Every Slashdotter should immediately begin to devise and circulate as many "offensive" TLAs as possible. I don't know whether scatological would be as offensive as sexual, but given the number that are needed, they will probably be required.
When making predictions of future behavior, is dominates over should.
Current behavior is a better indication that desired behavior. So is historic behavior.
I'll agree that removing child labor laws should not result in children working long hours in dangerous and unhealthy conditions. I would, however, predict that it would result in exactly that result.
Given what's being done in the studio's today there's no reason for more than one camera. You just need to use a super-fisheye lens and run the resulting image thorough the appropriate filters to reconstruct it into a cylindrical image. With three of them you could even get a reasonable 3-D reconstruction (for the area seen by all 3). Now the 3-D reconstruction takes a lot of computing power, but the cylindrical view doesn't. More than would fit on the camera, probably, but not more than you can get out of a video-card in nearly real-time...NOW, not in 5 years.
The problems here are figuring out what's interesting enough to show to a person, and getting someone to watch it and respond appropriately. At the moment I fairly certain the first part's so poor that the second part can't be done at anything within an order of magnitude of an acceptable cost. You'd be watching cat fights and dogs barking at passers-by.
As to whether it's a good idea anyway... well, that's almost irrelevant. It's an ATTRACTIVE idea to governments. So we'd better find out a way to MAKE it a good idea before it becomes feasible.
Re:Back in the day...
on
Terminal Chaos
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I wouldn't say that. I've seen plenty of bad unions (though more bad corporations).
OTOH, AFAIK most of the problems with the air industry didn't really surface until Regan broke the Air Traffic Controllers strike...for safer working conditions. (Safer for the airplanes that they were controlling.)
I wouldn't say that now the Air Traffic Controllers union is still trying to provide safe conditions for the traffic controlled. They might be, but they've learned that it's dangerous, so now they might just be trying to protect their jobs and screw the populace. (I haven't been paying attention for a decade or two.)
Do I trust this book? On a first guess, no. OTOH, if I were interested enough, I might check into it's background, and perhaps I would then trust it. I sort of doubt it though. Places where I have any current information at all tend to disagree with it's analyses.
Have you priced a train trip recently? You could fly back and forth across the country 2 or 3 times for the cost of crossing it on train once.
My wife had planned to take a cross country train trip (for business, but also for fun). Well, she crossed out the fun and took a plane after checking on the cost of a train.
If this were a criminal case, Sun should be given benefit of the doubt. Possibly they were contractually bound not to say anything. We haven't seen the agreement.
OTOH, Sun hasn't claimed that they couldn't say anything. They've pretty much acted like their attitude was "No skin of *my* nose." But this is inferred, not deduced.
It certainly doesn't make me want to trust Sun...OTOH, it's short of enough evidence for total condemnation. (Then again, the only Sun products I use are OpenOffice and Java. And not much Java. They wouldn't miss my custom.)
Java was relatively open from the beginning. I remember how surprised I was at finding the Java 1.0 libraries as source code. (Well, not ALL of them, but most.)
What Java wasn't was free. It as $0.00 for the entire set, but though it was Open Source (mostly) it wasn't Free (libre).
It's reasonable to be skeptical of Sun, but not dismissive. Sun has never been as closed as MS, and it's never been as open (or as free) as the FSF. In the last several years it's been edging towards the FSF position. I don't expect it to ever get there.
OTOH, it's important to remember that Sun is a corporation, and corporations have management, and top management changes. There's no guarantee that Sun will continue to be as open, and whatever is released under a license that doesn't provide openness into the future under a different management is untrustworthy. I don't know about the CSSL (or whatever it's called), except that it's incompatible with the GPL. OTOH, Java is being released under the GPL. And OpenOffice is being released under the GPL. Those are two very significant offerings. Don't discount them. (Note, also, that OpenOffice had no significant competition at the time it was released. And Sun still chose GPL. Unfortunately, about that same time it subsidized the SCOX lawsuit.)
Sensible of you. I don't think much of the current government either. (Actually, it's been quite awhile since I actually believed the government was working on my behalf. Around the 1970's I believe. And even then I was aware that often in the past it had been acting against the presumed best interests of the citizenry.)
Now... most election must be presumed to be rigged. There is no other explanation for the selection of the voting machines that have been selected. This extends all the way down to the local level. The excuse that I was given when I pointed out that the voting machinery was known to be defective was "Sorry, we've already signed a contract." To me this implies that the comissioner of voting is corrupt...and he was the one making the statement. (I didn't capitalize his title, because it's a paraphrase...I don't remember what it was precisely.)
OTOH, many politicians will still make at least a marginal effort to satisfy their constituency, so expressing your opinion on matters may help. Sometimes it seems to.
But if I were a foreign company, I'd perfer to do business elsewhere, too. If for no other reason, I feel the value of the dollar is still vastly overrated.
Well, no. He didn't say that. He said he was authorized to. And he said the development team was authorized to.
And I'm not sure that this statement was legally binding. There is no mention of an escrow account. There's no claim that the code to do such a thing exists. And there's no claim that it will exist at any particular future date. To me it's sounding like a serious waffle disguised with baffle-gab.
But they don't say how long a time. It could be 5 min., 5 hours, 5 days, or 5 years.
This isn't my real concern. I'm more concerned about the increase in software brittleness (which for game is already close to the limit). But any figure that you fill in for "some time" is conjecture, and they didn't say that.
I've bought games from them before. Some were ok, some were lousy. Well, ok, tastes vary.
The games that I bought frequently don't work, though, because they presume something about the OS that was true several versions ago. This implies that any game that does work is fragile, and can be expected to break in the future.
Now they want to add a technology that is long known for increasing the brittleness of games. I'm supposed to cheer at this? My reaction is to consider whether it's really worthwhile buying any of their games. Will the game still work after the SDL upgrade? I can't know ahead of time, because the source is closed. What about after the kernel upgrade? After the security patch?
This does not add benefit to me, it drastically reduces the benefit. Even if they offer support, it means many extra hoops to jump through, and it's not always true that they *have* a decent answer.
It's true, when a game of theirs breaks after this I won't know that it's the copy-protection that caused the break, but that's what I'll likely presume, as copy-protection is noted for causing breakages.
Before you can kiss someone goodbye, you have to have been close to them.
Loki was doing reasonably well before the boss ran off with the money. So Linux isn't an intrinsically hostile environment for gaming companies. (Loki wasn't "raking it in", either. Linux isn't an easy market for gaming companies, just not an intrinsically hostile one.)
Who generated those statistics, and what advantage do they get from having the numbers come out that way?
I believe that somebody told you that. I will accept the possibility that you actually saw such a report. Before I'd accept that report as truth, I'd need to know a LOT more about it.
OTOH, I wouldn't bother to study enough to convince myself, because I don't care that much. I accept that they have their reasons, whatever they are. They don't change the cost/benefit to me.
I already don't buy games very often, because most of the ones that I've bought haven't been worth the money. I still do occasionally, because some have been QUITE worth the cost. Copy-protection decreases the benefit to me, so I will already be buying fewer. (Games that are copy-protected are intrinsically more brittle, more subject to breaking when the system changes.)
OTOH, I'm not a large buyer of games anyway. Perhaps I'm not typical of their target audience. But this looks to me to be far more likely to discourage my buying additional games than it is to have any other change in my behavior.
I think you mean/usr/src, but on what grounds do you assert that most distributions put their source there? My opinion is that most distributions, by default, don't install their source. Most *DO* have that as an option, and/usr/src is a common location for some of it (not, by any means, all).
Remember, a distribution is more than just the kernel, even for really small systems. And the really small ones are highly unlikely to install the source by default.
I don't believe that applies to commercial entities, such as I presume Minerva to be. My understanding is that unless you are a non-commercial entity, if you distribute the binary code, then you must supply the source code to anyone who requests it, though you are allowed to charge a reasonable shipping and handling fee. Since this is an infrequent process for this company, I doubt that $100 would be considered unreasonable.
OTOH, I'm not really certain. I've never studied the GPL from that angle. (And I didn't reread it today.) Possibly if they always distribute the source together with the binaries to their customers, then they don't need to provide it to others who ask. But that's not the way I remember it.
I've heard it asserted by reasonable people that Linux is easier to use, easier to manage, and supports more hardware. I've never heard it asserted that Linux was more space-efficient. Not sure what "advanced" means in this context. (Also the versions of Linux that are "easy to use" don't tend to be space efficient. E.g., does Peanut Linux run Gnome? Not hardly!
People who aren't business executives are more likely to make decisions that business executives find both incomprehensible and repellent. Witness how hard it is for many such to understand the GPL. *I* happen to think that the GPL is a marvelous license, but many business executives don't understand it, possibly because it isn't motivated by greed. Possibly because they don't understand the basic level of disorganization in FOSS. (I.e., projects are organized, or try to be. The community isn't and doesn't want to be.)
Well, there was this time the mainland Chinese government and the one on the island were in bitter competition as to whose flag would be displayed in Red Hat Linux. I forget who won, and why displaying both wasn't a valid compromise. (Probably neither side wanted to compromise.)
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I *wish* I thought you sounded cynical. Unfortunately, there are too many laws like that already on the books.
Every Slashdotter should immediately begin to devise and circulate as many "offensive" TLAs as possible. I don't know whether scatological would be as offensive as sexual, but given the number that are needed, they will probably be required.
When making predictions of future behavior, is dominates over should.
Current behavior is a better indication that desired behavior. So is historic behavior.
I'll agree that removing child labor laws should not result in children working long hours in dangerous and unhealthy conditions. I would, however, predict that it would result in exactly that result.
Given what's being done in the studio's today there's no reason for more than one camera. You just need to use a super-fisheye lens and run the resulting image thorough the appropriate filters to reconstruct it into a cylindrical image. With three of them you could even get a reasonable 3-D reconstruction (for the area seen by all 3). Now the 3-D reconstruction takes a lot of computing power, but the cylindrical view doesn't. More than would fit on the camera, probably, but not more than you can get out of a video-card in nearly real-time...NOW, not in 5 years.
The problems here are figuring out what's interesting enough to show to a person, and getting someone to watch it and respond appropriately. At the moment I fairly certain the first part's so poor that the second part can't be done at anything within an order of magnitude of an acceptable cost. You'd be watching cat fights and dogs barking at passers-by.
As to whether it's a good idea anyway... well, that's almost irrelevant. It's an ATTRACTIVE idea to governments. So we'd better find out a way to MAKE it a good idea before it becomes feasible.
Sorry, it's a hangover from "Be fruitful and multiply and replenish the Earth" (Somewhere in Genesis)
Unfortunately, the rest of the world doesn't seem to be paying attention.
It appears that this is such an attractive dream to governments that evidence that it's not working doesn't stick.
Only if you use molasses. ... Well, or magnets.
I wouldn't say that. I've seen plenty of bad unions (though more bad corporations).
OTOH, AFAIK most of the problems with the air industry didn't really surface until Regan broke the Air Traffic Controllers strike...for safer working conditions. (Safer for the airplanes that they were controlling.)
I wouldn't say that now the Air Traffic Controllers union is still trying to provide safe conditions for the traffic controlled. They might be, but they've learned that it's dangerous, so now they might just be trying to protect their jobs and screw the populace. (I haven't been paying attention for a decade or two.)
Do I trust this book? On a first guess, no. OTOH, if I were interested enough, I might check into it's background, and perhaps I would then trust it. I sort of doubt it though. Places where I have any current information at all tend to disagree with it's analyses.
Have you priced a train trip recently? You could fly back and forth across the country 2 or 3 times for the cost of crossing it on train once.
My wife had planned to take a cross country train trip (for business, but also for fun). Well, she crossed out the fun and took a plane after checking on the cost of a train.
OpenOffice may be "free as in beer". It's also GPL.
PJ *MAY* be overstating the case. Perhaps.
If this were a criminal case, Sun should be given benefit of the doubt. Possibly they were contractually bound not to say anything. We haven't seen the agreement.
OTOH, Sun hasn't claimed that they couldn't say anything. They've pretty much acted like their attitude was "No skin of *my* nose." But this is inferred, not deduced.
It certainly doesn't make me want to trust Sun...OTOH, it's short of enough evidence for total condemnation. (Then again, the only Sun products I use are OpenOffice and Java. And not much Java. They wouldn't miss my custom.)
Java was relatively open from the beginning. I remember how surprised I was at finding the Java 1.0 libraries as source code. (Well, not ALL of them, but most.)
What Java wasn't was free. It as $0.00 for the entire set, but though it was Open Source (mostly) it wasn't Free (libre).
It's reasonable to be skeptical of Sun, but not dismissive. Sun has never been as closed as MS, and it's never been as open (or as free) as the FSF. In the last several years it's been edging towards the FSF position. I don't expect it to ever get there.
OTOH, it's important to remember that Sun is a corporation, and corporations have management, and top management changes. There's no guarantee that Sun will continue to be as open, and whatever is released under a license that doesn't provide openness into the future under a different management is untrustworthy. I don't know about the CSSL (or whatever it's called), except that it's incompatible with the GPL. OTOH, Java is being released under the GPL. And OpenOffice is being released under the GPL. Those are two very significant offerings. Don't discount them. (Note, also, that OpenOffice had no significant competition at the time it was released. And Sun still chose GPL. Unfortunately, about that same time it subsidized the SCOX lawsuit.)
Sensible of you. I don't think much of the current government either. (Actually, it's been quite awhile since I actually believed the government was working on my behalf. Around the 1970's I believe. And even then I was aware that often in the past it had been acting against the presumed best interests of the citizenry.)
Now... most election must be presumed to be rigged. There is no other explanation for the selection of the voting machines that have been selected. This extends all the way down to the local level. The excuse that I was given when I pointed out that the voting machinery was known to be defective was "Sorry, we've already signed a contract." To me this implies that the comissioner of voting is corrupt...and he was the one making the statement. (I didn't capitalize his title, because it's a paraphrase...I don't remember what it was precisely.)
OTOH, many politicians will still make at least a marginal effort to satisfy their constituency, so expressing your opinion on matters may help. Sometimes it seems to.
But if I were a foreign company, I'd perfer to do business elsewhere, too. If for no other reason, I feel the value of the dollar is still vastly overrated.
Well, no. He didn't say that. He said he was authorized to. And he said the development team was authorized to.
And I'm not sure that this statement was legally binding. There is no mention of an escrow account. There's no claim that the code to do such a thing exists. And there's no claim that it will exist at any particular future date. To me it's sounding like a serious waffle disguised with baffle-gab.
But they don't say how long a time. It could be 5 min., 5 hours, 5 days, or 5 years.
This isn't my real concern. I'm more concerned about the increase in software brittleness (which for game is already close to the limit). But any figure that you fill in for "some time" is conjecture, and they didn't say that.
I've bought games from them before. Some were ok, some were lousy. Well, ok, tastes vary.
The games that I bought frequently don't work, though, because they presume something about the OS that was true several versions ago. This implies that any game that does work is fragile, and can be expected to break in the future.
Now they want to add a technology that is long known for increasing the brittleness of games. I'm supposed to cheer at this? My reaction is to consider whether it's really worthwhile buying any of their games. Will the game still work after the SDL upgrade? I can't know ahead of time, because the source is closed. What about after the kernel upgrade? After the security patch?
This does not add benefit to me, it drastically reduces the benefit. Even if they offer support, it means many extra hoops to jump through, and it's not always true that they *have* a decent answer.
It's true, when a game of theirs breaks after this I won't know that it's the copy-protection that caused the break, but that's what I'll likely presume, as copy-protection is noted for causing breakages.
That's not unreasonable, but what it's actually doing is asking for the receipt each time you uncork the bottle.
Before you can kiss someone goodbye, you have to have been close to them.
Loki was doing reasonably well before the boss ran off with the money. So Linux isn't an intrinsically hostile environment for gaming companies. (Loki wasn't "raking it in", either. Linux isn't an easy market for gaming companies, just not an intrinsically hostile one.)
Who generated those statistics, and what advantage do they get from having the numbers come out that way?
I believe that somebody told you that. I will accept the possibility that you actually saw such a report. Before I'd accept that report as truth, I'd need to know a LOT more about it.
OTOH, I wouldn't bother to study enough to convince myself, because I don't care that much. I accept that they have their reasons, whatever they are. They don't change the cost/benefit to me.
I already don't buy games very often, because most of the ones that I've bought haven't been worth the money. I still do occasionally, because some have been QUITE worth the cost. Copy-protection decreases the benefit to me, so I will already be buying fewer. (Games that are copy-protected are intrinsically more brittle, more subject to breaking when the system changes.)
OTOH, I'm not a large buyer of games anyway. Perhaps I'm not typical of their target audience. But this looks to me to be far more likely to discourage my buying additional games than it is to have any other change in my behavior.
I think you mean /usr/src, but on what grounds do you assert that most distributions put their source there? My opinion is that most distributions, by default, don't install their source. Most *DO* have that as an option, and /usr/src is a common location for some of it (not, by any means, all).
Remember, a distribution is more than just the kernel, even for really small systems. And the really small ones are highly unlikely to install the source by default.
I don't believe that applies to commercial entities, such as I presume Minerva to be. My understanding is that unless you are a non-commercial entity, if you distribute the binary code, then you must supply the source code to anyone who requests it, though you are allowed to charge a reasonable shipping and handling fee. Since this is an infrequent process for this company, I doubt that $100 would be considered unreasonable.
OTOH, I'm not really certain. I've never studied the GPL from that angle. (And I didn't reread it today.) Possibly if they always distribute the source together with the binaries to their customers, then they don't need to provide it to others who ask. But that's not the way I remember it.
Basically, more people know about Linux.
I've heard it asserted by reasonable people that Linux is easier to use, easier to manage, and supports more hardware. I've never heard it asserted that Linux was more space-efficient. Not sure what "advanced" means in this context. (Also the versions of Linux that are "easy to use" don't tend to be space efficient. E.g., does Peanut Linux run Gnome? Not hardly!
Sorry, but it's not FUD, it's truth.
People who aren't business executives are more likely to make decisions that business executives find both incomprehensible and repellent. Witness how hard it is for many such to understand the GPL. *I* happen to think that the GPL is a marvelous license, but many business executives don't understand it, possibly because it isn't motivated by greed. Possibly because they don't understand the basic level of disorganization in FOSS. (I.e., projects are organized, or try to be. The community isn't and doesn't want to be.)
It actually makes a bit of sense, as FOSS projects are more likely to make choices that a business might recoil from.
More likely though, EWeek is just being afraid of the new and different.
Well, there was this time the mainland Chinese government and the one on the island were in bitter competition as to whose flag would be displayed in Red Hat Linux. I forget who won, and why displaying both wasn't a valid compromise. (Probably neither side wanted to compromise.)