Uh, okay. I looked at the top 50 rated games on the Linux Game Tome. The only "cool" ones were closed source commercial games that have been out for years: Railroad Tycoon 2, Unreal, Quake, Myth II. Maybe you could give some pointers to the list of Cool Open Source Games since they don't appear to be on the highest rated list.
My point was: look at Sega and the Dreamcast. How is Indrema going to do better? Are they going to have guaranteed names like Sonic the Hedgehog or Madden NFL or Tekken available at launch?
And, I'm sorry, but Loki and Silicon Dreams are not connections in "high places". They are second tier game companies at best.
So we're back where we started. There aren't going to be any decent commercial games for Indrema. So all that's left are the crappy open source ones. And I can program/play those on my PC.
I'm just not seeing a compelling reason for anyone to buy Indrema's box.
Actually, last I checked (admittedly several years ago) Debian stuff did use bashisms. At the time I complained, sending an email to the debian maintainers mailing list. I was told it wasn't a real issue because/bin/sh was bash under debian. Of course, it meant that you couldn't replace/bin/sh with anything other than bash without breaking your system horribly. I always thought that/bin/sh should be one of those virtual packages and zsh or ksh or newfoobarsh could then provide/bin/sh if it was actually POSIX compliant.
If Sega doesn't have the muscle to keep a console afloat in the industry what makes Indrema's financial backers think they can do better? Will they have better in-house development than Sega? No. Will they have better third-party support than Sega? No. Will they be able to advertise as much as Sega (although Sega's ad campaign for the Dreamcast was anemic)? Again, no.
So, start writing cool games!
Cool open source games do not exist. Take a look at freshmeat. The closest you'll find are clones of PC games that were state of the art 8-10 years ago.
"Cool" games require two big things that open source lacks and will likely never be able to overcome.
One, they take a lot of money. This is primarily because games need to be developed much quicker than, oh, say, a compiler in order to reach the market while they are still fresh. Game developers work insane hours to get the games out when they do. A few people working on a game that isn't their main job are never going to cut it. All you'll end up with is the usual gnome-tetris-beta-0.12 stuff.
Two, games require art work. Usually lots of it. For instance take a look at Sega's Shenmue. Look at the credits for programmers. There's about 5-8 programmers listed, IIRC. Easy enough for some open source project to come up with. Then look at the list of artists. There's dozens, probably close to a hundred. People doing FMV. People making textures. People making character models. People writing theme music. People creating sound effects. Etc etc etc. The average open source project can't even get a decent set of icons for its menu bar.
So why should I buy an Indrema box to play the same crappy, rip-off games that I can play under Linux?
By assuming that artists have natural rights to artistic works, as compared to rights explicitly granted them under law, you do us a disservice.
You seem to be implying that there actually exist "natural" rights for any thing at all. There is no such thing as "natural" rights. Ellison assuming he has a natural right to control that which he produces is not any worse than someone who assumes they have a natural right to, oh, say, property or life. It's all just social constructs at the bottom. So saying that "artistic works are never property" is meaningless. All you've done is created two separate categories of artificial rights and tried to argue that one is better than another.
Lack of monetary transaction is not what makes something Free. Otherwise everyone would agree that Darwin is Free. Look up Free in the dictionary. You'll find:
"not imprisoned or enslaved"
"not controlled by obligation or the will of another"
"not affected or restricted by a given condition or circumstance"
"not subject to external restraint"
How, exactly do the restrictions the GPL place on you count as "free"? A restriction is a restriction whether it comes from Apple or the FSF.
If the GPL were struck down, it would mean that no one anywhere (other than the authors) has the right to distribute or modify copyrighted/GPLed software (as per the terms of copyright law).
Who says you don't have the right to modify GPLed software?
According to the CONTU Final Report, which is generally interpreted by the courts as legislative history, ``the right to add features to the program that were not present at the time of rightful acquisition'' falls within the owner's rights of modification under section 117.
Note that, since it's not copyright infringement for you to apply a patch, it's also not copyright infringement for someone to give you a patch. For example, Galoob's Game Genie, which patches the software in Nintendo cartridges, does not infringe Nintendo's copyrights. ``Having paid Nintendo a fair return, the consumer may experiment with the product and create new variations of play, for personal enjoyment, without creating a derivative work.'' Galoob v. Nintendo, 780 F. Supp 1283 (N.D. Cal. 1991), affirmed, 22 U.S.P.Q.2d 1587 (9th Cir. 1992). See also Foresight v. Pfortmiller, 719 F. Supp 1006 (D. Kan. 1989).
Are we reading the same web site? I come to slashdot every day and see links to cnn.com and cnet.com and tomshardware.com with (if I'm really lucky) some pithy little commentary like "are people who use cars automotive engineers cause, like, they have to figure out how to shift and stuff?" They certainly aren't a source of anything (not counting misinformation and biased opinions, I mean; not that there's anything wrong with misinformation and biased opinions, mind you).
What was the first game to introduce on-line multiplayer play? What was the first game to use hardware acceleration? What was the first game to have a "sniper" view?
Ultima Undeworld came out a month before Wolf 3-d did, but you never hear people talk about it and how it had features that even DOOM didn't.
nettrek had been out for years allowing people to play online against multiple people.
Descent had true 3D long before Quake.
None of the game you list were TRULY innovative in and of themselves. They may have brought ideas to a new area but ultimately it was more than just the sum of their innovations that made them the names that you remember today.
BTW, the games I remember are C&C: Red Alert, Age of Empires 2, Duke Nukem 3D, Gabriel Knight. I don't remember them because they had innovations. I remember Duke Nukem 3D because I played that coop all the way through over a modem with my best friend one summer. I remember Red Alert because I spent a good chunk of my junior year playing it multi player with my friends. I remember Gabriel Knight because, even though it was extremely dated when I played it (1998) it had a great story and was a great adventure game.
One thing I've certainly noticed is that there is a lot more aimlessness in games nowadays. It goes under a lot of other names: interactivity or perhaps realistic action. However, what it really shows is one of the fundamental weaknesses of telling a story interactively. Anyone who have ever Game Mastered an RPG is aware of this problem. Most story telling is done in media like books, movie, or theater where the author has complete control over everything. Every thought of every character. Every action of every person. Once you distribute that control it becomes significantly harder to weave an interesting plot.
For instance, imagine you have a game world that is completely interactive. I mean, 100% immersive. Say it's a Blade Runner game. Remember the part where Harrison Ford just "happens" to find the snake scale? What are the chances of that actually happening if the author doesn't make the character notice that.
It's similar to the problem that a lot of sports and driving/flight simulators are having nowadays. They have become so realistic that they often become devoid any actual fun.
Now you have games like Baldur's Gate where you move your cursor over every square inch of the game screen hoping to find that elusive treasure hidden somewhere. Imagine a character in a book taking time from his quest to avenge his step-father's murder to comb every square inch of land for 40 miles looking for a magic ring that may or may not be there. Talk about tedium.
I dunno about most people but I find "open ended games" over-hyped. People often complain about "linear" plots but I think linearity has gotten a bad rap. The problem isn't linearity or non-linearity of plot. It's bad game design and weak story lines.
When was the last time you read a book and the main character picked up everything that wasn't nailed down "just in case" he needs it 60 days later to vanquish the evil demon hordes?
You wouldn't pay monthly for something you only use monthly.
Sure you would. Lots of people already do it for lots of things. People pay for garbage collection, but that only happens once a week. People pay for lawn maintenance but that only happens once a month. People pay a monthly fee to have someone come and shovel their sidewalks when it snows.
How often you pay for something and how often you use it aren't really related.
The assembler was written entirely in bash. It uses no external utilities. It does not use sed or awk or perl or python or ed or anything else. The post I was replying to was an idiot that got modded as insightful by other idiots.
And how about the Supreme Court? You didn't vote for any of them. Nor the Secretary of State. Nor the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Nor the Attorney General. Not any federal judge. Not the head of the FDA. None of those are elected positions.
It's exactly the same deal. You may not have directly elected the rulers of WIPO but you DID vote for the people who voted to join WIPO and agreed to its rules and regulations. And if you don't like it you can vote other people in to have us leave.
That is hinted at is that in the free software world it is often much harder to get "big" features implemented in a timely fashion. (In the article they are specifically talking about enterprise features but those are just one particular kind.) I mean, take a look at how quickly commercial operating systems like BeOS and Windows NT supported journalling file systems. Then take a look at how widespread it is among free operating systems. How many clustering solutions are there for linux? Now compare that to the number of mp3 playing front ends. The easy stuff gets done over and over again while the hard stuff gets done once. If it gets done at all.
With free OSes there is often little in the way of financial backing for more ambitious undertakings. Look at who extraordinary the recent support of the perl hacker is. I mean, it makes front page news that some guy gets to spend 100% of his time working on improving the product. When was the last time you saw Microsoft trumpeting the fact that they had hired a person to work full time on Visual Basic?
Of course, it's not IMPOSSIBLE to get good funding to implement more difficult features in free software. IBM and SGI are both doing so, more or less. However, the article does mention that many/most linux based companies are suffering from financial difficulties, which in turn will make it harder for people to get the kind of funding they need to do more ambitious work.
expensive commercial software packages
on
OS X on x86?
·
· Score: 2
That presupposes that those expensive commercial software packages will be available for x86/OSX. It's not a great example, but how much commercial software got ported to Alpha/NT?
Those commercial software makers have trouble supporting Linux due to the lack of consistent GUI etc
However, it just pushes the difficulty off onto Apple. How much trouble does Apple have hitting deadlines when they control every aspect of the hardware? I wonder how much more the OSX schedule would have slipped if they were dealing with commodity hardware they have next to no control over.
It is RECENT for that particular client but not for the end user. And end-users are the ultimate target of email systems. Clients just help make reading the e-mail less painful.
I'm still scratching my head trying to come up with a scenario where a user would want all of his mail to suddenly be marked UNSEEN behind his back. On the hand, every user I've ever met likes the scenario where switching to a different client maintains the state of his email world.
But you don't have that feature now.
There is a vast difference between a race condition that might affect erroneously flag some mail and a design that always erroneously flags all mail. In the four years I've been using IMAP I've never had this race condition hit me. Despite your claim, I do have this feature now.
Why are subscriptions stored on the server? That is client data.
It would completely defeat the purpose of IMAP if I had to resubscribe every time I use a new client.
Why does the RECENT flag exist? First of all, it's client data. Second of all, if it didn't exist at all the client is perfectly able to calculate RECENTness just be storing the UIDs from the last session.
What if there was no last session for the client?
it's no wonder it's made almost no inroads against POP3
POP3 and IMAP4 are targeted at completely different environments, they aren't competitors. In its target environment IMAP has made lots of progress, especially when you consider that Exchage is essentially IMAP.
Yes, those were pretty fucked up, too. Not excusing those, but, at least in the case of Ruby Ridge (and Waco, I think), the victims were armed.
And Taiwan is armed.
How arrogant of the US to offer to help out a fellow democracy against a much larger aggresor
IIRC, Taiwan didn't have it's first true elections until the 1990s. That doesn't really count as a democracy. What they were was capitalistic, which has traditionally been more important to US foreign interests than democracy.
ask yourself if it is as widely deployed and as widely scrutinized as bind
However, it is misleading to suggest that that is the only, or even the most important, criterion. Quantity of scrutiny has nothing to do with quality of scrutiny...as many open source software projects find out. Having millions of naive users who never look at the source code does you very little good from a security standpoint. Having ten knowledgeable people audit the source code does a tremendous amount of good. Also, djbdns has a little more than 10,000 lines of code. BIND has well over 120,000. It is much easy to verify simple software than complex software. That, combined with the relative track records of the authors of djbdns and BIND make the comparison much more difficult than simply looking at how widely deployed something is.
Slashdot Mirror
There's always been the principle of innocent until proven guilty
Always? You mean in British derived legal systems since the 18th century. That hardly qualifies as "always".
I'm lost as to what this case has to do with my rights online. Can someone explain?
Uh, okay. I looked at the top 50 rated games on the Linux Game Tome. The only "cool" ones were closed source commercial games that have been out for years: Railroad Tycoon 2, Unreal, Quake, Myth II. Maybe you could give some pointers to the list of Cool Open Source Games since they don't appear to be on the highest rated list.
My point was: look at Sega and the Dreamcast. How is Indrema going to do better? Are they going to have guaranteed names like Sonic the Hedgehog or Madden NFL or Tekken available at launch?
And, I'm sorry, but Loki and Silicon Dreams are not connections in "high places". They are second tier game companies at best.
So we're back where we started. There aren't going to be any decent commercial games for Indrema. So all that's left are the crappy open source ones. And I can program/play those on my PC.
I'm just not seeing a compelling reason for anyone to buy Indrema's box.
Actually, last I checked (admittedly several years ago) Debian stuff did use bashisms. At the time I complained, sending an email to the debian maintainers mailing list. I was told it wasn't a real issue because /bin/sh was bash under debian. Of course, it meant that you couldn't replace /bin/sh with anything other than bash without breaking your system horribly. I always thought that /bin/sh should be one of those virtual packages and zsh or ksh or newfoobarsh could then provide /bin/sh if it was actually POSIX compliant.
If Sega doesn't have the muscle to keep a console afloat in the industry what makes Indrema's financial backers think they can do better? Will they have better in-house development than Sega? No. Will they have better third-party support than Sega? No. Will they be able to advertise as much as Sega (although Sega's ad campaign for the Dreamcast was anemic)? Again, no.
So, start writing cool games!
Cool open source games do not exist. Take a look at freshmeat. The closest you'll find are clones of PC games that were state of the art 8-10 years ago.
"Cool" games require two big things that open source lacks and will likely never be able to overcome.
One, they take a lot of money. This is primarily because games need to be developed much quicker than, oh, say, a compiler in order to reach the market while they are still fresh. Game developers work insane hours to get the games out when they do. A few people working on a game that isn't their main job are never going to cut it. All you'll end up with is the usual gnome-tetris-beta-0.12 stuff.
Two, games require art work. Usually lots of it. For instance take a look at Sega's Shenmue. Look at the credits for programmers. There's about 5-8 programmers listed, IIRC. Easy enough for some open source project to come up with. Then look at the list of artists. There's dozens, probably close to a hundred. People doing FMV. People making textures. People making character models. People writing theme music. People creating sound effects. Etc etc etc. The average open source project can't even get a decent set of icons for its menu bar.
So why should I buy an Indrema box to play the same crappy, rip-off games that I can play under Linux?
By assuming that artists have natural rights to artistic works, as compared to rights explicitly granted them under law, you do us a disservice.
You seem to be implying that there actually exist "natural" rights for any thing at all. There is no such thing as "natural" rights. Ellison assuming he has a natural right to control that which he produces is not any worse than someone who assumes they have a natural right to, oh, say, property or life. It's all just social constructs at the bottom. So saying that "artistic works are never property" is meaningless. All you've done is created two separate categories of artificial rights and tried to argue that one is better than another.
Lack of monetary transaction is not what makes something Free. Otherwise everyone would agree that Darwin is Free. Look up Free in the dictionary. You'll find:
"not imprisoned or enslaved"
"not controlled by obligation or the will of another"
"not affected or restricted by a given condition or circumstance"
"not subject to external restraint"
How, exactly do the restrictions the GPL place on you count as "free"? A restriction is a restriction whether it comes from Apple or the FSF.
If the GPL were struck down, it would mean that no one anywhere (other than the authors) has the right to distribute or modify copyrighted/GPLed software (as per the terms of copyright law).
Who says you don't have the right to modify GPLed software?
According to the CONTU Final Report, which is generally interpreted by the courts as legislative history, ``the right to add features to the program that were not present at the time of rightful acquisition'' falls within the owner's rights of modification under section 117.
Note that, since it's not copyright infringement for you to apply a patch, it's also not copyright infringement for someone to give you a patch. For example, Galoob's Game Genie, which patches the software in Nintendo cartridges, does not infringe Nintendo's copyrights. ``Having paid Nintendo a fair return, the consumer may experiment with the product and create new variations of play, for personal enjoyment, without creating a derivative work.'' Galoob v. Nintendo, 780 F. Supp 1283 (N.D. Cal. 1991), affirmed, 22 U.S.P.Q.2d 1587 (9th Cir. 1992). See also Foresight v. Pfortmiller, 719 F. Supp 1006 (D. Kan. 1989).
Are we reading the same web site? I come to slashdot every day and see links to cnn.com and cnet.com and tomshardware.com with (if I'm really lucky) some pithy little commentary like "are people who use cars automotive engineers cause, like, they have to figure out how to shift and stuff?" They certainly aren't a source of anything (not counting misinformation and biased opinions, I mean; not that there's anything wrong with misinformation and biased opinions, mind you).
What do you see when you come to slashdot?
What was the first game to introduce on-line multiplayer play? What was the first game to use hardware acceleration? What was the first game to have a "sniper" view?
Ultima Undeworld came out a month before Wolf 3-d did, but you never hear people talk about it and how it had features that even DOOM didn't.
nettrek had been out for years allowing people to play online against multiple people.
Descent had true 3D long before Quake.
None of the game you list were TRULY innovative in and of themselves. They may have brought ideas to a new area but ultimately it was more than just the sum of their innovations that made them the names that you remember today.
BTW, the games I remember are C&C: Red Alert, Age of Empires 2, Duke Nukem 3D, Gabriel Knight. I don't remember them because they had innovations. I remember Duke Nukem 3D because I played that coop all the way through over a modem with my best friend one summer. I remember Red Alert because I spent a good chunk of my junior year playing it multi player with my friends. I remember Gabriel Knight because, even though it was extremely dated when I played it (1998) it had a great story and was a great adventure game.
One thing I've certainly noticed is that there is a lot more aimlessness in games nowadays. It goes under a lot of other names: interactivity or perhaps realistic action. However, what it really shows is one of the fundamental weaknesses of telling a story interactively. Anyone who have ever Game Mastered an RPG is aware of this problem. Most story telling is done in media like books, movie, or theater where the author has complete control over everything. Every thought of every character. Every action of every person. Once you distribute that control it becomes significantly harder to weave an interesting plot.
For instance, imagine you have a game world that is completely interactive. I mean, 100% immersive. Say it's a Blade Runner game. Remember the part where Harrison Ford just "happens" to find the snake scale? What are the chances of that actually happening if the author doesn't make the character notice that.
It's similar to the problem that a lot of sports and driving/flight simulators are having nowadays. They have become so realistic that they often become devoid any actual fun.
Now you have games like Baldur's Gate where you move your cursor over every square inch of the game screen hoping to find that elusive treasure hidden somewhere. Imagine a character in a book taking time from his quest to avenge his step-father's murder to comb every square inch of land for 40 miles looking for a magic ring that may or may not be there. Talk about tedium.
I dunno about most people but I find "open ended games" over-hyped. People often complain about "linear" plots but I think linearity has gotten a bad rap. The problem isn't linearity or non-linearity of plot. It's bad game design and weak story lines.
When was the last time you read a book and the main character picked up everything that wasn't nailed down "just in case" he needs it 60 days later to vanquish the evil demon hordes?
You wouldn't pay monthly for something you only use monthly.
Sure you would. Lots of people already do it for lots of things. People pay for garbage collection, but that only happens once a week. People pay for lawn maintenance but that only happens once a month. People pay a monthly fee to have someone come and shovel their sidewalks when it snows.
How often you pay for something and how often you use it aren't really related.
In a free society, compulsion should be reserved for extraordinary circumstances
It would have been nice if you had explained what this has to do with compulsion.
The military draft, for example, has been accepted as necessary to defend the freedom
Um, no it hasn't.
The United States government has no business telling a creator what they must do with their copyrighted work.
Why not? The only reason copyright exists is because the government says so. Why shouldn't it be able to retract or amend the rules of the game?
What do pipes have to do with anything?
The assembler was written entirely in bash. It uses no external utilities. It does not use sed or awk or perl or python or ed or anything else. The post I was replying to was an idiot that got modded as insightful by other idiots.
sed and awk aren't part of bash.
And how about the Supreme Court? You didn't vote for any of them. Nor the Secretary of State. Nor the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Nor the Attorney General. Not any federal judge. Not the head of the FDA. None of those are elected positions.
It's exactly the same deal. You may not have directly elected the rulers of WIPO but you DID vote for the people who voted to join WIPO and agreed to its rules and regulations. And if you don't like it you can vote other people in to have us leave.
That is hinted at is that in the free software world it is often much harder to get "big" features implemented in a timely fashion. (In the article they are specifically talking about enterprise features but those are just one particular kind.) I mean, take a look at how quickly commercial operating systems like BeOS and Windows NT supported journalling file systems. Then take a look at how widespread it is among free operating systems. How many clustering solutions are there for linux? Now compare that to the number of mp3 playing front ends. The easy stuff gets done over and over again while the hard stuff gets done once. If it gets done at all.
With free OSes there is often little in the way of financial backing for more ambitious undertakings. Look at who extraordinary the recent support of the perl hacker is. I mean, it makes front page news that some guy gets to spend 100% of his time working on improving the product. When was the last time you saw Microsoft trumpeting the fact that they had hired a person to work full time on Visual Basic?
Of course, it's not IMPOSSIBLE to get good funding to implement more difficult features in free software. IBM and SGI are both doing so, more or less. However, the article does mention that many/most linux based companies are suffering from financial difficulties, which in turn will make it harder for people to get the kind of funding they need to do more ambitious work.
That presupposes that those expensive commercial software packages will be available for x86/OSX. It's not a great example, but how much commercial software got ported to Alpha/NT?
Those commercial software makers have trouble supporting Linux due to the lack of consistent GUI etc
However, it just pushes the difficulty off onto Apple. How much trouble does Apple have hitting deadlines when they control every aspect of the hardware? I wonder how much more the OSX schedule would have slipped if they were dealing with commodity hardware they have next to no control over.
It is RECENT for that particular client but not for the end user. And end-users are the ultimate target of email systems. Clients just help make reading the e-mail less painful.
I'm still scratching my head trying to come up with a scenario where a user would want all of his mail to suddenly be marked UNSEEN behind his back. On the hand, every user I've ever met likes the scenario where switching to a different client maintains the state of his email world.
But you don't have that feature now.
There is a vast difference between a race condition that might affect erroneously flag some mail and a design that always erroneously flags all mail. In the four years I've been using IMAP I've never had this race condition hit me. Despite your claim, I do have this feature now.
Why are subscriptions stored on the server? That is client data.
It would completely defeat the purpose of IMAP if I had to resubscribe every time I use a new client.
Why does the RECENT flag exist? First of all, it's client data. Second of all, if it didn't exist at all the client is perfectly able to calculate RECENTness just be storing the UIDs from the last session.
What if there was no last session for the client?
it's no wonder it's made almost no inroads against POP3
POP3 and IMAP4 are targeted at completely different environments, they aren't competitors. In its target environment IMAP has made lots of progress, especially when you consider that Exchage is essentially IMAP.
What security issues does IMAP have that POP doesn't?
Courier-IMAP works with it. So every IMAP client works with it. Of course, mutt works fine with it, too.
Yes, those were pretty fucked up, too. Not excusing those, but, at least in the case of Ruby Ridge (and Waco, I think), the victims were armed.
And Taiwan is armed.
How arrogant of the US to offer to help out a fellow democracy against a much larger aggresor
IIRC, Taiwan didn't have it's first true elections until the 1990s. That doesn't really count as a democracy. What they were was capitalistic, which has traditionally been more important to US foreign interests than democracy.
ask yourself if it is as widely deployed and as widely scrutinized as bind
However, it is misleading to suggest that that is the only, or even the most important, criterion. Quantity of scrutiny has nothing to do with quality of scrutiny...as many open source software projects find out. Having millions of naive users who never look at the source code does you very little good from a security standpoint. Having ten knowledgeable people audit the source code does a tremendous amount of good. Also, djbdns has a little more than 10,000 lines of code. BIND has well over 120,000. It is much easy to verify simple software than complex software. That, combined with the relative track records of the authors of djbdns and BIND make the comparison much more difficult than simply looking at how widely deployed something is.