply of it. Elementary economics, where the worth of a good is inversely proportional to its supply, still applies in the digital world. As a result of a near infinite supply, digital media now has close to zero worth, and record and film companies are slowly beginning to realize this. "The music and movie industry is doomed!" these huge corporate conglomerates shout, "With all these pirates stealing our music, artists no longer have incentive to produce!"
Why do I buy bottled water? Water is a resource of infinite supply in most of the industrialized world--it comes out of the tap in my kitchen! Yet, I don't predict the bottlers will go out of business any time soon. The water I get for free from my kitchen sink is so full of chemicals and impurities that I am willing to pay for the luxury of clean water. But by offering water that is fresh and clean, the companies that produce bottled water give extra value to an inherently worthless product.
To put to rest another tired argument, think about this: Am I stealing from bottling companies if I decide to use tap water to wash my dishes? Am I a water pirate? Of course not! The suggestion that I am stealing by making use of an infinite resource, whether it be tap water or the digital version of the Backstreet Boys' latest single, is absurd.
To all you starving artists out there, I am sorry to say it but the digital cat is out of the bag--you're going to have to learn to live with it. Give your customers some motivation to pay for your product, or find a new job--that is, after all, how business works. You need to first decide whether your art is Evian or tap water, before you decide whether or not it's worth selling.
________________________________
Boy, I must have missed that memo. Let's see do corportations:
Take taxes from you?
Of course they do. Ever heard of product bundling? Price gouging? Monopolies? These are all legal ways of extracting as much cash as possible from their customers, giving them basically no alternative choice.
Start wars?
What do you think the Persian Gulf war was about? If you don't think oil companies were behind that you need to remove your head from your ass. Corporate interests also frequently influence our policy-makers to enact tarrifs on foreign goods and harsh trade sanctions, which if you happen to live in one of those other companies you'd understand is worse on their economy than war!
Engage in gross acts of waste?
I need only remind you of the Exxon oil spill in Alaska, and the many many cost-saving acts chemical plants are known to do which destroy the environment and/or directly harm their customers.
________________________________
Berners-Lee starts thinking about what has happened to the Web since he dreamed it up: e-commerce, big corporations, money. "Libertarians are used to fighting the government," he says, "and not corporations ..."
What Berners-Lee is forgetting, is that today, corporations ARE the government. Sure we may wave our hands around about "democracy" and elect "representatives", but who are we kidding? We all know that our politicians are for sale to the highest bidder, and the highest bidders are the huge, multinational corporations.
So things haven't changed. Libertarians are still fighting big government, today in the form of big corporations.
________________________________
Right. DirectPlay is for networking, and DirectInput is for input devices (joysticks, etc).
For graphics, the times of requiring direct framebuffer access are over, which basically makes DirectDraw useful only as a memory manager for offscreen and agp memory.
Direct3D Retained mode is useful for simple modeling apps and not much more.
Direct3D Immediate mode is basically a (poor) mirror of functionality already in OpenGL. The only reason for D3D IM is MS politics of embrace and extend.
For networking, we have and always have had sockets. The sockets API is low-level enough for games, cross-platform, and easy to program in. DirectPlay, again, is an API created for purely embrace-and-extend reasons.
For input devices and sound, MS has Linux beat fair and square. Although they are twisted and contorted APIs, DirectInput and DirectSound fill holes that haven't yet been filled on Linux.
________________________________
You point out the one edge that DirectX so far has over OpenGL, which is the ability to detect which features are implemented in hardware. There are, however, 3rd party libraries available for OpenGL that do the same thing--but really it should be part of the API.
I've done DirectX programming, and I don't really see how the various components (DirectDraw, DirectSound, DirectInput, etc.) are integrated in any way, besides the fact that they all use COM, require Windows, and have "Direct" in their names.
Anyway when comparing 3D graphics API's it's only fair to compare Direct3D Immediate mode with OpenGL. Sound and input libraries are important, and I wish Linux got up to speed in that department, but they don't really have anything to do with 3D graphics API's.
As for DirectX being faster for emulating features in software, this is not entirely true-- it is implementation-specific. It is up to the vendors like NVidia or Matrox to optimize their software fallback paths in OpenGL, whereas you are stuck with Microsoft code (which is reasonably fast anyway) for DirectX.
________________________________
I can't tell if this is a troll or just an uninformed opinion.
Please explain in detail what it is about OpenGL that makes it unsuitable for games.
Please explain in detail what it is about DirectX that makes it superior in ANY way to OpenGL for gaming purposes. Remember, we are comparing API's, not implementations.
________________________________
Linux has something BETTER than DirectX. A standard, cross-platform graphics API called OpenGL.
Despite what some (Microsoft) will say, OpenGL is well-suited for games, from 2D puzzle games to 3D shooters.
________________________________
Although the common Joe or Jane user doesn't really care about WinMark, WinBench, 3DBench, etc. scores, these are very important to OEM's and companies who purchase large volumes of PC's and peripherals.
If the community's goal is to get Linux adopted by more mainstream companies (note I said _IF_) a standardized performance testing suite is definitely going to have to be put together.
As far as video cards go, comparing Quake 3 scores is a start, but it's not the final word in 3D performance. There are very comprehensive test suites out there for 3D implementations that need to be ported or replaced on Linux.
We already have Viewperf (sorry, I can't find the link) which is an excellent cross-platform 3D benchmark. I believe its results much more accurately reflect the quality of a 3D implementation than, for instance Quake, which is heavily biased towards fast texture-mapped triangles (yes there is a 3D world out there besides texture-mapped triangles!)
A test similar to the OpenGL conformance test would also be nice, to make sure that 3D implementations out there for Linux are not "cheating".
________________________________
Since when did email replace FTP as the standard method of transferring files over the Internet?
Hmm... Probably around the time AOL, compuserve, etc. opened their floodgates...
________________________________
It's not the government's job to outlaw guns or bats--just the individuals who happen to be using them illegaly.
________________________________
Your point is taken, however I would argue that whereas it is pretty simple to determine what constitutes "harmed" (a victim undergoing some kind of monitary or physical loss), determining what is "wrong" is much more difficult :) I guess that is what the law and the will of the government/people is for. Either way, this will be an interesting case.
________________________________
Ralph Reed gives Christians as much a bad name as Bill Gates gives computer enthusiasts.
________________________________
*Oh*, you mean the file exchange/chat client software is the service? Does that make ICQ a service provider?
Yes.
How about AOL IM?
Yes.
Hey, I can post messages on slashdot. Are they a service provider too?
Yes. You made teriffic arguments for Napster's side, you know. Neither ICQ, AIM, nor Slashdot are responsible for the content provided by individual users. They are basically common carriers.
Internet Service Provider != Bank of modems that allow you to connect to the internet.
________________________________
Excellent summary. I wish I had moderator points!
If your corporation's business model stops being profitable in the face of new technology, it should NOT be the government's job to squash the technology in order to give your corporation a helping hand.
Unprofitable business models should follow the laws of nature: adapt or become extinct.
________________________________
Your argument is baseless because you are starting from the contrived assumption that when I make a digital copy of something, that constitutes stealing.
You throw around strong words like "stealing" and "theft" but what is theft? Is making a digital copy of something theft?
If I invite you to my home to listen to one of my CD's, are you a thief? Whose goods have been stolen? Who is now missing something they once had?
If I lend you my album to listen to, and after giving it back to me you still remember the song, are you a thief? (repeat above questions)
If you made a digital copy of said album before giving it back to me, but (hypothetically) only listen to it when I am not listening to mine, are you a thief?
If you decide you want to listen to it whenever you want, are you a thief?
Where do you cross the line between listening to what's playing in my home, and becoming a THIEF?
________________________________
Moderate me down if you will, but I just have to voice my criticism of the horrible computer generated effects in this series! B5 had an awesome story, and complex characters, but you'd think they'd be able to spend some more to get realistic looking spacecraft!
Take a look at the space station in any given episode. Extremely simplistic specular lighting, artificial looking material! Most of the craft in the show look like they were made by a 12 year old kid experimenting with 3D Studio Max!
Just my opinion... moderate me accordingly!
________________________________
IO performance has always been a problem with PC's. We've had PC's around for how long... and all we have to show for it is AGP 4X????
While CPU horsepower has been following Moore's law pretty well, the PC world has lagged behind in terms of bus bandwidth. "100GB/sec" peripherals are useless when your bus runs at 133Mhz.
Let's start pushing chipset and memory manufacturers to start putting out faster busses and memory subsystems, and then PC's will finally begin to approach supercomputer-level performance.
________________________________
America is to the world as Microsoft is to the software industry.
Huge...
Overbearing...
Sees only the good parts of itself.
________________________________
...as too much paranoia.
The government (i.e. multinational corporations) is constantly spying on its citizens. Only the regular and widespread use of cryptography gives private citizens any hope of avoiding prying eyes.
________________________________
Hey, I blew my top :)
Perhaps "incompetant management" would be a better description. Being part of the computer industry I've seen many cases where the engineers and coders want to do "the right thing", but management decides that they should do "the lazy thing" because it costs less or takes less time.
Latency is a part of internet games. It is and always will be. Giving clients extra information in an attempt to hide it is just asking for trouble. In general a game client really should just be a dumb terminal, periodically receiving state updates from a server, and never being trusted. The problem of client trust is way beyond the scope of this slashdot article, but for the purposes of a game, the basic idea is that "The Client Can Never Be Trusted".
When you assume a client is trustworthy, for whatever reason (trying to reduce the appearance of lag) you open yourself up to cheating. This is a choice Verant made when they developed the game, and one they should now accept and deal with.
________________________________
Argh. It's this "If I'm not doing anything wrong, what do I have to hide" attitude that is giving companies and governments more and more control over our privacy every day. Let me state for the record, and put it in bold so everyone can read it:
ANY COMPANY THAT WOULD EVEN THINK ABOUT SCANNING THEIR USERS' PROCESS LIST, REGISTRY OR HARD DRIVE, FOR ANY REASON WHATSOEVER, DESERVES TO GET TRASHED IN THE COURT OF PUBLIC OPINION.
This is a totally unacceptable solution to a problem that the game programmers brought upon themselves. If they weren't sending information that would give players an edge, they wouldnt have to worry about people "sniffing" it.
Violating a user's privacy is not an acceptable way to make up for incompetant coders.
________________________________
Where does it end?
You should be ashamed of yourself for having so little concern about your own privacy. Since you have no problem allowing Verant to search your hard drive remotely, lets see how far you will go...
Would you agree to allow Verant to send people to search your computer in person?
Would you allow them to search your home for books and tools related to reverse engineering?
Would you allow them to search through a record of your recent purchases (looking for hacking-related products)?
Silly, you say, but once you start down that path, you can say goodbye to any privacy you think you have.
________________________________
RANT MODE ON
What is with these installers these days? You download a tiny instalation EXE which then in turn tries to download the actual software package. The hell with you if you are actually behind a firewall or proxy that the "smart" installer doesn't know about!
What happened to the days when you just download the setup EXE, run it, and the software was installed???
RANT MODE OFF
Anyway, if anyone knows how to install the Windoze version of this on a machine behind a proxy let me know!
________________________________
Wow! That looks pretty cool, man... Will it run on Windoze and Linux?
________________________________
Ultima 5 was by far the BEST Ultima! They all pretty much went downhill from there. I'd like to see him do a re-make of this masterpiece with updated graphics and sound and maybe some extras!
________________________________