Although Microsoft now owns the whole of Bungie, as part of the deal, Take 2 Interactive (who used to own 19.9% of Bungie) have acquired all the rights to Oni and Myth, as well as the rights to build two titles based on the Halo engine.
Bungie have also been quoted as saying that they will remain autonomous within MS, and may continue to develop titles for non-MS platform (e.g. Mac), although it remains to see how long that lasts. I suspect that Mac titles may be allowed to continue for a little while, but PlayStation 2 titles will be knocked right on the head in favour of X-Box.
Hmm, that's around 25 miles away from the surface of the Earth. And they plan on surviving the flight and coming back down to this ever-increasing hell-hole of a planet because...? If I were them, I'd strap a live webcam to myself and see how close I could get to the Sun before my port80 got FUBAR.
;-)
Crusoe Schmuso (Yeah, I know I'll get flamed...)
on
RLX Gets Denser
·
· Score: 4, Redundant
Hemos:...the Transmeta Crusoe 5800 chip is pretty cool...
No, it really isn't. As much as we all wanted Transmeta to kick some royal ass in the chip market, they haven't, and may throw in the towel very soon. Here's a quote from an article posted here on Slashdot less than a week ago, I believe:
Meanwhile, Transmeta was courting Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. to produce its next chip, the Crusoe 5800. IBM had been making the chips, but Transmeta wanted a lower-cost manufacturer. In February, Transmeta struck an exclusive deal with TSMC.
But the switch didn't end the delays. Samples of the 5800 chip that Toshiba received had problems, which seemed destined to push the project to November and prompted Toshiba to kill the notebook for the U.S. market.
"We'd get products and then find an anomaly. You can put in a workaround but the only way to fix it is through silicon," said Steve Andler, Toshiba's vice president of marketing.
Before he was forced out last month, Transmeta CEO Mark Allen said the company was still completing "long-term operating life" tests on the 5800.
Sources familiar with the situation said that some of the problems stemmed from the complex design of the chip as well as from Transmeta's testing procedures, which were not weeding out inadequate chips but were giving the company an early, erroneous impression of success. Others, however, blamed TSMC's manufacturing processes. Early on, many of the faulty chips consistently came from the same section of the wafer, which sources said indicated a manufacturing flaw.
Normally tight-lipped TSMC blames the 5800's design.
So, Hemos, I'm not sure if you have actual experience with a 5X00 Transmeta chip, but from what I read, they're nothing to brag about.
I'm as pissed-off about this as any of you, but the truth is the truth.
Re:God damned MP3 anti-pirate busybodies...
on
80 Gig MP3 Player
·
· Score: 1
Kmail lets you select which radix (base) to use when attaching files. If you're into the whole *nix scene, you should definitely give Kmail a try.
Re:God damned MP3 anti-pirate busybodies...
on
80 Gig MP3 Player
·
· Score: 2
I'm curious how well emailing your 256kbps mp3s to friends works. Those files must be almost 10MB for a 5 minute song. Most people with email accounts probably have a quota of less than 7MB, if that.
Information About Eclipse
on
Java IDEs?
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Eclipse is an IDE framework written in Java. It is very extensible; all support for editors, compilers, debuggers, and other tools, etc is provided as plugins.
Although it's written in Java, it can be used to develop programs written in other languages; there are already proof-of-concept plugins for C (using gcc) and make.
It is being developed by OTI, an IBM subsidiary who did Visual Age Smalltalk and Visual Age Java. These people have a lot of experience building IDEs.
Currently you can download the basic framework and a set of plugins that let you edit, compile and debug Java applications --- a pretty decent Java IDE. (The very-context-sensitive code-completion is pretty nice. It also has a great feature where it compiles the code every time you save and puts unobtrusive error icons at every line with an error --- an excellent way to keep your source error-free as you go, without getting in your face.) You get the source but currently not under a true open source license. The OTI people promise that they will be moving to a true open source license soon.
This is a big initiative within IBM. The WebSphere Workbench product is already based on Eclipse. Lots of people within IBM, including IBM Research, and several other companies are building new development tools as Eclipse plugins.
One slightly weird thing about Eclipse is that it doesn't use Swing. Instead it has its own toolkit called SWT, which is designed to expose a single cross-platform API but is reimplemented using native widgets on each platform. You can download versions for Win32 and Motif but in the newsgroups some OTI people said that they're working on a Gtk port.
We need to be able to export our damn documents, too. People often times forget about this, and much of the consequent effort is directed at giving _us_ the ability to read their Office(tm) documents. We're doing OK, though -- S.O. 6beta is sweet.
You guys should check out Gobe's import/export filters. They actually developed an API that anyone can write to, so if they port the API and the filters over to Our Favorite OS(tm), which they are apparently going to do, then any application can choose to just write to that API and will immediately be able to save or write in any of the proprietary formats that Gobe supports.
I have two degrees, one in CS and one in Archaeology. CS isn't what I want my career to be in, but I can take my computer skills and development knowledge and apply it to archaeology problems.
Yeah, and I can take my engineering degree and apply it to 18th-century western European literature.
This is a strange coincidence because I just found an emulator for the Gameboy Advance that runs in a few different operating systems. It's still available and the folks have yet to be sued (at least that's what I ascertain from their website). The URL is http://boycottadvance.emuunlim.com
From their site -- BoycottAdvance is a free/legal/portable emulator for the Gameboy Advance handheld by Nintendo.
This emulator does not contain any copyrighted materials (BIOS or ROMs).
It features an ARM debugger/emulator with graphic features trying to reproduce the innerworkings of the videogame console. As for now, the emulator run some demos or commercial games with a few glitches.
It is a free tool for people who want to develop some nice demos.
Please buy the official Development Kit from Nintendo if you want to write more complete games.
If you use the emulator to play a game on your computer, be sure to own the original cartridge.
CmdrTaco (from `cmdrtaco.net'): "I plan to complain on Slashdot that Disney, AOL-TW, and Fox -- coincidentally the companies who will be making money off Monsters, Inc., Harry Potter, and Star Wars Episode II, respectively -- are using their vast monetary resources to purchase laws in the United States Congress. The irony of blasting these movie studios repeatedly on my website and then in the same breath praising and promoting their movies is apparently totally lost on me."
What should happen if OSI software supports plugins (note patented software is just a special case of this) and external scripting languages which themselves are not OSI? You cannot insist that they follow the same licensing. Take a look at GE Medical which embeds Tcl/TK within their medical instruments. I doubt whether they will kindly open up their IP.
Also if the software goes kaput (or bought out) for any reason, what should the contrib community code licensing do (considering the legal entity holding the original OSI does not exist). If I was a Gate-2.0 I would conceive of an ingeneous bait and switch tactic where the original stuff was OSI but then deliberately strangle the legal holder and change the terms of the now rootless software as individuals with forks won't have the resources to compete.
Can you just imagine having to put your command line args in RPN?
MyCalc%> mv file1 file2
error: argument missing
MyCalc%> file1 file2 mv
MyCalc%> cat/etc/passwd | grep fascdot | cut -d: -f7
cut: error: argument "|" is invalid
(I was going to re-write that in RPN, but I can't even figure out how pipelining would work--so forget it)
I think the key things that seperates GNOME, KDE, and CDE (and to a certain extent, OpenWindows and HP VUE) from the rest of the window managers is the concept of underlying services that facilitate communication between apps. In Windows, it's OLE (or COM or whatever they call it nowdays). In CDE, it's ToolTalk; in GNOME, it's CORBA (I don't know what it is in KDE).
You see this underlying communication in various ways: the most obvious is Drag-and-Drop between apps (or the desktop and apps). It also shows up in inter-app communication with documents (think Excel spreadsheet embeded in a Word Doc).
I'd almost consider WindowMaker an environment. It has most of the hooks that Enlightenment and Kwm have for their underlying services, and can work nicely in a GNOMEish or KDEish setup.
I think when people say "environment", they're referring to the whole shebang: backend libraries and daemons that provide Inter-app communication, a Window manager that uses those backend facilities, and apps that also are aware of the available functionality. Integration is the key here: all the parts need to be aware (and use) eachother, and not just be able to function next to eachother.
Here's why the mainstays for Linux development have ground to a halt:
1) Nobody is willing to work on something, pouring hours upon hours of work into it, only to have someone working in Company X take their code, and make a living off of tweaking it. Suppose you're writing a windowmanager for Linux. In order for your windowmanager to succeed, it probably has to be GPL in order for it to really catch on. And if its GPL, surprise-surprise, there are employees of parasitic companies like VA Linux Systems who make a nice living playing with your code. No one in their right mind is going to do something for free, working side by side next to someone who is getting paid to do the same. By simple virtue of the fact that parasitic GPL companies exist, you're effectively letting someone else make the money off your work by making it GPL. This is why companies who capitalize on Linux software development are a (tm) Bad Thing, because they assert a choking influence over the entire community. It stops becoming an exercise in fun, and rapidly becomes an exercise in profiteering.
2) Nobody is willing to think about doing anything different, more useful, or more ergonomic right now. The main driving force driving Linux UI development is "lets make it look like Windows!" which is a horrendously bad move. Instead of giving Linux its own face, its own appeal, and its own distinct look, we're playing Poor-Man's Explorer with X11. Instead of putting our own talents to work, making something useful for us, we're playing second fiddle to a third rate design by copying it.
Now, rather than purely bitching, here's what you can do about it:
Start at the ground up. Get ahold of the source of a weak windowmanager like fvwm, that has all the basic guts you need to work from. Ask yourself what makes sense to you as a user, NOT what makes sense because you've seen the same thing in Windows. Give Linux its own look. Try to avoid imitating other platforms. Build it because it makes sense to build, not because "Windows has it". The sheer number of things that Windows has wrong with its UI would require a completely separate article to discuss them in detail. Think about how to represent things differently. Is there a better way to represent the same information? Do you really want an OS that resembles a browser? Think, ask, and move. Learn, modify, and repeat.
This book is great, man. It's back to Columbia Internet, "the friendliest, hardest-working, and most neurotic little Internet Service Provider in the world," for the third installment from the hit online comic, User Friendly. The cast: Quake-obsessed techies, self-absorbed sales staff, well-meaning execs, and assorted almost-humans. The background: too little office space, warring operating systems, and eternally clueless customers.
Tag along as geeks go camping, Mike finds a new use for silly putty, and Stef decides to beef up his Quake skills with the Acme Forced-Feedback Enemy-Denial Smackdown Ergonomic Game Chair.
If you've read the first two User Friendly editions from O'Reilly, you don't need an introduction to Greg, Jeff, Miranda, the Dust Puppy and the others. But if you haven't, welcome to the world of the hard-core geek, where humor--especially at one's own foibles--can be a survival skill. Since this is true of most work environments, chances are you won't have to know Unix or be able to log in as "root" in order to get the joke.
Illiad's community is truly global--the comic's one-million-plus readers log on from Israel, Brazil, Iceland, New Zealand, and Greece, among other far-flung locations. All kinds of people seem drawn to the strip-- from 8-year-old girls to 81-year-old women--a large, diverse, and very loyal community.
Why is everybody saying Pixar=Steve Jobs ?
Pixar is John Lasseter, that's all.
He's an artist, and I love all that he has done,
from the very beginning.
I think one of the first 3D computer rendered image that Pixar made and got used in a movie was in "Young Sherlock Holmes", but I am not sure about this...
By the way, if you like short animation movies you can also
go to Aardman [aardman.com], and enjoy some movies from the makers of Chicken Run !
Um, if you're interested in networked applications involving 3D graphics, such as most modern games (including MMORPGS), you might want to check out Verse.
Briefly, Verse is a system (network protocol, client library, and a lightweight server) to make development of such applications easier. It's based on cool tech (such as subdivision surfaces), almost completely free and open (we use GPL, LGPL and BSD licenses), and best of all: not vapor!
Verse has been under development by two full-time developers for over 20 months, so we sure have code. If this sounds interesting, swing by the above SourceForge page and take a look. Thanks.
This is Bayley at the peak of his powers, barkingly brilliant. The thought experiments he weaves into a mosaic of energetic stories works its way to you like Borges on speed, a strange hybrid of Rudy Rucker, Italo Calvino and A. E. van Vogt - yet the core of it remains inescapably Bayley's own brand of strange sf. It's more like speculative cosmology, except Freeman Dyson would never have come up with ideas like Bayley's.
Like, what if the universe was completely filled with rock? And each of us is living in a little bubble in the rock? In other words, the basic premise of the story is impossible because the universe is not full of rock. But he's like, "what if it was?" And he goes on to describe attempts at space travel in this universe, the problems that arise, and ends the whole shebang with an orgasmic zen buzz to your frontal lobes. Wow. And then there more, each story going off on wild tangents into space and time and the lack thereof. If you think you're up for the ride, go for it. But be warned - this is NOT extrapolative hard sf, this is utterly original speculative stuff that will mess with your notions of reality and boggle the mind.
Passport is definitely an easier solution for consumers than any alternative yet presented. Having all your information stored in one central location is definitely better than having all your information stored all over the place. Microsoft also has a lot more motivation and resources to protect it than Joe Random Vendor.
The problem is that they haven't had any success protecting it anyway. To be completely fair, neither has anyone else. The other difficulty is that although I would trust MS rather than JRV to protect my data, the necessity of distribution and interaction opens up a whole new class of security holes that no one has even thought of before.
The unfortunate truth is that right now the only way to protect your privacy online is not to give out any information, and that Passport will do exactly nothing to remedy this situation.
Slashdot Mirror
Although Microsoft now owns the whole of Bungie, as part of the deal, Take 2 Interactive (who used to own 19.9% of Bungie) have acquired all the rights to Oni and Myth, as well as the rights to build two titles based on the Halo engine.
Bungie have also been quoted as saying that they will remain autonomous within MS, and may continue to develop titles for non-MS platform (e.g. Mac), although it remains to see how long that lasts. I suspect that Mac titles may be allowed to continue for a little while, but PlayStation 2 titles will be knocked right on the head in favour of X-Box.
Cool, now I get why they called it "Windows 1.0"! (many many many failures).
Queer.
Hmm, that's around 25 miles away from the surface of the Earth. And they plan on surviving the flight and coming back down to this ever-increasing hell-hole of a planet because...? If I were them, I'd strap a live webcam to myself and see how close I could get to the Sun before my port80 got FUBAR.
;-)
No, it really isn't. As much as we all wanted Transmeta to kick some royal ass in the chip market, they haven't, and may throw in the towel very soon. Here's a quote from an article posted here on Slashdot less than a week ago, I believe:
Meanwhile, Transmeta was courting Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. to produce its next chip, the Crusoe 5800. IBM had been making the chips, but Transmeta wanted a lower-cost manufacturer. In February, Transmeta struck an exclusive deal with TSMC. But the switch didn't end the delays. Samples of the 5800 chip that Toshiba received had problems, which seemed destined to push the project to November and prompted Toshiba to kill the notebook for the U.S. market. "We'd get products and then find an anomaly. You can put in a workaround but the only way to fix it is through silicon," said Steve Andler, Toshiba's vice president of marketing. Before he was forced out last month, Transmeta CEO Mark Allen said the company was still completing "long-term operating life" tests on the 5800. Sources familiar with the situation said that some of the problems stemmed from the complex design of the chip as well as from Transmeta's testing procedures, which were not weeding out inadequate chips but were giving the company an early, erroneous impression of success. Others, however, blamed TSMC's manufacturing processes. Early on, many of the faulty chips consistently came from the same section of the wafer, which sources said indicated a manufacturing flaw. Normally tight-lipped TSMC blames the 5800's design.
So, Hemos, I'm not sure if you have actual experience with a 5X00 Transmeta chip, but from what I read, they're nothing to brag about.
I'm as pissed-off about this as any of you, but the truth is the truth.
Kmail lets you select which radix (base) to use when attaching files. If you're into the whole *nix scene, you should definitely give Kmail a try.
I'm curious how well emailing your 256kbps mp3s to friends works. Those files must be almost 10MB for a 5 minute song. Most people with email accounts probably have a quota of less than 7MB, if that.
Eclipse is an IDE framework written in Java. It is very extensible; all support for editors, compilers, debuggers, and other tools, etc is provided as plugins.
Although it's written in Java, it can be used to develop programs written in other languages; there are already proof-of-concept plugins for C (using gcc) and make.
It is being developed by OTI, an IBM subsidiary who did Visual Age Smalltalk and Visual Age Java. These people have a lot of experience building IDEs.
Currently you can download the basic framework and a set of plugins that let you edit, compile and debug Java applications --- a pretty decent Java IDE. (The very-context-sensitive code-completion is pretty nice. It also has a great feature where it compiles the code every time you save and puts unobtrusive error icons at every line with an error --- an excellent way to keep your source error-free as you go, without getting in your face.) You get the source but currently not under a true open source license. The OTI people promise that they will be moving to a true open source license soon.
This is a big initiative within IBM. The WebSphere Workbench product is already based on Eclipse. Lots of people within IBM, including IBM Research, and several other companies are building new development tools as Eclipse plugins.
One slightly weird thing about Eclipse is that it doesn't use Swing. Instead it has its own toolkit called SWT, which is designed to expose a single cross-platform API but is reimplemented using native widgets on each platform. You can download versions for Win32 and Motif but in the newsgroups some OTI people said that they're working on a Gtk port.
More information at http://www.eclipse.org.
...Slash code has a variety of new improvements for users and administrators alike!
For example, the new SlashTag <goatsex>, which saves you the tedium of having to do all that HREF and HTTP:// stuff.
We need to be able to export our damn documents, too. People often times forget about this, and much of the consequent effort is directed at giving _us_ the ability to read their Office(tm) documents. We're doing OK, though -- S.O. 6beta is sweet.
You guys should check out Gobe's import/export filters. They actually developed an API that anyone can write to, so if they port the API and the filters over to Our Favorite OS(tm), which they are apparently going to do, then any application can choose to just write to that API and will immediately be able to save or write in any of the proprietary formats that Gobe supports.
I have two degrees, one in CS and one in Archaeology. CS isn't what I want my career to be in, but I can take my computer skills and development knowledge and apply it to archaeology problems.
Yeah, and I can take my engineering degree and apply it to 18th-century western European literature.
From their site -- BoycottAdvance is a free/legal/portable emulator for the Gameboy Advance handheld by Nintendo.
This emulator does not contain any copyrighted materials (BIOS or ROMs).
It features an ARM debugger/emulator with graphic features trying to reproduce the innerworkings of the videogame console.
As for now, the emulator run some demos or commercial games with a few glitches.
It is a free tool for people who want to develop some nice demos.
Please buy the official Development Kit from Nintendo if you want to write more complete games.
If you use the emulator to play a game on your computer, be sure to own the original cartridge.
CmdrTaco (from `cmdrtaco.net'): "I plan to complain on Slashdot that Disney, AOL-TW, and Fox -- coincidentally the companies who will be making money off Monsters, Inc., Harry Potter, and Star Wars Episode II, respectively -- are using their vast monetary resources to purchase laws in the United States Congress. The irony of blasting these movie studios repeatedly on my website and then in the same breath praising and promoting their movies is apparently totally lost on me."
There goes another two weeks at least of my life. Damnit, I was just kicking my Diablo II+ addiction.
What should happen if OSI software supports plugins (note patented software is just a special case of this) and external scripting languages which themselves are not OSI? You cannot insist that they follow the same licensing. Take a look at GE Medical which embeds Tcl/TK within their medical instruments. I doubt whether they will kindly open up their IP.
Also if the software goes kaput (or bought out) for any reason, what should the contrib community code licensing do (considering the legal entity holding the original OSI does not exist). If I was a Gate-2.0 I would conceive of an ingeneous bait and switch tactic where the original stuff was OSI but then deliberately strangle the legal holder and change the terms of the now rootless software as individuals with forks won't have the resources to compete.
This movie offers brainless high-tech action without interesting dialogue, characters, motivation or texture. In other words, it's sure to be popular.
Can you just imagine having to put your command line args in RPN?
/etc/passwd | grep fascdot | cut -d: -f7
MyCalc%> mv file1 file2
error: argument missing
MyCalc%> file1 file2 mv
MyCalc%> cat
cut: error: argument "|" is invalid
(I was going to re-write that in RPN, but I can't even figure out how pipelining would work--so forget it)
I think the key things that seperates GNOME, KDE, and CDE (and to a certain extent, OpenWindows and HP VUE) from the rest of the window managers is the concept of underlying services that facilitate communication between apps. In Windows, it's OLE (or COM or whatever they call it nowdays). In CDE, it's ToolTalk; in GNOME, it's CORBA (I don't know what it is in KDE).
You see this underlying communication in various ways: the most obvious is Drag-and-Drop between apps (or the desktop and apps). It also shows up in inter-app communication with documents (think Excel spreadsheet embeded in a Word Doc).
I'd almost consider WindowMaker an environment. It has most of the hooks that Enlightenment and Kwm have for their underlying services, and can work nicely in a GNOMEish or KDEish setup.
I think when people say "environment", they're referring to the whole shebang: backend libraries and daemons that provide Inter-app communication, a Window manager that uses those backend facilities, and apps that also are aware of the available functionality. Integration is the key here: all the parts need to be aware (and use) eachother, and not just be able to function next to eachother.
Here's why the mainstays for Linux development have ground to a halt:
1) Nobody is willing to work on something, pouring hours upon hours of work into it, only to have someone working in Company X take their code, and make a living off of tweaking it. Suppose you're writing a windowmanager for Linux. In order for your windowmanager to succeed, it probably has to be GPL in order for it to really catch on. And if its GPL, surprise-surprise, there are employees of parasitic companies like VA Linux Systems who make a nice living playing with your code. No one in their right mind is going to do something for free, working side by side next to someone who is getting paid to do the same. By simple virtue of the fact that parasitic GPL companies exist, you're effectively letting someone else make the money off your work by making it GPL. This is why companies who capitalize on Linux software development are a (tm) Bad Thing, because they assert a choking influence over the entire community. It stops becoming an exercise in fun, and rapidly becomes an exercise in profiteering.
2) Nobody is willing to think about doing anything different, more useful, or more ergonomic right now. The main driving force driving Linux UI development is "lets make it look like Windows!" which is a horrendously bad move. Instead of giving Linux its own face, its own appeal, and its own distinct look, we're playing Poor-Man's Explorer with X11. Instead of putting our own talents to work, making something useful for us, we're playing second fiddle to a third rate design by copying it.
Now, rather than purely bitching, here's what you can do about it:
Start at the ground up. Get ahold of the source of a weak windowmanager like fvwm, that has all the basic guts you need to work from. Ask yourself what makes sense to you as a user, NOT what makes sense because you've seen the same thing in Windows. Give Linux its own look. Try to avoid imitating other platforms. Build it because it makes sense to build, not because "Windows has it". The sheer number of things that Windows has wrong with its UI would require a completely separate article to discuss them in detail. Think about how to represent things differently. Is there a better way to represent the same information? Do you really want an OS that resembles a browser? Think, ask, and move. Learn, modify, and repeat.
This book is great, man. It's back to Columbia Internet, "the friendliest, hardest-working, and most neurotic little Internet Service Provider in the world," for the third installment from the hit online comic, User Friendly. The cast: Quake-obsessed techies, self-absorbed sales staff, well-meaning execs, and assorted almost-humans. The background: too little office space, warring operating systems, and eternally clueless customers.
Tag along as geeks go camping, Mike finds a new use for silly putty, and Stef decides to beef up his Quake skills with the Acme Forced-Feedback Enemy-Denial Smackdown Ergonomic Game Chair.
If you've read the first two User Friendly editions from O'Reilly, you don't need an introduction to Greg, Jeff, Miranda, the Dust Puppy and the others. But if you haven't, welcome to the world of the hard-core geek, where humor--especially at one's own foibles--can be a survival skill. Since this is true of most work environments, chances are you won't have to know Unix or be able to log in as "root" in order to get the joke.
Illiad's community is truly global--the comic's one-million-plus readers log on from Israel, Brazil, Iceland, New Zealand, and Greece, among other far-flung locations. All kinds of people seem drawn to the strip-- from 8-year-old girls to 81-year-old women--a large, diverse, and very loyal community.
Really nice. Thank you Pixar :)
Why is everybody saying Pixar=Steve Jobs ?
Pixar is John Lasseter, that's all.
He's an artist, and I love all that he has done,
from the very beginning.
I think one of the first 3D computer rendered image that Pixar made and got used in a movie was in "Young Sherlock Holmes", but I am not sure about this...
By the way, if you like short animation movies you can also
go to Aardman [aardman.com], and enjoy some movies from the makers of Chicken Run !
Um, if you're interested in networked applications involving 3D graphics, such as most modern games (including MMORPGS), you might want to check out Verse.
Briefly, Verse is a system (network protocol, client library, and a lightweight server) to make development of such applications easier. It's based on cool tech (such as subdivision surfaces), almost completely free and open (we use GPL, LGPL and BSD licenses), and best of all: not vapor!
Verse has been under development by two full-time developers for over 20 months, so we sure have code. If this sounds interesting, swing by the above SourceForge page and take a look. Thanks.
This is Bayley at the peak of his powers, barkingly brilliant. The thought experiments he weaves into a mosaic of energetic stories works its way to you like Borges on speed, a strange hybrid of Rudy Rucker, Italo Calvino and A. E. van Vogt - yet the core of it remains inescapably Bayley's own brand of strange sf. It's more like speculative cosmology, except Freeman Dyson would never have come up with ideas like Bayley's.
Like, what if the universe was completely filled with rock? And each of us is living in a little bubble in the rock? In other words, the basic premise of the story is impossible because the universe is not full of rock. But he's like, "what if it was?" And he goes on to describe attempts at space travel in this universe, the problems that arise, and ends the whole shebang with an orgasmic zen buzz to your frontal lobes. Wow. And then there more, each story going off on wild tangents into space and time and the lack thereof. If you think you're up for the ride, go for it. But be warned - this is NOT extrapolative hard sf, this is utterly original speculative stuff that will mess with your notions of reality and boggle the mind.
Passport is definitely an easier solution for consumers than any alternative yet presented. Having all your information stored in one central location is definitely better than having all your information stored all over the place. Microsoft also has a lot more motivation and resources to protect it than Joe Random Vendor.
The problem is that they haven't had any success protecting it anyway. To be completely fair, neither has anyone else. The other difficulty is that although I would trust MS rather than JRV to protect my data, the necessity of distribution and interaction opens up a whole new class of security holes that no one has even thought of before.
The unfortunate truth is that right now the only way to protect your privacy online is not to give out any information, and that Passport will do exactly nothing to remedy this situation.