As a player of the original Diablo, which at the time was fun and rather novel, and a battle.net stress tester for Blizzard I have to say I am rather disappointed. Yes the graphics are better, and there are a few more customization options (skills, etc), but the gameplay is pretty much unchanged and the graphics aren't THAT good. I'd like to know why it took a company 3 years to revamp a game,IMHO, so poorly. Blizzard is veering from the right track since the leaving of some of its top programmers which founded triforge. Gameplay is more important to me than graphics, and the gameplay is unimpressive....so much so that it would take Q3+ graphics to make up for it, and they ain't that good. Just my two cents of disappointment in a company I used to really like.
I have two views of this reply. One view is that this is an appropriate response to the letter issued by Microsoft. In that reguard I think it does a good job of arguing, seeking clarification, of the copyright infringement issue which is central to the M$ trade secret and DMCA attack. My second view is that this reply totally fails to even hint at any of the possible courses of action that will be taken. I can't quite explain it, but after reading the response letter it really seems to be a flank attack, dodging the action requested my M$ and in turn questioning the foundation behind those requested actions....which IMHO is a very good thing. Fight the good fight and keep up the good work.
Very nicely written! Emmet makes some wonderful, thought out, and well expressed points. You should write editorials more often, because, it appears you have a knack for them.
While this is a big Open Source issue, its also a big issue for everyone that isn't running M$'s OS. I'm a mac user and I realize that the closing and hiding of such protocols can totally prevent cross platform communication.
One of my favorite sayings: You can kick a dog til he does one of two things, 1) roll over and die, or 2) get up and take your leg off. M$ has been kicking a lot of smaller, all but helpless dogs, but I think this time that they've made a mistake and kicked one of the baddest pit bulls ever.....heck why stop at the leg.
I think/. should remove the text of the comments that have the explicit code and replace that text with a note why. Comments about unzipping the file and such should not be left alone. I'm not legally astute but from reading comments and such it would seem that the actual license would qualify for entrapment...its a setup to try and get someone to incriminate themselves. Being a dog lover I have the following thoughts: 1) If you can't run with the big dogs, stay on the porch 2) Show them that your bite is worse than your bark
Just to throw one more fact into the pile already posted by fellow scientists. I'm working in a lab where our main job is isolating and sequencing DNA, plants in our case. Its an extrememely tedious process. The point I wanted to mention was that there is such a thing as post-transcriptional modification with DNA. After the RNA has been transcribed sometimes an enzyme comes along and changes anywhere from a few to almost all of the bases in the strand. Not much is known how this works, but it is just one more thing that points just because you have the sequence it doesn't mean that it is all that useful. A majority of the DNA in higher mammals is repeats of things like ALU sequences which are leftover from things like retroviruses and have accumulated in the genome over generations. Why is it there? Well there really isn't a mechanism to remove it. There is going to be a really long scavenger hunt as they sort out the trash from the stuff that actually matters, and don't forget the introns/exons...but those aren't that difficult to separate. One of the more interesting albeit "noncritical" results of this will be the ability to make an accurate phylogenetic tree. It'll be very cool to be able to run Clustal W alignments of other species against the human genome.
The discussions about biology here often cause me to grit my teeth and shake my head in dismay. My degree is in molecular and cell biology, and I happen to work in a gene sequencing lab. First of all when these companies patent something it really isn't "the sequence" itself. What gets patented are things like cis and trans promoters/enhancers that are cloned into vectors. In terms of "open" source the genetics world is wide open. You can go to NCBI's homepage and run a sample sequence through the National database and get a few hundred results including H. sapiens similarities. No one has yet mentioned that the human genome project and celera have taken VERY DIFFERENT routes to get their data. HGP uses linear sequencing...one chunk at a time per se, last I heard Celera used a whole genome shotgun approach. Its actually more profitable because only a small percentage of the genome does anything...so they can pick out areas that "look interesting" and go back and linear sequence them. Basically this was a PR stunt and the public along with/.'ers ate it up. This is very old news and the posters/moderators might want to read a decent freshman biology text so they can figure out what's out there and what's not about these stories. As for science being free... um well when the people that ask for it will pay my rent, buy my groceries, and take care of my bills I'll be all for it, come on let's put both feet on the ground people. Just my two cents.
One day I dream of having the bandwidth to administer and play with my own server, and I've done a lot of wishful price checking/planning. I don't know about InterJet, but Cobalt's similar box runs about $1500. Last I checked you can get an entry level Sun Solaris machine for that. I'd think the latter would be a little more robust and versatile. Maybe I'm missing the point of "turnkey" setup. I noticed that the IBM box does not allow "custom cgi's"...well IMHO that seriously limits what it can be used with. Anyone played with these? What happens if you want to say upgrade Perl or Python etc? Of course with minimal skills, even I can do it, someone can setup a simple pc with linux and apache to do more than these will, and with easier installers and tools like RH 6.1, Mandrake, etc I think that it would be a little better. If someone wanted to emulate these products it doesn't look to be that hard...most of the web interface is just some shell scripting in your choice of scripting languages. Just thought I'd add my 2 cents to the discussion. Live long and prosper....
Ok I'm going to play devil's advocate and try and look at it from Apple's viewpoint. I don't think they can afford to port MacOS X to x86 due to previously mentioned hardware sales, BUT they always "secured" that by keeping the MacOS ROM veiled in mystery and secret. I imagine that the big "no go" here is that Apple just finished UMA chipset for use in the new iMacs, Powerbooks, and Sawtooths. I'm not an engineer, just a biology student, but I would think putting a x86 chip on a MB designed for RISC, I know the "categories" are useless/blurring, would require some design changes. That would be on a design I imagine that has already cost them some money and quite a bit of time to get where they wanted...it was primarly for cost reasons as far as I know. That's why the iMac's are slowly coming down in price along with a predicted drop in the iBook's price. Yep and I have to agree that Apple doesn't have the touch of death on technology either. SCSI is far from dead, the number of digital video devices using Firewire is growing (Sony even gave it its own product name), and wireless networks are becoming within range of multi-computer homes in terms of price. Anyway that's just my.02 or.03.
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As a player of the original Diablo, which at the time was fun and rather novel, and a battle.net stress tester for Blizzard I have to say I am rather disappointed. Yes the graphics are better, and there are a few more customization options (skills, etc), but the gameplay is pretty much unchanged and the graphics aren't THAT good. I'd like to know why it took a company 3 years to revamp a game,IMHO, so poorly. Blizzard is veering from the right track since the leaving of some of its top programmers which founded triforge. Gameplay is more important to me than graphics, and the gameplay is unimpressive....so much so that it would take Q3+ graphics to make up for it, and they ain't that good. Just my two cents of disappointment in a company I used to really like.
I have two views of this reply. One view is that this is an appropriate response to the letter issued by Microsoft. In that reguard I think it does a good job of arguing, seeking clarification, of the copyright infringement issue which is central to the M$ trade secret and DMCA attack. My second view is that this reply totally fails to even hint at any of the possible courses of action that will be taken. I can't quite explain it, but after reading the response letter it really seems to be a flank attack, dodging the action requested my M$ and in turn questioning the foundation behind those requested actions....which IMHO is a very good thing. Fight the good fight and keep up the good work.
Very nicely written! Emmet makes some wonderful, thought out, and well expressed points. You should write editorials more often, because, it appears you have a knack for them.
While this is a big Open Source issue, its also a big issue for everyone that isn't running M$'s OS. I'm a mac user and I realize that the closing and hiding of such protocols can totally prevent cross platform communication.
One of my favorite sayings: You can kick a dog til he does one of two things, 1) roll over and die, or 2) get up and take your leg off. M$ has been kicking a lot of smaller, all but helpless dogs, but I think this time that they've made a mistake and kicked one of the baddest pit bulls ever.....heck why stop at the leg.
Gig'em
I think /. should remove the text of the comments that have the explicit code and replace that text with a note why. Comments about unzipping the file and such should not be left alone. I'm not legally astute but from reading comments and such it would seem that the actual license would qualify for entrapment...its a setup to try and get someone to incriminate themselves. Being a dog lover I have the following thoughts: 1) If you can't run with the big dogs, stay on the porch 2) Show them that your bite is worse than your bark
Just to throw one more fact into the pile already posted by fellow scientists. I'm working in a lab where our main job is isolating and sequencing DNA, plants in our case. Its an extrememely tedious process. The point I wanted to mention was that there is such a thing as post-transcriptional modification with DNA. After the RNA has been transcribed sometimes an enzyme comes along and changes anywhere from a few to almost all of the bases in the strand. Not much is known how this works, but it is just one more thing that points just because you have the sequence it doesn't mean that it is all that useful. A majority of the DNA in higher mammals is repeats of things like ALU sequences which are leftover from things like retroviruses and have accumulated in the genome over generations. Why is it there? Well there really isn't a mechanism to remove it. There is going to be a really long scavenger hunt as they sort out the trash from the stuff that actually matters, and don't forget the introns/exons...but those aren't that difficult to separate. One of the more interesting albeit "noncritical" results of this will be the ability to make an accurate phylogenetic tree. It'll be very cool to be able to run Clustal W alignments of other species against the human genome.
The discussions about biology here often cause me to grit my teeth and shake my head in dismay. My degree is in molecular and cell biology, and I happen to work in a gene sequencing lab. First of all when these companies patent something it really isn't "the sequence" itself. What gets patented are things like cis and trans promoters/enhancers that are cloned into vectors. In terms of "open" source the genetics world is wide open. You can go to NCBI's homepage and run a sample sequence through the National database and get a few hundred results including H. sapiens similarities. No one has yet mentioned that the human genome project and celera have taken VERY DIFFERENT routes to get their data. HGP uses linear sequencing...one chunk at a time per se, last I heard Celera used a whole genome shotgun approach. Its actually more profitable because only a small percentage of the genome does anything...so they can pick out areas that "look interesting" and go back and linear sequence them. Basically this was a PR stunt and the public along with /.'ers ate it up. This is very old news and the posters/moderators might want to read a decent freshman biology text so they can figure out what's out there and what's not about these stories. As for science being free ... um well when the people that ask for it will pay my rent, buy my groceries, and take care of my bills I'll be all for it, come on let's put both feet on the ground people. Just my two cents.
One day I dream of having the bandwidth to administer and play with my own server, and I've done a lot of wishful price checking/planning. I don't know about InterJet, but Cobalt's similar box runs about $1500. Last I checked you can get an entry level Sun Solaris machine for that. I'd think the latter would be a little more robust and versatile. Maybe I'm missing the point of "turnkey" setup. I noticed that the IBM box does not allow "custom cgi's"...well IMHO that seriously limits what it can be used with. Anyone played with these? What happens if you want to say upgrade Perl or Python etc? Of course with minimal skills, even I can do it, someone can setup a simple pc with linux and apache to do more than these will, and with easier installers and tools like RH 6.1, Mandrake, etc I think that it would be a little better. If someone wanted to emulate these products it doesn't look to be that hard...most of the web interface is just some shell scripting in your choice of scripting languages. Just thought I'd add my 2 cents to the discussion. Live long and prosper....
Ok I'm going to play devil's advocate and try and look at it from Apple's viewpoint. I don't think they can afford to port MacOS X to x86 due to previously mentioned hardware sales, BUT they always "secured" that by keeping the MacOS ROM veiled in mystery and secret. I imagine that the big "no go" here is that Apple just finished UMA chipset for use in the new iMacs, Powerbooks, and Sawtooths. I'm not an engineer, just a biology student, but I would think putting a x86 chip on a MB designed for RISC, I know the "categories" are useless/blurring, would require some design changes. That would be on a design I imagine that has already cost them some money and quite a bit of time to get where they wanted...it was primarly for cost reasons as far as I know. That's why the iMac's are slowly coming down in price along with a predicted drop in the iBook's price. Yep and I have to agree that Apple doesn't have the touch of death on technology either. SCSI is far from dead, the number of digital video devices using Firewire is growing (Sony even gave it its own product name), and wireless networks are becoming within range of multi-computer homes in terms of price. Anyway that's just my .02 or .03.