Ya I have heard rumors that the brilliant people behind Full Throttle's humor and storyline were not involved with the Full Throttle sequel. If this is true, then had LucasArts released this game, they would've been "pulling an Accolade". As some of you no doubt recall, Accolade released the dismal Star Control 3 as a 'sequel' to Star Control 2 without involving the original creators. Hence, Accolade was just exploiting the brand name to make money off crap. If the Full Throttle sequel was indeed crap, then LucasArts thankfully did the right thing and canned it.
Game companies should never try to sell sequels without the genius of the original creators behind it...
However, in this case Linksys may just be careless, sloppy or ignorant of its obligations. I think it would be a mistake to assume that they are blatantly defying the GPL. I agree that Linksys ought to be reminded of its GPL obligations, but I think it is imperative that this reminder be courteous and polite. Even if Linksys recognizes that they are in the wrong, they won't be eager to continue linux support if everytime they release an update, they receive angry responses.
Yes, the scenario you describe is exactly what has kept me from writing some software to automatically redial spammer 1-800 numbers endlessly and rack up their long distance bills. The crap people leave on my car windows, the junk piling up in my snail mailbox at home, and the large volume of spam which flows into my email account like a wave of putrid filth... all of this stuff might be coming from the spammer OR it might be coming from a third party trying to get someone they don't like harassed by a mob of angry people. I don't think you can just look at a contact phone # and start war dialing it, assuming it's the real spammer.
You need to call the phone # first and find out if you're targeting the right organization. Once you've verified that you have got the right place, then you can commence with the retaliation, right? Or can you? I'm not sure that it's really legal to repeatedly dial a spammer's phone # 24 hours a day?
I don't know how things are where you live, but where I live, Canadian internet looks like a dream. The DSL (which I have) is $30 a month + ISP charges for 65k/s download and 25k/s upload which really kind of sucks compared to rates/bandwidth/latency ratios which I hear about in other countries and my phone company isn't making any effort to "compete" either. Something tells me they can't afford to.
The US is definitely not the place to be for high speed internet. Canada, Sweden, Korea... they all have the US beat hands down. I don't get what the problem is, surely there must be demand here:(
I can confirm that the first ][gs's came with 256k of RAM because that's how much our "Woz" had when we got it. I believe sometime later they started shipping all of them with 512k instead.
Man I have so many cool memories of the Apple ][gs!
Re:Be aware of explicit content
on
A Game of Thrones
·
· Score: 0, Troll
I wanted to make this point too. These books (I've read all 3) do use the F word and have some explicit violence and sex scenes in them, which I consider to be a big drawback. However, I have still read all 3 books and plan to read the 4th. I just finished reading the new Harry Potter, a book and series which shows that an author can write a wildly entertaining book without resorting to explicit passages in their book. But I doubt that there is any hope of getting Martin to tone it down a bit, I'm sure that he would say that the scenes play an important role.
I can understand that you (and maybe a lot of other people) may feel that getting a free replacement for Exchange is incredibly important, perhaps even the most important thing that needs to happen to linux. However, what really matters is what the programmers feel is important. Unfortunately, I'd venture to say that most programmers who write free software are not expecting to make much (or any) money off of their project and therefore will not be motivated toward working on a project that seems to be centered around pleasing _businesses_. Programmers who work on free software usually focus on pleasing individuals, namely themselves and not too many other people. Sorry to put it like this, but maybe what it's going to take is instead of hoping free software programmers will create the program, hope that free software _donators_ will hire people to write the program.
You make several good points and I agree with you. I too do not like having multiple applications installed in my GNOME menu that all do the same thing. I would prefer the people who package up the distribution make that choice for me, or at least have some kind of user voting system so I can see which application most users prefer.
I guess we can agree that there is no clear solution to this problem.
The main problem is that the stuff that comes pre-installed with Windows and/or Windows Components (Media Player, Internet Exploder) is the stuff that everyone uses, whether it's better or not.
If Microsoft suddenly started bundling Quicktime with Windows Media Player and suddenly forced users to manually download and install plug-ins to use file formats such as.WMV or.ASF, do you think any web sites would offer content in.WMV format? No, all web sites would offer stuff in Quicktime format by default because they'd know that they'd be able to reach the greatest number of users CONVENIENTLY. No company is going to want to tell users "We really want you to view our product, but you'll need to download this plugin to do so." All companies will say "We really want you to view our product, therefore we're going to use a format which you know you will already have pre-installed!"
Microsoft has pulled this BS time and time again. The law ought to be that if Microsoft ships with Windows Media Player pre-installed, that it must also pre-install all of its competitors too. If it ships with Internet Exploder pre-installed, it must ship with other browsers pre-installed too. Yeah this sounds kind of unreasonable, but there is a precedence. Remember how Windows 95 shipped with a bunch of shortcuts for other ISP's such as AOL?
Maybe I am missing something but I don't see source code for this available to be downloaded. I'd be interested in using what he has done for another certain emulator. A bootable linux CD that has support for most modern hardware is something I've longed for but haven't bothered putting together.
As a Utah citizen, I have been pretty apathetic as far as local voting has been concerned. But I am about to shake off that apathy and do what I can do get Hatch out of office, not to mention our lousy mayor as well. Both have displeased me in multiple ways and I am tired of seeing Hatch's name appear on Slashdot in conjunction with stories that promote radical, absurd, and potentially dangerous measures to help big business while at the same time trampling over individual rights. Hey, I have no problem helping big business, but I am much more interested in seeing spammers prosecuted (protecting individuals) than pirates prosecuted (protecting big business).
I support short-term copy protection but think it would be nice if it expired after about 5 years or so.
When software is brand new, the copy protection is usually only slightly annoying, such as having to have the CD of a game in the drive. But once your computer has gone through a few generations of upgrades and your OS has gone through a few of its own generations, will you even be able to run your programs anymore due to the copy protection not being compatible with your new stuff?
A somewhat extreme example is on my old Apple ][. I have a few relatively obscure copy protected educational programs on 5.25" disk. As far as I know, no one has ever cracked these disks and I would like to be able to convert them to disk images so I can back them up to CD-ROM and use them with an Apple ][ emulator. But since they are copy protected and since it's not worth it to learn how to crack these super old disks, I am stuck. All I can think of is that copy protection has killed these programs.
The moral of the story is... get cracks for all your software that you want to be able to run in 5 years from now. It's the sad reality of the situation.
So ya, I support short-term copy protection but in a perfect world, it would just happily expire after a few years.
For curiosity's sake, I decided to download both the win32 and linux versions using the torrents. Right now for the linux version I am downloading at 133kB/s and uploading at 4 kB/s (?)... and over on the windows side I am downloading and uploading at 0 kB/s hehe. Very strange. What does it all mean? I certainly can upload a lot faster than I currently am. I suppose me being NAT'd may have something to do with it.
Id has released many quality open source FPS games for Free. Perhaps you meant modern quality open source FPS games, but surely you must realize how unlikely this is considering the large development costs of these titles.
Quake 2 remains one of my most played games ever, and I am absolutely thrilled that id released the full source to that game. To me, quake2 is about as quality as it gets. Sure it's a little outdated now, but the basic physics and gameplay still appeals to me.
I can tell you right now that if this RMX thing got implemented that I would reject all email with a missing RMX record with a bounced message explaining the reasons for the rejection and instructions on how to contact me.
As it is now I already reject _all_ incoming email (to my primary, spam-infested address) with a bounced message with instructions on how to contact me, so in effect I would actually be allowing more email than I am now.
For those of you curious to see what my alternate contact method is, go here.
Well the GPL specifically says that it comes with absolutely no warranty and that if it happens to wipe out all your hard drive data, that's just too bad.
Therefore, assuming that the GPL is immune, we can now relax and laugh at Microsoft's plight.:)
RPI isn't a large university. It's located in Troy, New York (near Albany). I lived there for 4 months or so and I can tell you right now that RPI hardly struck me as a large university. Expensive maybe. But we have a _small_ local college that is tens of thousands of dollars too. Ya, maybe I am nitpicking a little bit, so let me say that I still think your point about the money and tuition attracting the RIAA to this particular school is valid.:)
Every day I get a spam with a poorly worded subject line (with offensive words intentionally misspelled) and a single URL in the body. Since mozilla was having a hard time identifying these messages as spam, I eventually began looking at the IP addresses of these messages and found that they were all different and didn't seem to relate to one another at all. At this point I realized that there was some kind of distributed spam attack going on and I was the recipient. Just for the heck of it, here are some of the URL's that it is advertising:
So there are some repeats in there. Man I'd love to see the person sending me this crap thrown in jail for 12 months to ponder their wretched existence.
why nvidia may not be going the way of 3dfx yet
on
The Cg Tutorial
·
· Score: 1
I see what you're saying... nvidia's latest video card with the super loud fan and only marginal performs gains reminds me of the voodoo3 to a certain extent. But they are still my video card of choice and that's because a) their drivers rock and b) they try to provide full access to all of the video cards new features in linux (usually by openGL extensions). I admit, i have a hard time understanding how to use these extensions, but at least I know that if I did know how to use them, I'd be able to in linux. (at least.. I hope I could! hehe)
Now in fairness, I haven't checked out ATI's linux drivers in much detail, but from what I understand they only provide very specific support to a few of their cards and you can't just download one set of unified drivers like you can with nvidia.
So until ATI produces better linux drivers than nvidia, I am going to stick with nvidia (unless nvidia becomes like 50% slower or something drastic)...
SCO appears to be trying to change their primary source of revenue to be that which they get from lawsuits rather than actually selling services like they used to be doing. I don't know how viable of a business strategy this is, but even if they were to successfully sue every linux company into bankruptcy (hypothetically) they would eventually run out of people to sue and go bankrupt themselves. It's like a virus that feeds on other living cells until it has no more hosts. Once it runs out of hosts, it must itself die.
The pigeon has long been recognized as a noble bird, a symbol of freedom and justice. And a flaming pigeon would just be that much better.
If Mozilla doesn't leap upon this idea, then I am going to go ahead with my original plan of starting the new FlamingPigeonSQL server.
Re:Why theres no windows port
on
Duke3d in Linux
·
· Score: 1
You know, I've noticed that lately whenever source code from a popular game is released, there seems to be a linux port first a lot of the time. This could indicate several things, but I think the main point that this indicates is that linux programmers are in general, more proficient at cross-platform development. Many linux coders also know how to write win32 applications, and often port their own projects to win32 to reach a wider audience. In my own experience I've also noticed that cross-platform development also helps to reveal more bugs.
I work as a programmer with several other programmers. I program in linux at home and ASP.NET/C# at work. The guys here at work only know how to write ASP/ASP.NET type applications and if asked to port a DOS game to windows, they'd be lost. I don't mean to knock them, but I honestly think that perhaps people who know how to code applications in both win32 and linux may be more... how shall I say it.. complete.. programmers than those who are win32 only people?:)
I found that article really quite amusing. Part of what made it so funny was that it sounded a lot like previous pro-shared source Microsoft'ish articles where MS tries to give the appearence of freedom while denying the power thereof.
I've been using Mozilla with Enigmail for GPG, but unfortunately this only is working for me in Windows right now because Debian Mozilla (which is what I use in linux) doesn't seem to be compatible with Enigmail.
When I saw this project announced, my first thought was "Ah ha, now I can use Debian Mozilla and a mozilla-based email client with GPG." But I didn't see GPG listed anywhere.
Some of you may be saying "Use evolution!" and believe me, I do, but evolution seems to only support PGP/MIME and the developers seem to be unable (unwilling?) to add support for PGP/INLINE according to mailing list posts that I've read. Maybe I've misinterpreted the situation though.
And thus my linux quest for PGP/INLINE support (enigmail) with built-in anti-aliased fonts in my browser (debian mozilla) continues...
If anyone has a solution, I'd be glad to hear it;)
This sounds like a cool idea, but I tend to need money to keep me working on something once the "cool" factor wears off and the drudgery sets in. All of the free projects that I am involved in work because I can quit anytime I want to and pick up the work later when I am motivated again. But working on a project like this where there is a start and a finish and a long-term commitment, there's really no way I could keep this up without getting paid at regular intervals.
I think I have a better chance of writing linux games if I get hired on at a windows-only shop and start porting our games to linux in my spare time.
Slashdot Mirror
Ya I have heard rumors that the brilliant people behind Full Throttle's humor and storyline were not involved with the Full Throttle sequel. If this is true, then had LucasArts released this game, they would've been "pulling an Accolade". As some of you no doubt recall, Accolade released the dismal Star Control 3 as a 'sequel' to Star Control 2 without involving the original creators. Hence, Accolade was just exploiting the brand name to make money off crap. If the Full Throttle sequel was indeed crap, then LucasArts thankfully did the right thing and canned it.
...
Game companies should never try to sell sequels without the genius of the original creators behind it
However, in this case Linksys may just be careless, sloppy or ignorant of its obligations. I think it would be a mistake to assume that they are blatantly defying the GPL. I agree that Linksys ought to be reminded of its GPL obligations, but I think it is imperative that this reminder be courteous and polite. Even if Linksys recognizes that they are in the wrong, they won't be eager to continue linux support if everytime they release an update, they receive angry responses.
Yes, the scenario you describe is exactly what has kept me from writing some software to automatically redial spammer 1-800 numbers endlessly and rack up their long distance bills. The crap people leave on my car windows, the junk piling up in my snail mailbox at home, and the large volume of spam which flows into my email account like a wave of putrid filth... all of this stuff might be coming from the spammer OR it might be coming from a third party trying to get someone they don't like harassed by a mob of angry people. I don't think you can just look at a contact phone # and start war dialing it, assuming it's the real spammer.
You need to call the phone # first and find out if you're targeting the right organization. Once you've verified that you have got the right place, then you can commence with the retaliation, right? Or can you? I'm not sure that it's really legal to repeatedly dial a spammer's phone # 24 hours a day?
I don't know how things are where you live, but where I live, Canadian internet looks like a dream. The DSL (which I have) is $30 a month + ISP charges for 65k/s download and 25k/s upload which really kind of sucks compared to rates/bandwidth/latency ratios which I hear about in other countries and my phone company isn't making any effort to "compete" either. Something tells me they can't afford to.
:(
The US is definitely not the place to be for high speed internet. Canada, Sweden, Korea... they all have the US beat hands down. I don't get what the problem is, surely there must be demand here
I can confirm that the first ][gs's came with 256k of RAM because that's how much our "Woz" had when we got it. I believe sometime later they started shipping all of them with 512k instead.
Man I have so many cool memories of the Apple ][gs!
I wanted to make this point too. These books (I've read all 3) do use the F word and have some explicit violence and sex scenes in them, which I consider to be a big drawback. However, I have still read all 3 books and plan to read the 4th. I just finished reading the new Harry Potter, a book and series which shows that an author can write a wildly entertaining book without resorting to explicit passages in their book. But I doubt that there is any hope of getting Martin to tone it down a bit, I'm sure that he would say that the scenes play an important role.
I can understand that you (and maybe a lot of other people) may feel that getting a free replacement for Exchange is incredibly important, perhaps even the most important thing that needs to happen to linux. However, what really matters is what the programmers feel is important. Unfortunately, I'd venture to say that most programmers who write free software are not expecting to make much (or any) money off of their project and therefore will not be motivated toward working on a project that seems to be centered around pleasing _businesses_. Programmers who work on free software usually focus on pleasing individuals, namely themselves and not too many other people. Sorry to put it like this, but maybe what it's going to take is instead of hoping free software programmers will create the program, hope that free software _donators_ will hire people to write the program.
Richard,
You make several good points and I agree with you. I too do not like having multiple applications installed in my GNOME menu that all do the same thing. I would prefer the people who package up the distribution make that choice for me, or at least have some kind of user voting system so I can see which application most users prefer.
I guess we can agree that there is no clear solution to this problem.
The main problem is that the stuff that comes pre-installed with Windows and/or Windows Components (Media Player, Internet Exploder) is the stuff that everyone uses, whether it's better or not.
.WMV or .ASF, do you think any web sites would offer content in .WMV format? No, all web sites would offer stuff in Quicktime format by default because they'd know that they'd be able to reach the greatest number of users CONVENIENTLY. No company is going to want to tell users "We really want you to view our product, but you'll need to download this plugin to do so." All companies will say "We really want you to view our product, therefore we're going to use a format which you know you will already have pre-installed!"
If Microsoft suddenly started bundling Quicktime with Windows Media Player and suddenly forced users to manually download and install plug-ins to use file formats such as
Microsoft has pulled this BS time and time again. The law ought to be that if Microsoft ships with Windows Media Player pre-installed, that it must also pre-install all of its competitors too. If it ships with Internet Exploder pre-installed, it must ship with other browsers pre-installed too. Yeah this sounds kind of unreasonable, but there is a precedence. Remember how Windows 95 shipped with a bunch of shortcuts for other ISP's such as AOL?
Maybe I am missing something but I don't see source code for this available to be downloaded. I'd be interested in using what he has done for another certain emulator. A bootable linux CD that has support for most modern hardware is something I've longed for but haven't bothered putting together.
As a Utah citizen, I have been pretty apathetic as far as local voting has been concerned. But I am about to shake off that apathy and do what I can do get Hatch out of office, not to mention our lousy mayor as well. Both have displeased me in multiple ways and I am tired of seeing Hatch's name appear on Slashdot in conjunction with stories that promote radical, absurd, and potentially dangerous measures to help big business while at the same time trampling over individual rights. Hey, I have no problem helping big business, but I am much more interested in seeing spammers prosecuted (protecting individuals) than pirates prosecuted (protecting big business).
I support short-term copy protection but think it would be nice if it expired after about 5 years or so.
When software is brand new, the copy protection is usually only slightly annoying, such as having to have the CD of a game in the drive. But once your computer has gone through a few generations of upgrades and your OS has gone through a few of its own generations, will you even be able to run your programs anymore due to the copy protection not being compatible with your new stuff?
A somewhat extreme example is on my old Apple ][. I have a few relatively obscure copy protected educational programs on 5.25" disk. As far as I know, no one has ever cracked these disks and I would like to be able to convert them to disk images so I can back them up to CD-ROM and use them with an Apple ][ emulator. But since they are copy protected and since it's not worth it to learn how to crack these super old disks, I am stuck. All I can think of is that copy protection has killed these programs.
The moral of the story is... get cracks for all your software that you want to be able to run in 5 years from now. It's the sad reality of the situation.
So ya, I support short-term copy protection but in a perfect world, it would just happily expire after a few years.
For curiosity's sake, I decided to download both the win32 and linux versions using the torrents. Right now for the linux version I am downloading at 133kB/s and uploading at 4 kB/s (?) ... and over on the windows side I am downloading and uploading at 0 kB/s hehe. Very strange. What does it all mean? I certainly can upload a lot faster than I currently am. I suppose me being NAT'd may have something to do with it.
Id has released many quality open source FPS games for Free. Perhaps you meant modern quality open source FPS games, but surely you must realize how unlikely this is considering the large development costs of these titles.
Quake 2 remains one of my most played games ever, and I am absolutely thrilled that id released the full source to that game. To me, quake2 is about as quality as it gets. Sure it's a little outdated now, but the basic physics and gameplay still appeals to me.
I can tell you right now that if this RMX thing got implemented that I would reject all email with a missing RMX record with a bounced message explaining the reasons for the rejection and instructions on how to contact me.
.
As it is now I already reject _all_ incoming email (to my primary, spam-infested address) with a bounced message with instructions on how to contact me, so in effect I would actually be allowing more email than I am now.
For those of you curious to see what my alternate contact method is, go here
Well the GPL specifically says that it comes with absolutely no warranty and that if it happens to wipe out all your hard drive data, that's just too bad.
:)
Therefore, assuming that the GPL is immune, we can now relax and laugh at Microsoft's plight.
RPI isn't a large university. It's located in Troy, New York (near Albany). I lived there for 4 months or so and I can tell you right now that RPI hardly struck me as a large university. Expensive maybe. But we have a _small_ local college that is tens of thousands of dollars too. Ya, maybe I am nitpicking a little bit, so let me say that I still think your point about the money and tuition attracting the RIAA to this particular school is valid. :)
Every day I get a spam with a poorly worded subject line (with offensive words intentionally misspelled) and a single URL in the body. Since mozilla was having a hard time identifying these messages as spam, I eventually began looking at the IP addresses of these messages and found that they were all different and didn't seem to relate to one another at all. At this point I realized that there was some kind of distributed spam attack going on and I was the recipient. Just for the heck of it, here are some of the URL's that it is advertising:
u s.lewdmother.biz . stopspy.infot tp://heevavam.lewdmother.biz/o ral-moms.biz/t p://qeimeileig.incestuals.com/
http://coorourav.homethrill.biz
http://veemeem
http://xaboasot.incestuals.com/
http://loufagaw.scaredgirls.com
http://peehuqov
http://zeagiseit.incestuals.com/
h
http://xoohouc.imm
http://toobabat.homethrill.biz
ht
So there are some repeats in there. Man I'd love to see the person sending me this crap thrown in jail for 12 months to ponder their wretched existence.
I see what you're saying... nvidia's latest video card with the super loud fan and only marginal performs gains reminds me of the voodoo3 to a certain extent. But they are still my video card of choice and that's because a) their drivers rock and b) they try to provide full access to all of the video cards new features in linux (usually by openGL extensions). I admit, i have a hard time understanding how to use these extensions, but at least I know that if I did know how to use them, I'd be able to in linux. (at least.. I hope I could! hehe)
...
Now in fairness, I haven't checked out ATI's linux drivers in much detail, but from what I understand they only provide very specific support to a few of their cards and you can't just download one set of unified drivers like you can with nvidia.
So until ATI produces better linux drivers than nvidia, I am going to stick with nvidia (unless nvidia becomes like 50% slower or something drastic)
Ya this indeed looks ugly.
SCO appears to be trying to change their primary source of revenue to be that which they get from lawsuits rather than actually selling services like they used to be doing. I don't know how viable of a business strategy this is, but even if they were to successfully sue every linux company into bankruptcy (hypothetically) they would eventually run out of people to sue and go bankrupt themselves. It's like a virus that feeds on other living cells until it has no more hosts. Once it runs out of hosts, it must itself die.
The pigeon has long been recognized as a noble bird, a symbol of freedom and justice. And a flaming pigeon would just be that much better.
If Mozilla doesn't leap upon this idea, then I am going to go ahead with my original plan of starting the new FlamingPigeonSQL server.
You know, I've noticed that lately whenever source code from a popular game is released, there seems to be a linux port first a lot of the time. This could indicate several things, but I think the main point that this indicates is that linux programmers are in general, more proficient at cross-platform development. Many linux coders also know how to write win32 applications, and often port their own projects to win32 to reach a wider audience. In my own experience I've also noticed that cross-platform development also helps to reveal more bugs.
:)
I work as a programmer with several other programmers. I program in linux at home and ASP.NET/C# at work. The guys here at work only know how to write ASP/ASP.NET type applications and if asked to port a DOS game to windows, they'd be lost. I don't mean to knock them, but I honestly think that perhaps people who know how to code applications in both win32 and linux may be more... how shall I say it.. complete.. programmers than those who are win32 only people?
I found that article really quite amusing. Part of what made it so funny was that it sounded a lot like previous pro-shared source Microsoft'ish articles where MS tries to give the appearence of freedom while denying the power thereof.
I've been using Mozilla with Enigmail for GPG, but unfortunately this only is working for me in Windows right now because Debian Mozilla (which is what I use in linux) doesn't seem to be compatible with Enigmail.
;)
When I saw this project announced, my first thought was "Ah ha, now I can use Debian Mozilla and a mozilla-based email client with GPG." But I didn't see GPG listed anywhere.
Some of you may be saying "Use evolution!" and believe me, I do, but evolution seems to only support PGP/MIME and the developers seem to be unable (unwilling?) to add support for PGP/INLINE according to mailing list posts that I've read. Maybe I've misinterpreted the situation though.
And thus my linux quest for PGP/INLINE support (enigmail) with built-in anti-aliased fonts in my browser (debian mozilla) continues...
If anyone has a solution, I'd be glad to hear it
This sounds like a cool idea, but I tend to need money to keep me working on something once the "cool" factor wears off and the drudgery sets in. All of the free projects that I am involved in work because I can quit anytime I want to and pick up the work later when I am motivated again. But working on a project like this where there is a start and a finish and a long-term commitment, there's really no way I could keep this up without getting paid at regular intervals.
I think I have a better chance of writing linux games if I get hired on at a windows-only shop and start porting our games to linux in my spare time.