An open-source browser cannot legally read h264 video, that is the real issue that people seem to have trouble to understand. That is why the HTML standard only mandates a format that is not impaired by any legal restrictions: Theora.
Not being able to legally play DVDs, Blurays, connect your ipod, etc. on linux are already big problems, we don't need another one.
Whether the actual person is paid or not is irrelevant. The same reviewing process should take place.
Also, I don't see anything wrong with paying someone to write articles for me. Writing articles is certainly time-consuming work that I'd rather have someone else do than myself, so that I can focus on my job. An example is if I'm part of some community around a newly created programming language X, and we need to create a good wikipedia page to advertise, demonstrate, etc. our language. The community is busy working on the runtime, what we're actually good at, so hiring someone to do that page for us seems like a good idea.
As long at it is only products, technologies, or something like and not controversial historic stuff there is no such thing as bias anyway.
This is simply open source development. There are lots of games out there made that way, and they simply suck. Probably because of the lack of a big name that puts people together.
So, how about movies? TV shows? Books? GPL'd code?
They're no different than the rest.
Actors are paid to perform, they don't earn money afterwards depending on the sales of their film. The same principle, being paid for the work rather than for the benefits earned through distributing the work, is already applied to certain programmers and book writers. This falls into what I called "orders".
Also, cinema can be considered an exhibition for film producers.
The ones that get hurt by lack of copyright are not the artists, it is the distributors. Internet already killed distribution networks anyway.
The way for musicians to make money is concerts. This is actually how they are earning their money today. Musicians don't earn much from CD sales, really.
This can be generalized to all artists, and also craftsmen and the like, fairly easily: money comes from exhibitions and orders.
OpenCL is like CUDA, but supposed to be more open along the lines of OpenGL, hence the name. The same guys who manage OpenGL (Khronos) manage OpenCL as well. You could probably use it to do graphics, but that would be stupid.
Stupid or very smart. What if you wanted to do rendering using a radically different method than the typical OpenGL stack? There are some nice vexel renderers in CUDA out there, some of which with global illumination.
His point was, if this pornographic material spreads the ideology that women are sexual objects existing only for men's pleasure, which causes women to self-censor themselves and their ideas due to peer pressure, fear, or general brain washing, then it must be banned.
If banning pornography spreads the ideology that perverts are sick and dangerous creeps, which causes perverts to self-censor themselves and their ideas due to peer pressure, fear, or general brain washing, then it must be banned.
The current price of DNS records is already quite an abuse in my opinion. The US government is making money out of this. What kind of legitimacy is there in a single country making profits out of the system?
Internet users have not become used to pirating, they're simply sharing with their friends, as they've always been doing, except they're doing this through the Internet, as it is more practical than previous media.
And sharing copyrighted material in a private circle is perfectly legal as it lies under fair use. What is illegal is distributing it to anyone, which basically only real pirates do, not regular users.
It's time content providers stop making false accusations.
Possibility A. You have a police force/army more powerful than the players. If that's the case, why aren't they defending the town? Are they just standing around, did they all sit down to lunch? The classic "I'm too busy to do X" excuse that virtually every MMO questgiver uses fails when the rampaging hordes are burning down your house.
It's not about individual power, it's about numbers. You're not the only one that is being asked assistance of. A person is not enough to change the issue of the battle. Everyone is asked to help. Yes the police force is more powerful than you because they're numerous, and you're alone.
So, the first one to get to an NPC and complete the quest gets to kill the NPC afterward, making sure nobody else can complete that quest in that world?
You can, of course. Why not? You may have big issues with law enforcement though, since killing people is a crime, so you'd better have very high stealth skills.
And anyway there is no need to kill him to prevent other people from doing the quest. Once you've done the quest, the need of the NPC has been fulfilled so the NPC has no reason to ask other players to do it, at least not before the NPC has that need again.
Of course, since I said it required dynamic NPC population growth, the NPC will eventually be replaced by someone else.
What you would like to be able to do is exterminate mobs to extinction, raze all the cities, rape and plunder all you can, then jump through a gateway and move to another time and/or place and start all over again.
Not at all. I never said to destroy the world and leave. You have to stay in the world and live with the consequences. You're probably confusing things with the plot system I exposed later, which is really something entirely independent, where indeed a world would have a limited lifetime, but that would be in years.
But with 100,000 players, that leaves a lot of devastated worlds and smoldering ruins behind, and few players are going to want to spend all their time cleaning up the mess you've left behind! One way around this would be to force all the noobs to be creators before they can become destroyers (which would also make them a bit more reluctant to reduce everything to smoldering ruins). But balancing creation and destruction in a virtual world where you are allowed to make lasting changes in your environment sounds really hard.
Mob repopulation would be calculated depending on how much they are, with faster breeding when they're few. Extinction would be possible indeed, but only for a time since species would then be artificially reinserted to avoid lost of content.
Also, the real world is an environment where you can destroy anything, yet it is not completely destroyed. Mainly because we've got governments and armies regulating things. A game would have them too.
Let's compare the gaming experience of a typical MMORPG and the one I'm proposing.
1) You log-in, you get teleported in a City. You go around town and attack a Young Wolf, since that's the monster fitting your current level. You kill it, take the loot, and kill another one. Again and Again. You reach a new level, you acquire new combat skills. You get back to town, sell the loot and buy better weapons. You go back around town and now attack Nimble Wolf, since that's the new monster fitting your new level.
2) You log-in, you're in your house in a town. Darkspawns hiding in caves have been breeding, are now in numbers and are attacking the neighboring city, which is facing massacre and extinction. They emitted a call for help to all neighboring towns.
A) You're the mayor of the town or something, role that was initially that of a NPC but that you have reached through achievements, and you set up a small army to go help
B) You're a random adventurer who joins the army as a mercenary for glory and money
C) You just decide to try to make things worse or whatever
Then both players and NPCs face the threat of darkspawns together.
There are so many things that are fundamentally wrong with current MMORPGs that it would be fairly easy to come in the market and make the genre much better.
I don't even personally understand how so many people can like WoW. Out of all the MMORPGs I've played, it's one of the worse ones. It's just grinding, nothing else. Since the market seems content with such a boring experience, you can't even predict popularity of a better game and thus set up a business model.
While there are a lot of single-player RPGs that are very good, and that do a lot of things right, MMORPGs still fail to do what those games do, for no good reason.
The things that need fixing isn't hot bars or quest logs, those are merely interface matters. What needs fixing is the very mechanisms of the game.
One of the most important thing in a role-playing game is that your actions affect the world, giving sense to the role. Otherwise there is just no point.
In a MMORPG, the world is entirely static: not only the world geometry itself, but also its people, the players and the NPCs (which include mobs). NPCs will just stay at the same place and ask all adventurers that go talk to them to do the same thing for them ("quests"). Evil monsters and even overlords will always stay at the same place, and respawn a few minutes after you've killed them. It's like the game is stuck in time, endlessly rehearsing the same pre-chewed gaming experience for every one.
That completely misses the point of a virtual world on which entities can interact: the gaming experience should be entirely dynamic depending on what's happening in and to the world. Just like in an actual tabletop or live action role playing game.
There is a very simple way to achieve this: make it so that all entities in the world, players and NPCs, are constrained by the same rules, making it thus a true virtual world.
This inherently leads to dynamic quest generation depending on the needs and desires of NPCs, since they will have finite resources like players, and thus will need to acquire some through jobs or trade etc.
Now it could be argued that the problem only exists with NPCs, and thus the game could just be based on player-player interaction. And the best MMOs out there are actually the ones that are mostly player-driven, such as most space ones.
However players don't necessarily want to play all the roles necessary for a world, and for social reasons having a frame of NPCs is also important, since they will always be there and will never refuse to interact with you. They're also the obvious choice for law enforcement.
In short, smarter AI to give NPCs real roles is what MMORPGs need.
Other things such as permanent in-game presence, possibility of permanent death, non-optional PvP and dynamic NPC population growth then come naturally.
Making the world entirely destructible and constructible would be a great plus also, but that is not really required for a good game.
Now, another way to also improve MMORPGs would be to give a real goal to people, not just being adventurers, with the killing feature of single-player RPGs: a plot. This could be achieved by giving a limited lifetime to the virtual world, enabling certain story events as time goes closer to the end. The easiest plot would be that the prison of the big evil is getting looser and looser, and that eventually the forces of good will have to fight the forces of bad, and the chances of one side winning the final battle will depend on what the players have achieved in the play-through.
Look at the new dragon age trailer, the roleplaying game from Bioware that is expected this fall. (and which unfortunately looks quite lame) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4GiSRuAHxG4
Now THIS game has a lot of gore. Wolverine just doesn't.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately, even people outside of US and Japan are concerned, since we share the same web and applications.
An open-source browser cannot legally read h264 video, that is the real issue that people seem to have trouble to understand. That is why the HTML standard only mandates a format that is not impaired by any legal restrictions: Theora.
Not being able to legally play DVDs, Blurays, connect your ipod, etc. on linux are already big problems, we don't need another one.
The problem with those codecs are patents. That is completely irrelevant to pirates.
Who the hell would want to use DRM on a fully open format? It doesn't make sense.
The only thing that makes DRM work is the fact it's closed.
Whether the actual person is paid or not is irrelevant. The same reviewing process should take place.
Also, I don't see anything wrong with paying someone to write articles for me. Writing articles is certainly time-consuming work that I'd rather have someone else do than myself, so that I can focus on my job.
An example is if I'm part of some community around a newly created programming language X, and we need to create a good wikipedia page to advertise, demonstrate, etc. our language. The community is busy working on the runtime, what we're actually good at, so hiring someone to do that page for us seems like a good idea.
As long at it is only products, technologies, or something like and not controversial historic stuff there is no such thing as bias anyway.
This is simply open source development.
There are lots of games out there made that way, and they simply suck. Probably because of the lack of a big name that puts people together.
They're no different than the rest.
Actors are paid to perform, they don't earn money afterwards depending on the sales of their film. The same principle, being paid for the work rather than for the benefits earned through distributing the work, is already applied to certain programmers and book writers.
This falls into what I called "orders".
Also, cinema can be considered an exhibition for film producers.
The ones that get hurt by lack of copyright are not the artists, it is the distributors.
Internet already killed distribution networks anyway.
The way for musicians to make money is concerts.
This is actually how they are earning their money today. Musicians don't earn much from CD sales, really.
This can be generalized to all artists, and also craftsmen and the like, fairly easily: money comes from exhibitions and orders.
Stupid or very smart.
What if you wanted to do rendering using a radically different method than the typical OpenGL stack? There are some nice vexel renderers in CUDA out there, some of which with global illumination.
If banning pornography spreads the ideology that perverts are sick and dangerous creeps, which causes perverts to self-censor themselves and their ideas due to peer pressure, fear, or general brain washing, then it must be banned.
Because laptops are overpriced in Europe. Which is why some people buy net/smart books
I don't see any holy war here.
Nvidia (only one that cares about OpenGL), Intel (Core 2 basically killed AMD), and Coke (has 15% more market share).
The current price of DNS records is already quite an abuse in my opinion. The US government is making money out of this.
What kind of legitimacy is there in a single country making profits out of the system?
And anyone can use it.
What matters is whether your file is accessible publically (and private trackers where you can register are really public).
Internet users have not become used to pirating, they're simply sharing with their friends, as they've always been doing, except they're doing this through the Internet, as it is more practical than previous media.
And sharing copyrighted material in a private circle is perfectly legal as it lies under fair use. What is illegal is distributing it to anyone, which basically only real pirates do, not regular users.
It's time content providers stop making false accusations.
Is that about free wifi or pay-to-use wifi?
Pay-to-use wifi is useless, I'm never gonna pay for that.
What kind of power user leaves the built-in OS?
It's usually a customized version of vista riddled with crapware.
They're comparing an integrated webserver / web application with a general webserver connected to an independent application through unix sockets.
Of course the first one is much faster, but it's not the same thing at all...
Everyone knows Linux has 10% market share worldwide.
Those 1% are from broken statistics. Even for just the US they're wrong.
It's not about individual power, it's about numbers.
You're not the only one that is being asked assistance of. A person is not enough to change the issue of the battle. Everyone is asked to help.
Yes the police force is more powerful than you because they're numerous, and you're alone.
You can, of course. Why not?
You may have big issues with law enforcement though, since killing people is a crime, so you'd better have very high stealth skills.
And anyway there is no need to kill him to prevent other people from doing the quest. Once you've done the quest, the need of the NPC has been fulfilled so the NPC has no reason to ask other players to do it, at least not before the NPC has that need again.
Of course, since I said it required dynamic NPC population growth, the NPC will eventually be replaced by someone else.
Not at all. I never said to destroy the world and leave. You have to stay in the world and live with the consequences.
You're probably confusing things with the plot system I exposed later, which is really something entirely independent, where indeed a world would have a limited lifetime, but that would be in years.
Mob repopulation would be calculated depending on how much they are, with faster breeding when they're few. Extinction would be possible indeed, but only for a time since species would then be artificially reinserted to avoid lost of content.
Also, the real world is an environment where you can destroy anything, yet it is not completely destroyed.
Mainly because we've got governments and armies regulating things. A game would have them too.
Let's compare the gaming experience of a typical MMORPG and the one I'm proposing.
1) You log-in, you get teleported in a City. You go around town and attack a Young Wolf, since that's the monster fitting your current level. You kill it, take the loot, and kill another one. Again and Again. You reach a new level, you acquire new combat skills. You get back to town, sell the loot and buy better weapons. You go back around town and now attack Nimble Wolf, since that's the new monster fitting your new level.
2) You log-in, you're in your house in a town. Darkspawns hiding in caves have been breeding, are now in numbers and are attacking the neighboring city, which is facing massacre and extinction. They emitted a call for help to all neighboring towns.
A) You're the mayor of the town or something, role that was initially that of a NPC but that you have reached through achievements, and you set up a small army to go help
B) You're a random adventurer who joins the army as a mercenary for glory and money
C) You just decide to try to make things worse or whatever
Then both players and NPCs face the threat of darkspawns together.
Would you rather play 1 or 2?
What about TV and radio exposure?
This is probably more important than the ability to buy CDs online.
Open-source has a very strict definition from OSI.
It is actually *more* restrictive than free software, unlike what most people believe.
Open-source implies free software, but free software doesn't imply open-source.
There are so many things that are fundamentally wrong with current MMORPGs that it would be fairly easy to come in the market and make the genre much better.
I don't even personally understand how so many people can like WoW. Out of all the MMORPGs I've played, it's one of the worse ones. It's just grinding, nothing else.
Since the market seems content with such a boring experience, you can't even predict popularity of a better game and thus set up a business model.
While there are a lot of single-player RPGs that are very good, and that do a lot of things right, MMORPGs still fail to do what those games do, for no good reason.
The things that need fixing isn't hot bars or quest logs, those are merely interface matters.
What needs fixing is the very mechanisms of the game.
One of the most important thing in a role-playing game is that your actions affect the world, giving sense to the role. Otherwise there is just no point.
In a MMORPG, the world is entirely static: not only the world geometry itself, but also its people, the players and the NPCs (which include mobs).
NPCs will just stay at the same place and ask all adventurers that go talk to them to do the same thing for them ("quests"). Evil monsters and even overlords will always stay at the same place, and respawn a few minutes after you've killed them.
It's like the game is stuck in time, endlessly rehearsing the same pre-chewed gaming experience for every one.
That completely misses the point of a virtual world on which entities can interact: the gaming experience should be entirely dynamic depending on what's happening in and to the world.
Just like in an actual tabletop or live action role playing game.
There is a very simple way to achieve this: make it so that all entities in the world, players and NPCs, are constrained by the same rules, making it thus a true virtual world.
This inherently leads to dynamic quest generation depending on the needs and desires of NPCs, since they will have finite resources like players, and thus will need to acquire some through jobs or trade etc.
Now it could be argued that the problem only exists with NPCs, and thus the game could just be based on player-player interaction.
And the best MMOs out there are actually the ones that are mostly player-driven, such as most space ones.
However players don't necessarily want to play all the roles necessary for a world, and for social reasons having a frame of NPCs is also important, since they will always be there and will never refuse to interact with you. They're also the obvious choice for law enforcement.
In short, smarter AI to give NPCs real roles is what MMORPGs need.
Other things such as permanent in-game presence, possibility of permanent death, non-optional PvP and dynamic NPC population growth then come naturally.
Making the world entirely destructible and constructible would be a great plus also, but that is not really required for a good game.
Now, another way to also improve MMORPGs would be to give a real goal to people, not just being adventurers, with the killing feature of single-player RPGs: a plot.
This could be achieved by giving a limited lifetime to the virtual world, enabling certain story events as time goes closer to the end.
The easiest plot would be that the prison of the big evil is getting looser and looser, and that eventually the forces of good will have to fight the forces of bad, and the chances of one side winning the final battle will depend on what the players have achieved in the play-through.
Game developers, you know what to do.
Look at the new dragon age trailer, the roleplaying game from Bioware that is expected this fall. (and which unfortunately looks quite lame)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4GiSRuAHxG4
Now THIS game has a lot of gore. Wolverine just doesn't.