Its not much good having the source for a project, particulerly a large one. You also need people who understand it. This takes time and costs money. Then, perhaps more importantly, you need people clever/interested enough to take the project forward. Again this is hard to acheive.
As Microsoft and other companies have learned, you can't throw people and money at a project and be certain of success. The people have to be motivated (money != motivation) and *wanting* the project to succeed.
There's probably just as much dead open source code as there is closed source code, just having the code available is never enough.
DId you know the PC port is still available? I drag it out and try to do Morkins quest every now and then. I used to find it easy when I was a young'un, but now I'm not so lucky.
No Pong. No Space Invaders. No Elite. No Dune 2 (first RTW) No Flashback (first motion capture) No Doom.
Reaaly showing your age there:) If you hang out on the Egosoft X3 forums you'll find that the debate about which was the most influential Space sim emerges fairly often. For me its Elite 1 all the way.
However, many of the games you (rightly) mention are beyond the experience of most gamers, so I suspect they left them off because either they thought their readers wouldn't know them (or perhaps the person compiling the article didn't play them).
Its like the Star Wars thing. Lots of people think of that as the start of decent/influential SF films, ignoring Logans Run and others that predate it. This being mainly because if you aren't a serious SF fan, you likely would only encounter older films by accident, except when buying posters of robbie the robot carrying 'that hot chick'.
When you're buying an audiobook, you're paying for more than just having the book read to you. The reader (well, the GOOD ones, anyway) inject personality into them.
I've bought a number of audiobooks based simply on the fact that Scott Brick narrates them. I wouldn't consider tts to be something able to replace a reader of his skill.
I don't know. I mean it was a great desktop years back, probably the best (discounting Debian), I used it for the whole of my time at university, but things have moved on. I use it for servers nowadays, servers that I set up and don't change, aside from updates, but as a deasktop system it would need to compete with Ubuntu for ease of use and administration. Ubuntu's a long way ahead in those respects.
Still, I'm mildly interested to see what they might offer.
Had to happen eventually. But it would be nice if there were C-based clients rather than Java. Java is cool, but it is also slow.
Java is slower than C, yes, but having used it recently for the first time on some commercial work, I have to say that speed concerns aside, Java is vastly better in terms of additional libraries, ease of use, and general 'getting things done faster'.
With multi core software being the way forward, it also has the edge because its easier to paralellise than C/C++ (well ok, debatable, but in my experience its easier and involves less dev time), and the increase in cores mean the old concerns about speed aren't as relevent, or won't be soon.
Not that I'm using Java for my own work, just for paid stuff. Since my own code is something I control, the reduction in dev time you get from Java isn't a factor, and I do like my C++.
There are some large software packages that can't use bash without problems. Take the Nemo Stellaer Dynamics Toolbox for instance(http://bima.astro.umd.edu/nemo/). When I was using that a couple of years ago it needed a fair bit of messing about to get it to work with bash.
Freedom isn't defined by the ability to download music for free.
This does amuse me. All these measures do is bring about new technology for sharing files. Well, that and win the people who came up with the idea promotions/votes.
Anyone who thinks of things like this should be sat down and made to watch a film about prohibition. Then they might just realise how stupid they're being. Just arguing that they're doing the wrong thing won't work, because they don't think they are, and anyone who says they are is 'uninformed'.
Let me enlighten you here mr security expert. Once you hit that submit button on your shopping cart at joe's online store, you have no idea what just happened with that information. I don't care if you put in your cc number a thousand times it does not in any way mean that the other end is not storing the information. In fact for all you know it sends a email to someone that processes the order, however mr hacker already owns that server and grabs everything running through the mail spool. Or has just modified the code to send himself a copy of your information as well.
Oh great, now I'm going to be even more paranoid about online shopping, thanks for that:(
Keeping that much financial data online is stupidity of the highest order.
Anyone who does that deserves anything they get for trusting the security of their card info to a third party.
I use online services a lot (increasingly so these last two years), and re enter my card info each time. Sure its slow, and less convenient, but if a site is hacked, my card details won't be stored there. I'm far too worried by that to let any site keep my card details.
It's not exactly unusual for pubs to have CCTV, like anonymous, I call BS.
I'll bet its unusual to have individual and undisguised cctv camaras pointed at every table and cubicle. I've not known it be as bad as the pub in question. I'm disregarding the usual unobtrusive cctv presence.
Not that I wish to detract from your obvious need to refute my claim, after all, thats half the fun of slashdot, or all of it, for you...
They did that to a pub in my town (UK) once. Granted it was a really dodgy pub that most people avoided.
The result though was not only did the known nasty types stop going there, no-one else wnet there either, because we knew there were cameras in it.
Its since closed and reoppened under new ownership, a gay bar I beleive, sans cameras. I suspect the change in customer focus is because even though its almost ten years later, its still remembered by most as the pub that had cctv everywhere.
London has the highest density of CCTV cameras of any city in the world, and it's ridiculous overkill. Technically they may not be on EVERY street, but damn near close.
But more importantly, it's been shown as completely ineffective. Chicago is going to make the same mistake. Security theater..
It hasn't managed to stop a single crime in London either.
I live in a UK town so small that the total population is less than a minor London borough, and we have camera's throughout the town centre, and along all major roads into and out of the town.
Most aren't watched, and the police have had zero luck using them to catch criminals, even when they rob several shops in a row at night.
Muggings? Hasn't stopped one.
There was a murder along one of these monitored streets, and the culprit has never been caught. All we got was wooden placards from the police asking if anyone had seen something.
The take home from this is that in the UK, cameras are put up to 'fit the mood' of the political times, but few councils have the money, or the will, to employ them on a day to day basis.
The government, in typical UK style, decreed that cameras would make use safer, but declined to provide sufficient funding. Any council that did nothing would have been deemed to be putting its people at risk, but if cameras were put up, but mostly unused, the blame could be placed on the governemtn again, for failing to provide the funding.
Its a farce. The loss to our freedom? negligable, barely noticable, if it exists at all. The loss to our pocket through wasted taxes? Millions, and thats far worse.
A camara that watches people is worthless unless there is someone to watch the camara output. Citywide survelliance for somewhere like Chicago would need thousands of people if it were to work.
That means an expensive workforce. This in turn means low wages, which means poor quality.
This would of course then be something a tech company will say they can do more efficiently and cheaply. The provided system will suck (unless AI has developed beyond our current abilities, and if it has, I missed a paper somewhere). The company will claim IP protection for their tech, and try to hide the snake oil nature of the code.
The result? an expensive but useless system kept in place to prevent the politicians who put them in from losing face (as in having to explain where those tens of millions of dollars went).
I wait until the games I want are on the bargian shelves then buy them (or cheap on Steam). Ok, this usually means I'm behind other gamers, but new to me is good enough.
Nor am I starved for quality games, less so perhaps, because by the time I get round to buying, the shit games have been identified, and the gems lauded.
Diablo 3 may cause me to break this trend, at least for that one game, but everything else is bought cheap or not touched.
Would such a clause actually hold up in court? I just can't see how it possibly would, it's purely "You're damned if you do you're damned if you don't.
For a paid service? No. For a free service? Well, you'd have to explain why you started to use the service and added your content without bothering to read or understand the TOS.
The provider could probably get away with the justification of needing to finance the free system. In a way thats not a bad defence. If Facebook don't find some way of profitiing from their users soon, their little web 2.0 service is going to die the death of a thousand uninterested investors.
They're not alone in taking advantage of their users content. Go take a look at flickrvision. See all those geotagged photos that are being pushed out via the flickr API? Usernames, photo locations, and the photos themselves, free for anyone who wants them.
I wouldn't touch that service with a shitty stick, but obviously many people think its ok.
Also, you won't find a lot disturbing details about HTML, HTTP and the like."
What "disturbing details" are there about HTTP? Does it have connections to rogue regimes or something? Is it a deadbeat dad? Does like to dress as a clown?
Best what? Bioshock was the least challenging game I have played in years. Those vita chambers where *everywhere*, ammo was, well, everywhere, and the big daddies were as easy to kill as a jolly easy to kill thing.
You didn't need to care about health or powerup juice (aka 'eve'), because if you ran out, all you had to do was 'die', regenerate near to where you where (you always are) and you get some more free, over and over and over and over.....
I played it through more out of curiosity then any sense of fun. Once you realise that the game doesn't punish faliure at all, and actually rewards you for dying (you get regenerated health and eve, but your enemies are as damanged as they were when you 'died'), all thats left is the pretty graphics and nice level design.
Would I want to go through this morass of tedium they called a game again on a mobile? Nah....
There is, is there not, a difference between 'need' and want. After all we probably only 'need' a small number of programming languages, but we have, and want, many.
It would, I beleive, be a mistake to cut down the number of licences. Evolutionary theory makes it quite clear that lack of diversity leads to a much higher liklihood of extinction in the event of a crisis, and Open Source is no exception.
Personally I'm very boring in my licensing. I use the GPL, or I just public domain my code without any if its trivial enough. That said, I did do a lot of research when making my choice of licence, and while I wouldn't have minded it if the process of reviewing licences were simpler (like for instance a site where you describe your project and people suggest licence types), I didn't think there were 'too many'.
Yeah, they probably thought the bacteria would never come up with an answer to penicillin either.
Actually it didn't. Instead what happened was antibiotics were handed out like candy and people weren't made to complete their courses.
If you stop taking antibiotics before the whole course is complete, any remaining bacteria are those which have some resistance (but in the beginning not enough to survive a completed course). Multiply this by the millions of people who didn't complete their courses over the decades, and you have trouble.
The GP did indicate that he was in a small minority and that most other students involved did experience these illusions. I'm not sure what more you want.
The supervising lecturer said it was likely because I, and at least one other person (I didn't hear him talk to everyone), had sight defects, My left eye looks minutelly to the left when I look straight forward. Its enough to disrupt distance judgement, but otherwise pretty trivial.
Apparently that, or other minor sight defects are enough to nix some optical illusions.
Slashdot Mirror
Its not much good having the source for a project, particulerly a large one. You also need people who understand it. This takes time and costs money. Then, perhaps more importantly, you need people clever/interested enough to take the project forward. Again this is hard to acheive.
As Microsoft and other companies have learned, you can't throw people and money at a project and be certain of success. The people have to be motivated (money != motivation) and *wanting* the project to succeed.
There's probably just as much dead open source code as there is closed source code, just having the code available is never enough.
And where is Lords of Midnight?
DId you know the PC port is still available? I drag it out and try to do Morkins quest every now and then. I used to find it easy when I was a young'un, but now I'm not so lucky.
I must have played it far too much back then.
No Pong.
No Space Invaders.
No Elite.
No Dune 2 (first RTW)
No Flashback (first motion capture)
No Doom.
Reaaly showing your age there :) If you hang out on the Egosoft X3 forums you'll find that the debate about which was the most influential Space sim emerges fairly often. For me its Elite 1 all the way.
However, many of the games you (rightly) mention are beyond the experience of most gamers, so I suspect they left them off because either they thought their readers wouldn't know them (or perhaps the person compiling the article didn't play them).
Its like the Star Wars thing. Lots of people think of that as the start of decent/influential SF films, ignoring Logans Run and others that predate it. This being mainly because if you aren't a serious SF fan, you likely would only encounter older films by accident, except when buying posters of robbie the robot carrying 'that hot chick'.
But can they fold them more than seven times?
as soon as os x for all pc comes out M$ will be carping there pants.
Not really. Microsoft Office is the dominant word processing package on the Mac.
When you're buying an audiobook, you're paying for more than just having the book read to you. The reader (well, the GOOD ones, anyway) inject personality into them.
I've bought a number of audiobooks based simply on the fact that Scott Brick narrates them. I wouldn't consider tts to be something able to replace a reader of his skill.
I don't know. I mean it was a great desktop years back, probably the best (discounting Debian), I used it for the whole of my time at university, but things have moved on.
I use it for servers nowadays, servers that I set up and don't change, aside from updates, but as a deasktop system it would need to compete with Ubuntu for ease of use and administration. Ubuntu's a long way ahead in those respects.
Still, I'm mildly interested to see what they might offer.
Had to happen eventually. But it would be nice if there were C-based clients rather than Java. Java is cool, but it is also slow.
Java is slower than C, yes, but having used it recently for the first time on some commercial work, I have to say that speed concerns aside, Java is vastly better in terms of additional libraries, ease of use, and general 'getting things done faster'.
With multi core software being the way forward, it also has the edge because its easier to paralellise than C/C++ (well ok, debatable, but in my experience its easier and involves less dev time), and the increase in cores mean the old concerns about speed aren't as relevent, or won't be soon.
Not that I'm using Java for my own work, just for paid stuff. Since my own code is something I control, the reduction in dev time you get from Java isn't a factor, and I do like my C++.
There are some large software packages that can't use bash without problems. Take the Nemo Stellaer Dynamics Toolbox for instance(http://bima.astro.umd.edu/nemo/). When I was using that a couple of years ago it needed a fair bit of messing about to get it to work with bash.
First shut down the BBC news service to remove possible competition.
Oh wait, you can't.
That's it, really. How sad.
Freedom isn't defined by the ability to download music for free.
This does amuse me. All these measures do is bring about new technology for sharing files. Well, that and win the people who came up with the idea promotions/votes.
Anyone who thinks of things like this should be sat down and made to watch a film about prohibition. Then they might just realise how stupid they're being. Just arguing that they're doing the wrong thing won't work, because they don't think they are, and anyone who says they are is 'uninformed'.
Let me enlighten you here mr security expert. Once you hit that submit button on your shopping cart at joe's online store, you have no idea what just happened with that information. I don't care if you
put in your cc number a thousand times it does not in any way mean that the other end is not storing the information. In fact for all you know it sends a email to someone that processes the order, however
mr hacker already owns that server and grabs everything running through the mail spool. Or has just modified the code to send himself a copy of your information as well.
Oh great, now I'm going to be even more paranoid about online shopping, thanks for that :(
I see what you're saying though.
Keeping that much financial data online is stupidity of the highest order.
Anyone who does that deserves anything they get for trusting the security of their card info to a third party.
I use online services a lot (increasingly so these last two years), and re enter my card info each time. Sure its slow, and less convenient, but if a site is hacked, my card details won't be stored there. I'm far too worried by that to let any site keep my card details.
It's not exactly unusual for pubs to have CCTV, like anonymous, I call BS.
I'll bet its unusual to have individual and undisguised cctv camaras pointed at every table and cubicle. I've not known it be as bad as the pub in question. I'm disregarding the usual unobtrusive cctv presence.
Not that I wish to detract from your obvious need to refute my claim, after all, thats half the fun of slashdot, or all of it, for you...
They did that to a pub in my town (UK) once. Granted it was a really dodgy pub that most people avoided.
The result though was not only did the known nasty types stop going there, no-one else wnet there either, because we knew there were cameras in it.
Its since closed and reoppened under new ownership, a gay bar I beleive, sans cameras. I suspect the change in customer focus is because even though its almost ten years later, its still remembered by most as the pub that had cctv everywhere.
London has the highest density of CCTV cameras of any city in the world, and it's ridiculous overkill. Technically they may not be on EVERY street, but damn near close.
But more importantly, it's been shown as completely ineffective. Chicago is going to make the same mistake. Security theater..
It hasn't managed to stop a single crime in London either.
I live in a UK town so small that the total population is less than a minor London borough, and we have camera's throughout the town centre, and along all major roads into and out of the town.
Most aren't watched, and the police have had zero luck using them to catch criminals, even when they rob several shops in a row at night.
Muggings? Hasn't stopped one.
There was a murder along one of these monitored streets, and the culprit has never been caught. All we got was wooden placards from the police asking if anyone had seen something.
The take home from this is that in the UK, cameras are put up to 'fit the mood' of the political times, but few councils have the money, or the will, to employ them on a day to day basis.
The government, in typical UK style, decreed that cameras would make use safer, but declined to provide sufficient funding. Any council that did nothing would have been deemed to be putting its people at risk, but if cameras were put up, but mostly unused, the blame could be placed on the governemtn again, for failing to provide the funding.
Its a farce. The loss to our freedom? negligable, barely noticable, if it exists at all. The loss to our pocket through wasted taxes? Millions, and thats far worse.
A camara that watches people is worthless unless there is someone to watch the camara output. Citywide survelliance for somewhere like Chicago would need thousands of people if it were to work.
That means an expensive workforce. This in turn means low wages, which means poor quality.
This would of course then be something a tech company will say they can do more efficiently and cheaply. The provided system will suck (unless AI has developed beyond our current abilities, and if it has, I missed a paper somewhere). The company will claim IP protection for their tech, and try to hide the snake oil nature of the code.
The result? an expensive but useless system kept in place to prevent the politicians who put them in from losing face (as in having to explain where those tens of millions of dollars went).
I wait until the games I want are on the bargian shelves then buy them (or cheap on Steam). Ok, this usually means I'm behind other gamers, but new to me is good enough.
Nor am I starved for quality games, less so perhaps, because by the time I get round to buying, the shit games have been identified, and the gems lauded.
Diablo 3 may cause me to break this trend, at least for that one game, but everything else is bought cheap or not touched.
Would such a clause actually hold up in court? I just can't see how it possibly would, it's purely "You're damned if you do you're damned if you don't.
For a paid service? No. For a free service? Well, you'd have to explain why you started to use the service and added your content without bothering to read or understand the TOS.
The provider could probably get away with the justification of needing to finance the free system. In a way thats not a bad defence. If Facebook don't find some way of profitiing from their users soon, their little web 2.0 service is going to die the death of a thousand uninterested investors.
They're not alone in taking advantage of their users content. Go take a look at flickrvision. See all those geotagged photos that are being pushed out via the flickr API? Usernames, photo locations, and the photos themselves, free for anyone who wants them.
I wouldn't touch that service with a shitty stick, but obviously many people think its ok.
Also, you won't find a lot disturbing details about HTML, HTTP and the like."
What "disturbing details" are there about HTTP? Does it have connections to rogue regimes or something? Is it a deadbeat dad? Does like to dress as a clown?
You can embed flash in it?
Best what? Bioshock was the least challenging game I have played in years. Those vita chambers where *everywhere*, ammo was, well, everywhere, and the big daddies were as easy to kill as a jolly easy to kill thing.
You didn't need to care about health or powerup juice (aka 'eve'), because if you ran out, all you had to do was 'die', regenerate near to where you where (you always are) and you get some more free, over and over and over and over.....
I played it through more out of curiosity then any sense of fun. Once you realise that the game doesn't punish faliure at all, and actually rewards you for dying (you get regenerated health and eve, but your enemies are as damanged as they were when you 'died'), all thats left is the pretty graphics and nice level design.
Would I want to go through this morass of tedium they called a game again on a mobile? Nah....
There is, is there not, a difference between 'need' and want. After all we probably only 'need' a small number of programming languages, but we have, and want, many.
It would, I beleive, be a mistake to cut down the number of licences. Evolutionary theory makes it quite clear that lack of diversity leads to a much higher liklihood of extinction in the event of a crisis, and Open Source is no exception.
Personally I'm very boring in my licensing. I use the GPL, or I just public domain my code without any if its trivial enough.
That said, I did do a lot of research when making my choice of licence, and while I wouldn't have minded it if the process of reviewing licences were simpler (like for instance a site where you describe your project and people suggest licence types), I didn't think there were 'too many'.
From a few tons of colliding satellite? Seriously?
Oh dear, someone doesn't have a well tuned sense of scale methinks.
Yeah, they probably thought the bacteria would never come up with an answer to penicillin either.
Actually it didn't. Instead what happened was antibiotics were handed out like candy and people weren't made to complete their courses.
If you stop taking antibiotics before the whole course is complete, any remaining bacteria are those which have some resistance (but in the beginning not enough to survive a completed course). Multiply this by the millions of people who didn't complete their courses over the decades, and you have trouble.
The GP did indicate that he was in a small minority and that most other students involved did experience these illusions. I'm not sure what more you want.
The supervising lecturer said it was likely because I, and at least one other person (I didn't hear him talk to everyone), had sight defects, My left eye looks minutelly to the left when I look straight forward. Its enough to disrupt distance judgement, but otherwise pretty trivial.
Apparently that, or other minor sight defects are enough to nix some optical illusions.