A browser monoculture based on webkit is at least better than a monoculture based on a closed source rendering engine... Just how bad it is, really comes down to who controls it and how much input other people have into it.
Of course without intervention pretty much everything will end up heading towards a monoculture... Linux for instance has pretty much killed the varied proprietary unixes that existed just as x86 has killed the risc processors they ran on.
So if a monoculture is inevitable, then minimising the damage by keeping it open is the best you can hope for.
Last I checked, the various flavors of BSD were alive and well (but I haven't confirmed this with Netcraft, so I may be wrong).
You are the way this model should work - you understand that what you're spending money on is entertainment, not any sort of future investment. If STO shut down tomorrow. the $20 you spent last month wasn't "lost" - it was spent on a month's worth of entertainment, As you mentioned, it can actually be a good entertainment value. When MMO's do shut down, it's a sad day for players who enjoyed the game, but a worse day for those who mistakenly thought of the money they spent on the game as "invested" in their avatar(s).
Bruce, first off, thank you for everything you've done to advance the cause of FLOSS. My question: It's not hard to notice the shift in mass market computing away from the PC and toward the tablet and phone. While at its core Android runs the Linux kernel, it's hard for me to think of it with the same fondness that I have for my favorite FLOSS OS distributions. I can't just load up a new Linux distro on my Acer tablet, or in many cases even an updated version of Android, short of "jailbreaking" it. It's seems clear to me that such hardware is designed with the intent to replicate Apple's success with a vertical hardware/software stack.
Given this (or perhaps not given this, if you disagree with my statements above), what do you think the future of open source will be in the tablet and phone world? Android? Meego? WebOS? Something else? Will it be open source programs in a not-quite-completely open OS like Android?
... My only wish for something like this happening is that the developers dump everything into an open source license and tell the community "good luck" in terms of trying to make something of it. That doesn't help the game company itself, but it at least allows the potential for the game community to continue into the future.
There ought to be at least some sort of value to opening up something like that... even if NCSoft simply tries to do something like a fundraiser to sell off the assets to some foundation in exchange for some reasonable amount of money. Blender was able to raise a bunch of money to turn that into an open source program, couldn't the same be done to a game like this?
Because of the number of IP's licensed for just about any large MMO - the graphics engine, physics, engine, maybe even the IP itself (eg, Star Wars Galaxies), there are usually legal reasons they couldn't open up the game like that. Also, at least for companies with more than one MMO, why would they want to? They'd just be creating a free competitor against any of their other games. Instead, they usually offer incentives to their departing players to transition them to another of their titles.
iOS is a walled garden. Apple is under no obligation to let anyone develop for it. If you're going to embarrass and criticize Apple, they are under no obligation to let you do it on their iPhones and iPads (or Macs either, for that matter).
On the flip side, he make both Apple and the public aware of the exploits he finds. I'd rather Apple get a black eye over this than have the exploits remain out there where someone nefarious can find them and sell them to an eastern European cartel.
BTW IANAL but I think it's legal to download YouTube video because of the Betamax case. I suspect YouTube-MP3.org may have been targeted because a) they purloined their trademark and b) YouTube-MP3.org acts as a third party "distributing" copyrighted works (not merely Betamaxing it for time-shifting) because they act as an intermediary between YouTube and the end user. It's the low-hanging fruit for YouTube -- if they can succeed against YouTube-MP3.org then probably the next target will be a similar site that doesn't mimic their trademark. Then if they succeed with that maybe they'll even try their luck with going after tool vendors (though probably at first one smaller than real.com), thereby overturning Betamax.
Why bother going after anyone else? It costs money to litigate. Google went after these guys for three reasons:
1) They infringed on Youtube's trademark.
2) They're wasting Youtube's bandwidth.
3) Shutting them down gives Google proof they're protecting IP when the **AA's come knocking on the door.
Anyone with half a brain can find an alternate way to scrape the audio substate from a Youtube video.
While I'm not a huge fan of Acer's laptops, I got a 7" Iconia from Best Buy's Black Friday sale, and I love it. It's held up extremely well to the beating my 8 and 4-year-olds have put it through.
Also, they upgraded the OS version from Honeycomb to ICS six months after purchase. Not sure how common that is in the Android tablet world, but I'm getting the impression it's pretty rare for phones, especially here in the US.
I'd buy another Iconia tomorrow. Giving credit where credit is due.
Odd... the Firefox version on my Slackware desktop comes up as 12. As far as "datedness" goes, Slackware aims for stability, not bleeding edge, which is why it remains popular as a server distro. Not sure if you were trolling here but the naming version was tongue-in-check - the latest kernel version available at release time was 2.6.37, and since Slackware was at version 13, they named it 13.37 ("leet"). Aw, never mind...
Acronym Overload Detected. A summary is supposed to summarize but I couldn't tell what this story is about unless I already know.
Notice that the first reference to ASLR in the summary is actually a link to Wikipedia. If you hover over the link, you get the acronym expansion. While not as effective as expanding it in the text, it's nice to have the full Wikipedia article available in case you want to read up on it prior to digging into the article.
So how many Slashdotters really just stick with defaults no matter how much they like something else better? Seems like a total non-issue (and a non-complaint) to me.
The problem is that in most distros the default system is installed around the default desktop UI, so just typing
apt-get install xxx-desktop
might get you the desktop, but many apps designed for the new desktop UI only partially work, and some not at all. This is why kubuntu, xubuntu and lubuntu end up with their own install discs, even though (IIRC) they use the same repositories (ie, codebase) as ubuntu.
While it's nice that you're adding new forms of content, how about giving TV it's own section/icon so those of us who don't want to or can't stream can safely ignore it?
Ditto - skipped AC2, Diablo 3, Starcraft 2, and now Sim City because of the always on requirement. I bought all of their predecessors. Nothing would make Diablo 3 suck more than spending pounding on a boss and then losing the fight because of a hiccup in my wireless. Oh well, back to Skyrim...
There's a debian squeeze port available now right here. The problem is that it was never compiled to do floating point instructions in hardware, so you're going to lose some seroius performance by using it over Fedora.
There are two "stock" Debian ARM distros. The one in stable (the "Arm EABI" port) doesn't support floating point. There's also one in the unstable branch called "armhf" which has support for ARM hardware floaitng point, but only for ARMv7 and up. Raspberry Pi is ARMv6 (notes for armhf platform are here..
Even ignoring the lack of evidence for your claim, your statement is truly bizarre. You genuinely believe that an upcoming version of a live distribution that doesn't fit on a CD is why one distro is more popular than another right now?
No he appears to believe that many Ubuntu users are jumping ship to Mint (which is basically a Ubuntu-derived distribution that cleaned up all the stuff Ubuntu has done that its users hate) because Ubuntu stopped listening to its users. As a former Ubuntu and current Mint user, I have to agree.
Could we start a white list of compatible hardware manufacturers or a black list of offending hardware (which ever is easier to maintain) so it would help us users that are planning for our next PC build?
When I was at RPI in the mid-1980's, several RPI professors sat on the board for the local community college - Hudson Valley Community College. At that time, you could do two years at HVCC and transfer all of it to RPI, assuming you kept a decent QPA (which any simian could do at HVCC). This would give you the first two years of RPI ar 1/10th the cost of RPI itself. I'd be surprised if this hasn't changed since then, but it's worth looking into.
Slashdot Mirror
A browser monoculture based on webkit is at least better than a monoculture based on a closed source rendering engine...
Just how bad it is, really comes down to who controls it and how much input other people have into it.
Of course without intervention pretty much everything will end up heading towards a monoculture... Linux for instance has pretty much killed the varied proprietary unixes that existed just as x86 has killed the risc processors they ran on.
So if a monoculture is inevitable, then minimising the damage by keeping it open is the best you can hope for.
Last I checked, the various flavors of BSD were alive and well (but I haven't confirmed this with Netcraft, so I may be wrong).
You are the way this model should work - you understand that what you're spending money on is entertainment, not any sort of future investment. If STO shut down tomorrow. the $20 you spent last month wasn't "lost" - it was spent on a month's worth of entertainment, As you mentioned, it can actually be a good entertainment value. When MMO's do shut down, it's a sad day for players who enjoyed the game, but a worse day for those who mistakenly thought of the money they spent on the game as "invested" in their avatar(s).
Yes, building your own is cheaper if your time is worthless.
...and the knowledge you gain about hardware, OS'es, etc, has its own value that offsets the cost of your time.
Got it - thanks for the tip.
Very true. The right solution is to make signing free for homebrew creators, but either...
That brings the cost of game development for the PS3 down to free, and Sony can't sell insanely priced dev kits to development houses.
Bruce, first off, thank you for everything you've done to advance the cause of FLOSS. My question: It's not hard to notice the shift in mass market computing away from the PC and toward the tablet and phone. While at its core Android runs the Linux kernel, it's hard for me to think of it with the same fondness that I have for my favorite FLOSS OS distributions. I can't just load up a new Linux distro on my Acer tablet, or in many cases even an updated version of Android, short of "jailbreaking" it. It's seems clear to me that such hardware is designed with the intent to replicate Apple's success with a vertical hardware/software stack.
Given this (or perhaps not given this, if you disagree with my statements above), what do you think the future of open source will be in the tablet and phone world? Android? Meego? WebOS? Something else? Will it be open source programs in a not-quite-completely open OS like Android?
This was such an awesome post that I clipped and saved it. Thanks.
... My only wish for something like this happening is that the developers dump everything into an open source license and tell the community "good luck" in terms of trying to make something of it. That doesn't help the game company itself, but it at least allows the potential for the game community to continue into the future.
There ought to be at least some sort of value to opening up something like that... even if NCSoft simply tries to do something like a fundraiser to sell off the assets to some foundation in exchange for some reasonable amount of money. Blender was able to raise a bunch of money to turn that into an open source program, couldn't the same be done to a game like this?
Because of the number of IP's licensed for just about any large MMO - the graphics engine, physics, engine, maybe even the IP itself (eg, Star Wars Galaxies), there are usually legal reasons they couldn't open up the game like that. Also, at least for companies with more than one MMO, why would they want to? They'd just be creating a free competitor against any of their other games. Instead, they usually offer incentives to their departing players to transition them to another of their titles.
iOS is a walled garden. Apple is under no obligation to let anyone develop for it. If you're going to embarrass and criticize Apple, they are under no obligation to let you do it on their iPhones and iPads (or Macs either, for that matter).
On the flip side, he make both Apple and the public aware of the exploits he finds. I'd rather Apple get a black eye over this than have the exploits remain out there where someone nefarious can find them and sell them to an eastern European cartel.
Will youtube.com sue real.com next?
BTW IANAL but I think it's legal to download YouTube video because of the Betamax case. I suspect YouTube-MP3.org may have been targeted because a) they purloined their trademark and b) YouTube-MP3.org acts as a third party "distributing" copyrighted works (not merely Betamaxing it for time-shifting) because they act as an intermediary between YouTube and the end user. It's the low-hanging fruit for YouTube -- if they can succeed against YouTube-MP3.org then probably the next target will be a similar site that doesn't mimic their trademark. Then if they succeed with that maybe they'll even try their luck with going after tool vendors (though probably at first one smaller than real.com), thereby overturning Betamax.
Why bother going after anyone else? It costs money to litigate. Google went after these guys for three reasons:
1) They infringed on Youtube's trademark.
2) They're wasting Youtube's bandwidth.
3) Shutting them down gives Google proof they're protecting IP when the **AA's come knocking on the door.
Anyone with half a brain can find an alternate way to scrape the audio substate from a Youtube video.
While I'm not a huge fan of Acer's laptops, I got a 7" Iconia from Best Buy's Black Friday sale, and I love it. It's held up extremely well to the beating my 8 and 4-year-olds have put it through.
Also, they upgraded the OS version from Honeycomb to ICS six months after purchase. Not sure how common that is in the Android tablet world, but I'm getting the impression it's pretty rare for phones, especially here in the US.
I'd buy another Iconia tomorrow. Giving credit where credit is due.
Me too!!!
Odd ... the Firefox version on my Slackware desktop comes up as 12. As far as "datedness" goes, Slackware aims for stability, not bleeding edge, which is why it remains popular as a server distro. Not sure if you were trolling here but the naming version was tongue-in-check - the latest kernel version available at release time was 2.6.37, and since Slackware was at version 13, they named it 13.37 ("leet"). Aw, never mind ...
Acronym Overload Detected. A summary is supposed to summarize but I couldn't tell what this story is about unless I already know.
Notice that the first reference to ASLR in the summary is actually a link to Wikipedia. If you hover over the link, you get the acronym expansion. While not as effective as expanding it in the text, it's nice to have the full Wikipedia article available in case you want to read up on it prior to digging into the article.
Hmmm ... I have the little xbox keyboard attachment for my wired controller. I wonder if I'll be able to use IE with that? No mention of it in TFA.
I want to strangle some of these bean counters.
We don't need another MMO to replicate Skyrim--We just need MULTIPLAYER.
(and by multiplayer, I mean IP to IP connections that don't rely on your fucking servers)
Where's the money in that?
Pat, put up a Kickstarter project to get Slackware a new server already. You'll probably have a rackful of blades by the end of the month.
So how many Slashdotters really just stick with defaults no matter how much they like something else better? Seems like a total non-issue (and a non-complaint) to me.
The problem is that in most distros the default system is installed around the default desktop UI, so just typing
apt-get install xxx-desktop
might get you the desktop, but many apps designed for the new desktop UI only partially work, and some not at all. This is why kubuntu, xubuntu and lubuntu end up with their own install discs, even though (IIRC) they use the same repositories (ie, codebase) as ubuntu.
While it's nice that you're adding new forms of content, how about giving TV it's own section/icon so those of us who don't want to or can't stream can safely ignore it?
Ditto - skipped AC2, Diablo 3, Starcraft 2, and now Sim City because of the always on requirement. I bought all of their predecessors. Nothing would make Diablo 3 suck more than spending pounding on a boss and then losing the fight because of a hiccup in my wireless. Oh well, back to Skyrim...
There's a debian squeeze port available now right here. The problem is that it was never compiled to do floating point instructions in hardware, so you're going to lose some seroius performance by using it over Fedora.
There are two "stock" Debian ARM distros. The one in stable (the "Arm EABI" port) doesn't support floating point. There's also one in the unstable branch called "armhf" which has support for ARM hardware floaitng point, but only for ARMv7 and up. Raspberry Pi is ARMv6 (notes for armhf platform are here..
Wow - what a throwback - Wasteland FTW!
Even ignoring the lack of evidence for your claim, your statement is truly bizarre. You genuinely believe that an upcoming version of a live distribution that doesn't fit on a CD is why one distro is more popular than another right now?
No he appears to believe that many Ubuntu users are jumping ship to Mint (which is basically a Ubuntu-derived distribution that cleaned up all the stuff Ubuntu has done that its users hate) because Ubuntu stopped listening to its users. As a former Ubuntu and current Mint user, I have to agree.
Could we start a white list of compatible hardware manufacturers or a black list of offending hardware (which ever is easier to maintain) so it would help us users that are planning for our next PC build?
Here you go:
http://www.h-node.com/hardware/catalogue/en
When I was at RPI in the mid-1980's, several RPI professors sat on the board for the local community college - Hudson Valley Community College. At that time, you could do two years at HVCC and transfer all of it to RPI, assuming you kept a decent QPA (which any simian could do at HVCC). This would give you the first two years of RPI ar 1/10th the cost of RPI itself. I'd be surprised if this hasn't changed since then, but it's worth looking into.