Rocks'n'Diamonds is a great Boulderdash / Sokoban / Supaplex / Emerald Mine clone. Distributed under the GPL and packaged for most Linux distros. It's a great puzzle game for kids with nice graphics, SFX and brainteasers. Might be a bit too challenging for a 3-year-old, but great for 10+.
Well yes, it's not maybe a Pulitzer Prize earning writeup. But these people are tech enthusiasts, not journalists, after all. Also, good to bear in mind that the original article was published in Finnish, and translated to English by volunteers. However, I enjoyed the read because it provides very exclusive insight to the story behind MeeGo.
Even before Nokia scrapped its whole smartphone strategy, the MeeGo project was in difficulties. The biggest problem was that Nokia clung to Symbian, refusing to see the obvious fact that the customers were attracted to the competitors' platforms because they had a much stronger offering of 3rd party apps. MeeGo/Maemo was a good development platform, but internal competition between teams meant that the managers of the much older Symbian division would do anything in their power to stall the development of the "competing" platform. Although this might have shielded a few jobs in the Symbian division for a short period, Nokia's customers, and eventually the company as a whole, had to pay a very dire price for this indecisiveness.
Relevant quotes:
First signs of Nokia’s internal competition between two platforms were seen with the N810 device. It was released in late 2007 and entered the market without phone functionality. It would have been Nokia’s first Maemo phone, but the decision to leave out the phone functionality was said to have been completely political.
According to a Maemo team member we interviewed, Symbian team directors were afraid of the possible competition between the N810 and the Symbian based communicator.
Inside Nokia, members of the Maemo team thought that the managers of the Symbian team were afraid for their jobs, and used their positions within the company to slow down the development of Maemo by any means they could.
N9 will remain most critically acclaimed and one of the fastest-selling and anticipated models in the company's history. Sadly, it could have been so much more, the beginning of a new platform like Android and iOS, but it was ultimately an executive-level decision to prioritize Symbian over Maemo. With falling market figures, this eventually lead to a situation where the whole strategy had to be scrapped in favor of Microsoft serfdom.
You do understand that the interviewed current and ex-employees of Nokia had to speak generally and under the condition of anonymity because they are subject to very strict NDAs? Talking about anything specific could make it possible to identify the individual. We should be greatful that we even got this peek into the inner workings of the MeeGo project, and what went wrong.
BTW if you want a more in-depth (albeit slightly outdated) look at Nokia's downfall from #1 mobile phone producer in the world, have a look at this article. It is also much more journalitically written, and touches extensively on MeeGo as well.
Apparently they think it is worth it, as they have been doing it for a while.
To my understanding NVIDIA has never released GPL-licensed drivers for their GPUs. My bet is they develop Linux drivers because they think Linux is a viable and innovative computing platform, not because they agree with FOSS purists.
I would like to counter that point with a reference to the Debian Manifesto. It was published in 1994, and Debian, in addition to becoming one of the most popular distributions by itself, came to form the basis behind products like Ubuntu, Mint, Nokia Maemo, Knoppix and Mepis. So for them it seems to have worked.
Court: The next question is, have you or a family member or someone very close to you ever been involved in a lawsuit, either as a plaintiff, a defendant, or as a vitness?
Prospective juror: In 2008, after my company went belly up, the programmer that worked for me filed a lawsuit against me...
He goes on to give details of that case (which was settled out of court). He never disclosed the dispute with Seagate. But obviously, the court never said anything about not disclosing cases older than 10 years. So, he failed to disclose a very important case, probably because doing so would have meant that he couldn't have served in the jury, which he really much wanted (see TFA).
How do they mitigate these inherent security problems of the JavaScript platform in the API draft? With XSS, I can always overwrite the browser's crypto API object, replacing it with a rogue implementation.
My understanding has been that JavaScript in its present form is not a viable platform for cryptography.
Interesting points, but in paragraphs 24 and 34 of the suit they quite much seem to claim a "violation of the [CC BY-SA] License" and that "the creation of 'Wiki Travel Guide' has been done without proper attribution". The alleged trademark infringement happened when the volunteer admin wrote to the Wikitravel users in an e-mail that the "Wikitravel community" was migrating to Wikimedia Foundation, which is obviously different from claiming that "Wikitravel" (the site) was migrating to Wikimedia (a view also admitted by Internet Brands in the suit.)
Anyway, just because someone somewhere mentioned your trademark in context that did not please you is not grounds for damages. What IB seems to claim is that the supposed Wikimedia hosted travel website would infringe its trademark - before it has even launched! Given that they only own a trademark for a travel website "Wikitravel", anyone should be able to launch a new website with different name.
Given that they are making such claims of trademark and license violations even before those have happened (obviously you can not infringe with a non-existing product or not give attribution before you actually start distributing the content), it seems like a desperate last resort effort to stop the split by suing a few individuals to me.
It's not Gaelic but Finnish. The pronounciation of Finnish is actually massively more regular than English, and you can easily learn it (although learning to understand Finnish is a different deal.) Here's the approximate pronounciations of those family names in the Wikipedia spelling key with approx. translations:
It seems like with this move and generally the Metro and Windows 8 walled garden stuff, Microsoft is going more and more "the Apple way". Is it really in their best interest? Is it just me, or hasn't the open-ish (compared to Apple) Intel + Microsoft Windows ecosystem served a desktop market niche that is different from the Apple universe? Does Microsoft have an exit strategy in case they fail in closer competition with Apple at Apple's game?
Well apparently my post got modded -1 Troll already, but I'll just say I still fail to see the point. If you are implementing a Turing complete programming environment, why go with 6502 + Assembler? Why not go Ruby, Python, Perl or some other modern programming language? I am just honestly failing to see the utility of this, although I admit emulators are always very cool and have mad respect for guys who make them.
So the guy wrote an emulator of the 6502 processor and various perihipals as a native-code plugin for the game. Technically, it does not seem so special, as various 6502 emulators have been written before; they just usually have a more usable GUI than operating them from within a 3D game.
I would be much more impressed if they actually implemented a general purpose computer by only using readily-available in-game building blocks and mechanics without code extensions to the game engine. This has been done for Conway's Game of Life and a Turing Machine before.
I can't believe Stephen Elop of Nokia is not on that list. During his stint as the CEO of the former world leader in mobile phones, the company has lost 70% of its market valuation – mostly down to Elop's borderline insane strategic choices. Maybe the list is only for US companies?
No, GPL is not "open" in the same sense that people in the IT industry use the word "open". When we talk about "open" - and really mean it - it implies that anyone can use the specification (say, a piece of computer code), and integrate it as a part of their own products, thus increasing interoperability and furthering technical development of commercial systems.
GPL on the other hand is anti-corporate, in that it does not allow mixing GPL-licensed code with pre-existing closed-source corporate solutions. It was specifically devised for this purpose by the Free Software Foundation, who have been miserably failing in their relentless idealism to create an exclusively GPL-based software ecosystem for the last three decades.
Fukushima did not have passive emergency cooling systems. The cores started melting in less than 24 hours after the SCRAM, because external electricity (to drive the water circulation pumps) went out and the tsunami knocked out the backup diesel generators as well.
Were any passive cooling systems in place like you describe, the meltdowns could not have occurred that fast.
Fukushima Daiichi did have a passive cooling system, called Isolation Condenser (IC). It is a passive cooling system, but distinct from modern convection cooling systems. While convection cooling systems shield the reactor from meltdown for 72 hours, the IC system used in Fukushima (even if fully operational) could have only protected the plant from meltdown for 8 hours in case of total power loss. Also, the IC did not apparently work as expected in Fukushima. I guess such last-resort emergency systems are rarely tested, and TEPCO had also made alterations to its original design.
In the end, Fukushima Daiichi was cooled with ad-hoc solutions, such as parking a fire truck outside the reactor and spraying water directly into the core from there.
He is referring to a passive cooling systems (aka. convection cooling, gravity cooling or natural cooling). Such systems are great and essential safety feature in modern reactors, and Fukushima Daiichi actually had a passive emergency cooling system. However, with current technology such systems can only contain the decay heat for up to 72 hours. It is only a temporary system, giving technicians time to restore external power to cooling pumps. This can be problematic in a catastrophic situation (such as natural disaster).
I always considered 2000 just an enterprise-oriented version of XP. Also, if you consider them one and same, the "Windows cycles" becomes pefect:
Windows 3.1x (stable)
Windows 95 (unstable)
Windows 98 (stable)
Windows Me (unstable)
Windows XP/2000 (stable)
Windows Vista (unstable)
Windows 7 (stable)
Windows 8 (unstable)
While we definitely can not account the invention of the modern DST to Ben Franklin (because it was invented by George Vernon Hudson, a New Zealander, and put to use by the British war-time effort), it is most satirical twist of history that his satirical writing from 1784 would be attributed to such feat. As if a joke had become the reality.
First, let me ask this: if the GPL is anti-innovate and anti-progress because it prevents the users from using the source code, how is a proprietary license - that you claim to be inevitable -
Cutting it right there. You obviously misread my post. I have never ever claimed that proprietary licensing was any solution -- absolutely not -- I am an eager fan and user of open source software every day, but I also want to use it in my professional work. However, GPL is inherently incompatible with software that is not open source, so it is not really "free". As has been already established, there are many more licences out there that are more compatible with commercial software.
Usually what people care about in copyright is not really the right to very strictly control the reuse of your source code, but the so-called artistic "moral rights", for example being attributed when someone uses large portions of your source code and getting acknowledgement and recognition through this. These rights are actually so inherent, that they can not actually be ever even licensed away in most jurisdictions! (Most notably the French copyright/moral rights system.) GPL is just prohibiting the reuse of your code for no reasonable purposes, if all you want is acknowledgement and recognition -- the copyright hack part is by large redundant, but also restrictive and hostile to commercial reuse.
The GPL goes way, way beyond moral rights. Although I am perfectly aware there there are many people who really believe in the FSF mantra, this is just a small fraction of open source developers. For each GNU person, there are several people who feel excluded and deprived because they can not use this supposedly "free" software.
I think in most instances, the original creator of the GPL software would be happy to share the source code of their creation for a simple attribution even to closed source software, but the GPL specifically disallows this. So it seems to be in contrast with what most people perceive and believe free software to actually be!
Slashdot Mirror
Here's a story TorrentFreak run on this (in English)
Rocks'n'Diamonds is a great Boulderdash / Sokoban / Supaplex / Emerald Mine clone. Distributed under the GPL and packaged for most Linux distros. It's a great puzzle game for kids with nice graphics, SFX and brainteasers. Might be a bit too challenging for a 3-year-old, but great for 10+.
Homepage
... in nerd mythology. Nobody outside Nokia has seen the real sales figures, though.
Right on. Here is the estimate (by Tomi Ahonen, a blogger and ex-employee).
Well yes, it's not maybe a Pulitzer Prize earning writeup. But these people are tech enthusiasts, not journalists, after all. Also, good to bear in mind that the original article was published in Finnish, and translated to English by volunteers. However, I enjoyed the read because it provides very exclusive insight to the story behind MeeGo.
Even before Nokia scrapped its whole smartphone strategy, the MeeGo project was in difficulties. The biggest problem was that Nokia clung to Symbian, refusing to see the obvious fact that the customers were attracted to the competitors' platforms because they had a much stronger offering of 3rd party apps. MeeGo/Maemo was a good development platform, but internal competition between teams meant that the managers of the much older Symbian division would do anything in their power to stall the development of the "competing" platform. Although this might have shielded a few jobs in the Symbian division for a short period, Nokia's customers, and eventually the company as a whole, had to pay a very dire price for this indecisiveness.
Relevant quotes:
First signs of Nokia’s internal competition between two platforms were seen with the N810 device. It was released in late 2007 and entered the market without phone functionality. It would have been Nokia’s first Maemo phone, but the decision to leave out the phone functionality was said to have been completely political.
According to a Maemo team member we interviewed, Symbian team directors were afraid of the possible competition between the N810 and the Symbian based communicator.
Inside Nokia, members of the Maemo team thought that the managers of the Symbian team were afraid for their jobs, and used their positions within the company to slow down the development of Maemo by any means they could.
N9 will remain most critically acclaimed and one of the fastest-selling and anticipated models in the company's history. Sadly, it could have been so much more, the beginning of a new platform like Android and iOS, but it was ultimately an executive-level decision to prioritize Symbian over Maemo. With falling market figures, this eventually lead to a situation where the whole strategy had to be scrapped in favor of Microsoft serfdom.
You do understand that the interviewed current and ex-employees of Nokia had to speak generally and under the condition of anonymity because they are subject to very strict NDAs? Talking about anything specific could make it possible to identify the individual. We should be greatful that we even got this peek into the inner workings of the MeeGo project, and what went wrong.
BTW if you want a more in-depth (albeit slightly outdated) look at Nokia's downfall from #1 mobile phone producer in the world, have a look at this article. It is also much more journalitically written, and touches extensively on MeeGo as well.
Apparently they think it is worth it, as they have been doing it for a while.
To my understanding NVIDIA has never released GPL-licensed drivers for their GPUs. My bet is they develop Linux drivers because they think Linux is a viable and innovative computing platform, not because they agree with FOSS purists.
I would like to counter that point with a reference to the Debian Manifesto. It was published in 1994, and Debian, in addition to becoming one of the most popular distributions by itself, came to form the basis behind products like Ubuntu, Mint, Nokia Maemo, Knoppix and Mepis. So for them it seems to have worked.
See it for yourself: court transcript from Jury Selection
Court: The next question is, have you or a family member or someone very close to you ever been involved in a lawsuit, either as a plaintiff, a defendant, or as a vitness?
...
Prospective juror: In 2008, after my company went belly up, the programmer that worked for me filed a lawsuit against me
He goes on to give details of that case (which was settled out of court). He never disclosed the dispute with Seagate. But obviously, the court never said anything about not disclosing cases older than 10 years. So, he failed to disclose a very important case, probably because doing so would have meant that he couldn't have served in the jury, which he really much wanted (see TFA).
Douglas Crockford tends to disagree. And he's not alone.
How do they mitigate these inherent security problems of the JavaScript platform in the API draft? With XSS, I can always overwrite the browser's crypto API object, replacing it with a rogue implementation.
My understanding has been that JavaScript in its present form is not a viable platform for cryptography.
Interesting points, but in paragraphs 24 and 34 of the suit they quite much seem to claim a "violation of the [CC BY-SA] License" and that "the creation of 'Wiki Travel Guide' has been done without proper attribution". The alleged trademark infringement happened when the volunteer admin wrote to the Wikitravel users in an e-mail that the "Wikitravel community" was migrating to Wikimedia Foundation, which is obviously different from claiming that "Wikitravel" (the site) was migrating to Wikimedia (a view also admitted by Internet Brands in the suit.)
Anyway, just because someone somewhere mentioned your trademark in context that did not please you is not grounds for damages. What IB seems to claim is that the supposed Wikimedia hosted travel website would infringe its trademark - before it has even launched! Given that they only own a trademark for a travel website "Wikitravel", anyone should be able to launch a new website with different name.
Given that they are making such claims of trademark and license violations even before those have happened (obviously you can not infringe with a non-existing product or not give attribution before you actually start distributing the content), it seems like a desperate last resort effort to stop the split by suing a few individuals to me.
Well, very funny indeed.
It's not Gaelic but Finnish. The pronounciation of Finnish is actually massively more regular than English, and you can easily learn it (although learning to understand Finnish is a different deal.) Here's the approximate pronounciations of those family names in the Wikipedia spelling key with approx. translations:
E = upside-down e, like a in about. For some reason, Slashdot does not allow this letter in comments.
You are forced to release your software as GPL if you use the QT sdk tough.
No you aren't. Get your facts straight.
It seems like with this move and generally the Metro and Windows 8 walled garden stuff, Microsoft is going more and more "the Apple way". Is it really in their best interest? Is it just me, or hasn't the open-ish (compared to Apple) Intel + Microsoft Windows ecosystem served a desktop market niche that is different from the Apple universe? Does Microsoft have an exit strategy in case they fail in closer competition with Apple at Apple's game?
Well apparently my post got modded -1 Troll already, but I'll just say I still fail to see the point. If you are implementing a Turing complete programming environment, why go with 6502 + Assembler? Why not go Ruby, Python, Perl or some other modern programming language? I am just honestly failing to see the utility of this, although I admit emulators are always very cool and have mad respect for guys who make them.
So the guy wrote an emulator of the 6502 processor and various perihipals as a native-code plugin for the game. Technically, it does not seem so special, as various 6502 emulators have been written before; they just usually have a more usable GUI than operating them from within a 3D game.
I would be much more impressed if they actually implemented a general purpose computer by only using readily-available in-game building blocks and mechanics without code extensions to the game engine. This has been done for Conway's Game of Life and a Turing Machine before.
I can't believe Stephen Elop of Nokia is not on that list. During his stint as the CEO of the former world leader in mobile phones, the company has lost 70% of its market valuation – mostly down to Elop's borderline insane strategic choices. Maybe the list is only for US companies?
No, GPL is not "open" in the same sense that people in the IT industry use the word "open". When we talk about "open" - and really mean it - it implies that anyone can use the specification (say, a piece of computer code), and integrate it as a part of their own products, thus increasing interoperability and furthering technical development of commercial systems.
GPL on the other hand is anti-corporate, in that it does not allow mixing GPL-licensed code with pre-existing closed-source corporate solutions. It was specifically devised for this purpose by the Free Software Foundation, who have been miserably failing in their relentless idealism to create an exclusively GPL-based software ecosystem for the last three decades.
Fukushima did not have passive emergency cooling systems. The cores started melting in less than 24 hours after the SCRAM, because external electricity (to drive the water circulation pumps) went out and the tsunami knocked out the backup diesel generators as well.
Were any passive cooling systems in place like you describe, the meltdowns could not have occurred that fast.
Fukushima Daiichi did have a passive cooling system, called Isolation Condenser (IC). It is a passive cooling system, but distinct from modern convection cooling systems. While convection cooling systems shield the reactor from meltdown for 72 hours, the IC system used in Fukushima (even if fully operational) could have only protected the plant from meltdown for 8 hours in case of total power loss. Also, the IC did not apparently work as expected in Fukushima. I guess such last-resort emergency systems are rarely tested, and TEPCO had also made alterations to its original design.
In the end, Fukushima Daiichi was cooled with ad-hoc solutions, such as parking a fire truck outside the reactor and spraying water directly into the core from there.
He is referring to a passive cooling systems (aka. convection cooling, gravity cooling or natural cooling). Such systems are great and essential safety feature in modern reactors, and Fukushima Daiichi actually had a passive emergency cooling system. However, with current technology such systems can only contain the decay heat for up to 72 hours. It is only a temporary system, giving technicians time to restore external power to cooling pumps. This can be problematic in a catastrophic situation (such as natural disaster).
I always considered 2000 just an enterprise-oriented version of XP. Also, if you consider them one and same, the "Windows cycles" becomes pefect:
Windows 3.1x (stable)
Windows 95 (unstable)
Windows 98 (stable)
Windows Me (unstable)
Windows XP/2000 (stable)
Windows Vista (unstable)
Windows 7 (stable)
Windows 8 (unstable)
While we definitely can not account the invention of the modern DST to Ben Franklin (because it was invented by George Vernon Hudson, a New Zealander, and put to use by the British war-time effort), it is most satirical twist of history that his satirical writing from 1784 would be attributed to such feat. As if a joke had become the reality.
Just because an actor was in a sci-fi TV series doesn't mean they automatically excel in advanced computer science.
I never thought Trekkies were the sharpest pencils in the box but this just tops anything I've seen so far.
AP is reporting that the new iPad's name is simply "iPad". It's not iPad 3 or iPad HD, it's simply "iPad".
Wonder how the retailers are going to assure their customers that "iPad" is better and newer than "iPad 2"?
First, let me ask this: if the GPL is anti-innovate and anti-progress because it prevents the users from using the source code, how is a proprietary license - that you claim to be inevitable -
Cutting it right there. You obviously misread my post. I have never ever claimed that proprietary licensing was any solution -- absolutely not -- I am an eager fan and user of open source software every day, but I also want to use it in my professional work. However, GPL is inherently incompatible with software that is not open source, so it is not really "free". As has been already established, there are many more licences out there that are more compatible with commercial software.
Usually what people care about in copyright is not really the right to very strictly control the reuse of your source code, but the so-called artistic "moral rights", for example being attributed when someone uses large portions of your source code and getting acknowledgement and recognition through this. These rights are actually so inherent, that they can not actually be ever even licensed away in most jurisdictions! (Most notably the French copyright/moral rights system.) GPL is just prohibiting the reuse of your code for no reasonable purposes, if all you want is acknowledgement and recognition -- the copyright hack part is by large redundant, but also restrictive and hostile to commercial reuse.
The GPL goes way, way beyond moral rights. Although I am perfectly aware there there are many people who really believe in the FSF mantra, this is just a small fraction of open source developers. For each GNU person, there are several people who feel excluded and deprived because they can not use this supposedly "free" software.
I think in most instances, the original creator of the GPL software would be happy to share the source code of their creation for a simple attribution even to closed source software, but the GPL specifically disallows this. So it seems to be in contrast with what most people perceive and believe free software to actually be!