Well, y'know, Valve does support Linux servers for the game. I'm not sure why they haven't ported it to Linux yet, but a friend suggests it might be Sierra internal politicking. We all know how weird Sierra has been lately, laying off people and killing very promising games only a couple of months from completion. I wouldn't put it past them to have some strange ideas concerning Linux, too.
I seem to recall hearing months ago that Lucas had no plans to release Phantom Menace or, indeed, any of the Star Wars films on DVD yet. He planned, so sources said, to wait several years until the rest of the First Trilogy was in the can, then sell the set as sort of a Star Wars Ultimate Collector's Edition thing.
Has any of this changed? The only thing I saw that might have portended a change--that website crowing that Phantom Menace was going to be released on DVD--turned out to be a red herring.
Frankly, Lucas has always been a bit of an oddball about things like this...going back and CGIing and reshooting the original trilogy just because he wanted to, for instance. I'm not at all surprised by this. Saddened a bit, but not surprised.
I will be surprised if Lucas changes his mind any time soon. Despite what all the people have been saying about him, I don't think Lucas does what he does out of greed or commercialism. For him to turn around and release the films in time for Christmas of this year because they'll sell more copies just doesn't strike me as likely.
How to free up *other* old games?
on
Verge2 GPLed
·
· Score: 4
As I mentioned in an "Ask Slashdot" I submitted the other day but was never posted, there are other old games that a lot of people would love to see open-sourced. For example, Darklands, the 1992 Microprose/SSI RPG of medieval Germany. It was originally supposed to be part of a larger set of games, but Microprose never got around to doing the sequels. It was buggy at first, but in many respects was far ahead of its time; people are still playing it today.
But even though the game itself is no longer sold, and even shows up on abandonware sites for people to download, its source is still locked away in Microprose's vaults, doing no conceivable good to anyone. Writing to support@microprose.com hasn't done any good, though people have been trying for eight years.
I don't think I'm ever likely to need to use citifi.com. I don't think I would ever have gone there at all if not for the Slashdot pointer to their article.
I know it's nice for sites to offer access to all operating systems, but I find it hard to get worked up over something like this. If you don't like it, there are thousands of other banks in the U.S. alone. (I bank locally anyway.)
Now, something that does annoy me is that I can't seem to get access to my Commerce Bank account's automatic check-dispatchment system (click on the "sign in" link) with Netscape/Linux even when I accept all cookies and connect directly to the Internet. sigh.
It's probably too late to contribute meaningfully to this discussion, but I ought to try anyway.
As I learned in my Business Law class this semester, it's only thanks to Ralph Nader that we even have a legal right to privacy.
Back in the 1960s, Nader wrote a book about a General Motors car (the Corvair?) called Unsafe at Any Speed. He really ticked off General Motors, and they tried everything to discredit him...tapping his phone, going through his mail, even hiring a prostitute to sleep with him.
Nader sued over this, alledging invasion of privacy. He won, and that court case is what set the precedent for the court-sanctioned right to privacy in this country. You certainly won't find a right to privacy specifically delineated anywhere in the Constitution; before that case, it simply didn't exist.
Given that I'm repeating hearsay, I may not have my facts 100% right, but I'm sure they're close enough.
When I tried the trial version of a relatively recent VMware a couple months ago, it recognized a pre-existing Windows partition just fine, with the caveat that it had to redetect all the system hardware under Linux, which took a while. I ended up removing it because it ran too slowly and I didn't have the time, effort, or skill to spare to hack around with it and figure out how to find my VMware arse with both hands, so to speak. Maybe FreeMWare would be different. I dunno; maybe I'll fool around with it once it gets finished someday.
I can't help but think, however, that this sort of thing casts a bad light upon the OSS/Free Software community. Some entrepreneur out there has a great commercial idea, and what's the first thing the OSS/FS people do? They rip it off! Wasn't this precisely the sort of thing patents were intended to prevent? What happens if the VMWare people have/get a patent on their program?
BBSes, I feel, were a strong example of the human need to build a community with like-minded people.
I'm one of those people who you might say spans two worlds; I got into college in Fall, 1991, here in Springfield, Missouri. One of the first things I did was figure out how to make the university's modem pool dial out and voila...a new universe of BBSes presented itself to my wondering gaze. Likewise, there was a student-run campus BBS on the ISN (Information Systems Network, a primitive networking system something like a cross between a phone system and Ethernet) with 8 connections (later expanded to 16) which featured chat and message boards, but no doors. It was called COEPIS, for the College of Education & Psychology which was where it was located, and nobody could quite figure out how to pronounce the name. I still have a T-shirt from it.
I made a lot of friends on COEPIS, a couple of whom I still know now--they're employed by the university, I'm still studying at it, the eternal student. But COEPIS wasn't long for the world; it only lasted a couple of years, more on that in a bit...
I got accounts on a dozen different BBSes, soon whittled down to one or two as my interest dwindled. I dabbled a bit in FidoNet, too. I made friends via COEPIS, and a few acquaintances through the local BBSes; I even schlepped down to the weekly BBS get-together at a local pizza joint a couple of times. This was sort of a community within a community...all the geeks could get together and talk about computers and things. We weren't completely likeminded, but we were closer than a lot of the other people in the town.
BBS doors were kind of fun for a while, but didn't really hold my interest too much, because I discovered...the Internet. I came into the computer lab one day, noticed some of my COEPIS friends doing something that looked interesting, and said, "Hey, how do I get into that?" "I'll set you up." Thus came my first encounter with the Internet: MUCKing via RexxTalk on a VM/CMS box. In those days, Internet was not a gratis-for-all-students deal; it was a "get a faculty sponsor so you can get an account" sort of thing.
Gradually, as time marched on, the Internet became much more accessible, students got an honest-to-god Unix box to play on and Ethernet replaced ISN...and COEPIS died. The Internet killed it.
The Internet made it possible to find people who were >90% interest matches, rather than the 60-70% that were the closest local BBSes came, just because there was suddenly a much greater pool of people to search through. There were whole newsgroups (mailing lists, chat forums, eventually webpages, etc.) devoted to niche interests, be they anime, Star Trek, belly-button lint collections, or almost anything you could think of. Once it became available to The Great Unwashed Masses, how could something with a strictly local focus possibly compete?
We have the same functions available to us via the Internet as we did on local BBSes. E-mail, USENET and mailing lists for discussion groups, IRC/MU*/ICQ/webchat for chat forums, and so forth. The only difference is that there are many more participants now, and we're not guaranteed to find the same people in one area that we know in another. Our community is that much greater in scope.
Of course, we do sacrifice the community closeness inherent in the BBSes...but do we really miss it enough to want to use it? I don't know...I haven't checked in with the local BBSes in a couple of years; I'm not sure how many people still do use them. I suppose that for the old-timers, and the people who still have a lot of fast friends in the area, there's still some appeal...but for this new, younger generation, I expect that the rapid explosion of the 'net more or less speaks for itself.
I'm not a lawyer, but we've been learning about this in my Business Law course that is taught by one.
Minors have an absolute right to void any contract into which they enter. That means that, to use the prof's example, if you sell your $20,000 car to a 17-year-old kid, he pulls out of the driveway and is immediately hit by a garbage truck which totally demolishes the car, he can immediately void the contract and get his money back and you're left with a $20,000 junkpile.
For this reason, many businesses would refuse to deal with minors at all, which causes problems for "liberated minors" who live on their own and have to buy certain things. This is covered by the Doctrine of Necessities, which states (IIRC) that certain businesses that sell neccesities have to deal with minors, and are legally entitled to "reasonable compensation" for their goods. These necessities include food, clothing, and utilities, and California adds TV and a car to that list (but then, that's California for you).
There have been cases of minors abusing this privilege--for example, my prof told about how his son built up a huge CD collection by joining BMG's "get so many CDs for $1" offer, then voiding the contract...multiple times. He also told about a minor who flew first class on an airline all over the place, then immediately voided the contract and cancelled the check after touching down.
The upshot is, businesses have to be cautious when dealing with minors...and you should be cautious, too, especially if one of them wants to buy your car. It's regrettable from the standpoint of "hey, kids have rights too!" people, but it's a legal necessity.
My current dreambox was put together from parts, too...I got my processor, a C300A, from Fantasy Computing, a small computer reseller. It took a few days extra to get it--the lady who ran the store revealed that she hadn't been able to get the one she'd originally sold me and had to scramble to find another--but it overclocked to 450 MHz like a dream, and still does. I wholeheartedly recommend this company.
With as many things as customarily go wrong for me with computer upgrades, it's nice that this, of all things, went right.
Actually...no, it's not. There's a program called malsync that will suck down AvantGo pages from a Linux shell prompt pretty as you please. This was the last of the utilities I needed that allowed me to use my Palm completely in Linux without ever having to reboot into Windows.
I suspect that there's a similar thing out that will download websites and translate them into doc format. If not... there should be. Hmm... sounds like a job for Perl:)
There's one of those, too. It's called SiteScooper and you can either run it yourself or download the fruits of its labors from this webpage in Doc or iSilo format.
I actually read online magazines in the bathroom all the time. (And on the bus, and in spare moments at work at K-Mart, as long as the bosses don't catch me.) And e-books and things. I just suck 'em down to my trusty Palm IIIe using AvantGo and SiteScooper, and off I go!
No, I'm not online at the time...but why would I need to be? Content's content, no matter if I'm actually online while I'm reading it or if I just suck it down and read it later.
Y'know, a certain science fiction author once meditated on this very thing...morals for computers. Perhaps you've heard of him; his name was Isaac Asimov.
This is what caused him to posit the "Three Laws of Robotics" used in so many of his science fiction stories...which are, in effect, an artificially-imposed moral structure which made robots into humans' slaves. (It provided an interesting backdrop for, among other things, one slave's struggle for freedom, in The Bicentennial Man. There was also a rather hilarious short story in which the robots at an automated space factory spontaneously developed religion...)
While the Three Laws were an interesting structure, they always slightly annoyed me because the poor computer/robots essentially had their morals imposed upon them by a higher power, rather than having the chance to decide upon them for themselves.
1) by c+era What are the chances of Microsoft being forced to open the entire source code to Windows, not just its APIs?
Huh? This question was posted by Robotech_Master (me). Maybe someone else posted a similar one...but the one as quoted in the article is verbatim from what I posted, right down to the parenthetical "attrition of programmers" remark.
And as an aside, the Diamond Sutra is also what the big bearded guy uses to make all the evil critters blow up in the Tsui Hark movie A Chinese Ghost Story.
What are the chances of Microsoft being forced to open the entire source code to Windows, not just its APIs? Some articles I've read/listened to bandied that about as a possible solution.
What sort of software licence would an "opened Windows" be most likely to employ?
What would the short- and long-term effects of such a release be? (Other than a sudden dreadful attrition of open source programmers as about half of those who take a look at the Windows source code die laughing.:)
First and foremost, the thing you need to do is find a lawyer, find a lawyer, find a lawyer. I'm not one. 99.9% of the people who post on Slashdot on/. are not one either. Don't take our advice, except in that one important respect.
How to find a lawyer? There's a lawyer directory called Martindale-Hubbell, which you can find at most any library. They also have a website, but I don't know if that actually contains the full content of the book or just those people who've added an online listing.
This book lists not only the lawyers and their types of practices, but also certain important statistics that help you decide how good they are. Find a lawyer and talk to them. You may or may not have a case, but Slashdotters are not the ones to tell you that.
I should point out, as a moderator myself (rec.toys.transformers.moderated), that there are ways to moderate a group so that direct posts don't get passed. For instance, PGPMoose, which checks each post to make sure it was properly PGP-signed by the moderation software, and if not, cancels it immediately. We use this software for our newsgroup, and it works very, very well.
If someone further down's already asked this, then shame on me, but with the brouhaha about MP3s, I'm surprised nobody's thought to ask this yet.
What about tape-recordings of lectures?
It's relatively easy, now, to tape-record lectures, then record them into digital form and cook them down to MP3. (I recorded the Hasbro-Kenner panel at BotCon '99 on a microtape machine and cooked it down thusly; it only came to 18 megabytes for an hour and is still available on my BotCon '99 webpage for all comers.) I'm now recording one of my lecture classes the same way--not for help studying, but because the Prof. is an A1 Cynical Bastard (TM) and funny as hell, and his class is at least 30% amusing digressions by weight.
What if companies start paying for and selling lectures that way? I imagine there's no way in hell they'd get away with it, but the difference is only one of degree, isn't it?
...we go on for years about how badly Microsoft sucks...and then when we finally get a judge who agrees with us, we're hesitant or even fearful about what he might do to the company/industry as restitution.
This is a momentous moment in history. As one of my college instructors said today, it will probably have repercussions that our children and our children's children have to live with. It could affect the industry, politics, life as we know it in utterly unguessable ways, especially now that we're on the cusp of a new electronic/Internet revolution.
Of all the possible outcomes, the one I most hope for is that Microsoft has to open their source. That could finally mean the end of some of those annoying proprietary formats they use, let the WINE people make their product even better, and just generally help things all over. I'm not terribly sanguine about the prospect of splitting the company up, as that would probably only mean instead of one monopolistic Microsoft, we'd soon be dealing with several of them.
What will happen? We'll just have to wait and see...
This is amazing (if a little disgusting in the details), and I really do mean that. But just think how this technology could be applied to other fields.
We could have vending machines that really do use slugs.
I seem to recall hearing that you could use any calculator on standardized tests that didn't have a qwerty keyboard.
The Palm doesn't have a qwerty keyboard (well, as long as you don't tap the dot, at least), and does have various scientific calculatory utilities available for it...
I like my hardware decoder, even though it's Windows-only at the moment.
It puts less strain on my system--even though my 450 MHz/192 meg system can take it, I'm not terribly sanguine about how Windows will react while it's doing it. I like to do multiple things on my computer while I'm watching DVDs.
It lets me stream out to my TV, which is sitting right next to my monitor, so I can watch stuff and still noodle around on the Internet and Web and so forth without losing the screen real-estate. (It also lets me defeat Macrovision with Remote Selector and tape the movies off onto VHS to share with my folks.)
It lets me stream MPEG movies out to my TV set for viewing, too--I get each episode of Beast Machines a couple of days early that way.
Software players simply can't give me that sort of functionality.
Which isn't to say I wouldn't mind having a functional one in Linux, given that it would let me view movies without rebooting to Windows, but I plan to upgrade to a Linux-compatible player card as soon as one becomes available, and consign this Hollywood+ to Ebay.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, y'know, Valve does support Linux servers for the game. I'm not sure why they haven't ported it to Linux yet, but a friend suggests it might be Sierra internal politicking. We all know how weird Sierra has been lately, laying off people and killing very promising games only a couple of months from completion. I wouldn't put it past them to have some strange ideas concerning Linux, too.
I wish to exclude whiners from the comments page. They are pointless. [...]
Does anyone else see the irony here?
I seem to recall hearing months ago that Lucas had no plans to release Phantom Menace or, indeed, any of the Star Wars films on DVD yet. He planned, so sources said, to wait several years until the rest of the First Trilogy was in the can, then sell the set as sort of a Star Wars Ultimate Collector's Edition thing.
Has any of this changed? The only thing I saw that might have portended a change--that website crowing that Phantom Menace was going to be released on DVD--turned out to be a red herring.
Frankly, Lucas has always been a bit of an oddball about things like this...going back and CGIing and reshooting the original trilogy just because he wanted to, for instance. I'm not at all surprised by this. Saddened a bit, but not surprised.
I will be surprised if Lucas changes his mind any time soon. Despite what all the people have been saying about him, I don't think Lucas does what he does out of greed or commercialism. For him to turn around and release the films in time for Christmas of this year because they'll sell more copies just doesn't strike me as likely.
As I mentioned in an "Ask Slashdot" I submitted the other day but was never posted, there are other old games that a lot of people would love to see open-sourced. For example, Darklands, the 1992 Microprose/SSI RPG of medieval Germany. It was originally supposed to be part of a larger set of games, but Microprose never got around to doing the sequels. It was buggy at first, but in many respects was far ahead of its time; people are still playing it today.
But even though the game itself is no longer sold, and even shows up on abandonware sites for people to download, its source is still locked away in Microprose's vaults, doing no conceivable good to anyone. Writing to support@microprose.com hasn't done any good, though people have been trying for eight years.
Any thoughts?
I can't believe nobody has yet commented on the dates for the feedback that follows the above-linked article.
All those 1/01/100s look so nice and nifty, don't they?
I don't think I'm ever likely to need to use citifi.com. I don't think I would ever have gone there at all if not for the Slashdot pointer to their article.
I know it's nice for sites to offer access to all operating systems, but I find it hard to get worked up over something like this. If you don't like it, there are thousands of other banks in the U.S. alone. (I bank locally anyway.)
Now, something that does annoy me is that I can't seem to get access to my Commerce Bank account's automatic check-dispatchment system (click on the "sign in" link) with Netscape/Linux even when I accept all cookies and connect directly to the Internet. sigh.
It's probably too late to contribute meaningfully to this discussion, but I ought to try anyway.
As I learned in my Business Law class this semester, it's only thanks to Ralph Nader that we even have a legal right to privacy.
Back in the 1960s, Nader wrote a book about a General Motors car (the Corvair?) called Unsafe at Any Speed. He really ticked off General Motors, and they tried everything to discredit him...tapping his phone, going through his mail, even hiring a prostitute to sleep with him.
Nader sued over this, alledging invasion of privacy. He won, and that court case is what set the precedent for the court-sanctioned right to privacy in this country. You certainly won't find a right to privacy specifically delineated anywhere in the Constitution; before that case, it simply didn't exist.
Given that I'm repeating hearsay, I may not have my facts 100% right, but I'm sure they're close enough.
A button I wear on my K-Mart employee vest says it best:
"I may be getting older, but I refuse to grow up."
I like to play with Transformers...in fact, I help to moderate a newsgroup dedicated to them.
Toys are neat, dude.
When I tried the trial version of a relatively recent VMware a couple months ago, it recognized a pre-existing Windows partition just fine, with the caveat that it had to redetect all the system hardware under Linux, which took a while. I ended up removing it because it ran too slowly and I didn't have the time, effort, or skill to spare to hack around with it and figure out how to find my VMware arse with both hands, so to speak. Maybe FreeMWare would be different. I dunno; maybe I'll fool around with it once it gets finished someday.
I can't help but think, however, that this sort of thing casts a bad light upon the OSS/Free Software community. Some entrepreneur out there has a great commercial idea, and what's the first thing the OSS/FS people do? They rip it off! Wasn't this precisely the sort of thing patents were intended to prevent? What happens if the VMWare people have/get a patent on their program?
BBSes, I feel, were a strong example of the human need to build a community with like-minded people.
I'm one of those people who you might say spans two worlds; I got into college in Fall, 1991, here in Springfield, Missouri. One of the first things I did was figure out how to make the university's modem pool dial out and voila...a new universe of BBSes presented itself to my wondering gaze. Likewise, there was a student-run campus BBS on the ISN (Information Systems Network, a primitive networking system something like a cross between a phone system and Ethernet) with 8 connections (later expanded to 16) which featured chat and message boards, but no doors. It was called COEPIS, for the College of Education & Psychology which was where it was located, and nobody could quite figure out how to pronounce the name. I still have a T-shirt from it.
I made a lot of friends on COEPIS, a couple of whom I still know now--they're employed by the university, I'm still studying at it, the eternal student. But COEPIS wasn't long for the world; it only lasted a couple of years, more on that in a bit...
I got accounts on a dozen different BBSes, soon whittled down to one or two as my interest dwindled. I dabbled a bit in FidoNet, too. I made friends via COEPIS, and a few acquaintances through the local BBSes; I even schlepped down to the weekly BBS get-together at a local pizza joint a couple of times. This was sort of a community within a community...all the geeks could get together and talk about computers and things. We weren't completely likeminded, but we were closer than a lot of the other people in the town.
BBS doors were kind of fun for a while, but didn't really hold my interest too much, because I discovered...the Internet. I came into the computer lab one day, noticed some of my COEPIS friends doing something that looked interesting, and said, "Hey, how do I get into that?" "I'll set you up." Thus came my first encounter with the Internet: MUCKing via RexxTalk on a VM/CMS box. In those days, Internet was not a gratis-for-all-students deal; it was a "get a faculty sponsor so you can get an account" sort of thing.
Gradually, as time marched on, the Internet became much more accessible, students got an honest-to-god Unix box to play on and Ethernet replaced ISN...and COEPIS died. The Internet killed it.
The Internet made it possible to find people who were >90% interest matches, rather than the 60-70% that were the closest local BBSes came, just because there was suddenly a much greater pool of people to search through. There were whole newsgroups (mailing lists, chat forums, eventually webpages, etc.) devoted to niche interests, be they anime, Star Trek, belly-button lint collections, or almost anything you could think of. Once it became available to The Great Unwashed Masses, how could something with a strictly local focus possibly compete?
We have the same functions available to us via the Internet as we did on local BBSes. E-mail, USENET and mailing lists for discussion groups, IRC/MU*/ICQ/webchat for chat forums, and so forth. The only difference is that there are many more participants now, and we're not guaranteed to find the same people in one area that we know in another. Our community is that much greater in scope.
Of course, we do sacrifice the community closeness inherent in the BBSes...but do we really miss it enough to want to use it? I don't know...I haven't checked in with the local BBSes in a couple of years; I'm not sure how many people still do use them. I suppose that for the old-timers, and the people who still have a lot of fast friends in the area, there's still some appeal...but for this new, younger generation, I expect that the rapid explosion of the 'net more or less speaks for itself.
I'm not a lawyer, but we've been learning about this in my Business Law course that is taught by one.
Minors have an absolute right to void any contract into which they enter. That means that, to use the prof's example, if you sell your $20,000 car to a 17-year-old kid, he pulls out of the driveway and is immediately hit by a garbage truck which totally demolishes the car, he can immediately void the contract and get his money back and you're left with a $20,000 junkpile.
For this reason, many businesses would refuse to deal with minors at all, which causes problems for "liberated minors" who live on their own and have to buy certain things. This is covered by the Doctrine of Necessities, which states (IIRC) that certain businesses that sell neccesities have to deal with minors, and are legally entitled to "reasonable compensation" for their goods. These necessities include food, clothing, and utilities, and California adds TV and a car to that list (but then, that's California for you).
There have been cases of minors abusing this privilege--for example, my prof told about how his son built up a huge CD collection by joining BMG's "get so many CDs for $1" offer, then voiding the contract...multiple times. He also told about a minor who flew first class on an airline all over the place, then immediately voided the contract and cancelled the check after touching down.
The upshot is, businesses have to be cautious when dealing with minors...and you should be cautious, too, especially if one of them wants to buy your car. It's regrettable from the standpoint of "hey, kids have rights too!" people, but it's a legal necessity.
My current dreambox was put together from parts, too...I got my processor, a C300A, from Fantasy Computing, a small computer reseller. It took a few days extra to get it--the lady who ran the store revealed that she hadn't been able to get the one she'd originally sold me and had to scramble to find another--but it overclocked to 450 MHz like a dream, and still does. I wholeheartedly recommend this company.
With as many things as customarily go wrong for me with computer upgrades, it's nice that this, of all things, went right.
Croaker says of AvantGo (italicized text):
:)
'course, it's Windows only.
Actually...no, it's not. There's a program called malsync that will suck down AvantGo pages from a Linux shell prompt pretty as you please. This was the last of the utilities I needed that allowed me to use my Palm completely in Linux without ever having to reboot into Windows.
I suspect that there's a similar thing out that will download websites and translate them into doc format. If not... there should be. Hmm... sounds like a job for Perl
There's one of those, too. It's called SiteScooper and you can either run it yourself or download the fruits of its labors from this webpage in Doc or iSilo format.
I actually read online magazines in the bathroom all the time. (And on the bus, and in spare moments at work at K-Mart, as long as the bosses don't catch me.) And e-books and things. I just suck 'em down to my trusty Palm IIIe using AvantGo and SiteScooper, and off I go!
No, I'm not online at the time...but why would I need to be? Content's content, no matter if I'm actually online while I'm reading it or if I just suck it down and read it later.
Y'know, a certain science fiction author once meditated on this very thing...morals for computers. Perhaps you've heard of him; his name was Isaac Asimov.
This is what caused him to posit the "Three Laws of Robotics" used in so many of his science fiction stories...which are, in effect, an artificially-imposed moral structure which made robots into humans' slaves. (It provided an interesting backdrop for, among other things, one slave's struggle for freedom, in The Bicentennial Man. There was also a rather hilarious short story in which the robots at an automated space factory spontaneously developed religion...)
While the Three Laws were an interesting structure, they always slightly annoyed me because the poor computer/robots essentially had their morals imposed upon them by a higher power, rather than having the chance to decide upon them for themselves.
And as an aside, the Diamond Sutra is also what the big bearded guy uses to make all the evil critters blow up in the Tsui Hark movie A Chinese Ghost Story.
What are the chances of Microsoft being forced to open the entire source code to Windows, not just its APIs? Some articles I've read/listened to bandied that about as a possible solution.
:)
What sort of software licence would an "opened Windows" be most likely to employ?
What would the short- and long-term effects of such a release be? (Other than a sudden dreadful attrition of open source programmers as about half of those who take a look at the Windows source code die laughing.
First and foremost, the thing you need to do is find a lawyer, find a lawyer, find a lawyer. I'm not one. 99.9% of the people who post on Slashdot on /. are not one either. Don't take our advice, except in that one important respect.
How to find a lawyer? There's a lawyer directory called Martindale-Hubbell, which you can find at most any library. They also have a website, but I don't know if that actually contains the full content of the book or just those people who've added an online listing.
This book lists not only the lawyers and their types of practices, but also certain important statistics that help you decide how good they are. Find a lawyer and talk to them. You may or may not have a case, but Slashdotters are not the ones to tell you that.
I should point out, as a moderator myself (rec.toys.transformers.moderated), that there are ways to moderate a group so that direct posts don't get passed. For instance, PGPMoose, which checks each post to make sure it was properly PGP-signed by the moderation software, and if not, cancels it immediately. We use this software for our newsgroup, and it works very, very well.
If someone further down's already asked this, then shame on me, but with the brouhaha about MP3s, I'm surprised nobody's thought to ask this yet.
What about tape-recordings of lectures?
It's relatively easy, now, to tape-record lectures, then record them into digital form and cook them down to MP3. (I recorded the Hasbro-Kenner panel at BotCon '99 on a microtape machine and cooked it down thusly; it only came to 18 megabytes for an hour and is still available on my BotCon '99 webpage for all comers.) I'm now recording one of my lecture classes the same way--not for help studying, but because the Prof. is an A1 Cynical Bastard (TM) and funny as hell, and his class is at least 30% amusing digressions by weight.
What if companies start paying for and selling lectures that way? I imagine there's no way in hell they'd get away with it, but the difference is only one of degree, isn't it?
...we go on for years about how badly Microsoft sucks...and then when we finally get a judge who agrees with us, we're hesitant or even fearful about what he might do to the company/industry as restitution.
This is a momentous moment in history. As one of my college instructors said today, it will probably have repercussions that our children and our children's children have to live with. It could affect the industry, politics, life as we know it in utterly unguessable ways, especially now that we're on the cusp of a new electronic/Internet revolution.
Of all the possible outcomes, the one I most hope for is that Microsoft has to open their source. That could finally mean the end of some of those annoying proprietary formats they use, let the WINE people make their product even better, and just generally help things all over. I'm not terribly sanguine about the prospect of splitting the company up, as that would probably only mean instead of one monopolistic Microsoft, we'd soon be dealing with several of them.
What will happen? We'll just have to wait and see...
This is amazing (if a little disgusting in the details), and I really do mean that. But just think how this technology could be applied to other fields.
We could have vending machines that really do use slugs.
I seem to recall hearing that you could use any calculator on standardized tests that didn't have a qwerty keyboard.
The Palm doesn't have a qwerty keyboard (well, as long as you don't tap the dot, at least), and does have various scientific calculatory utilities available for it...
The mind boggles.
- It puts less strain on my system--even though my 450 MHz/192 meg system can take it, I'm not terribly sanguine about how Windows will react while it's doing it. I like to do multiple things on my computer while I'm watching DVDs.
- It lets me stream out to my TV, which is sitting right next to my monitor, so I can watch stuff and still noodle around on the Internet and Web and so forth without losing the screen real-estate. (It also lets me defeat Macrovision with Remote Selector and tape the movies off onto VHS to share with my folks.)
- It lets me stream MPEG movies out to my TV set for viewing, too--I get each episode of Beast Machines a couple of days early that way.
Software players simply can't give me that sort of functionality.Which isn't to say I wouldn't mind having a functional one in Linux, given that it would let me view movies without rebooting to Windows, but I plan to upgrade to a Linux-compatible player card as soon as one becomes available, and consign this Hollywood+ to Ebay.