Novell is not dead. I'm running 60 users, 10 printers, mail, intranet, and proxy on a Novell 4.11 box (Proliant 800, P2-350, 448MB) - CPU ut. hardly ever goes over 5%. It uses all it's RAM, sure, and the RAID is pretty busy, but it's still just one box serving the whole network.
Stable? In 22 months it's crashed exactly once. Fast? File access is still fast enough for me, and I'm type A with rabies.
Other firms our size in the city are running as many as 6 NT servers to do the same chores. Maybe I could replace it with *nix or *BSD, but why fuck with something that's almost perfect? "Almost" that is, until IBM open-sources NDS. I think I'd wet myself;)
when we say "real time 3d environment" we mean something generated by a computer from 3d wireframes and texture maps, in real time, as the client requests each frame. real time 3d requires either immense processing power on generic hardware/software (e.g. "software" mode in quake 1), or specialized 3d hardware (e.g. voodoo card).
you seem to think it's an environment that can be navigated in 3 dimensions, like duke nukem 3d. duke nukem was a 3d environment hacked into a very 2d game. it looked like you could walk over/under things, but that effect was created using 2d objects, sprites, and textures.
if you understand this distinciton, then you'll understand that wolf3d and doom were 2d games, where descent and quake were 3d.
The first real-time 3D environments were pioneered by the house of id...
um... no... that would have been Descent by Parallax.
And with Quake's robust networking code, action gamers went head-to-head on the Net for the first time.
um... no... many people played Doom over the 'net (it was an ugly hack, especially compared with 'net games today, but it did work).
Ah, yes, always easy to be cynical. The important point, oh world-weary one, is that perhaps some institutions should exist outside the marketplace.
The government in this country [USA] does a pitiful job of promoting the intersts of private citizens. (As an OT example, last time I saw the numbers, the city of Hamburg, Germany, spent more money per year promoting artists than the entire yearly budget of the US NEA.)
So yes, this news is certainly not surprising, and anyone who needed Katz to bring it to his attention wasn't paying much attention in the first place. However, that doesn't stop some of us from hoping and working for a society in which corporations don't own everything of value.
an architecture firm, to be specific. sure, i'm running novell and bsd where it counts (on the servers), but we have no choice but to run windoze on the desktops.
why? one word: autocad. the firm's been using autocad since it first got computers, and we're not going to change anytime soon. if at all. the license costs ($3500-$4000 for acad, depending on flavor) are the least factor - retraining is the killer. we make 90% of our money doing one thing only: billing people out by the hour. every hour we spend training someone on a new product is an hour of billable time lost, and the cost to train the entire office on new cad software is more than we bill in 2 months (i know, we're run the numbers). this could take a whole profitable year and turn it into a big loser, nevermind all the other issues (pissing off clients, employees, consultants).
that's assuming, of course, that there were a professional-quality CAD program available for linux, which there isn't.
my point is simply, you're right; some people have literally no choice but to run windoze on the desktop. an operating system is only a tool, and you must use the best tool for the job.
it looks like we pretty much agree, then. corporatism sucks, but as long as that's the way things are run, NDA's are necessary. that was my main point, anyway.
quothe you: You obviously care about money more than freedom, and I pity that.
quote me: consenting adults should be free to enter any arrangement or agreement they choose, as long as doesn't directly harm anyone else.
so which of those two world sounds freer to you? you'd like to regulate private sexual behaviour - and i think that what i do in the privacy of my own home and with whom (ob: consenting adult) and for what reason is NOYB, pal. why don't you read what i actually said, before you react.
i also said that i agreed that what apple is doing is stupid, for what it's worth. and suing news sources is obviously of a completely different category - any news written in good faith (or more to the point, not written in demonstrably bad faith) should be legal without restraint. but if two free people/legal entities enter into a contract, that contract should be legally enforceable, period (ob: as long as it doesn't directly harm anyone else).
quothe you: You cannot under any circumstances make a legal contract to do an illegal thing.
that's what they call a tautology: a trivial truth. legal != illegal. what i'm saying is, what business does the government have regulating business or other exchanges between consenting adults (ob: as long as it doesn't harm anyone else)?
so you'd have company's confidential infromation stolen from them with no legal way for them to stop it? you think that NDA's are "just a piece of paper" that have no meaning?
look, i think this shit is lame, too. these leaks are helping apple, not hurting them. suing your own employees/fans may be a fad now (northwest, metallica, now apple), but that doesn't mean it isn't stupid.
however, unless you want to overturn our entire economic system (cute idea, but ain't gonna happen), you have to grant companies the right to keep confidential what they want to be confidential. NDA's have to be legally binding.
the most basic principal of any sound economy has to be that consenting adults should be free to enter any arrangement or agreement they choose, as long as doesn't directly harm anyone else. if i sign a paper, of my own free will, that you can tie me up and beat me for money, then that's the law, pal. likewise an NDA.
This is about as "unauthorized" as those new G4 cube shots. Companies have gotten smart - they realize that they can get more publicity by releasing something and "trying" to shut it down than by just releasing it and waiting.
It does look pretty cool, though. One hopes that they've learned lessons from some of the recent big-budget deritative flops and actually cast decent actors.
Everyone makes mistakes. Every company makes mistakes. Most companies never apologize at all, and frankly I'm astonished that nVidia has. Now that they have, let's at least give them a chance. Unless you can see into the future, you don't know if their apology is sincere or not. Sure, we can speculate, but no one knows.
If this apology is an insincere attempt at press manipulation, we're all certain to find out sooner or later. If it's genuine, then we'll just alienate them and get ourselves into a tizzy for no reason at all. We have nothing to lose by giving them the benefit of the doubt.
Look at their Linux support, if you want a good example. They used to treat Linux like a red-headed stepchild, but now they appear to be genuinely interested in having us use their products. Sure, this is a market-based decision. But it's also a good market-based decision to not piss off your customers by strong-arming review sites. Let's hope they made the right decision for the right reasons, congratulate them, and move on. Time will tell.
No one's mentioned this yet, so I will. HushMail is very cool. Web/Java-based, highly encrypted (1024 bits between HushMail boxes, IIRC), and reliable.
So correct me if I'm wrong, but you're saying that no one has any rights to any digital content, including its creators.
So if I want to write a software program and sell it... too bad. Same goes for music and movies. Web sites. Literature. Anything that can be duplicated exactly.
You said, "Popular acclaim and money mean nothing in art." And see, this is where you're full of it. Artists need to eat. If my friend the writer isn't independently wealthy (she's not) she has to make food/shelter money somehow. If she can make her living by doing her art, then that's wonderful: it gives her more time to write, so she improves her skills, and creates better art. You would deny her the possibility to create art for a living (like Picasso and, to a lesser extent, Joyce).
If this is your intent, then I feel sorry for you. If it's not and you don't see it as a result of your ideas, then you're a dangerous lunatic.
Ok, I appreciate the spirit of your rant here, but I've got one nagging question. You spend a lot of time talking about corporations undermining our rights, and how bad that is, and how good freedom and free speech are. I agree.
What about personal rights to content? If I create something unique, do I have rights? A painting - sure - it's a physical object. What if I create a program, or a digital movie, or a song - anything that can be downloaded? Do you really mean to say that I should have no rights to and no recompense for that work? That I should be happy to give it away for free?
My point, which I think you missed, is simply that a market completely free from government attention is not what you're advocating. You cannot have enforced licensing without a government (again, unless you want Microsoft to be able to throw people in jail for license violations, in which case you're quite literally insane, and we can abandon the argument).
For your IP rights, I'm not sure I agree with you. Say a researcher at DrugCo discovers (fan-fare, drum roll) a cure for cancer, and since he's signed over all his rights to DrugCo, now they own it. And since it'll never, ever enter the public domain, they own it forever. What if this is the only cure anyone ever finds (there are any number of diseases that have only one known cure, thank god in the "public domain"). This scares me?
Of course, if you're making a case against corporations being able to own or transfer such rights, then I'm right there with you.
please explain to the class the meaning of the word "license" in a completely government-free economy? and exactly how it would be enforced? the [U.S.|World] does not operate as a free-market economy, nor did it ever, nor is it ever intended to.
come on - no one (re: very few) really wants the government out of the economy; people just want to make sure that the government benefits them more than the other guy.
copyright, patent, trademark - all those are 100% dependent upon the government, unless you want corporations building their own jails and private armies. in a truly givernment-free society, only one person would need to pay $20 for the latest Britney Spears cd; everyone else would pay whatever it cost the first person (or second, etc.) to rip it.
He's talking about font anti-aliasing, not graphics anti-aliasing, and there's a world of difference.
Graphics anti-aliasing is photoshop/gimp anti-aliasing a graphic to remove jaggies. This is certainly a good thing, but it's only manipulating pixels in an image file.
The other is the OS/window manager/whatever anti-aliasing all the text on the screen in real time. Again, this is not manipulating stored file data, only display-time screen pixels.
Furthermore, he's right - at high-rez, anti-aliased fonts are harder to read. The oh-so-popular 8-point navigation text on many web sites turns into a gray mess if it's anti-aliased at 1600x1200.
Sure, you're right too, but only about anti-aliased graphics, and I don't think anyone's going to argue that point.
You are, of course, perfectly correct. That company also has the right to sue you into the stone ages to shut you up. Of course the law would be on your side, and you might win in the end, but it certainly wouldn't be a pleasant battle.
Given the choice, I'd prefer my first line of defense to be my anonymity, not my lawyer.
Amen to that. I've lived in many countries, and bought Lego-alikes in a few of them, and aways been disappointed. The crap I bought in India didn't even fit with itself, much less real Lego.
Real Lego is incredibly durable, and made with amazing precision. Lego my parents bought 25 years ago still fits perfectly with brand-new sets. Find me any other toy that's this cool, this durable, and this backwards-compatible for less money.
Anyone here remember the low-poly love doll competition? Challenge: using 1k triangles or less, build a... um... female love doll model: an unabashedly sexist objectification. All the entries were anonymous until voting was finished, and voting was on posed models alone - no skins.
Some of the entries (about 60, IIRC) were wretched, and many were from professionals, but Paul Steed's model won with 801 votes, compared with 344 for 2nd place. After reviewing the other entries, his looks all the more amazing. Have any of you ever tried to build a believable wire-frame from scratch? My god, it's hard.
The fact that id fired Steed for (ostensibly) political reasons (or any reason at all other than, say, keying John's F50) does not speak well of them. I know, I know, Kevin and Adrian own the company and they can do whatever the fsck they want; I also know that you need to work with people you like and "personality conflicts" are regularly cited as dismissal reasons.
None of that overshadows the fact that they fired one of the most amazing low-poly modeler/animators in the business. Their future games will suffer for it, and that makes me sad.
Slashdot Mirror
The marketing department at 3dfx going up in smoke?
... speed doesn't matter, uh ... anti-aliasing matters!"
"Image quality doesn't matter, speed matters."
(shit - let's improve the image quality)
"32 bits don't matter, speed matters."
(shit, let's do 32 bits)
"22 bits looks just as good as 32 bits."
(i said, let's do 32 bits!)
And now:
"um
(let's just make toasters. expensive, fast toasters)
Novell is not dead. I'm running 60 users, 10 printers, mail, intranet, and proxy on a Novell 4.11 box (Proliant 800, P2-350, 448MB) - CPU ut. hardly ever goes over 5%. It uses all it's RAM, sure, and the RAID is pretty busy, but it's still just one box serving the whole network.
;)
Stable? In 22 months it's crashed exactly once. Fast? File access is still fast enough for me, and I'm type A with rabies.
Other firms our size in the city are running as many as 6 NT servers to do the same chores. Maybe I could replace it with *nix or *BSD, but why fuck with something that's almost perfect? "Almost" that is, until IBM open-sources NDS. I think I'd wet myself
when we say "real time 3d environment" we mean something generated by a computer from 3d wireframes and texture maps, in real time, as the client requests each frame. real time 3d requires either immense processing power on generic hardware/software (e.g. "software" mode in quake 1), or specialized 3d hardware (e.g. voodoo card).
you seem to think it's an environment that can be navigated in 3 dimensions, like duke nukem 3d. duke nukem was a 3d environment hacked into a very 2d game. it looked like you could walk over/under things, but that effect was created using 2d objects, sprites, and textures.
if you understand this distinciton, then you'll understand that wolf3d and doom were 2d games, where descent and quake were 3d.
right at the start:
... no ... that would have been Descent by Parallax.
... no ... many people played Doom over the 'net (it was an ugly hack, especially compared with 'net games today, but it did work).
The first real-time 3D environments were pioneered by the house of id...
um
And with Quake's robust networking code, action gamers went head-to-head on the Net for the first time.
um
Ah, yes, always easy to be cynical. The important point, oh world-weary one, is that perhaps some institutions should exist outside the marketplace.
The government in this country [USA] does a pitiful job of promoting the intersts of private citizens. (As an OT example, last time I saw the numbers, the city of Hamburg, Germany, spent more money per year promoting artists than the entire yearly budget of the US NEA.)
So yes, this news is certainly not surprising, and anyone who needed Katz to bring it to his attention wasn't paying much attention in the first place. However, that doesn't stop some of us from hoping and working for a society in which corporations don't own everything of value.
On page 3 of that interview, there's a photo of Carmack fragging - on a Mac! Looks like a G4, plus a sweet LCD screen. Hope he brought his own mouse ;)
an architecture firm, to be specific. sure, i'm running novell and bsd where it counts (on the servers), but we have no choice but to run windoze on the desktops.
why? one word: autocad. the firm's been using autocad since it first got computers, and we're not going to change anytime soon. if at all. the license costs ($3500-$4000 for acad, depending on flavor) are the least factor - retraining is the killer. we make 90% of our money doing one thing only: billing people out by the hour. every hour we spend training someone on a new product is an hour of billable time lost, and the cost to train the entire office on new cad software is more than we bill in 2 months (i know, we're run the numbers). this could take a whole profitable year and turn it into a big loser, nevermind all the other issues (pissing off clients, employees, consultants).
that's assuming, of course, that there were a professional-quality CAD program available for linux, which there isn't.
my point is simply, you're right; some people have literally no choice but to run windoze on the desktop. an operating system is only a tool, and you must use the best tool for the job.
it looks like we pretty much agree, then. corporatism sucks, but as long as that's the way things are run, NDA's are necessary. that was my main point, anyway.
quothe you:
You obviously care about money more than freedom, and I pity that.
quote me:
consenting adults should be free to enter any arrangement or agreement they choose, as long as doesn't directly harm anyone else.
so which of those two world sounds freer to you? you'd like to regulate private sexual behaviour - and i think that what i do in the privacy of my own home and with whom (ob: consenting adult) and for what reason is NOYB, pal. why don't you read what i actually said, before you react.
i also said that i agreed that what apple is doing is stupid, for what it's worth. and suing news sources is obviously of a completely different category - any news written in good faith (or more to the point, not written in demonstrably bad faith) should be legal without restraint. but if two free people/legal entities enter into a contract, that contract should be legally enforceable, period (ob: as long as it doesn't directly harm anyone else).
quothe you:
You cannot under any circumstances make a legal contract to do an illegal thing.
that's what they call a tautology : a trivial truth. legal != illegal. what i'm saying is, what business does the government have regulating business or other exchanges between consenting adults (ob: as long as it doesn't harm anyone else)?
so you'd have company's confidential infromation stolen from them with no legal way for them to stop it? you think that NDA's are "just a piece of paper" that have no meaning?
look, i think this shit is lame, too. these leaks are helping apple, not hurting them. suing your own employees/fans may be a fad now (northwest, metallica, now apple), but that doesn't mean it isn't stupid.
however, unless you want to overturn our entire economic system (cute idea, but ain't gonna happen), you have to grant companies the right to keep confidential what they want to be confidential. NDA's have to be legally binding.
the most basic principal of any sound economy has to be that consenting adults should be free to enter any arrangement or agreement they choose, as long as doesn't directly harm anyone else. if i sign a paper, of my own free will, that you can tie me up and beat me for money, then that's the law, pal. likewise an NDA.
This is about as "unauthorized" as those new G4 cube shots. Companies have gotten smart - they realize that they can get more publicity by releasing something and "trying" to shut it down than by just releasing it and waiting.
It does look pretty cool, though. One hopes that they've learned lessons from some of the recent big-budget deritative flops and actually cast decent actors.
Everyone makes mistakes. Every company makes mistakes. Most companies never apologize at all, and frankly I'm astonished that nVidia has. Now that they have, let's at least give them a chance. Unless you can see into the future, you don't know if their apology is sincere or not. Sure, we can speculate, but no one knows.
If this apology is an insincere attempt at press manipulation, we're all certain to find out sooner or later. If it's genuine, then we'll just alienate them and get ourselves into a tizzy for no reason at all. We have nothing to lose by giving them the benefit of the doubt.
Look at their Linux support, if you want a good example. They used to treat Linux like a red-headed stepchild, but now they appear to be genuinely interested in having us use their products. Sure, this is a market-based decision. But it's also a good market-based decision to not piss off your customers by strong-arming review sites. Let's hope they made the right decision for the right reasons, congratulate them, and move on. Time will tell.
No one's mentioned this yet, so I will. HushMail is very cool. Web/Java-based, highly encrypted (1024 bits between HushMail boxes, IIRC), and reliable.
Large amounts of cash missing, grainy "photos" offered as proof that they ... um ... painted a miniscule logo on a rocket. Riiiiighiiit.
So correct me if I'm wrong, but you're saying that no one has any rights to any digital content, including its creators.
... too bad. Same goes for music and movies. Web sites. Literature. Anything that can be duplicated exactly.
So if I want to write a software program and sell it
You said, "Popular acclaim and money mean nothing in art." And see, this is where you're full of it. Artists need to eat. If my friend the writer isn't independently wealthy (she's not) she has to make food/shelter money somehow. If she can make her living by doing her art, then that's wonderful: it gives her more time to write, so she improves her skills, and creates better art. You would deny her the possibility to create art for a living (like Picasso and, to a lesser extent, Joyce).
If this is your intent, then I feel sorry for you. If it's not and you don't see it as a result of your ideas, then you're a dangerous lunatic.
Ok, I appreciate the spirit of your rant here, but I've got one nagging question. You spend a lot of time talking about corporations undermining our rights, and how bad that is, and how good freedom and free speech are. I agree.
What about personal rights to content? If I create something unique, do I have rights? A painting - sure - it's a physical object. What if I create a program, or a digital movie, or a song - anything that can be downloaded? Do you really mean to say that I should have no rights to and no recompense for that work? That I should be happy to give it away for free?
Honest question...
My point, which I think you missed, is simply that a market completely free from government attention is not what you're advocating. You cannot have enforced licensing without a government (again, unless you want Microsoft to be able to throw people in jail for license violations, in which case you're quite literally insane, and we can abandon the argument).
For your IP rights, I'm not sure I agree with you. Say a researcher at DrugCo discovers (fan-fare, drum roll) a cure for cancer, and since he's signed over all his rights to DrugCo, now they own it. And since it'll never, ever enter the public domain, they own it forever. What if this is the only cure anyone ever finds (there are any number of diseases that have only one known cure, thank god in the "public domain"). This scares me?
Of course, if you're making a case against corporations being able to own or transfer such rights, then I'm right there with you.
quoth the poster:
... or a license becomes unacceptable ...
please explain to the class the meaning of the word "license" in a completely government-free economy? and exactly how it would be enforced? the [U.S.|World] does not operate as a free-market economy, nor did it ever, nor is it ever intended to.
come on - no one (re: very few) really wants the government out of the economy; people just want to make sure that the government benefits them more than the other guy.
copyright, patent, trademark - all those are 100% dependent upon the government, unless you want corporations building their own jails and private armies. in a truly givernment-free society, only one person would need to pay $20 for the latest Britney Spears cd; everyone else would pay whatever it cost the first person (or second, etc.) to rip it.
He's talking about font anti-aliasing, not graphics anti-aliasing, and there's a world of difference.
Graphics anti-aliasing is photoshop/gimp anti-aliasing a graphic to remove jaggies. This is certainly a good thing, but it's only manipulating pixels in an image file.
The other is the OS/window manager/whatever anti-aliasing all the text on the screen in real time. Again, this is not manipulating stored file data, only display-time screen pixels.
Furthermore, he's right - at high-rez, anti-aliased fonts are harder to read. The oh-so-popular 8-point navigation text on many web sites turns into a gray mess if it's anti-aliased at 1600x1200.
Sure, you're right too, but only about anti-aliased graphics, and I don't think anyone's going to argue that point.
You are, of course, perfectly correct. That company also has the right to sue you into the stone ages to shut you up. Of course the law would be on your side, and you might win in the end, but it certainly wouldn't be a pleasant battle.
Given the choice, I'd prefer my first line of defense to be my anonymity, not my lawyer.
sure humans influence the weather - the government does it all the time. what do you think a trailer park is? a tornado-trap!
;)
a little-known program started in the 50's to place trailer parks around all major cities, thus shielding the cities from tornadoes.
don't tell me you never thought of it
Windoze recovery CDs restore a disk image complete with drivers, apps, and branding. It's not just as simple as you suggest.
Amen to that. I've lived in many countries, and bought Lego-alikes in a few of them, and aways been disappointed. The crap I bought in India didn't even fit with itself, much less real Lego.
Real Lego is incredibly durable, and made with amazing precision. Lego my parents bought 25 years ago still fits perfectly with brand-new sets. Find me any other toy that's this cool, this durable, and this backwards-compatible for less money.
Anyone here remember the low-poly love doll competition? Challenge: using 1k triangles or less, build a ... um ... female love doll model: an unabashedly sexist objectification. All the entries were anonymous until voting was finished, and voting was on posed models alone - no skins.
Some of the entries (about 60, IIRC) were wretched, and many were from professionals, but Paul Steed's model won with 801 votes, compared with 344 for 2nd place. After reviewing the other entries, his looks all the more amazing. Have any of you ever tried to build a believable wire-frame from scratch? My god, it's hard.
The fact that id fired Steed for (ostensibly) political reasons (or any reason at all other than, say, keying John's F50) does not speak well of them. I know, I know, Kevin and Adrian own the company and they can do whatever the fsck they want; I also know that you need to work with people you like and "personality conflicts" are regularly cited as dismissal reasons.
None of that overshadows the fact that they fired one of the most amazing low-poly modeler/animators in the business. Their future games will suffer for it, and that makes me sad.