"* Get cheat codes
* Find new ways to have fun in the game"
Yes! I spent countless hours just messing around with the "spam,
spam, spam, humbug" cheat back in Ultima 6. I would create long
chains of powder kegs, and then set them off, killing a random
villager at the end. Completely pointless, but it amused the hell out
of me.
Overall, I think that cheat codes are a great way for the player to
engage in undirected gameplay (technical term: "screwing around").
Game designers are also getting better at including it as an actual
feature (for example, being able to fly around the landscape in
Mario64 or being able to drive around the cities in Midnight Club
Street Racing), especially as we move toward more explorable 3D
worlds.
"Are you implying by playing GTA people will be encouraged to steal
cars?"
No. Read the article headline. "Grand Theft Auto Still Banned Down
Under." The previous poster was making a joke by delibrately choosing
to confuse the name of the video game "Grand Theft Auto" with the name
of the actual crime "Grand Theft Auto". The joke utilizes the
confusion to paint the absurd image of a news headline about the
banning of something that's widely accepted as an outright criminal
offense -- unlike, say, P2P filesharing, guns, or abortion, you don't
have people arguing over whether or not the government should try to
stop it.
"While their TOS might sound evil, as long as they stay on paper,
who cares?"
As long as they're willing to put it in writing that they won't
enforce the clauses in the contract, I'd be happy. Otherwise, that's
some pretty scary stuff, especially since universities have been known
to enforce similar clauses to get interesting intellectual property
from students.
I'll admit that I mostly believe that the clause is just some
ill-conceived attempt by the DSL provider to just cover their own ass
legally, but there's no reason to justify giving them such a potent
and abusable weapon.
"Since when did Slashdot take to linking paid content?"
The paid content wasn't the focus of the Slashdot posting. The paid
content was provided as further background information with regard to
the author.
Furthermore, Slashdot has linked paid content in the past both in
online form as well as using something called a "book review" -- it
provided a third-party, descriptive "link" to some content stored as
words printed on pieces of processed tree. I find the convenience of
this "book" invention rather nice, but I take issue at some of the
inherent ARM (analog rights management) features.
As far as I know, Tivo doesn't generate a viewer profile like the
Microsoft product does. Instead, it's just a larger aggregate of what
people watch. Futhermore, the privacy conscious can opt-out by
calling Tivo's customer support line. People who have hacked the Tivo
have been able to confirm that boxes set to opt-out don't upload the
viewing information to Tivo at all.
However, there's a reason why I actually like Tivo's data
collection. I think Taco's dreaming a bit as far as actual targeted
ads go (at least for now), but there's a more important benefit:
Aggregate viewing statistics are more or less what're commonly
referred to as "ratings". Ratings determine whether shows live or
die. They determine how much many a network gets from a show's
advertisers. This, in turn, determines how much money goes into a
show's budget. It should be obvious why having my viewing habits
correlate with TV studio's spending is A Good Thing.
To provide a slightly more concrete example, however, I give you
"Family Guy". It's a funny show, it has a decent geek following, and
it runs in a time-slot that's otherwise dominated by stupid reality
TV. The network it's on, Fox, keeps playing the stupid game of
repeatedly cancelling the show and then bringing it back. Apparently,
they decided that last week's ratings were going to decide whether or
not they cancel the show yet again. I recorded the show on my Tivo
and watched it. Assuming that Fox subscribes to Tivo's viewer
information, that's one more vote in the "Keep it on the air, dammit"
column. Even better, given that viewer statistics are collected from
a relatively small portion of the viewing public, it's a
disproportionately large vote.
"If the game isn't appropriate for children, then toy tie-ins
probably aren't either. Their "lobby" only imposes upon
eight-year-olds."
Yes, because the soldier doll from a mature video game is somehow
magically different from the soldier doll from a Saturday morning
cartoon. Conversely, if someone makes an amateur "porn" film
utilizing Barbie dolls, does that suddenly mean stores should drop
them from their shelves?
Furthermore, given that eight-year-olds aren't in the business of
marketing toys, they're imposing on other people as well.
When I was a kid, they sold Robocop toys despite the R-rating on the
movie. I fail to see how the fact that the movie contained profanity
and gratuitous violence should've stopped me from owning an action
figure of a giant robot. The figures themselves weren't necessarily
any more inherently violent that GI Joes or Transformers. (Well,
unless they did a figure for the toxic waste melting guy.)
Whether it's an ED-209 or Soundwave, I was still capable of picking it
up, pointing its gun at another toy, and having it kill it. Arguably,
my Soundwave toy was actually more violent, since my dad added a
spring to the missile mechanism to make it actually fire. (They had a
whole latching assembly in Soundwave's gun. It looks like they were
originally intended to fire, but the manufacturer didn't include the
springs when they realized it was a perfect "shoot your eye out"
missile.)
They're arguable trying. Here's a link to
their testimony to Congress. They're apparently trying to get
Congressional support so that action figure tie-ins from M-rated video
games don't get marketed to children.
They've gone from "inform" to "lobby", in my opinion.
"Anyway, it just seems that we can't just attack the spammer, we really need to attack the beneficiary. Then the spammers will go away, as they can't find anyone to demand their services. "
Of course then it promotes another tactic. People could pay spammers to send out spam with their competitors' contact information. When the spammer's operating from China, it becomes much more difficulty to prove that the person listed in the spam is the person who ultimately initiated it.
"Come to that, I doubt that "flash ugrades in the field" are even possible, let alone planned, or the author probably wouldn't have had to replace the ROM at all."
That's not necessarily so. For example, the X-box could be set up to only accept cryptographically signed ROM upgrades that're stored on an authorized CD.
There're two methods I can think of to crack such a system. The first is to look at an authorized, MS-released ROM upgrade and try to reverse engineer it. Since MS hasn't released one yet, this obviously isn't an option right now. The second is to reverse engineer the existing ROM. The leads to a chicken-and-egg problem: You can't reflash the ROM to reverse engineer it until you've already reverse engineered it.
So in the future, it's entirely possible that people will be able to provide software that will do the ROM dump on a still sealed X-box. But for now, they have to do things the hard way.
Re:Cutting off you nose to spite your face
on
The LDP and Debian
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
"Documentation is not software."
I fail to see any significant difference.
Similarities:
Both require the producer to have a special skill set.
Both have the same distribution cost (virtually zero) for
duplication of the purely electronic form of the product.
Both require a significant amount of work for the creation of the
product.
Both endeavours are such that multiple people can collaborate on
them.
Both products are in fields that have a large market of non-free
products.
Both are descriptions of how to perform a task.
Differences:
One's parsed by a computer. One's parsed by a machine.
The area of the written word doesn't have a high-profile
equivilant to the Free Software Foundation.
Documentation is less likely to scratch a personal itch.
"If you don't think there is a good enough Open Source solution to
this (or any other issue), well, you've got the compiler, so use the
source."
I think you're completely missing the point. The previous poster was
underscoring the "personal itch" nature of open source. Developers in
open source projects, who are almost exclusively unpaid volunteers,
tend to focus mainly on coding up programs and features that satisfy a
personal need. Just because someone recognizes the importance and
need of a feature doesn't mean they'll have the personal need that
motivates them through the actual effort of coding up a solution.
"yes, I do have a webmail account - call me old-fashioned, but I do
prefer to have real email"
I prefer real email, too. Over the years, I've jumped from AOL (long,
long ago) to a local, shell-based ISP (back when SLIP access wasn't a
flat-rate) to a college big pipe connection to a work big pipe
connection (with FreeZero when I had to dialup from home) to a
national PPP-based ISP to residential DSL. It almost goes without
saying that I do not consider email artificially tied to my connection
provider to be "real" email.
One idea is to get a number of geek friends together, pool your
resources, and see about getting a couple email accounts hosted
somewhere.
"The reason that I ask is that if there is a difference between
Temporary Licence, (such as what Microsoft is doing with the XP line),
and a rental of a program to play games with(such as with all console
video games)."
I think the easiest way to differentiate the two is who's granting the
temporary use. My guess is that the law is an anti-piracy thing. As
such, it would be rather difficult to claim that Microsoft was
violating Microsoft's copyright. Instead, I think the law's intended
to prevent someone like Blockbuster from renting out Microsoft
software.
"To speak quite frank, I don't find this "Funny". I find this quite
Insightful. People form thousands of years ago were interested (and
partaked (sp)) in the same things we do now."
The reason that Pompeii is a tourist attraction is because it has a
buried city there. At the time that this "new" city was buried (1800
BC), Pompeii may have not been founded yet and certainly wasn't buried
(79 AD). As such, it's quite likely that there would be nothing for
prehistoric tourists to see if they were to visit Pompeii, regardless
of whether or not they're interested in the same things as we are.
Now I'll be the first to admit that a city from 1800 years in the
future would make a damn nifty tourist attraction, but it's hard to
treat it as anything other than humor in the absence of evidence of
time travel. I'd write more on the matter, but I've got vacation
plans for Mars.
I've been pretty happy with Uplink -- this game is the best
hacking-type game I've played since the old Neuromancer computer game.
As an added bonus, you get both Windows and Linux versions for
only $25 or so.
"Seems like everyone hates spam with a passion, except maybe the spammers themselves, and from what I've gathered they're generally pretty clueless."
Given that (some) spammers are smart enough to pull of dictionary attacks for accounts, exploit open relays, and use a non-Internet-based reply method (i.e. something you can't get yanked with an email to abuse@whatever), I question your characterization.
I hate spammers, and I find what they do reprehensible, but you're deluding yourself if you don't recognize that some people working that side of the fence have technical skill.
"By their telling EBay that you were violating a contract that they
should have known (I mean really, contract law pretty well smacks
EULAs around completely) you were NOT violating, I would imagine they
open themselves to some liability."
I think it all depends on phrasing. For example, I could create
Erasmus's Useless List of Rules (EULR). Rule #16 on that list might
be "Never, ever post something I disagree agree with." Obviously,
this would have no legal force, but it would not be untrue if I were
to claim that you had violated my EULR.
Similarly, while the EULA may not be enforceable, I believe Microsoft
could still legitimately state that a given sale violates the terms in
the license agreement. Microsoft is not asserting that the license
agreement is actually legally enforceable. Furthermore, one could
argue that EBay's compliance was based on professional courtesy,
rather than a fear of being legally in the wrong.
"The leading "L" allows those who would use your library to remain
proprietary, if they so choose"
It's an embedded systems issue, though. Proprietary application
dynamically linked to an LGPL library on a regular PC? No problem.
Proprietary application dynamically linked to an LGPL library on an
embedded device? Resource problems. Proprietary application
statically linked to an LGPL library on an embedded device? License
problems.
Even though people are doing what's identical in overall intent/spirit
to a permitted activity, technical limitations shoot it down.
"You should also ask yourself: who would potentially object to an
LGPL code base rather than one licensed under the BSD license? My
guess is that the only people who would benefit from you using the BSD
license in this case are parasites who seek to sell your hard work for
their own personal profit."
If you reread the article text, you'll see that it emphasizes embedded
systems. These are people doing things that would be 100% A-OK if
they were using the same business model on a regular, full-featured PC
where dynamic linking was an option. More specifically, someone can
already write a closed-source, commercial player that only dynamically
links with the LGPL'd codec.
However, in an embedded system, resources tend to be much more scarce.
You don't always have the luxury of people able to dynamically link in
the codec. It's still the same conceptual act of providing a
commercial player that uses a free codec, but it violates the license
due to hardware constraints.
I will agree that the BSD license would benefit parasites interested
in pulling an embrace-and-extend on the FLAC standard itself, but it
also benefits people who want to be able to, say, add FLAC support to
an existing portable mp3 player without giving away all their
non-FLAC-specific code on that system. While such a case is contrary
to the hardcore free software goal (everything should be free as in
speech), I don't think it necessarily violates the FLAC goals, as FLAC
was obviously consciously placed under the more flexible LGPL.
Slashdot Mirror
* Find new ways to have fun in the game"
Yes! I spent countless hours just messing around with the "spam, spam, spam, humbug" cheat back in Ultima 6. I would create long chains of powder kegs, and then set them off, killing a random villager at the end. Completely pointless, but it amused the hell out of me.
Overall, I think that cheat codes are a great way for the player to engage in undirected gameplay (technical term: "screwing around"). Game designers are also getting better at including it as an actual feature (for example, being able to fly around the landscape in Mario64 or being able to drive around the cities in Midnight Club Street Racing), especially as we move toward more explorable 3D worlds.
No. The fifth reply listed is a reference to the "X standard replies" rant.
No. Read the article headline. "Grand Theft Auto Still Banned Down Under." The previous poster was making a joke by delibrately choosing to confuse the name of the video game "Grand Theft Auto" with the name of the actual crime "Grand Theft Auto". The joke utilizes the confusion to paint the absurd image of a news headline about the banning of something that's widely accepted as an outright criminal offense -- unlike, say, P2P filesharing, guns, or abortion, you don't have people arguing over whether or not the government should try to stop it.
As long as they're willing to put it in writing that they won't enforce the clauses in the contract, I'd be happy. Otherwise, that's some pretty scary stuff, especially since universities have been known to enforce similar clauses to get interesting intellectual property from students.
I'll admit that I mostly believe that the clause is just some ill-conceived attempt by the DSL provider to just cover their own ass legally, but there's no reason to justify giving them such a potent and abusable weapon.
The paid content wasn't the focus of the Slashdot posting. The paid content was provided as further background information with regard to the author.
Furthermore, Slashdot has linked paid content in the past both in online form as well as using something called a "book review" -- it provided a third-party, descriptive "link" to some content stored as words printed on pieces of processed tree. I find the convenience of this "book" invention rather nice, but I take issue at some of the inherent ARM (analog rights management) features.
However, there's a reason why I actually like Tivo's data collection. I think Taco's dreaming a bit as far as actual targeted ads go (at least for now), but there's a more important benefit: Aggregate viewing statistics are more or less what're commonly referred to as "ratings". Ratings determine whether shows live or die. They determine how much many a network gets from a show's advertisers. This, in turn, determines how much money goes into a show's budget. It should be obvious why having my viewing habits correlate with TV studio's spending is A Good Thing.
To provide a slightly more concrete example, however, I give you "Family Guy". It's a funny show, it has a decent geek following, and it runs in a time-slot that's otherwise dominated by stupid reality TV. The network it's on, Fox, keeps playing the stupid game of repeatedly cancelling the show and then bringing it back. Apparently, they decided that last week's ratings were going to decide whether or not they cancel the show yet again. I recorded the show on my Tivo and watched it. Assuming that Fox subscribes to Tivo's viewer information, that's one more vote in the "Keep it on the air, dammit" column. Even better, given that viewer statistics are collected from a relatively small portion of the viewing public, it's a disproportionately large vote.
Yes, because the soldier doll from a mature video game is somehow magically different from the soldier doll from a Saturday morning cartoon. Conversely, if someone makes an amateur "porn" film utilizing Barbie dolls, does that suddenly mean stores should drop them from their shelves?
Furthermore, given that eight-year-olds aren't in the business of marketing toys, they're imposing on other people as well.
When I was a kid, they sold Robocop toys despite the R-rating on the movie. I fail to see how the fact that the movie contained profanity and gratuitous violence should've stopped me from owning an action figure of a giant robot. The figures themselves weren't necessarily any more inherently violent that GI Joes or Transformers. (Well, unless they did a figure for the toxic waste melting guy.)
Whether it's an ED-209 or Soundwave, I was still capable of picking it up, pointing its gun at another toy, and having it kill it. Arguably, my Soundwave toy was actually more violent, since my dad added a spring to the missile mechanism to make it actually fire. (They had a whole latching assembly in Soundwave's gun. It looks like they were originally intended to fire, but the manufacturer didn't include the springs when they realized it was a perfect "shoot your eye out" missile.)
They're arguable trying. Here's a link to their testimony to Congress. They're apparently trying to get Congressional support so that action figure tie-ins from M-rated video games don't get marketed to children.
They've gone from "inform" to "lobby", in my opinion.
I'd say it's pretty explicit about that. The first sentence from the front page reads:
"The mission of The Lion & Lamb Project is to stop the marketing of violence to children."
Well, since they changed the definition of "forever", and you changed the definition of "Christmas", it looks like you two are about even.
Of course then it promotes another tactic. People could pay spammers to send out spam with their competitors' contact information. When the spammer's operating from China, it becomes much more difficulty to prove that the person listed in the spam is the person who ultimately initiated it.
That's not necessarily so. For example, the X-box could be set up to only accept cryptographically signed ROM upgrades that're stored on an authorized CD.
There're two methods I can think of to crack such a system. The first is to look at an authorized, MS-released ROM upgrade and try to reverse engineer it. Since MS hasn't released one yet, this obviously isn't an option right now. The second is to reverse engineer the existing ROM. The leads to a chicken-and-egg problem: You can't reflash the ROM to reverse engineer it until you've already reverse engineered it.
So in the future, it's entirely possible that people will be able to provide software that will do the ROM dump on a still sealed X-box. But for now, they have to do things the hard way.
I fail to see any significant difference.
Similarities:
Differences:
I think you're completely missing the point. The previous poster was underscoring the "personal itch" nature of open source. Developers in open source projects, who are almost exclusively unpaid volunteers, tend to focus mainly on coding up programs and features that satisfy a personal need. Just because someone recognizes the importance and need of a feature doesn't mean they'll have the personal need that motivates them through the actual effort of coding up a solution.
I prefer real email, too. Over the years, I've jumped from AOL (long, long ago) to a local, shell-based ISP (back when SLIP access wasn't a flat-rate) to a college big pipe connection to a work big pipe connection (with FreeZero when I had to dialup from home) to a national PPP-based ISP to residential DSL. It almost goes without saying that I do not consider email artificially tied to my connection provider to be "real" email.
One idea is to get a number of geek friends together, pool your resources, and see about getting a couple email accounts hosted somewhere.
I think the easiest way to differentiate the two is who's granting the temporary use. My guess is that the law is an anti-piracy thing. As such, it would be rather difficult to claim that Microsoft was violating Microsoft's copyright. Instead, I think the law's intended to prevent someone like Blockbuster from renting out Microsoft software.
The reason that Pompeii is a tourist attraction is because it has a buried city there. At the time that this "new" city was buried (1800 BC), Pompeii may have not been founded yet and certainly wasn't buried (79 AD). As such, it's quite likely that there would be nothing for prehistoric tourists to see if they were to visit Pompeii, regardless of whether or not they're interested in the same things as we are.
Now I'll be the first to admit that a city from 1800 years in the future would make a damn nifty tourist attraction, but it's hard to treat it as anything other than humor in the absence of evidence of time travel. I'd write more on the matter, but I've got vacation plans for Mars.
I've been pretty happy with Uplink -- this game is the best hacking-type game I've played since the old Neuromancer computer game. As an added bonus, you get both Windows and Linux versions for only $25 or so.
Given that (some) spammers are smart enough to pull of dictionary attacks for accounts, exploit open relays, and use a non-Internet-based reply method (i.e. something you can't get yanked with an email to abuse@whatever), I question your characterization.
I hate spammers, and I find what they do reprehensible, but you're deluding yourself if you don't recognize that some people working that side of the fence have technical skill.
So what you're saying is that a fake virtual celebrity doesn't count, while a real virtual celebrity does? I think I've hurt my brain.
I think it all depends on phrasing. For example, I could create Erasmus's Useless List of Rules (EULR). Rule #16 on that list might be "Never, ever post something I disagree agree with." Obviously, this would have no legal force, but it would not be untrue if I were to claim that you had violated my EULR.
Similarly, while the EULA may not be enforceable, I believe Microsoft could still legitimately state that a given sale violates the terms in the license agreement. Microsoft is not asserting that the license agreement is actually legally enforceable. Furthermore, one could argue that EBay's compliance was based on professional courtesy, rather than a fear of being legally in the wrong.
I wouldn't mind being able to browse the Net while standing in line. Hell, even surfing through a white-list filter would be better than nothing.
It's an embedded systems issue, though. Proprietary application dynamically linked to an LGPL library on a regular PC? No problem. Proprietary application dynamically linked to an LGPL library on an embedded device? Resource problems. Proprietary application statically linked to an LGPL library on an embedded device? License problems.
Even though people are doing what's identical in overall intent/spirit to a permitted activity, technical limitations shoot it down.
If you reread the article text, you'll see that it emphasizes embedded systems. These are people doing things that would be 100% A-OK if they were using the same business model on a regular, full-featured PC where dynamic linking was an option. More specifically, someone can already write a closed-source, commercial player that only dynamically links with the LGPL'd codec.
However, in an embedded system, resources tend to be much more scarce. You don't always have the luxury of people able to dynamically link in the codec. It's still the same conceptual act of providing a commercial player that uses a free codec, but it violates the license due to hardware constraints.
I will agree that the BSD license would benefit parasites interested in pulling an embrace-and-extend on the FLAC standard itself, but it also benefits people who want to be able to, say, add FLAC support to an existing portable mp3 player without giving away all their non-FLAC-specific code on that system. While such a case is contrary to the hardcore free software goal (everything should be free as in speech), I don't think it necessarily violates the FLAC goals, as FLAC was obviously consciously placed under the more flexible LGPL.