Game companies get exclusive licenses to things like this all the time. Is there any reason to complain about this other than that the company that got the license is MS?
For example in C++ you have objects which are suppose to be seperate and thought of only through interfaces. Well it just never really works like that. You have public members which other modules can read and write, you got the "friend" keyword hack which lets other special objects access members of a certain object. All these things break all the rules of OO programming and modular programming in general.
If object A is dependant on a certain public member always being available from object B and suddenly the variable is assigned different types of values or used in another way, the object A will have to be changed to accept the changes in B. Well this synchonization never usually happens unless there is a lot of documentation written (We all know coders love to write documenation!) or it finally produces a bug and you whip out the debugger and start tracing...
This is just one of the many examples. I would like to see a language where objects are forced to be seperate and truly defined only by their interfaces. C++ almost had it until it introduced all the hack keywords which broke everything.
A truly modular lanuage would be great for a Open Source language because people could work on different objects without having to worry about the internal details being compatible with another coder's object. This would allow parrallel coding to work more efficiently. Also when people join on Open Source projects, they don't have to time to go through all the code in the project to see how things work, they only have the time to look at a few sections, understand those and start coding. With enforced modular code, the new coder will only have to look at interfaces to understand how a program works.
I live in an apartment and sometimes people can get in past the front door and come up to my apartment door. I've had people call me on their cellphone from there to tell me they were waiting out front, rather than using the doorbell at the front door like everyone else.
If a company takes your software and says they own it, then when they give it to a customer they have to take responsiblity if anything goes wrong with the software. So if they demand your software you wrote, give them a really buggy poorly functioning version of the software. Then when a customer runs it and it trashes their system, it will be the companies fault since they own it, not you. Trashing your own software may sound bad but if a company demands they own it, you won't get any credit for your software and it won't have anything to do with your name anymore.
While this may not be a practical solution it would be a fun one. =)
At least that's what I find. Has anyone played the game Operation Flashpoint? You'll be walking along on a nice sunny day with birds chirping all around you with your buddies. Then one of your friends head explodes in a cloud of red from an enemy sniper that you have no idea about. The game seems more of a reality check about war and violence. After playing it a few times you begin to get more hesitant about running into combat or firing at an enemy and getting shot back at since all it takes is one bullet to do you in. In Quake you run out into people and start firing away, in Flashpoint you hide behind a bush for an hour hoping the enemy patrol won't notice you...
... then with no medium for the light to go through and slow it down, we will have true light speed data transmissions. You can't go any faster than that (at least not with current day theories.)
Because the warhead would be coming from space, it would achieve enormous speed and kinetic energy on its way down -- so great that it wouldn't even need explosives on board to generate the destructive power of a small nuclear device, according to Dailey's presentation. As proof, he pointed out the huge craters that have been created by relatively small meteors.
Has anyone ever read the book The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein? In the book the people living on the moon fight for their independance by using the moons potential energy difference between the earth to drop rocks on the earth. Funny what those rocks will do when they impact at high speed...
Which brings up another question. A rock colliding with the earth can create a near nuclear explosion. So with the current ban on nuclear weapons, will we have a ban on dropping rocks from outerspace on other countries?
Just wait until you (or some of you) goto a college that accepts people from all over the world. You don't realize how open other cultures are to sex until you start mixing into a group of people from other countries. I'm from the US and when I first went to college I was kinda suprised as to how open so many people from other countries were about sex. Most people from other countries would willingly talk about sex out in the open on the campus while Americans would shy away from and walk around these groups of people to avoid the conversation.
Another thing I don't understand. Why is sex considered such a bad thing that everyone wants you to avoid? But then when you hit 21, sex is suddenly a great thing you should be doing. It's like telling kids 2+2=4, then when they turn 21 2+2 really equals 6.
Actually we did ask the game developers. We did a survey that took results from developers and random programmers on the internet together. We also got emails from the developers themselves. Most developers believe the time/money put into creating and supporting an application for another os besides windows is not cost effective. One of the suggestions I had for the support problem was to only support the application on Windows, then release a non-supported version for other OS's. You get the extra market share and most Linux users can figure out how to install and setup their programs themselves like they have been doing for years.
I did a large research project for my college on Cross Platform Software Design. The goal was to find out why companies weren't creating games and applications to run on multiple platforms. Developers were running into a lot of different code level problems and one of our conclusions was that the SDL library handled almost all of these coding problems in making a portable game. The project can be found online in.pdf format here.
As a side note, the biggest problem people had in creating a cross platform game is supporting non-Windows operating systems.
An expensive cure is better than no cure. Besides, there are corporations (yes I said corporations) in other countries that are breaking patents that other corporations have on cures for the aids virus so that they can produce a cheaper cure.
X-Coding, a new tv series to be shown on the FOX tv network. Watch has hackers code under Xtreme conditions like sleep deprivation and consitent badgering from parents to go outside!! Sweat in your seat as you watch these Xtreme coders write scripts that ping flood and create various other dos attacks against their enemies!!!
X-Coding will be shown at 9:00pm, right after X-DataEntry and X-MSCE-Testing.
Better yet, run your own mail server. Accept all incoming mail, then when one of the messages is from a lawyer, send a fake bounce back message saying your address doesn't exist.
What about not putting your email address on the page? Then they can't figure out how to send you the nasty-gram that you can't use their trademark. Put on your webpage that if you want people to contact you, they need to put a message in a certain newsgroup on a certain news server or something. Most legal department people are going to have no clue how to do that. Problem is, some of the other people that need to contact your page might not either.
Slashdot needs to start interviewing these random MS bashers:
Slash: Is Microsoft really using GPL source?
Bob:Of course.
Slash:How do you know?
B:Because they are Microsoft and MS is evil.
Slash:Of course, why didn't we think of that. We use that logic on all our Microsoft stories we post.
Slash:Is Microsoft bad also?
B:Microsoft is very bad.
Slash:Is it true all Microsoft employees camp in Counter Strike?
B:Yes, they are all a bunch of camping lamers.
Slash:What else can you tell us about Microsoft?
B:They assasinate people from other software companies if they don't sell out to them.
Slash:Wow, that's pretty deep stuff. How could you possibly know that and still be alive?
B:Zcool42985628546756 from #warez4free told me so.
Well there you go, investigative journalism at its best.
Although not directly related. If Linux was easy to use and had a good user interface that everyone could understand, then more people would use Linux. If more people use Linux then more companies will make applications for Linux. I know many Linux users think "Well it works for me, I don't care about anyone else." Well unless everyone else starts using linux, companies are not going to see enough consumers using Linux that will buy their products.
More Linux users == bigger market share for Linux == more Linux users to buy Linux applications == more applications for Linux.
You can use a patent to prevent another company from patenting your idea. Also if a company uses your idea in a commercial application you can sue them. You don't have to make them pay you if it's your patent. I think patenting Open Source software would be good in that you can force people to only make free software with your idea, or open source software. Just think of it as an extension to the GPL. Right now the GPL forces people that use your software to use it in a free Open Source project. A patent on your software will just enforce this idea even more.
For example you could patent say, the binary search algorithm. Then force everyone that uses it to either pay a huge exorbitant fee they can't afford, or open the source of the product for free.
If Linux didn't have so many different distros with different configuration files, different GUI libraries, different window managers.. it would make the job of developing and installing programs on all platforms much easier. How many times do you have to download and install a bunch of extra libraries before you can install the main program you wanted to use? This is one of the things that makes MS-Windows so easy to use to install applications. All the basic libraries applications need are already on the system. Linux on the other hand has so many different libraries competeing with each other that no distro can fit every single one on the same distro and so users have to go around downloading all these libraries just to install a simple program.
This brings up another point. With Open Source, libraries shouldn't be fighting against each other. All developers have access to the libraries code so they should work together and make one very good library. If they go off and make their own library then we end up with a bunch of poor libraries that are pretty much the same. Open Source means people should be working together, yet for most applications this isn't true.
If you're worried about where you are going to get your product to sell and don't have any reliable source to get the product from, then this probably isn't a safe business. As far as I know no one makes Atari carts anymore so you are not going to be garaunteed a source of atari carts from anyone. What happens in the middle of your business when you run out of carts?
Right now there is a limited set of cartriges out in the world. Everytime someone breaks one, looses one, stuffs one in the attic, the supply goes down, and down is the only direction the supply will ever go in. So the longer your business stays up, the harder it will be to get cartriges.
You could make your own cartriges if you had the right hardware, but who knows what kind of legal implications this will get you into. Companies are not making these catriges anymore, yet they still feel the need that they should get money for their sales.
This trial isn't about morals or ethics, it's about competition in the computer industry so that consumers can get better products. It's about economics, the foundation of a capitalist country! MS isn't getting split up because they look like a big bad evil company. They are getting split up because they are disallowing competition in the market with their barriers of entry to the computer market. The government is doing their job in trying to allow more companies to entry the computer market. America is not a true capitalist country, we still have the goverment to come in and try to solve business problems.
Without the goverment, how else are you going to end a monopoly? The only other way is through educating the consumer about his/her other choices, but this is difficult to near impossible to do. This is why we have the goverment interfere with our economics.
It all comes down to the consumers. You can't always rely on the government to make everyone happy, or a few lawyers. Consumers need to be educated about economics and the negative economic impact these patents have on companies. The consumer is the one that suffers from these patents and bad business practices so if the consumer was educated maybe they would boycott these places or refuse to buy a companies product. Most consumers don't realize that competition is what makes a better product. Most people figure the more money you give to a company, the better the product that will come out of it.
For example Linux. Most consumers have no idea what Linux is or what it can do, so they continue to buy Windows products. They continue to support a monopoly even though they have no idea MS is a monopoly. Most people figure since Microsoft has the most money and Bill Gates is the richest man in the world, then they must be creating the best products in the world.
Competition is what makes a better market. Consumers need to realize this and stop supporting the monopolies and other dominant companies.
...that can be found here. It's a college research project (by me and another person actually) that studies cross platform design, current software used for cross platform design and solutions to problems and design issues. It's a 90 page.pdf file. It also includes a survey on cross platform design and it's results. We did the research project in order to try and find out why many commercial companies do not create cross platform software, and to find solutions to the problems they claim. It is an interesting read I think.
Slashdot Mirror
Game companies get exclusive licenses to things like this all the time. Is there any reason to complain about this other than that the company that got the license is MS?
For example in C++ you have objects which are suppose to be seperate and thought of only through interfaces. Well it just never really works like that. You have public members which other modules can read and write, you got the "friend" keyword hack which lets other special objects access members of a certain object. All these things break all the rules of OO programming and modular programming in general.
If object A is dependant on a certain public member always being available from object B and suddenly the variable is assigned different types of values or used in another way, the object A will have to be changed to accept the changes in B. Well this synchonization never usually happens unless there is a lot of documentation written (We all know coders love to write documenation!) or it finally produces a bug and you whip out the debugger and start tracing...
This is just one of the many examples. I would like to see a language where objects are forced to be seperate and truly defined only by their interfaces. C++ almost had it until it introduced all the hack keywords which broke everything.
A truly modular lanuage would be great for a Open Source language because people could work on different objects without having to worry about the internal details being compatible with another coder's object. This would allow parrallel coding to work more efficiently. Also when people join on Open Source projects, they don't have to time to go through all the code in the project to see how things work, they only have the time to look at a few sections, understand those and start coding. With enforced modular code, the new coder will only have to look at interfaces to understand how a program works.
Modularity is the key to making Open Source work.
I live in an apartment and sometimes people can get in past the front door and come up to my apartment door. I've had people call me on their cellphone from there to tell me they were waiting out front, rather than using the doorbell at the front door like everyone else.
If a company takes your software and says they own it, then when they give it to a customer they have to take responsiblity if anything goes wrong with the software. So if they demand your software you wrote, give them a really buggy poorly functioning version of the software. Then when a customer runs it and it trashes their system, it will be the companies fault since they own it, not you. Trashing your own software may sound bad but if a company demands they own it, you won't get any credit for your software and it won't have anything to do with your name anymore.
While this may not be a practical solution it would be a fun one. =)
At least that's what I find. Has anyone played the game Operation Flashpoint? You'll be walking along on a nice sunny day with birds chirping all around you with your buddies. Then one of your friends head explodes in a cloud of red from an enemy sniper that you have no idea about. The game seems more of a reality check about war and violence. After playing it a few times you begin to get more hesitant about running into combat or firing at an enemy and getting shot back at since all it takes is one bullet to do you in. In Quake you run out into people and start firing away, in Flashpoint you hide behind a bush for an hour hoping the enemy patrol won't notice you...
... then with no medium for the light to go through and slow it down, we will have true light speed data transmissions. You can't go any faster than that (at least not with current day theories.)
From the article:
Because the warhead would be coming from space, it would achieve enormous speed and kinetic energy on its way down -- so great that it wouldn't even need explosives on board to generate the destructive power of a small nuclear device, according to Dailey's presentation. As proof, he pointed out the huge craters that have been created by relatively small meteors.
Has anyone ever read the book The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein? In the book the people living on the moon fight for their independance by using the moons potential energy difference between the earth to drop rocks on the earth. Funny what those rocks will do when they impact at high speed...
Which brings up another question. A rock colliding with the earth can create a near nuclear explosion. So with the current ban on nuclear weapons, will we have a ban on dropping rocks from outerspace on other countries?
Just wait until you (or some of you) goto a college that accepts people from all over the world. You don't realize how open other cultures are to sex until you start mixing into a group of people from other countries. I'm from the US and when I first went to college I was kinda suprised as to how open so many people from other countries were about sex. Most people from other countries would willingly talk about sex out in the open on the campus while Americans would shy away from and walk around these groups of people to avoid the conversation.
Another thing I don't understand. Why is sex considered such a bad thing that everyone wants you to avoid? But then when you hit 21, sex is suddenly a great thing you should be doing. It's like telling kids 2+2=4, then when they turn 21 2+2 really equals 6.
I'm posting this again as a non-AC
Actually we did ask the game developers. We did a survey that took results from developers and random programmers on the internet together. We also got emails from the developers themselves. Most developers believe the time/money put into creating and supporting an application for another os besides windows is not cost effective. One of the suggestions I had for the support problem was to only support the application on Windows, then release a non-supported version for other OS's. You get the extra market share and most Linux users can figure out how to install and setup their programs themselves like they have been doing for years.
I did a large research project for my college on Cross Platform Software Design. The goal was to find out why companies weren't creating games and applications to run on multiple platforms. Developers were running into a lot of different code level problems and one of our conclusions was that the SDL library handled almost all of these coding problems in making a portable game. The project can be found online in .pdf format here.
As a side note, the biggest problem people had in creating a cross platform game is supporting non-Windows operating systems.
An expensive cure is better than no cure. Besides, there are corporations (yes I said corporations) in other countries that are breaking patents that other corporations have on cures for the aids virus so that they can produce a cheaper cure.
X-Coding, a new tv series to be shown on the FOX tv network. Watch has hackers code under Xtreme conditions like sleep deprivation and consitent badgering from parents to go outside!! Sweat in your seat as you watch these Xtreme coders write scripts that ping flood and create various other dos attacks against their enemies!!!
X-Coding will be shown at 9:00pm, right after X-DataEntry and X-MSCE-Testing.
Better yet, run your own mail server. Accept all incoming mail, then when one of the messages is from a lawyer, send a fake bounce back message saying your address doesn't exist.
What about not putting your email address on the page? Then they can't figure out how to send you the nasty-gram that you can't use their trademark. Put on your webpage that if you want people to contact you, they need to put a message in a certain newsgroup on a certain news server or something. Most legal department people are going to have no clue how to do that. Problem is, some of the other people that need to contact your page might not either.
Slashdot needs to start interviewing these random MS bashers:
Slash: Is Microsoft really using GPL source?
Bob:Of course.
Slash:How do you know?
B:Because they are Microsoft and MS is evil.
Slash:Of course, why didn't we think of that. We use that logic on all our Microsoft stories we post.
Slash:Is Microsoft bad also?
B:Microsoft is very bad.
Slash:Is it true all Microsoft employees camp in Counter Strike?
B:Yes, they are all a bunch of camping lamers.
Slash:What else can you tell us about Microsoft?
B:They assasinate people from other software companies if they don't sell out to them.
Slash:Wow, that's pretty deep stuff. How could you possibly know that and still be alive?
B:Zcool42985628546756 from #warez4free told me so.
Well there you go, investigative journalism at its best.
Although not directly related. If Linux was easy to use and had a good user interface that everyone could understand, then more people would use Linux. If more people use Linux then more companies will make applications for Linux. I know many Linux users think "Well it works for me, I don't care about anyone else." Well unless everyone else starts using linux, companies are not going to see enough consumers using Linux that will buy their products.
More Linux users == bigger market share for Linux == more Linux users to buy Linux applications == more applications for Linux.
You can use a patent to prevent another company from patenting your idea. Also if a company uses your idea in a commercial application you can sue them. You don't have to make them pay you if it's your patent. I think patenting Open Source software would be good in that you can force people to only make free software with your idea, or open source software. Just think of it as an extension to the GPL. Right now the GPL forces people that use your software to use it in a free Open Source project. A patent on your software will just enforce this idea even more.
For example you could patent say, the binary search algorithm. Then force everyone that uses it to either pay a huge exorbitant fee they can't afford, or open the source of the product for free.
Oh no... someone said Money in the same paragraph as Linux, someone better prepare for the onslaught of free software fanatics from Slashdot...
...who are also going to try and mod this down.
Oh wait, it's not April, the RIAA really is just dumb.
If Linux didn't have so many different distros with different configuration files, different GUI libraries, different window managers.. it would make the job of developing and installing programs on all platforms much easier. How many times do you have to download and install a bunch of extra libraries before you can install the main program you wanted to use? This is one of the things that makes MS-Windows so easy to use to install applications. All the basic libraries applications need are already on the system. Linux on the other hand has so many different libraries competeing with each other that no distro can fit every single one on the same distro and so users have to go around downloading all these libraries just to install a simple program.
This brings up another point. With Open Source, libraries shouldn't be fighting against each other. All developers have access to the libraries code so they should work together and make one very good library. If they go off and make their own library then we end up with a bunch of poor libraries that are pretty much the same. Open Source means people should be working together, yet for most applications this isn't true.
If you're worried about where you are going to get your product to sell and don't have any reliable source to get the product from, then this probably isn't a safe business. As far as I know no one makes Atari carts anymore so you are not going to be garaunteed a source of atari carts from anyone. What happens in the middle of your business when you run out of carts?
Right now there is a limited set of cartriges out in the world. Everytime someone breaks one, looses one, stuffs one in the attic, the supply goes down, and down is the only direction the supply will ever go in. So the longer your business stays up, the harder it will be to get cartriges.
You could make your own cartriges if you had the right hardware, but who knows what kind of legal implications this will get you into. Companies are not making these catriges anymore, yet they still feel the need that they should get money for their sales.
This trial isn't about morals or ethics, it's about competition in the computer industry so that consumers can get better products. It's about economics, the foundation of a capitalist country! MS isn't getting split up because they look like a big bad evil company. They are getting split up because they are disallowing competition in the market with their barriers of entry to the computer market. The government is doing their job in trying to allow more companies to entry the computer market. America is not a true capitalist country, we still have the goverment to come in and try to solve business problems.
Without the goverment, how else are you going to end a monopoly? The only other way is through educating the consumer about his/her other choices, but this is difficult to near impossible to do. This is why we have the goverment interfere with our economics.
It all comes down to the consumers. You can't always rely on the government to make everyone happy, or a few lawyers. Consumers need to be educated about economics and the negative economic impact these patents have on companies. The consumer is the one that suffers from these patents and bad business practices so if the consumer was educated maybe they would boycott these places or refuse to buy a companies product. Most consumers don't realize that competition is what makes a better product. Most people figure the more money you give to a company, the better the product that will come out of it.
For example Linux. Most consumers have no idea what Linux is or what it can do, so they continue to buy Windows products. They continue to support a monopoly even though they have no idea MS is a monopoly. Most people figure since Microsoft has the most money and Bill Gates is the richest man in the world, then they must be creating the best products in the world.
Competition is what makes a better market. Consumers need to realize this and stop supporting the monopolies and other dominant companies.
...that can be found here. It's a college research project (by me and another person actually) that studies cross platform design, current software used for cross platform design and solutions to problems and design issues. It's a 90 page .pdf file. It also includes a survey on cross platform design and it's results. We did the research project in order to try and find out why many commercial companies do not create cross platform software, and to find solutions to the problems they claim. It is an interesting read I think.
P.S. Currently this is the next to final draft.