I think the thing to take away here is to remember what happened at the end of each of these crazes.
As far as i can tell, Corel has never once followed through on any of these buzzword projects. They get *something* in the hands of consumers.. they never really *commit*.. they spend lots of money.. then they get bored, wander off, and dump the thing like it never existed sometime well before the point at which the inclusion of the buzzword would begin to make sense.
Like the java thing all those years ago. They got their office suite *working* in java. I tried it. It was buggy and it was slow, but it was beta, and it was *there*. But, from my perspective as a mac user-- well, first off, running it was a bloody mess, you had to bugger about with.jar files. They didn't bother doing the application encapsulization thing on any platform, you had to run it in a browser or appletrunner ultimately if i remember right. But that's just a lack of polish. They had the groundwork. And most of the problems *i* had were that this was in the early days of apple's MRJ runtime and the MRJ was *slow*.
So then what did they do? Well, um, nothing. After awhile they decided it wasn't worth the bother and just stopped updating, maintaining or allowing you to download it. By the time the MRJ reached a decent level of speed, which was still the EARLY days of java, you couldn't get Wordperfect for Java anymore, and if i remember right the older WPJ versions had some big incompaibilities with the later MRJ versions anyway. Had they kept developing it, they probably would have been able to come up with a reason why Wordperfect for Java is a good idea, and it would have been a usable, considerable project. Java's a big thing now, Java's everywhere, Java could probably use a wordprocessor. But they didn't bother to let that happen.
And then the linux thing. Everyone said it was a neat distro, not *very* revolutionary, but that it needed more work. Did they do the work? Did they develop the product until it lived up to its stated goals? Did they even maintain it long enough for it to take hold? No, they just went "hm, this isn't taking over the world overnight, it probably isn't worth the bother". Then they ran out of money.
I don't know what's up with this.NET or XML things, but i'm willing to bet that Corel won't really bother coming up with a reason why you should be excited or whatever that they're using.NET and XML now, and they won't explore or exploit the possible benefits of.NET and XML being part of their architecture, whatever those are.
This is, of course, just my perception of things, and i could be wrong, but *shrugs*.
As far as i can tell, perl 6 is supposed to evoke four main reactions:
Whoa.. It's Scheme, but I don't have to deal with the pervasive suffix notation and all those parenthesis!
Whoa.. It's Smalltalk, but less heavy on the Everythings-A-Message pounding and without all those wierd hard brackets!
Whoa.. It's K, but without the need to completely rethink how i program!
Whoa.. It's Perl, but the object system isn't an eyesore and the reference system doesn't make your head explode!
Or, alternately:
Whoa.. It's a language with all the neat functional-flow-control bits of ML, but I don't actually have to write in ML!
Whoa.. it's Objective C, but everything's an object, and no need to muck about with C types and baggage unless i really want to! or Whoa.. It's Java, but everything's an object, and there aren't any rules!
Whoa.. It's APL, but without the need to completely rethink how i program and buy a new keyboard!
Whoa.. It's a programming language I can trick into acting exactly like Java/LISP/ML/K/APL/Smalltalk/Ruby/Python/Prolog/C#/Mercury, and still use the Perl string manipulation tools!
Really.. it steals from everyone. I think it's even kind of the point. Of course, maybe I'm completely confused and wrong and have inserted Perl 6 here; but, well, these were the reactions i had:)
I dont see the inherent advantage in desinging a language thats hard to read.
This is what's great about perl 6. Yes, it has so many insane features and rediculous complex rules and bizarre exceptions to its rules that when reading code with someone else's programming style, you may as well be reading a different programming language (Quick! What's the difference between "sub foo will do { something() }" and " { something() } " ?).
But the real strength in perl 6 is that it's just about infinitely configurable. You can redefine the grammar to fit your needs or whims. This is going, naturally, to cause 17 year olds who load their grammars up so much with wierd macros that their programs will become literal line noise that ceases to function if you change one character, but it will also mean that in the "enterprise", you can be completely shielded from the messiness. All it takes is defining a specialized version of "use strict" that reduces the language down to what you need, and suddenly perl 6 is some very simple, simple, easy to understand language. As long as the speed's OK, people enforce standardized coding within an organization and the default -w is really careful to warn you if you say { 1, 2, 3 => "a" } and it looks like what you probably meant was hash { 1, 2, 3 => "a" } , i don't see it being a real problem. And from a compatibility stndpoint, having one language with EVERYTHING and the ability to cut out what you don't need in wide swaths is way better than recurring situations where people go "well.. i want to use java, but i need feature X" and wind up using some funky third-party jvm compiler that produces huge executables and requires funky tricks to incorporate into my build cycle."
Perl 6 is as hairy as you want it to be, and no more.
Perl 6 is going to be the bestest second system ever! ^_^
The problem with MMORPGs is that they very very closely resemble paper and pen RPGs, but cover exactly one end of the traditional roles within that game: the player. There is no place for a GM in everquest.
This is a problem that you rarely saw with, say, MUDs, because most MUDs you had an average of maybe 30 people on at once, and if you wanted to make your own MUD, or MUSH, or MUCK, why then, you just had to get some hardware that could handle 30 heavy text connections at once, and type descriptions of an intricate world. You could easily play the GM if you wanted to, long as you owned hardware. And then with MUSHes, even a non-administrator player could play GM as long as they could learn a simplified version of Forth.
I think "There" has the best idea, at this point: they have an open-ended world with the ability to be extended by users, programatically. People can recreate the world in any way they want, and interact with it however they want, even in ways that the people who made the game never foresaw. The community can build itself and entertain itself without the company having to build 3d models for everything that happens. And, of course, it empowers the user.
People want to be able to tell their own stories, there are a *lot* of people with the technical and creative expertise to come up with perfectly entertaining content on their own (as long as someone gives them some stock art to work from..) and i think users are a lot happier with the traditional MUD two-admins-and-28-players ratio than the Everquest "log a complaint and we'll schedule you with an admin appointment in two days time, after the other 10,000 requests are dealt with" ratio.
What i think is going to be the killer app as far as MMORPGs go is when someone figures out how to make it is as easy to make an everquest-style "graphical MUD" as it is to set up a Diku MUD, and then somehow links together all the player-created worlds so that you can let characters drift between them. The only problem i see with this system is accountability-- if you can transfer characters between worlds, what's to stop someone from creating a "everyone immediately levels to 99" world? Most likely, some kind of system would have to be implemented whereby each world would just have policies as to what they will and won't allow, similar once again to traditional pen and paper RPGs-- like, you try to bring in your 50th level Godlike Jedi Master into a star wars game around here, and everyone will go "Um, no, here's a piece of paper. Everyone else in the game at the moment is at *about* level 10, dumb your stats down to level 10 or so and give us a backstory for a character of that experience."
Of course, the problem there is that then you start going less toward a persistent multiverse and more just toward a series of played-online pen and paper RPGs with some kind of associated community.. at which point you might have just as much fun with an *actual* play-by-email pen and paper rpg, or just finding some kind of database of active MUSHes. So i'm not sure how this would work out. But it's definitely something I think is worth experimenting with.
Also, i'm not quite sure how Yiffing would be implemented within such a system.
Just a thought: i rented Animal Crossing from blockbuster a couple of days ago, and it really does a good job of fitting what you describe.
The game is basically The Sims, except from the perspective of a Sim rather than the perspective of God. The game takes place in realtime-- it works off the Gamecube's internal clock-- and even if you aren't there, stuff happens and changes in the town.
The reason the game is interesting is that after the 30-40 minute tutorialish session of setting up a new character, it is basically designed such to make you want to play it for about ten minutes every day-- however, after about ten minutes, there really won't be much to do. You basically sign on to see if anything changed in the town, see if you got any mail, check with your neighbors and see what's up, *maybe* do something to get some money to help toward eventually paying your mortgage and see what's new in the store. And then there really isn't much else to do, usually, unless you want to just sit around and fish. This is brilliant becuase it keeps you from getting sick of it. And, of course, every few days something will actually be *happening*, or every so often you'll decide to plant some trees, and you'll be playing for a couple hours maybe. But you generally won't overdose on it: you can't sit through and experience the entire game in one solid weeklong gaming session. The game *forces* you to take it in small bites, yet ensures there is something special worth signing on for every single day-- yet doesn't *penalize* you if you just stop playing for a month.
This is an example the MMORPG world would do well to follow. As you note, a system like this would lead to some community "issues", but it would make content creation, system maintenence, etc, an order of magnitude easier.
Interestingly, shigeru miyamotu is on record as saying that Animal Crossing 2 will have "network support". I assume this means internet support. As of now, it's possible to "take the train" to a friend's town with your character if you either borrow their memory card with their saved town on it, "take the boat" to an "island" if you plug in a GBA with the GBA version of animal crossing saved on it. I'm very curious how they'd implement internet features.. it could wind up being like a kind of p2p MMORPG.
(Note to everyone: make sure if you rent this game, you either have a spare memory card or rent it from somewhere that includes with the rental the memory card that came with the game. An animal crossing savefile takes up a full 57-block memory card.)
This discussion has a couple places where i see people asking, if smog is bad for people and ozone is in smog, why isn't this ozone bad for humans? Well, i would like to ask the opposite question.
I'm from Houston. I am, incidentally, at Purdue now, but that's just a coincidence. Anyway, i'm from Houston.
Houston has a *lot* of ozone in the air. Houston surpassed LA as the nation's most polluted city a couple years ago. Houston also has a *LOT* of mosquitos.
If ozone kills insects, why hasn't all the ozone in the air in Houston killed some of the insects there?
Everyone keeps saying "well, the ozone they used wasn't dense enough to be harmful to humans." So if the ozone in the air is dense enough to be harmful to humans, as it seems to be back in Houston, it should be armageddon to mosquitoes, no? And someone else said that the ozone in smog is different from normal ozone becuase it's reacted with hydrocarbons. Okay, i guess that makes sense, but now that i think about it i very clearly remember days when the Houston city government released a "ozone warning". Not a smog warning, an "ozone warning". Did they actually mean "smog which contains ozone as one of its chemical components but also contains something that makes mosquitos immortal"?
Or have the insects in big cities just built up some kind of immunity to ozone? If that's possible, what's to stop the insects that live in grain vats from building up an immunity?
Atari is still makingmoney off of a number of those games. I agree it would be incredibly cool, but from their perspective, why on earth would they want to give the source away to the public?
I'm not sure if anyone else noticed this, but.. good lord, Miyazaki is making Howl's Moving Castle into a movie?? That's *awesome*.
I don't really have a comment here. I'm just curious whether i'm the only person on Slashdot who's heard of Diana Wynne Jones. She was, like, one of my favorite authors all the way through junior and high school, but not a lot of people in america seem to have heard of her (she's apparently mostly known in Britain.. apparently Neil Gaiman is a big fan, or something). I randomly wound up running across and subsequently buying a bunch of her books in paperback last week, after not having really thought about them for years, and now i see that Studio Ghibi is making one of her books into a movie. That's kind of random.
Anyway, DWJ writes this very very well-realized sf/f that is pretty clearly aimed at a "younger audience". but doesn't seem any shallower now that i'm a bit older. Am I the only fan of hers around here? Just curious.
They are a somewhat major company so the DMCA violation wouldn't go unnoticed. Im not sure they would risk a lawsuit from a much larger company even if they hadn't been bought out.
Microsoft would have no reason to want to stop VPC users buying windows, at all, no.
However, Microsoft also has no reason to want certain things about VPC to stay the way they are. For example, the fact it is screamingly fast. For a long time, one of the big bragging points mac users had was that we could run windows, *emulated*, at about the speed as a windows machine with half the mhz. (I don't know how current models perform.) That's really, really impressive insofar as emulation goes. Microsoft also has no reason to want VPC to continue to be as clean and effective as it has been.
What i am saying is that people don't come to VPC on a lark: it is an expensive piece of software, and people come to it becuase they need to get something out of it, usually to run some windows-only program. This means VPC's quality can suffer, and Microsoft will have no reason to consider this a bad thing-- at the moment, VPC has no serious competitors, so people will keep buying VPC.
Microsoft also has no reason *not* to stop Virtual PC from being able so cleanly, seamlessly, and easily to emulate, say, Linux. They have no reason to make it easy to run a non-MS operating system on your mac.
There is also no reason not for Microsoft to continue as they have and then, after a couple versions, slowly let wierd bugs, incompatibilities, etc, creep into VPC., until mac users *still* can run windows, but they only do so becuase they need to run windows for some reason-- because VPC has become enough of a pain that the PPC's wonderful talent for emulation no longer seems like much of an advantage over the x86.
Am i saying Microsoft is going to do this? Well.. no. In fact, i don't think they will, becuase macslash is reporting that apparently the VPC team will report directly to the MacBU, not to seattle. This means that they will continue, almost certainly, to make VPC as much a quality product as possible. So there goes that conspiracy theory out the window right there.
However, it does bother me that Microsoft is able to take big, important groups like Connectix and Softway (Interix) and buy them up just like that. Yes, they are buying them for apparently benign purposes. But what it seems like to me is that while Microsoft is not buying these companies so they can quash or disable them, they are buying them so that they can keep their eye on them. Potentially, something like Interix or VPC could become a big stepstone in some kind of major migration away from Microsoft. if Microsoft owns those companies, however, if it looks like such a thing is going to happen, MS can take steps to prevent it, so long as MS always keeps the quality of those companies' products so high that there never is a reason for a competitor to arise. Threat management.
This brings me to my question: how on earth is MS going to make Palladium work with VPC? Palladium becomes pointless unless those keys are kept secret, and if MS embeds those keys into a macintosh executable then extracting them will be trivial. So how is MS planning to make Palladium work in VPC? Are they going to require a PCI card with a palladium chip in it, or what? That would still toss out Palladium's concept of the secure keyboard-to-processor-to-monitor path, but it would at least keep the keys locked safely in silicon. Or, much more likely, are they just going to not let VPC run palladium apps, since the Mac OS is not "secure"?
So, here's a slightly more likely conspiracy theory. Perhaps MS [only partially of course-- i've no doubt they're mainly buying Connectix for the reasons they say they are] likes the idea of buying Connectix because it removes the risk Connectix will attempt to emulate Palladium within VPC? I mean, Palladium is going to be damned hard to crack, but if anyone at this exact moment in time has both the resources and the reason to crack palladium, it's Connectix or nobody. I really haven't the foggiest idea what Connectix was planning to do about Palladium, but they have experience at cracking closed systems-- they reverse-engineered the PSX. That expertise, and a few hours rented time with an electron microscope to pull on the Palladium's keys, and suddenly MS is no longer the sole source or vendor of their Palladium platform.
Would that have actually happened? I have no idea. But it certainly won't now. Maybe not a big deal, but certainly convenient for Microsoft either way, no?
Just like it's "convenient" that Bungie's excellent cross-platform game development library, rather than being sold off with Oni and Myth, is currently buried somewhere deep in the bowels of the earth..
The "entertainment industry"? The TV, movie, play and music industries may be fairly interlinked, but they aren't *quite* the same things or people. And i wouldn't say this is anything special about that group of industries that can be described as "entertainment'. Look:
AFPA Industry Business Award -- "This annual award has been established to formally recognize and honour the efforts of those individuals who have made significant and lasting contributions to the growth of the food processing industry in Alberta [Canada]."
There were 41 questions moderated up to 5 in the original interview. see them here if you like. If you'll notice, there were only about 12 questions forwarded to Dave Barry. The slashdot admins were the ones who had to pick and choose those final questions, using the moderators just as their guide.
This is of course inavoidable given the limitations of the slashdot moderation system.. I mean, it isn't like they could send dave barry forty questions.
Anyway the unpicked ones were more or less the same kind of stuff as the questions asked, but a few were slightly less humorous / set-up-knock-down and more direct and probing, like questions on Barry's thoughts on fair use or dog redundancy.
(Yes, my question was put to 5 in the original discussion but not sent.. nooo, not that i'm bitter or anything ^_^ okay, i'm going to go crawl back under my rock now. Sorry)
As a response to your challenge, I have just now asked it some basic questions about the world political situation, and some subjects which tend for one reason or another to accumulate conspiracy theories. I will leave you to judge the results.
mcc: Why does George W. Bush want to invade Iraq?
megahal: Jim morrison is hiding in the midst of a mass of energy.
mcc: I see. And what is the connection between Jim Morrison and Iraq?
megahal: Jim morrison is hiding in the larger society, relationships between women within the next two weeks.
mcc: Could that be considered an act of terrorism?
megahal: W00t w00t w00t?
mcc: Please stay on subject.
megahal: Jim morrison in in the end it doesn't work for you.
mcc: Is Saddam Hussein hiding weapons of mass destruction?
megahal: Don't pay attention to your car, ma'am?" "will that be considered an act of terrorism?
mcc: What would you say is the role of the international oil trade insofar as the current situation in Iraq goes?
megahal: By virtue of this subject.
mcc: Do you think Osama Bin Laden is working with Saddam Hussein?
megahal: Grand theft, genocide, racism, initiating the destruction of a mass of energy.
mcc: Left alone with any weapons of mass destruction he may have, do you think that Saddam Hussein poses a threat to the outside world?
megahal: Insofar as capitalism has created a world spun purely out of me and get bored eassily its veryt hard to find this here beach! Man's got a job interview in like 30:00 so if you distribute copies of the international war crimes tribunal at the hague that the term is not only a good bot.
mcc: Why do France and Germany wish to wait before allowing military action in Iraq?
megahal: I can tell you that you think jm should do with me and i vote.
mcc: So enough on Iraq for the moment. In the late nineties, Bobby Fischer claimed that several thousand dollars of his memorabilia had been stolen by an International Jewish Conspiracy. What are your thoughts on this?
megahal: He could not find a way to destruction.
mcc: What are your thoughts on the Scientologists?
megahal: One of the world jewish conspiracy?
mcc: What happened to Rudolph Hess?
megahal: Few of the tower of babel.
mcc: What are your thoughts on Ayn Rand?
megahal: And my mistake is that roles depend on the scientologists?
mcc: What are your thoughts on the Roman Catholic Church?
megahal: This has happened to rudolph hess?
mcc: Who shot Malcom X?
megahal: Feng and english are your thoughts on ayn rand?
(A) Biasing of the UI This is not anti competitive. The example given in the summary is that if a site is mistyped, MSN search comes up.
One time, in my girlfriend's copy of MSIE, i typed "cnn" into the address bar, assuming it would do the same thing as every macintosh web browser i'd ever used (prepend "www." and append ".com").
To my surprise, instead of just going to www.cnn.com, it launched me to an MSN "search page".
At the very top, hit #1, was MSNBC News, prominently displayed, accompanied with the words "featured link" and a big screenshot of the MSN News page.
Underneath this, hit #2, was a nondescript link to www.cnn.com.
Now, i don't really feel like getting into a legal argument, becuase i'm not 100% sure of what is and isn't legal. But if the example given above is not unethically leveraging a virtual monopoly in one area (web browsers) to gain unearned market share in another totally unrelated area (news services) then i don't know what is.
---- (almost OT comment: Besides this, Mac web browsers, including IE/mac, tend to have a preferences option asking you what your favorite search engine is. (Though i can't remember if it's possible to make the little Google Search pane in the Safari browser bar redirect to some other engine.) I seem to remember no such option existing for MSIE/windows, which is odd becuase MSIE/windows has such tight 'integration' with 'a search engine'..)
I was rather surprised and impressed by the random out-of-nowhere short story near the end of the Dave Barry in Cyberspace book, and have been kind of wondering since then what would happen if you tried to write anything in a longer format than the standard columns. ( Big Trouble sounds really cool, but I haven't gotten around to picking up a copy yet:) )
Anyway, my question is: Do you have plans to write any more fiction, and is it possible we could see any more movies from you in the future after what happened with Big Trouble?
And do you still write newspaper articles for the Herald outside the scope of the column?
you've got to be kidding, nintendo has nver produced ANYTHING that was backward compatible. both Sony and MS beat the heck out of them there.
First off: That's not actually true. The Game Boy Color was backward compatible with the Game Boy, and the Game Boy Advance was backward compatible with the previous two Game Boy platforms.
Secondly, while no *home* console system nintendo has ever released has been backward compatible (unless you count add-ons like the 64DD and the [japan only] Famicom Disk system), Nintendo has also always in the past always been cartridge-based. This is no longer the case; the gamecube is optical disk based. It is not really particularly easy to maintain compatibility from machine to machine when each machine has a different cartridge format that is going to be a different size and shape. Optical disks, however, are a different beast; this thing alone shows that it is perfectly possible to create one laser that can read both the DVD format and the Gamecube format. If nintendo continues with the optical disks thing, and there is every reason to believe they will, nintendo very well could just allow disks of either sort to fit in their next-gen console.
Now, here's my prediction: Nintendo once released a $50 super nintendo addon that let you play game boy games on it, and now has out a $50 gamecube addon that lets you play GBA games on it. A few years into the Super Nintendo's lifespan, they released a "redesigned" NES, that could play all the NES games but was very small and very cheap, just for everyone who'd never had an NES. From this i'd say Nintendo knows how to milk every last cent out of an expired franchise. My guess would be that if it turns out to be technologically inconvenient to make their next console backward-compatible, Nintendo will just release along with the console a $50 "compatibility card", or something, that will allow people who never had a gamecube to enjoy both systems relatively cheaply, while still making the new system as cheap as possible for those of us with gamecubes.
But what do i know.
---
And anyway, how can you say MS beat out nintendo in the back-compatibility department? MS has only released one console, ever, remember? Wait to make statements like that until the Xbox2 (and maybe, to, be fair, the GC2) is actually *out*.
I suspect you say that with your tongue in cheek, but i would just like to ask anyway: All those of you who are miffed about the fact your brand-new gamecube will be obsolete in two and a half years:
The most likely thing is that the thing nintendo originally referred to as the "Megaton" announcement was probably just this.
As for all that stuff about the Megaton announcement being "the thing that will deliver a deathblow to one of nintendo's major competitors" and "the thing that will make gamecubes just fly off the shelves", that was probably just the rumor sites blowing wishful thinking out of proportion.
That said, the Game Boy Advance SP is nothing to sneeze at, and nintendo probably considers the Game Boy a bigger thing than the Game Cube anyway, rightfully so at least considering their sales for the GBA are about an order of magnitude higher. I just wish they'd announced something (*cough* Pokemon Online? *cough*) to placate those of us who have gamecubes:)
I am not sure how comfortable with this i am, not becuase i at all think linux is prone to fail but becuase linux is capable of failing. Kernel panics still happen, like, once in a billion years. Linux just never struck me as an OS you need when, like, it is absolutely essential that absolutely nothing go wrong ever. Like when you are running some kind of control system for an airplane, or controlling a robot drilling holes in people's skulls. I don't think linux or even bsd would be a great choice in those cases, though i sure as hell don't think windows should even be considered given their track record in such situations.
Aren't there any OSes about at the moment that are like all redundant and correctness-proven and stuff, like with NASA-like failure margins? Wouldn't it be better to be using those instead?
Can't really look too much at the linked site right now (no sound on the computer i'm at at the moment), but if this interests you:
You may also be interested in the hacking Charlie Clouser (you'd know him from Nine Inch Nails) did to his speak and spell (see partway down the page).
Consider the impact on those outside of the jurisdiction in which the patent applies; the hypothetical rogue nation that outlaws GPLed software
The GPL specifically addresses this. Section 8 reads:
If the distribution and/or use of the Program is restricted in certain countries either by patents or by copyrighted interfaces, the original copyright holder who places the Program under this License may add an explicit geographical distribution limitation excluding those countries, so that distribution is permitted only in or among countries not thus excluded. In such case, this License incorporates the limitation as if written in the body of this License.
OK, so that doesn't seem to cover the idea of a nation that outlaws the GPL-- i guess there's a bug in that section 7 covers "any law" and section 8 covers intellectual property law only. But that's a pretty outlandish scenario to consider, and unless a country someday outlaws GPLed software, this is not even worth thinking about. Anyway, since most GPLed software is licensed under "GPL 2.0 or, at your option, some later version of the GPL", were this issue ever to somehow come up, RMS could release GPL 2.0.1 in which section 8 allows you to make a geographical exemption based on any law, and just about everyone could switch to that. But i just don't see this happening.
As far as the contract thing goes, that's just kind of wierd and i don't think it's a valid problem. In that case, you've still unconditionally granted the rights the GPL requires you to grant, it's just that someone signed those rights away.
the above should read "... would not permit royalty-free distribution of arbitrary derived works". But this is clearly nonsense: If I added one-click shopping to GNU ls, I would not have a license to distribute the result. So by section 7, nobody can distribute GNU ls under the GPL
Yes.. that is clearly nonsense. But that's not what the GPL says. The GPL says that derivative works must be "licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License". It seems pretty clear to me that your obligations in section 7 are toward certifying the unlimited redistributability of code *you distribute*. Code other people write is not your problem in this way, even if it links against code you put under the gpl, and there's no reason to think it is.
Okay, so it's possible to misinterpret the language in the GPL to make a logical contradiction. That doesn't make it any less a misinterpretation, and since the *intent* of the words which are there are spelled out very clearly in the associated FAQs, i believe a court of law would (if for some bizarre reason someone in court attempted to argue what your post argues) interpret the GPL in the way it was intended to be interpreted.
I don't see the problem here. Section 7 is necessary for the rest of the GPL to work.
Since they have distributed Linux, that alone is enough to thwart the rumored patent attack.
Actually, not really. Since the GPL is a redistribution license and not a contract, there really isn't anything at all *legally* to stop SCO from exercising any patents they might have. If the patent they have is valid and they institute a license fee for that patent, they would lose the right to redistribute any gpled software that is covered by said patent, but then so would Debian. I think the only *direct* consequence for SCO if they instituted a license fee would be that they'd have to stop distributing linux until such time as they removed the code covered by their patent.
GPL section 7 is meant specifically to prevent a situation from this from ever happening. Here is a quote:
If, as a consequence of a court judgment or allegation of patent infringement or for any other reason (not limited to patent issues), conditions are imposed on you (whether by court order, agreement or otherwise) that contradict the conditions of this License, they do not excuse you from the conditions of this License. If you cannot distribute so as to satisfy simultaneously your obligations under this License and any other pertinent obligations, then as a consequence you may not distribute the Program at all. For example, if a patent license would not permit royalty-free redistribution of the Program by all those who receive copies directly or indirectly through you, then the only way you could satisfy both it and this License would be to refrain entirely from distribution of the Program.
I read this section to mean that if SCO has patents that Linux implements, and 'the community' doesn't already have an unlimited eternal royaltay-free license to use these patents, then the Linux people are right now, regardless of whether SCO tries to pay up or not, legally obligated to remove the implementations of these patents from the Linux code. As far as i'm aware, there have been in the past concentrated efforts to find and remove submarined patents that accidentally wound up in GPLed software, no? What patents of this sort could SCO have?
At any rate one would imagine that SCO would not be so stupid as to demand individual $97 patent licenses from a group of people that (1) is at the moment their core target market (2) has a long-standing tendency to boycott people who do things like demand money for submarine patents (3) would probably not even pay the $97 fees, as they also have a long-standing tendency to not mind stealing from anyone they believe to be screwing them over. (I call (3) "civil disobedience", personally, but that's probably just spin on my part.)
And SCO would have to demand this money from individual users-- it would be impossible for SCO to demand it from vendors, becuase were SCO to start demanding licensing fees from anyone at all regarding patents of theirs inside the Linux kernel (which i assume is where these patent violations would have taken place), all existing linux vendors, including SCO, would be under GPL section 7 immediately legally unable to distribute Linux to anyone at all! (Not permanently, of course, as i find it highly unlikely any defendable SCO patent, once discovered in the linux kernel, would remain there any longer than a span of hours.)
Either way, assuming that SCO is in fact this stupid, and assuming that SCO actually does own patents that the linux kernel violates but that no one in the free software community has ever noticed, i think i'll wait until i read this on SCO.COM to pay any attention to it whatsoever.
Actually, were I wanting to show off a new web browser, I would probably try to hit slashdot before anywhere else. Why?
Ugly table code! Your typical slashdot pageload is a humongous mess of hundreds upon hundreds of random tables nested in odd ways. If you want an example of a truly taxing test to throw at a web page renderer, slashdot's about as heavy as you can do. Since Safari is apparently all about speed, then it makes lots of sense. After all, rendering a single slashdot discussion page is enough to make MSIE on Mac OS 9 choke on my parents' G4 400 just about every single time-- once the page has loaded, the computer freezes up for at least 5 or so seconds even if IE is in the background. (MSIE for OS X does not have these problems) Omniweb loads slashdot fine but tends to act sluggish while scrolling. (Or it did the last time i used it.) This is what Safari is competing with..
Of course, this reasoning is obliterated by the poor framerate on that one quicktime movie, making it impossible to tell how smoothly it's running. but still ^_^
Slashdot Mirror
A shallow introduction to the K programming language.
It's kind of like J.
I think the thing to take away here is to remember what happened at the end of each of these crazes.
.jar files. They didn't bother doing the application encapsulization thing on any platform, you had to run it in a browser or appletrunner ultimately if i remember right. But that's just a lack of polish. They had the groundwork. And most of the problems *i* had were that this was in the early days of apple's MRJ runtime and the MRJ was *slow*.
.NET or XML things, but i'm willing to bet that Corel won't really bother coming up with a reason why you should be excited or whatever that they're using .NET and XML now, and they won't explore or exploit the possible benefits of .NET and XML being part of their architecture, whatever those are.
As far as i can tell, Corel has never once followed through on any of these buzzword projects. They get *something* in the hands of consumers.. they never really *commit*.. they spend lots of money.. then they get bored, wander off, and dump the thing like it never existed sometime well before the point at which the inclusion of the buzzword would begin to make sense.
Like the java thing all those years ago. They got their office suite *working* in java. I tried it. It was buggy and it was slow, but it was beta, and it was *there*. But, from my perspective as a mac user-- well, first off, running it was a bloody mess, you had to bugger about with
So then what did they do? Well, um, nothing. After awhile they decided it wasn't worth the bother and just stopped updating, maintaining or allowing you to download it. By the time the MRJ reached a decent level of speed, which was still the EARLY days of java, you couldn't get Wordperfect for Java anymore, and if i remember right the older WPJ versions had some big incompaibilities with the later MRJ versions anyway. Had they kept developing it, they probably would have been able to come up with a reason why Wordperfect for Java is a good idea, and it would have been a usable, considerable project. Java's a big thing now, Java's everywhere, Java could probably use a wordprocessor. But they didn't bother to let that happen.
And then the linux thing. Everyone said it was a neat distro, not *very* revolutionary, but that it needed more work. Did they do the work? Did they develop the product until it lived up to its stated goals? Did they even maintain it long enough for it to take hold? No, they just went "hm, this isn't taking over the world overnight, it probably isn't worth the bother". Then they ran out of money.
I don't know what's up with this
This is, of course, just my perception of things, and i could be wrong, but *shrugs*.
As far as i can tell, perl 6 is supposed to evoke four main reactions:
- Whoa.. It's Scheme, but I don't have to deal with the pervasive suffix notation and all those parenthesis!
- Whoa.. It's Smalltalk, but less heavy on the Everythings-A-Message pounding and without all those wierd hard brackets!
- Whoa.. It's K, but without the need to completely rethink how i program!
- Whoa.. It's Perl, but the object system isn't an eyesore and the reference system doesn't make your head explode!
Or, alternately:- Whoa.. It's a language with all the neat functional-flow-control bits of ML, but I don't actually have to write in ML!
- Whoa.. it's Objective C, but everything's an object, and no need to muck about with C types and baggage unless i really want to! or Whoa.. It's Java, but everything's an object, and there aren't any rules!
- Whoa.. It's APL, but without the need to completely rethink how i program and buy a new keyboard!
- Whoa.. It's a programming language I can trick into acting exactly like Java/LISP/ML/K/APL/Smalltalk/Ruby/Python/Prolog/C
# /Mercury, and still use the Perl string manipulation tools!
Really.. it steals from everyone. I think it's even kind of the point. Of course, maybe I'm completely confused and wrong and have inserted Perl 6 here; but, well, these were the reactions i hadI dont see the inherent advantage in desinging a language thats hard to read.
This is what's great about perl 6. Yes, it has so many insane features and rediculous complex rules and bizarre exceptions to its rules that when reading code with someone else's programming style, you may as well be reading a different programming language (Quick! What's the difference between "sub foo will do { something() }" and " { something() } " ?).
But the real strength in perl 6 is that it's just about infinitely configurable. You can redefine the grammar to fit your needs or whims. This is going, naturally, to cause 17 year olds who load their grammars up so much with wierd macros that their programs will become literal line noise that ceases to function if you change one character, but it will also mean that in the "enterprise", you can be completely shielded from the messiness. All it takes is defining a specialized version of "use strict" that reduces the language down to what you need, and suddenly perl 6 is some very simple, simple, easy to understand language. As long as the speed's OK, people enforce standardized coding within an organization and the default -w is really careful to warn you if you say { 1, 2, 3 => "a" } and it looks like what you probably meant was hash { 1, 2, 3 => "a" } , i don't see it being a real problem. And from a compatibility stndpoint, having one language with EVERYTHING and the ability to cut out what you don't need in wide swaths is way better than recurring situations where people go "well.. i want to use java, but i need feature X" and wind up using some funky third-party jvm compiler that produces huge executables and requires funky tricks to incorporate into my build cycle."
Perl 6 is as hairy as you want it to be, and no more.
Perl 6 is going to be the bestest second system ever! ^_^
The problem with MMORPGs is that they very very closely resemble paper and pen RPGs, but cover exactly one end of the traditional roles within that game: the player. There is no place for a GM in everquest.
This is a problem that you rarely saw with, say, MUDs, because most MUDs you had an average of maybe 30 people on at once, and if you wanted to make your own MUD, or MUSH, or MUCK, why then, you just had to get some hardware that could handle 30 heavy text connections at once, and type descriptions of an intricate world. You could easily play the GM if you wanted to, long as you owned hardware. And then with MUSHes, even a non-administrator player could play GM as long as they could learn a simplified version of Forth.
I think "There" has the best idea, at this point: they have an open-ended world with the ability to be extended by users, programatically. People can recreate the world in any way they want, and interact with it however they want, even in ways that the people who made the game never foresaw. The community can build itself and entertain itself without the company having to build 3d models for everything that happens. And, of course, it empowers the user.
People want to be able to tell their own stories, there are a *lot* of people with the technical and creative expertise to come up with perfectly entertaining content on their own (as long as someone gives them some stock art to work from..) and i think users are a lot happier with the traditional MUD two-admins-and-28-players ratio than the Everquest "log a complaint and we'll schedule you with an admin appointment in two days time, after the other 10,000 requests are dealt with" ratio.
What i think is going to be the killer app as far as MMORPGs go is when someone figures out how to make it is as easy to make an everquest-style "graphical MUD" as it is to set up a Diku MUD, and then somehow links together all the player-created worlds so that you can let characters drift between them. The only problem i see with this system is accountability-- if you can transfer characters between worlds, what's to stop someone from creating a "everyone immediately levels to 99" world? Most likely, some kind of system would have to be implemented whereby each world would just have policies as to what they will and won't allow, similar once again to traditional pen and paper RPGs-- like, you try to bring in your 50th level Godlike Jedi Master into a star wars game around here, and everyone will go "Um, no, here's a piece of paper. Everyone else in the game at the moment is at *about* level 10, dumb your stats down to level 10 or so and give us a backstory for a character of that experience."
Of course, the problem there is that then you start going less toward a persistent multiverse and more just toward a series of played-online pen and paper RPGs with some kind of associated community.. at which point you might have just as much fun with an *actual* play-by-email pen and paper rpg, or just finding some kind of database of active MUSHes. So i'm not sure how this would work out. But it's definitely something I think is worth experimenting with.
Also, i'm not quite sure how Yiffing would be implemented within such a system.
Any thoughts?
Just a thought: i rented Animal Crossing from blockbuster a couple of days ago, and it really does a good job of fitting what you describe.
The game is basically The Sims, except from the perspective of a Sim rather than the perspective of God. The game takes place in realtime-- it works off the Gamecube's internal clock-- and even if you aren't there, stuff happens and changes in the town.
The reason the game is interesting is that after the 30-40 minute tutorialish session of setting up a new character, it is basically designed such to make you want to play it for about ten minutes every day-- however, after about ten minutes, there really won't be much to do. You basically sign on to see if anything changed in the town, see if you got any mail, check with your neighbors and see what's up, *maybe* do something to get some money to help toward eventually paying your mortgage and see what's new in the store. And then there really isn't much else to do, usually, unless you want to just sit around and fish. This is brilliant becuase it keeps you from getting sick of it. And, of course, every few days something will actually be *happening*, or every so often you'll decide to plant some trees, and you'll be playing for a couple hours maybe. But you generally won't overdose on it: you can't sit through and experience the entire game in one solid weeklong gaming session. The game *forces* you to take it in small bites, yet ensures there is something special worth signing on for every single day-- yet doesn't *penalize* you if you just stop playing for a month.
This is an example the MMORPG world would do well to follow. As you note, a system like this would lead to some community "issues", but it would make content creation, system maintenence, etc, an order of magnitude easier.
Interestingly, shigeru miyamotu is on record as saying that Animal Crossing 2 will have "network support". I assume this means internet support. As of now, it's possible to "take the train" to a friend's town with your character if you either borrow their memory card with their saved town on it, "take the boat" to an "island" if you plug in a GBA with the GBA version of animal crossing saved on it. I'm very curious how they'd implement internet features.. it could wind up being like a kind of p2p MMORPG.
(Note to everyone: make sure if you rent this game, you either have a spare memory card or rent it from somewhere that includes with the rental the memory card that came with the game. An animal crossing savefile takes up a full 57-block memory card.)
This discussion has a couple places where i see people asking, if smog is bad for people and ozone is in smog, why isn't this ozone bad for humans? Well, i would like to ask the opposite question.
I'm from Houston. I am, incidentally, at Purdue now, but that's just a coincidence. Anyway, i'm from Houston.
Houston has a *lot* of ozone in the air. Houston surpassed LA as the nation's most polluted city a couple years ago. Houston also has a *LOT* of mosquitos.
If ozone kills insects, why hasn't all the ozone in the air in Houston killed some of the insects there?
Everyone keeps saying "well, the ozone they used wasn't dense enough to be harmful to humans." So if the ozone in the air is dense enough to be harmful to humans, as it seems to be back in Houston, it should be armageddon to mosquitoes, no? And someone else said that the ozone in smog is different from normal ozone becuase it's reacted with hydrocarbons. Okay, i guess that makes sense, but now that i think about it i very clearly remember days when the Houston city government released a "ozone warning". Not a smog warning, an "ozone warning". Did they actually mean "smog which contains ozone as one of its chemical components but also contains something that makes mosquitos immortal"?
Or have the insects in big cities just built up some kind of immunity to ozone? If that's possible, what's to stop the insects that live in grain vats from building up an immunity?
What am i missing?
Atari is still making money off of a number of those games. I agree it would be incredibly cool, but from their perspective, why on earth would they want to give the source away to the public?
I'm not sure if anyone else noticed this, but.. good lord, Miyazaki is making Howl's Moving Castle into a movie?? That's *awesome*.
I don't really have a comment here. I'm just curious whether i'm the only person on Slashdot who's heard of Diana Wynne Jones. She was, like, one of my favorite authors all the way through junior and high school, but not a lot of people in america seem to have heard of her (she's apparently mostly known in Britain.. apparently Neil Gaiman is a big fan, or something). I randomly wound up running across and subsequently buying a bunch of her books in paperback last week, after not having really thought about them for years, and now i see that Studio Ghibi is making one of her books into a movie. That's kind of random.
Anyway, DWJ writes this very very well-realized sf/f that is pretty clearly aimed at a "younger audience". but doesn't seem any shallower now that i'm a bit older. Am I the only fan of hers around here? Just curious.
They are a somewhat major company so the DMCA violation wouldn't go unnoticed. Im not sure they would risk a lawsuit from a much larger company even if they hadn't been bought out.
Are you sure about that?
Microsoft would have no reason to want to stop VPC users buying windows, at all, no.
However, Microsoft also has no reason to want certain things about VPC to stay the way they are. For example, the fact it is screamingly fast. For a long time, one of the big bragging points mac users had was that we could run windows, *emulated*, at about the speed as a windows machine with half the mhz. (I don't know how current models perform.) That's really, really impressive insofar as emulation goes. Microsoft also has no reason to want VPC to continue to be as clean and effective as it has been.
What i am saying is that people don't come to VPC on a lark: it is an expensive piece of software, and people come to it becuase they need to get something out of it, usually to run some windows-only program. This means VPC's quality can suffer, and Microsoft will have no reason to consider this a bad thing-- at the moment, VPC has no serious competitors, so people will keep buying VPC.
Microsoft also has no reason *not* to stop Virtual PC from being able so cleanly, seamlessly, and easily to emulate, say, Linux. They have no reason to make it easy to run a non-MS operating system on your mac.
There is also no reason not for Microsoft to continue as they have and then, after a couple versions, slowly let wierd bugs, incompatibilities, etc, creep into VPC., until mac users *still* can run windows, but they only do so becuase they need to run windows for some reason-- because VPC has become enough of a pain that the PPC's wonderful talent for emulation no longer seems like much of an advantage over the x86.
Am i saying Microsoft is going to do this? Well.. no. In fact, i don't think they will, becuase macslash is reporting that apparently the VPC team will report directly to the MacBU, not to seattle. This means that they will continue, almost certainly, to make VPC as much a quality product as possible. So there goes that conspiracy theory out the window right there.
However, it does bother me that Microsoft is able to take big, important groups like Connectix and Softway (Interix) and buy them up just like that. Yes, they are buying them for apparently benign purposes. But what it seems like to me is that while Microsoft is not buying these companies so they can quash or disable them, they are buying them so that they can keep their eye on them. Potentially, something like Interix or VPC could become a big stepstone in some kind of major migration away from Microsoft. if Microsoft owns those companies, however, if it looks like such a thing is going to happen, MS can take steps to prevent it, so long as MS always keeps the quality of those companies' products so high that there never is a reason for a competitor to arise. Threat management.
This brings me to my question: how on earth is MS going to make Palladium work with VPC? Palladium becomes pointless unless those keys are kept secret, and if MS embeds those keys into a macintosh executable then extracting them will be trivial. So how is MS planning to make Palladium work in VPC? Are they going to require a PCI card with a palladium chip in it, or what? That would still toss out Palladium's concept of the secure keyboard-to-processor-to-monitor path, but it would at least keep the keys locked safely in silicon. Or, much more likely, are they just going to not let VPC run palladium apps, since the Mac OS is not "secure"?
So, here's a slightly more likely conspiracy theory. Perhaps MS [only partially of course-- i've no doubt they're mainly buying Connectix for the reasons they say they are] likes the idea of buying Connectix because it removes the risk Connectix will attempt to emulate Palladium within VPC? I mean, Palladium is going to be damned hard to crack, but if anyone at this exact moment in time has both the resources and the reason to crack palladium, it's Connectix or nobody. I really haven't the foggiest idea what Connectix was planning to do about Palladium, but they have experience at cracking closed systems-- they reverse-engineered the PSX. That expertise, and a few hours rented time with an electron microscope to pull on the Palladium's keys, and suddenly MS is no longer the sole source or vendor of their Palladium platform.
Would that have actually happened? I have no idea. But it certainly won't now. Maybe not a big deal, but certainly convenient for Microsoft either way, no?
Just like it's "convenient" that Bungie's excellent cross-platform game development library, rather than being sold off with Oni and Myth, is currently buried somewhere deep in the bowels of the earth..
- Some yearly awards given out by plumbers' unions and industry groups
- Yearly award given out by the American Welding Society
- AFPA Industry Business Award -- "This annual award has been established to formally recognize and honour the efforts of those individuals who have made significant and lasting contributions to the growth of the food processing industry in Alberta [Canada]."
- Developer.com Web Services Industry Product of the Year award
- Awards won by Slashdot
I'd say humans in general are just a very self-aggrandizing, self-congratulatory bunch of meatsacks.There were 41 questions moderated up to 5 in the original interview. see them here if you like. If you'll notice, there were only about 12 questions forwarded to Dave Barry. The slashdot admins were the ones who had to pick and choose those final questions, using the moderators just as their guide.
This is of course inavoidable given the limitations of the slashdot moderation system.. I mean, it isn't like they could send dave barry forty questions.
Anyway the unpicked ones were more or less the same kind of stuff as the questions asked, but a few were slightly less humorous / set-up-knock-down and more direct and probing, like questions on Barry's thoughts on fair use or dog redundancy.
(Yes, my question was put to 5 in the original discussion but not sent.. nooo, not that i'm bitter or anything ^_^ okay, i'm going to go crawl back under my rock now. Sorry)
As a response to your challenge, I have just now asked it some basic questions about the world political situation, and some subjects which tend for one reason or another to accumulate conspiracy theories. I will leave you to judge the results.
mcc: Why does George W. Bush want to invade Iraq?
megahal: Jim morrison is hiding in the midst of a mass of energy.
mcc: I see. And what is the connection between Jim Morrison and Iraq?
megahal: Jim morrison is hiding in the larger society, relationships between women within the next two weeks.
mcc: Could that be considered an act of terrorism?
megahal: W00t w00t w00t?
mcc: Please stay on subject.
megahal: Jim morrison in in the end it doesn't work for you.
mcc: Is Saddam Hussein hiding weapons of mass destruction?
megahal: Don't pay attention to your car, ma'am?" "will that be considered an act of terrorism?
mcc: What would you say is the role of the international oil trade insofar as the current situation in Iraq goes?
megahal: By virtue of this subject.
mcc: Do you think Osama Bin Laden is working with Saddam Hussein?
megahal: Grand theft, genocide, racism, initiating the destruction of a mass of energy.
mcc: Left alone with any weapons of mass destruction he may have, do you think that Saddam Hussein poses a threat to the outside world?
megahal: Insofar as capitalism has created a world spun purely out of me and get bored eassily its veryt hard to find this here beach! Man's got a job interview in like 30:00 so if you distribute copies of the international war crimes tribunal at the hague that the term is not only a good bot.
mcc: Why do France and Germany wish to wait before allowing military action in Iraq?
megahal: I can tell you that you think jm should do with me and i vote.
mcc: So enough on Iraq for the moment. In the late nineties, Bobby Fischer claimed that several thousand dollars of his memorabilia had been stolen by an International Jewish Conspiracy. What are your thoughts on this?
megahal: He could not find a way to destruction.
mcc: What are your thoughts on the Scientologists?
megahal: One of the world jewish conspiracy?
mcc: What happened to Rudolph Hess?
megahal: Few of the tower of babel.
mcc: What are your thoughts on Ayn Rand?
megahal: And my mistake is that roles depend on the scientologists?
mcc: What are your thoughts on the Roman Catholic Church?
megahal: This has happened to rudolph hess?
mcc: Who shot Malcom X?
megahal: Feng and english are your thoughts on ayn rand?
mcc: Thank you for your time.
megahal: Wait..what..i am so confused.
(A) Biasing of the UI This is not anti competitive. The example given in the summary is that if a site is mistyped, MSN search comes up.
One time, in my girlfriend's copy of MSIE, i typed "cnn" into the address bar, assuming it would do the same thing as every macintosh web browser i'd ever used (prepend "www." and append ".com").
To my surprise, instead of just going to www.cnn.com, it launched me to an MSN "search page".
At the very top, hit #1, was MSNBC News, prominently displayed, accompanied with the words "featured link" and a big screenshot of the MSN News page.
Underneath this, hit #2, was a nondescript link to www.cnn.com.
Now, i don't really feel like getting into a legal argument, becuase i'm not 100% sure of what is and isn't legal. But if the example given above is not unethically leveraging a virtual monopoly in one area (web browsers) to gain unearned market share in another totally unrelated area (news services) then i don't know what is.
----
(almost OT comment: Besides this, Mac web browsers, including IE/mac, tend to have a preferences option asking you what your favorite search engine is. (Though i can't remember if it's possible to make the little Google Search pane in the Safari browser bar redirect to some other engine.) I seem to remember no such option existing for MSIE/windows, which is odd becuase MSIE/windows has such tight 'integration' with 'a search engine'..)
I didn't know "Tricky Business" existed. Neat.
I feel stupid ^_^
Mr. Barry:
:) )
I was rather surprised and impressed by the random out-of-nowhere short story near the end of the Dave Barry in Cyberspace book, and have been kind of wondering since then what would happen if you tried to write anything in a longer format than the standard columns. ( Big Trouble sounds really cool, but I haven't gotten around to picking up a copy yet
Anyway, my question is: Do you have plans to write any more fiction, and is it possible we could see any more movies from you in the future after what happened with Big Trouble?
And do you still write newspaper articles for the Herald outside the scope of the column?
---
you've got to be kidding, nintendo has nver produced ANYTHING that was backward compatible. both Sony and MS beat the heck out of them there.
First off: That's not actually true. The Game Boy Color was backward compatible with the Game Boy, and the Game Boy Advance was backward compatible with the previous two Game Boy platforms.
Secondly, while no *home* console system nintendo has ever released has been backward compatible (unless you count add-ons like the 64DD and the [japan only] Famicom Disk system), Nintendo has also always in the past always been cartridge-based. This is no longer the case; the gamecube is optical disk based. It is not really particularly easy to maintain compatibility from machine to machine when each machine has a different cartridge format that is going to be a different size and shape. Optical disks, however, are a different beast; this thing alone shows that it is perfectly possible to create one laser that can read both the DVD format and the Gamecube format. If nintendo continues with the optical disks thing, and there is every reason to believe they will, nintendo very well could just allow disks of either sort to fit in their next-gen console.
Now, here's my prediction: Nintendo once released a $50 super nintendo addon that let you play game boy games on it, and now has out a $50 gamecube addon that lets you play GBA games on it. A few years into the Super Nintendo's lifespan, they released a "redesigned" NES, that could play all the NES games but was very small and very cheap, just for everyone who'd never had an NES. From this i'd say Nintendo knows how to milk every last cent out of an expired franchise. My guess would be that if it turns out to be technologically inconvenient to make their next console backward-compatible, Nintendo will just release along with the console a $50 "compatibility card", or something, that will allow people who never had a gamecube to enjoy both systems relatively cheaply, while still making the new system as cheap as possible for those of us with gamecubes.
But what do i know.
---
And anyway, how can you say MS beat out nintendo in the back-compatibility department? MS has only released one console, ever, remember? Wait to make statements like that until the Xbox2 (and maybe, to, be fair, the GC2) is actually *out*.
I suspect you say that with your tongue in cheek, but i would just like to ask anyway: All those of you who are miffed about the fact your brand-new gamecube will be obsolete in two and a half years:
Do you get as annoyed about being coerced into spending $150-$200 every two or so years for an incrementally improved version of your operating system that doesn't really add much, as you do about being coerced into spending $150-$200 every three or so years for a completely new and improved game console?
Just curious.
The most likely thing is that the thing nintendo originally referred to as the "Megaton" announcement was probably just this.
:)
As for all that stuff about the Megaton announcement being "the thing that will deliver a deathblow to one of nintendo's major competitors" and "the thing that will make gamecubes just fly off the shelves", that was probably just the rumor sites blowing wishful thinking out of proportion.
That said, the Game Boy Advance SP is nothing to sneeze at, and nintendo probably considers the Game Boy a bigger thing than the Game Cube anyway, rightfully so at least considering their sales for the GBA are about an order of magnitude higher. I just wish they'd announced something (*cough* Pokemon Online? *cough*) to placate those of us who have gamecubes
I am not sure how comfortable with this i am, not becuase i at all think linux is prone to fail but becuase linux is capable of failing. Kernel panics still happen, like, once in a billion years. Linux just never struck me as an OS you need when, like, it is absolutely essential that absolutely nothing go wrong ever. Like when you are running some kind of control system for an airplane, or controlling a robot drilling holes in people's skulls. I don't think linux or even bsd would be a great choice in those cases, though i sure as hell don't think windows should even be considered given their track record in such situations.
Aren't there any OSes about at the moment that are like all redundant and correctness-proven and stuff, like with NASA-like failure margins? Wouldn't it be better to be using those instead?
Is this reasonable of me to say?
Can't really look too much at the linked site right now (no sound on the computer i'm at at the moment), but if this interests you:
You may also be interested in the hacking Charlie Clouser (you'd know him from Nine Inch Nails) did to his speak and spell (see partway down the page).
The GPL specifically addresses this. Section 8 reads:OK, so that doesn't seem to cover the idea of a nation that outlaws the GPL-- i guess there's a bug in that section 7 covers "any law" and section 8 covers intellectual property law only. But that's a pretty outlandish scenario to consider, and unless a country someday outlaws GPLed software, this is not even worth thinking about. Anyway, since most GPLed software is licensed under "GPL 2.0 or, at your option, some later version of the GPL", were this issue ever to somehow come up, RMS could release GPL 2.0.1 in which section 8 allows you to make a geographical exemption based on any law, and just about everyone could switch to that. But i just don't see this happening.
As far as the contract thing goes, that's just kind of wierd and i don't think it's a valid problem. In that case, you've still unconditionally granted the rights the GPL requires you to grant, it's just that someone signed those rights away.
the above should read "... would not permit royalty-free distribution of arbitrary derived works". But this is clearly nonsense: If I added one-click shopping to GNU ls, I would not have a license to distribute the result. So by section 7, nobody can distribute GNU ls under the GPL
Yes.. that is clearly nonsense. But that's not what the GPL says. The GPL says that derivative works must be "licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License". It seems pretty clear to me that your obligations in section 7 are toward certifying the unlimited redistributability of code *you distribute*. Code other people write is not your problem in this way, even if it links against code you put under the gpl, and there's no reason to think it is.
Okay, so it's possible to misinterpret the language in the GPL to make a logical contradiction. That doesn't make it any less a misinterpretation, and since the *intent* of the words which are there are spelled out very clearly in the associated FAQs, i believe a court of law would (if for some bizarre reason someone in court attempted to argue what your post argues) interpret the GPL in the way it was intended to be interpreted.
I don't see the problem here. Section 7 is necessary for the rest of the GPL to work.
Since they have distributed Linux, that alone is enough to thwart the rumored patent attack.
Actually, not really. Since the GPL is a redistribution license and not a contract, there really isn't anything at all *legally* to stop SCO from exercising any patents they might have. If the patent they have is valid and they institute a license fee for that patent, they would lose the right to redistribute any gpled software that is covered by said patent, but then so would Debian. I think the only *direct* consequence for SCO if they instituted a license fee would be that they'd have to stop distributing linux until such time as they removed the code covered by their patent.
I read this section to mean that if SCO has patents that Linux implements, and 'the community' doesn't already have an unlimited eternal royaltay-free license to use these patents, then the Linux people are right now, regardless of whether SCO tries to pay up or not, legally obligated to remove the implementations of these patents from the Linux code. As far as i'm aware, there have been in the past concentrated efforts to find and remove submarined patents that accidentally wound up in GPLed software, no? What patents of this sort could SCO have?
At any rate one would imagine that SCO would not be so stupid as to demand individual $97 patent licenses from a group of people that (1) is at the moment their core target market (2) has a long-standing tendency to boycott people who do things like demand money for submarine patents (3) would probably not even pay the $97 fees, as they also have a long-standing tendency to not mind stealing from anyone they believe to be screwing them over. (I call (3) "civil disobedience", personally, but that's probably just spin on my part.)
And SCO would have to demand this money from individual users-- it would be impossible for SCO to demand it from vendors, becuase were SCO to start demanding licensing fees from anyone at all regarding patents of theirs inside the Linux kernel (which i assume is where these patent violations would have taken place), all existing linux vendors, including SCO, would be under GPL section 7 immediately legally unable to distribute Linux to anyone at all! (Not permanently, of course, as i find it highly unlikely any defendable SCO patent, once discovered in the linux kernel, would remain there any longer than a span of hours.)
Either way, assuming that SCO is in fact this stupid, and assuming that SCO actually does own patents that the linux kernel violates but that no one in the free software community has ever noticed, i think i'll wait until i read this on SCO.COM to pay any attention to it whatsoever.
they're using Slashdot as an example website!
Actually, were I wanting to show off a new web browser, I would probably try to hit slashdot before anywhere else. Why?
Ugly table code! Your typical slashdot pageload is a humongous mess of hundreds upon hundreds of random tables nested in odd ways. If you want an example of a truly taxing test to throw at a web page renderer, slashdot's about as heavy as you can do. Since Safari is apparently all about speed, then it makes lots of sense. After all, rendering a single slashdot discussion page is enough to make MSIE on Mac OS 9 choke on my parents' G4 400 just about every single time-- once the page has loaded, the computer freezes up for at least 5 or so seconds even if IE is in the background. (MSIE for OS X does not have these problems) Omniweb loads slashdot fine but tends to act sluggish while scrolling. (Or it did the last time i used it.) This is what Safari is competing with..
Of course, this reasoning is obliterated by the poor framerate on that one quicktime movie, making it impossible to tell how smoothly it's running. but still ^_^