Re:I really want to understand...
on
ClusterKnoppix
·
· Score: 3, Informative
pay no attention to the "insightful" comments that serve to dress up a "Fuck you, MS dude."
I'll try to give you an actual response. People have been quick to mention Knoppix CD's for rescue operations -- this doesn't apply to the Clustering feature, just knoppix in general. I used one of these last night to fix my roommate's system which had gotten totally owned and was halting at LILO. Could i have done it with a floppy based linux distro? Probly, but it would've been a bigger pain, because the floppy is small and may not have the tools i need, whereas a CD is big enough to have damn near everything.
That being out of the way - some uses for the cluster disks. 1. say your server (using ClusterKnoppix), which has a hard disk and lots of ram, etc, runs a really dynamic web site which needs lots of CPU. If you see that you're getting shitload of connections you take some other systems that aren't critical, pop in a CD and reboot and add their processors to the pool to help out the web server
2. as has been mentioned, in academic institutions, you could use this to harness the computers down the hall in the public lab for experiments overnight...
3. i don't today, but someday i may need a cluster, and why make it difficult if i can pop a CD in 6 LAN systems and get it going rather than spending a week on configuration. Shit, i've had occasions where my computer was compiling for 3 days straight... would've been nice to fire up a couple of secondary systems to help out...
i suppose you could call these contrived examples, but they're not wholly unrealistic. i think what you're getting at is, "why should normal people care?" which is a good question. is this useful for 90% of computer users? fuck no. 1%? Maybe. it solves the problem of running a cluster which can be simply and arbitrarily resized (keyword simply). If you have no need for a cluster, then you certainly don't care about a resizable one.
keep in mind though, that lots of things can be cool without being useful to yourself. i have no need for a supercomputer, but i still think they're pretty interesting and cool. i think this is a cool technology too, useful for a certain class of problem, and a limited set of users.
that's my 57 yen... for what it's worth.
Re:One of the reasons I think people hated Wesley:
on
Dancing Barefoot
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· Score: 1
This is just a thought, but I think that some of the younger Star Trek: TNG viewers might have even been JEALOUS of Wesley Crusher.
agreed. plus, he got to make out with Ashley Judd in one episode.
I think it should be obvious to any reasonable person that genetic modification has the potential to be a great boon to society, but it must be evaluated carefully to minimize negative effects.
We've now got some amazing food crops that, due to GM, are more resistant to insects, deseases and poor growing conditions, all of which are good things. On the other hand, most of those modified seeds (perhaps all of them) are patented, and have the added feature of having been further modified to prevent the plants they produce from producing any more seeds. This presents a social and environmental issue because while poorer nations now have crops that are more likely to survive, they also have to pay for more seeds every year, and can't create a self sustaining crop.
That's just one example, of course, but i think it's important to address how society at large will benefit most from GM and do everything possible to steer policy in that direction. Seems like GM for humans would have the potential to further divide rich from poor as the rich spend their money on designer kids that are smarter, stronger, and healthier. It's naive in the extreme to assume that GM will create some kind of utopia where there's no more disease and everyone's happy and healthy and has a 180 IQ. It could work out that way, but only if we give due diligence to developments in the technology, policy and law behind GM.
10 bucks a month? For unlimited downloads? That wouldn't even cover the bandwidth used for 20 tracks, much less even begin to compensate the IP owner, STILL less the artist.
And, of course, $10 won't even buy you 5 seconds of studio time so let's not get into the "there's no packaging/manufacturing costs" issue. Making professional quality music costs money. People who've never analyzed the industry don't realize how low the margins actually are for normal artists (AND the labels, as concerns those artists)... it's all funded by the few hundred acts that go mega platinum.
Lets face it, for music downloads to work, it's gonna have to be an album neutral (i.e. you're not required to buy the album whole), previewable, and pay-per-song-minute, or per meg if you prefer. At 15 cents per minute, a one hour record is 9 bucks. I'd pay at least that for music i like, assuming it's unrestricted in terms of where/when/how i can enjoy it. Plus, with this scheme i can get any single song i like without putting up with an album of filler.
I guess i've exceeded my two cent mark, but anyway, this is the only way i see online distribution working.
persistence will occur because people will cache things they care about locally. or rather, the browser (or whatever it becomes) will do that for you. ideally, all content will be semantically grouped so you can trivially find things that are similar to something you are already looking at. people call this the semantic web right now, but it's going to have to evolve a great deal to become useful. my prediction is that knowledge management, in some guise or another, will replace the browser, and our interface to the worlds information sources will be an abstraction which relates not only new things matching what we asked for, but other similar things that we've seen before or that the program has found relevant. all the content you've cached locally will be indexed and made available to others, unless you've flagged it private (your own documents, for example) so things that people care about will never vanish. eventually the concept of "your" computer will fade and what you'll really have is a terminal which provides content you care about, quickly and efficently, and allows you to create content, which you may share or not as you see fit.
i don't think Timothy's quite right. Not that this is a whole hell of a lot better, but the patent appears to apply only to the application of versioning/history, etc. to web content. That still sucks, but i don't believe it'll impact code versioning systems (e.g. CVS) though perhaps someone using CVS as a backend for their own CMS would be in trouble.
I'm not sure how broadly the courts would read "content" but on first glance, it seems all the coders out there should be ok.
Just a layman's opinion, but patents are ususally pretty specific in their scope, and this one mentions "Web" and "Content" not "code" or "source"
actually, they *are* reeling from lost sales, and the global economy and online music piracy do "compound" that problem. they didn't say "caused by"...
you may believe that online piracy has a minimal effect, or a positive one (fwiw, i think it's the former) but it's not a non-issue, and it'd be just as wrong for the journalists to not mention it.
now, if they were *really* on top of their shit, they would've spared a sentence for "Some critics believe that homogeniety and overpricing are at the heart of the reduced sales of music." That would be nice, but they said nothing that was outright wrong.
You think this will saturate the network with broadcast pings? sweet mother, have you ever seen the kind of noise SMB Windows Networking puts out?
If i never see another packet on my network carrying a vote for who should be the damn MDC, it'll be too soon.
I can't imagine this is worse, and it serves far more useful purposes.
Quite the detailed 'technical description'
on
Real DRM
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· Score: 2
By which i mean to say, not a technical description at all. Anyone else click those links? Read like marketing materials -- can't imagine why. God forbit they should expose the slightest bit of their architechture.
Maybe i'm missing something but using the phrases 'secure container technology' and 'encryption algorithms' doesn't seem like a tech doc to me.
Really, fuck Real anyway. It's been a long time since i used their product and even then it was mostly for wasting time with humor clips.
I'll change my mind (maybe) when i see some details.
Your math is wrong because you're not factoring in overlap... by which i mean, users who fall into more than one category. These characteristics you list are not strictly independent. I'd guess that damn near everyone still running win95 lacks broadband, for example, so if you've already limited your market to "broadband subscribers" you probly don't have to care about too many people with win95.
I won't bother getting into the discussion of whether your numbers are accurate, but if we assume they are, i'd figure that the best guess for the actual market is much closer to being exactly the same as the percentage of users with broadband, due to overlap. In your estimation, that's 20%, which is still a fairly decent chunk of the user base, assuming they're able to effectively advertise to that demographic. I don't think they will, mind you, but it's still a potentially lucrative market.
Dude, RIAA is gonna be the biggest fan of this... Only not. Will radios no longer come with tape decks? Line outs? Speaker connections? Perhaps they'll only enable the audio out if the proper DRM key is inserted? I like the idea, but in the current climate, something tells me this is going to have an uphill battle.
and my number one reason i use mozilla over i.e. -- tabbed browsing. i can't even deal w/ i.e. any more. opening multiple windows for new pages seems so... vulgar.
I haven't decided that this feature really should cost more... it *will* of course, but it seems to me, this should be possible with regular cdr drives, given the proper software. This is something i've been thinking about for quite a while, but never got around to looking into. Looks like Yamaha beat me to it. Not that us poor americans will get it within the year.
I'm not sure your assessment of Moby's status is correct. Moby is *not* a fringe artist anymore. Just because his records aren't being gobbled up like candy by legions of 14 year old girls, doesn't mean he's not mainstream. Bits and pieces of songs from Play were featured in quite a few very prominent advertisements, being used to *sell* other things. I call that mainstream. I believe some of his music appeared in an episode of the X Files -- mainstream. And at least one of his videos, Eastside iirc, got enough MTV airplay to make me start skipping that track on the cd, good as it is -- mainstream.
Additionally, it's a little disingenuous to indicate that Moby is a sideline, indie artist that needs the exposure that only p2p can provide, and in the next paragraph indicate that perhaps the new record wasn't marketed well enough. If anything proves just how mainstream an artist is, it's that marketing sells the record better than quality.
At any rate, your ultimate conclusion is correct -- I don't think filesharing killed this record.
that explains why i don't have it. I don't have a pirated copy either, because i like moby enough *not* to steal from him. Seems probable to me that a lot of techies are in much lower paying jobs than they were a year or two ago, and perhaps are having trouble adjusting to a budget. I know in my case, I just don't have ability to buy every cd i want -- wish it were otherwise.
Aside from that, geeks have more entertainment options grappling for their limited resources, like new computer gear, and video games... If you went and shelled out 60 clams for Neverwinter Nights this weekend, it may be tougher to justify the already hard-to-swallow 18 bucks for a CD, even if you like the artist.
Didn't they use this feature in the super bowl a couple of years ago? Of course, you still need one camera to expose each angles, usually at least 3, and a hoss computer to build the 3D model. If i recall, it wasn't as Matrix-esqe as we'd like it to have been, (though that's mostly a limitation of camera and computing power).
Aside from all that, what's the point. If a guy looks suspicious, and you have 3 cameras able to pick him up, flip the camera view -- is that too much harder than rolling a jog dial?
Re:Charge for it in geometrically increasing sums
on
Fair IP Laws?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
i think this is an excellent idea.
now it just needs to be brought to the attention of people with actual power, instead of a crew like minded dorks.
have you considered submitting this as a proposal to your elected reps? assuming you're not planning to copyright the concept ; ) i may do so myself, perhaps with a bit more formalism and examples....
"If only they would devote a little bit of the millions of dollars they're spending on this ad campaign to help stop illegal downloading... but that wouldn't help them sell more CD burners, would it," said Hilary Rosen"
here's mine:
"If only the music industry would devote a little bit of millions of dollars they're spending on lawyers and buying senators to update their distribution model into the 21st century... but that wouldn't let them fuck the artists as much would it?"
from what i've heard Shadowbane (which i believe the publisher claims will be out sometime in the next few months) will be very much like what you describe. You wanna build walls in a field that spell out your name when viewd from above? Do it. That's maybe a lame example, but you get my drift. I might even recall a bit about natural aging... (i.e. the wall will fall apart over time, unless you maintain it) but i'm not sure.
I'm not in the betas, but i've read and heard a bit, and it seems that the level of actual world interaction in this game will be substantial.
At any rate if it lives up to what i think it is, i fear for my free time...
I keep reading these stories about software/mew media related patents and clearly there's something very wrong in the USPTO (and probably other nations' patent bodies too, to be fair), however there's something in here that never seems to be addressed.
What resposibility does the patent attorney hold in these situations. I realize that there's no requirement that an attorney be involved in any way with a patent application process, and many larger companies likely handle them internally (albeit, i would guess, through their own office of general counsel). Most smaller companies though, and certainly individuals, would hire a patent lawyer to handle the intricacies of the patent application. It's not an easy process and that's why there are specialists, and it was my understanding, though i could be wrong, that part of what the patent attorney does before filing a patent is perform research for prior art and/or other patents which would conflict with the current application. The signature of the attorney on the application, I thought, was primarily to say "I'm an expert and I see nothing wrong about this application."
That being said, it seems that for any patent for which there is very obvious prior art, or which attempts to patent something obvious, there's a patent attorney who didn't do his job quite well enough (for whatever reason).
So then, what responsibility does this lawyer hold for such a misrepresentation, or, perhaps, what responsibility *should* he/she hold. Can they be disbarred? Or does the issue not really matter.
If I'm wrong about all this, by all means, educate me, but it seems like the USPTO can't take all the blame, nor be responsible for deeply researching each patent application it gets. Lets find a way to properly weed out lame patents before they even get to the USPTO, perhaps through greater accountability for the handlers of the pre-application process.
Wearable appliance? That's what your Mom is. I wore her out.
Re:Do you think Loki.....
on
Last Word on Loki
·
· Score: 3, Informative
No. They can't, because they don't own the rights, most likely. The original game publisher will retain exclusive right to the licencing of the game product -- all Loki owns is the Linux-specific stuff that got written for the port, and parts of *that* are even probably unreleasable because it'd expose too much of the game's underlying, proprietary, operations.
It's a damn shame, I played the hell out of Tribes and there were a couple other games I was considering buying when a few bucks came my way... guess I waited to long.
But at least we get access to some of the great work they did release -- most notably SDL.
Slashdot Mirror
pay no attention to the "insightful" comments that serve to dress up a "Fuck you, MS dude."
I'll try to give you an actual response. People have been quick to mention Knoppix CD's for rescue operations -- this doesn't apply to the Clustering feature, just knoppix in general. I used one of these last night to fix my roommate's system which had gotten totally owned and was halting at LILO. Could i have done it with a floppy based linux distro? Probly, but it would've been a bigger pain, because the floppy is small and may not have the tools i need, whereas a CD is big enough to have damn near everything.
That being out of the way - some uses for the cluster disks.
1. say your server (using ClusterKnoppix), which has a hard disk and lots of ram, etc, runs a really dynamic web site which needs lots of CPU. If you see that you're getting shitload of connections you take some other systems that aren't critical, pop in a CD and reboot and add their processors to the pool to help out the web server
2. as has been mentioned, in academic institutions, you could use this to harness the computers down the hall in the public lab for experiments overnight...
3. i don't today, but someday i may need a cluster, and why make it difficult if i can pop a CD in 6 LAN systems and get it going rather than spending a week on configuration. Shit, i've had occasions where my computer was compiling for 3 days straight... would've been nice to fire up a couple of secondary systems to help out...
i suppose you could call these contrived examples, but they're not wholly unrealistic. i think what you're getting at is, "why should normal people care?" which is a good question. is this useful for 90% of computer users? fuck no. 1%? Maybe. it solves the problem of running a cluster which can be simply and arbitrarily resized (keyword simply). If you have no need for a cluster, then you certainly don't care about a resizable one.
keep in mind though, that lots of things can be cool without being useful to yourself. i have no need for a supercomputer, but i still think they're pretty interesting and cool. i think this is a cool technology too, useful for a certain class of problem, and a limited set of users.
that's my 57 yen... for what it's worth.
This is just a thought, but I think that some of the younger Star Trek: TNG viewers might have even been JEALOUS of Wesley Crusher.
agreed. plus, he got to make out with Ashley Judd in one episode.
that had to be pretty OK, right...
I think it should be obvious to any reasonable person that genetic modification has the potential to be a great boon to society, but it must be evaluated carefully to minimize negative effects.
We've now got some amazing food crops that, due to GM, are more resistant to insects, deseases and poor growing conditions, all of which are good things. On the other hand, most of those modified seeds (perhaps all of them) are patented, and have the added feature of having been further modified to prevent the plants they produce from producing any more seeds. This presents a social and environmental issue because while poorer nations now have crops that are more likely to survive, they also have to pay for more seeds every year, and can't create a self sustaining crop.
That's just one example, of course, but i think it's important to address how society at large will benefit most from GM and do everything possible to steer policy in that direction. Seems like GM for humans would have the potential to further divide rich from poor as the rich spend their money on designer kids that are smarter, stronger, and healthier. It's naive in the extreme to assume that GM will create some kind of utopia where there's no more disease and everyone's happy and healthy and has a 180 IQ. It could work out that way, but only if we give due diligence to developments in the technology, policy and law behind GM.
10 bucks a month? For unlimited downloads? That wouldn't even cover the bandwidth used for 20 tracks, much less even begin to compensate the IP owner, STILL less the artist.
And, of course, $10 won't even buy you 5 seconds of studio time so let's not get into the "there's no packaging/manufacturing costs" issue. Making professional quality music costs money. People who've never analyzed the industry don't realize how low the margins actually are for normal artists (AND the labels, as concerns those artists)... it's all funded by the few hundred acts that go mega platinum.
Lets face it, for music downloads to work, it's gonna have to be an album neutral (i.e. you're not required to buy the album whole), previewable, and pay-per-song-minute, or per meg if you prefer. At 15 cents per minute, a one hour record is 9 bucks. I'd pay at least that for music i like, assuming it's unrestricted in terms of where/when/how i can enjoy it. Plus, with this scheme i can get any single song i like without putting up with an album of filler.
I guess i've exceeded my two cent mark, but anyway, this is the only way i see online distribution working.
persistence will occur because people will cache things they care about locally. or rather, the browser (or whatever it becomes) will do that for you. ideally, all content will be semantically grouped so you can trivially find things that are similar to something you are already looking at. people call this the semantic web right now, but it's going to have to evolve a great deal to become useful. my prediction is that knowledge management, in some guise or another, will replace the browser, and our interface to the worlds information sources will be an abstraction which relates not only new things matching what we asked for, but other similar things that we've seen before or that the program has found relevant. all the content you've cached locally will be indexed and made available to others, unless you've flagged it private (your own documents, for example) so things that people care about will never vanish. eventually the concept of "your" computer will fade and what you'll really have is a terminal which provides content you care about, quickly and efficently, and allows you to create content, which you may share or not as you see fit.
i don't think Timothy's quite right. Not that this is a whole hell of a lot better, but the patent appears to apply only to the application of versioning/history, etc. to web content. That still sucks, but i don't believe it'll impact code versioning systems (e.g. CVS) though perhaps someone using CVS as a backend for their own CMS would be in trouble.
I'm not sure how broadly the courts would read "content" but on first glance, it seems all the coders out there should be ok.
Just a layman's opinion, but patents are ususally pretty specific in their scope, and this one mentions "Web" and "Content" not "code" or "source"
actually, they *are* reeling from lost sales, and the global economy and online music piracy do "compound" that problem. they didn't say "caused by"...
you may believe that online piracy has a minimal effect, or a positive one (fwiw, i think it's the former) but it's not a non-issue, and it'd be just as wrong for the journalists to not mention it.
now, if they were *really* on top of their shit, they would've spared a sentence for "Some critics believe that homogeniety and overpricing are at the heart of the reduced sales of music." That would be nice, but they said nothing that was outright wrong.
You think this will saturate the network with broadcast pings? sweet mother, have you ever seen the kind of noise SMB Windows Networking puts out?
If i never see another packet on my network carrying a vote for who should be the damn MDC, it'll be too soon.
I can't imagine this is worse, and it serves far more useful purposes.
By which i mean to say, not a technical description at all. Anyone else click those links? Read like marketing materials -- can't imagine why. God forbit they should expose the slightest bit of their architechture.
Maybe i'm missing something but using the phrases 'secure container technology' and 'encryption algorithms' doesn't seem like a tech doc to me.
Really, fuck Real anyway. It's been a long time since i used their product and even then it was mostly for wasting time with humor clips.
I'll change my mind (maybe) when i see some details.
Your math is wrong because you're not factoring in overlap... by which i mean, users who fall into more than one category. These characteristics you list are not strictly independent. I'd guess that damn near everyone still running win95 lacks broadband, for example, so if you've already limited your market to "broadband subscribers" you probly don't have to care about too many people with win95.
I won't bother getting into the discussion of whether your numbers are accurate, but if we assume they are, i'd figure that the best guess for the actual market is much closer to being exactly the same as the percentage of users with broadband, due to overlap. In your estimation, that's 20%, which is still a fairly decent chunk of the user base, assuming they're able to effectively advertise to that demographic. I don't think they will, mind you, but it's still a potentially lucrative market.
-k
Dude, RIAA is gonna be the biggest fan of this... Only not. Will radios no longer come with tape decks? Line outs? Speaker connections? Perhaps they'll only enable the audio out if the proper DRM key is inserted? I like the idea, but in the current climate, something tells me this is going to have an uphill battle.
-k
TiVo + Season Pass(Enterprise) + Season Pass(Junkyard Wars) == Happiness
What, i'm easy to please.
and my number one reason i use mozilla over i.e. -- tabbed browsing. i can't even deal w/ i.e. any more. opening multiple windows for new pages seems so... vulgar.
look at http://www.mac.com/WebObjects/Welcome.woa?aff=cons umer&cty=US&lang=en
-k
I haven't decided that this feature really should cost more... it *will* of course, but it seems to me, this should be possible with regular cdr drives, given the proper software. This is something i've been thinking about for quite a while, but never got around to looking into. Looks like Yamaha beat me to it. Not that us poor americans will get it within the year.
I'm not sure your assessment of Moby's status is correct. Moby is *not* a fringe artist anymore. Just because his records aren't being gobbled up like candy by legions of 14 year old girls, doesn't mean he's not mainstream. Bits and pieces of songs from Play were featured in quite a few very prominent advertisements, being used to *sell* other things. I call that mainstream. I believe some of his music appeared in an episode of the X Files -- mainstream. And at least one of his videos, Eastside iirc, got enough MTV airplay to make me start skipping that track on the cd, good as it is -- mainstream.
Additionally, it's a little disingenuous to indicate that Moby is a sideline, indie artist that needs the exposure that only p2p can provide, and in the next paragraph indicate that perhaps the new record wasn't marketed well enough. If anything proves just how mainstream an artist is, it's that marketing sells the record better than quality.
At any rate, your ultimate conclusion is correct -- I don't think filesharing killed this record.
that explains why i don't have it. I don't have a pirated copy either, because i like moby enough *not* to steal from him. Seems probable to me that a lot of techies are in much lower paying jobs than they were a year or two ago, and perhaps are having trouble adjusting to a budget. I know in my case, I just don't have ability to buy every cd i want -- wish it were otherwise.
Aside from that, geeks have more entertainment options grappling for their limited resources, like new computer gear, and video games... If you went and shelled out 60 clams for Neverwinter Nights this weekend, it may be tougher to justify the already hard-to-swallow 18 bucks for a CD, even if you like the artist.
just my 2 cents.
Didn't they use this feature in the super bowl a couple of years ago? Of course, you still need one camera to expose each angles, usually at least 3, and a hoss computer to build the 3D model. If i recall, it wasn't as Matrix-esqe as we'd like it to have been, (though that's mostly a limitation of camera and computing power).
Aside from all that, what's the point. If a guy looks suspicious, and you have 3 cameras able to pick him up, flip the camera view -- is that too much harder than rolling a jog dial?
i think this is an excellent idea.
now it just needs to be brought to the attention of people with actual power, instead of a crew like minded dorks.
have you considered submitting this as a proposal to your elected reps? assuming you're not planning to copyright the concept ; ) i may do so myself, perhaps with a bit more formalism and examples....
-k
Does this make google a circumvention device?
"If only the music industry would devote a little bit of millions of dollars they're spending on lawyers and buying senators to update their distribution model into the 21st century... but that wouldn't let them fuck the artists as much would it?"
nuff said.
from what i've heard Shadowbane (which i believe the publisher claims will be out sometime in the next few months) will be very much like what you describe. You wanna build walls in a field that spell out your name when viewd from above? Do it. That's maybe a lame example, but you get my drift. I might even recall a bit about natural aging... (i.e. the wall will fall apart over time, unless you maintain it) but i'm not sure.
I'm not in the betas, but i've read and heard a bit, and it seems that the level of actual world interaction in this game will be substantial.
At any rate if it lives up to what i think it is, i fear for my free time...
-k
I keep reading these stories about software/mew media related patents and clearly there's something very wrong in the USPTO (and probably other nations' patent bodies too, to be fair), however there's something in here that never seems to be addressed.
What resposibility does the patent attorney hold in these situations. I realize that there's no requirement that an attorney be involved in any way with a patent application process, and many larger companies likely handle them internally (albeit, i would guess, through their own office of general counsel). Most smaller companies though, and certainly individuals, would hire a patent lawyer to handle the intricacies of the patent application. It's not an easy process and that's why there are specialists, and it was my understanding, though i could be wrong, that part of what the patent attorney does before filing a patent is perform research for prior art and/or other patents which would conflict with the current application. The signature of the attorney on the application, I thought, was primarily to say "I'm an expert and I see nothing wrong about this application."
That being said, it seems that for any patent for which there is very obvious prior art, or which attempts to patent something obvious, there's a patent attorney who didn't do his job quite well enough (for whatever reason).
So then, what responsibility does this lawyer hold for such a misrepresentation, or, perhaps, what responsibility *should* he/she hold. Can they be disbarred? Or does the issue not really matter.
If I'm wrong about all this, by all means, educate me, but it seems like the USPTO can't take all the blame, nor be responsible for deeply researching each patent application it gets. Lets find a way to properly weed out lame patents before they even get to the USPTO, perhaps through greater accountability for the handlers of the pre-application process.
-k
I want a "Stupid Moron" option for this guy
Wearable appliance? That's what your Mom is. I wore her out.
No. They can't, because they don't own the rights, most likely. The original game publisher will retain exclusive right to the licencing of the game product -- all Loki owns is the Linux-specific stuff that got written for the port, and parts of *that* are even probably unreleasable because it'd expose too much of the game's underlying, proprietary, operations.
It's a damn shame, I played the hell out of Tribes and there were a couple other games I was considering buying when a few bucks came my way... guess I waited to long.
But at least we get access to some of the great work they did release -- most notably SDL.
R.I.P Loki.