This is supposed to be the one of the greatest advantages of open source; if you don't like the way people play, you can pick up the pieces and start your own game.
You're right, but it's also, in my opinion, one of open source's problems and it's kinda frustrating. Excessive versioning and forking dilute projects; the flip side of rich diversity is a lack of critical mass to any one application. As an end-user I don't want to have to do a ton of research to figure out which sub-version of which fork of which application is best. I just want it to work. I don't want to have to deal with two different versions of my IM client. I don't want religious wars over trivial GUI features. I get that choice is good, really I do. But too many choices (especially when forks are made for trivial reasons like this) can be paralyzing and counter productive for both developers and users.
Look at the excessive forking of Linux here. Nerds see this as a good thing. Users see it as confusing and just want to give up. And yes, this problem is not unique to open source. Microsoft made the same mistake with the eight bajillion versions of Vista.
This is the parent poster, responding.... A few points 1) You're damned if you do, damned if you don't If someone was to literally just update the graphics, you'd get called out for not being inventive, being derivative, cashing in, etc. I thought the point was we need to focus on creativity and not simply re-hashing old games with better graphics. You can't have it both ways 2) Updating these games is pretty far from a sure thing. Can you get the license? How big a cut will the holder of the IP want? Really, how many people would by a re-made version of a game released last decade?
If it's such a sure thing, why don't you do it? Maybe you're right and you'll actually be allowed to do it, be able to do it and make a boat load of cash in the process. I wish you luck; my experience tells me you'd need it.
>More gold, coal, natural gas, nickle, iron, etc. etc. than has ever been mined in the history of mankind.
There's coal in space? I thought coal came from dead plants and dinosaurs. Even if there was coal just floating around, would we really want to bring it back here and burn it? Don't we have enought air pollution?
Additionally, I remember being taught in grade school that if there were 100% pure gold bricks just lying on the surface of the moon for the taking, it still wouldn't be fiscally worth it to go there and bring them back. It's just too expensive. Or so I was told.:)
A question about copyright law..... I've asked this before, but I've yet to get a decent answer. How can the RIAA know that a person is (illegally?) sharing a file? I can fire up Kazzaa and share any file named "Britney Spears - Lucky.mp3", but that doesn't mean that it's actually a copyrighted Britney song. Even if the file is the right size, it still could be a stub. It's just a file named a certian way. As far as I know, the only way they could actually determine the contents of the file is to download it, which would be illegal for them to do. IANAL, but I doubt that the RIAA has any special rights/legal exemptions that would let them download copyrighted material. Can the RIAA legally download copyrighted material? Do they have or need explicit permission to do so from the copyright holder? If they are illegally downloading these files to prove that they're being illegally shared, how can they sue? The "evidence" would be illegally collected. If they aren't actually verifying that the shared files are copyrighted material, then those being sued could just say "Well, that file wasn't actually what its name would suggest." Any thoughts?
Yes, you might be able to write a program to do a checksum or whatever on a file to verify that it contains copywrited material, but as far as I can tell the RIAA has no way of doing this legally. The RIAA is not a law enforcement agency and has no special rights or privlages. For the purposes of this arguemnt let's just agree that downloading copyrighted material is illegal. How is the RIAA going to listen/verify that a file contains copyrighted material without downloading it and listening to it (or running a program like you suggest.) If they download a file to see if it's being illegally shared, then they are breaking the very law they're trying to enforce. I've made this analogy before and I'll use it again because it works: it would be similar to a cop snorting some suspicious white powder to see if it's cocaine. Just because the cop's intentions might be ok, that doesn't make it legal. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. As far as I know, only law enforcement agencies can legally download copywrited materials to confirm they are indeed being illegally shared.
Of course, maybe it is legal if the artisit/copywrite holder gives the RIAA permission to download material for psuedo-law enforcemnet purposes, but maybe it's not. I'm no lawyer. Does anyone here know?
They did and still do. If I remember correctly, it's not owned by Nintnedo, but more like sponsered. Anyway it's called Digipen From the little familiarity I have with both of these programs they seem rather similar....
I second this. I get my money's worth from Emusic and then some. You just can't beat it for $9.99 a month. They have catalogs from many, many music labels, very fast servers, and a simple, fast, well organized site. Their catalog covers a very large spectrum of music, but is deeper in some areas than others. I'm mostly into punk and they have a zillion differnt bands, many I hadn't heard of before. They also seem to have a lot of jazz, classical, and electronica if that's your poison. When you download a record from some band you like their will suggest many other similar bands in their catalog that you might want to check out. I've found a ton of new bands that I like this way. If you're looking for boy bands or whatever from top 40 radio you won't find it there, but if you're looking for new, often less popular music, I think it's a great value. Additionally, they pay the bands (or at least their labels?) each time a song is downloaded, so there's no guilt.:o)
And no, I don't work for emusic; I'm just a very satisfied customer.
So you drank some jungle-juice with grain alcohol to excess and blacked out and now you think it's good for the gorvernment to legislate away your problem? Wouldn't it be better if you took responsibility for your own mistake? You decided to drink something that would get you drunk. It wasn't the grain alchol manufacture's decision or fault. If you don't think drinking certian grain alcohols is a good idea, then don't drink them. Let the rest of us be. Wouldn't it be better to let people make their own decisions about what they choose to put in their body?
As someone who experienced a very "wet" campus environment, and later returned to see the trend towards moderation, I can tell you moderation is better.
Would you care to explain by what criteria is moderation better? Is it some subjective descion you've made such as "Sobriety is better than drunkeness." or "Drunkeness is unhealthy and being unhealthy is bad." The point of trying to make is that it's unethical to force (through legislation) your subjective values on others. This is symptomatic of a larger problem in this country: given the choice between freedom and safety, many (most?) people choose safety. As George Carlin said "People are always willing to trade away a little bit of their personal liberty for the feeling, the illusion of safety." Wouldn't it more ethical to allow people to choose what they want? In my opinion it would be better to live 50 years free, than 100 safe years.
Sure, you shouldn't smoke if you value your life, but shouldn't you have the right to kill yourself with cigarettes if you want? You shouldn't drink to excess if you value your health and want to accomplish other things, but if you do want to stew your brain in grain alcohol, shouldn't you be allowed to?
Of course one can argue "We should legislate liquor sales because people drink and drive and cause car crashes, and therefore are harming innocent parties." True, that does happen, and I don't think any rational person would argue in favor of allowing drunks to drive. However, legislating away grain alcohol is unethical because your denying everybody something based on the grounds that it may potentially be used in a negative way. That's just ridiculous. That would be like outlawing cars because they might be used in a bank robbery or outlawing strong encryption because some people might use to transmit kiddie-porn. Instead, wouldn't it be better to punish the crime itself instead of denying everyone of something that has the potential to be used in a crime?
For the record, I'm not from Virginia, I haven't drank grain alcohol in eight or more years, and I'm well past the age of 21.:)
You PC simply will not play XBox games. The XBox runs its own OS (based on very stripped down version Win2k, but it's not backwards compatible with any other OS) Your PC will play ports of XBox games if and when developers decide to port games; just like your PC will play ports of Playstation games and Nintendo games.
Additionally, MS does not need to sell 32 games per unit. On average, Sony & Nintendo (and MS will pressumably will follow suit) get about US$10 per game in licensing profit for each copy of a game sold. If we assume that MS is loosing about US$100 per XBox sold, they only need to sell 10 games per unit. BUT, that's still not the whole picture. MS will make additional profit on each DVD controller and periphiral it sells. Additionally, as the technology ages its cost of manufacturing goes down faster than the price of the console; so in two years an XBox may cost US$200 to buy, but it may only cost only US$100 to manufacture; eventually hardware manufactures can make money just selling the console and won't need to worry about the number of games sold per unit. Unless the XBox is a total washout, MS is not likely to take a bath on this.
I took a UNIX administration class from Evi while getting my BS in CS at the University of Colorado, Boulder and the class was strongly biased towards HP-UX, which is what all of the undergraduate labs ran. No Solaris, no IRIX, no Linux, no *BSD, no nothing except HP-UX. As far as I know Evi is still teaching there and the labs she runs are still HP-UX only.
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You're right, but it's also, in my opinion, one of open source's problems and it's kinda frustrating. Excessive versioning and forking dilute projects; the flip side of rich diversity is a lack of critical mass to any one application. As an end-user I don't want to have to do a ton of research to figure out which sub-version of which fork of which application is best. I just want it to work. I don't want to have to deal with two different versions of my IM client. I don't want religious wars over trivial GUI features. I get that choice is good, really I do. But too many choices (especially when forks are made for trivial reasons like this) can be paralyzing and counter productive for both developers and users.
Look at the excessive forking of Linux here. Nerds see this as a good thing. Users see it as confusing and just want to give up. And yes, this problem is not unique to open source. Microsoft made the same mistake with the eight bajillion versions of Vista.
This is the parent poster, responding....
A few points
1) You're damned if you do, damned if you don't
If someone was to literally just update the graphics, you'd get called out for not being inventive, being derivative, cashing in, etc. I thought the point was we need to focus on creativity and not simply re-hashing old games with better graphics. You can't have it both ways
2) Updating these games is pretty far from a sure thing. Can you get the license? How big a cut will the holder of the IP want? Really, how many people would by a re-made version of a game released last decade?
If it's such a sure thing, why don't you do it? Maybe you're right and you'll actually be allowed to do it, be able to do it and make a boat load of cash in the process. I wish you luck; my experience tells me you'd need it.
>More gold, coal, natural gas, nickle, iron, etc. etc. than has ever been mined in the history of mankind.
There's coal in space? I thought coal came from dead plants and dinosaurs. Even if there was coal just floating around, would we really want to bring it back here and burn it? Don't we have enought air pollution?
Additionally, I remember being taught in grade school that if there were 100% pure gold bricks just lying on the surface of the moon for the taking, it still wouldn't be fiscally worth it to go there and bring them back. It's just too expensive. Or so I was told.:)
A question about copyright law.....
I've asked this before, but I've yet to get a decent answer. How can the RIAA know that a person is (illegally?) sharing a file? I can fire up Kazzaa and share any file named "Britney Spears - Lucky.mp3", but that doesn't mean that it's actually a copyrighted Britney song. Even if the file is the right size, it still could be a stub. It's just a file named a certian way. As far as I know, the only way they could actually determine the contents of the file is to download it, which would be illegal for them to do. IANAL, but I doubt that the RIAA has any special rights/legal exemptions that would let them download copyrighted material. Can the RIAA legally download copyrighted material? Do they have or need explicit permission to do so from the copyright holder? If they are illegally downloading these files to prove that they're being illegally shared, how can they sue? The "evidence" would be illegally collected. If they aren't actually verifying that the shared files are copyrighted material, then those being sued could just say "Well, that file wasn't actually what its name would suggest." Any thoughts?
Yes, you might be able to write a program to do a checksum or whatever on a file to verify that it contains copywrited material, but as far as I can tell the RIAA has no way of doing this legally. The RIAA is not a law enforcement agency and has no special rights or privlages. For the purposes of this arguemnt let's just agree that downloading copyrighted material is illegal. How is the RIAA going to listen/verify that a file contains copyrighted material without downloading it and listening to it (or running a program like you suggest.) If they download a file to see if it's being illegally shared, then they are breaking the very law they're trying to enforce. I've made this analogy before and I'll use it again because it works: it would be similar to a cop snorting some suspicious white powder to see if it's cocaine. Just because the cop's intentions might be ok, that doesn't make it legal. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. As far as I know, only law enforcement agencies can legally download copywrited materials to confirm they are indeed being illegally shared.
Of course, maybe it is legal if the artisit/copywrite holder gives the RIAA permission to download material for psuedo-law enforcemnet purposes, but maybe it's not. I'm no lawyer. Does anyone here know?
They did and still do. If I remember correctly, it's not owned by Nintnedo, but more like sponsered. Anyway it's called Digipen From the little familiarity I have with both of these programs they seem rather similar....
I second this. I get my money's worth from Emusic and then some. You just can't beat it for $9.99 a month. They have catalogs from many, many music labels, very fast servers, and a simple, fast, well organized site. Their catalog covers a very large spectrum of music, but is deeper in some areas than others. I'm mostly into punk and they have a zillion differnt bands, many I hadn't heard of before. They also seem to have a lot of jazz, classical, and electronica if that's your poison. When you download a record from some band you like their will suggest many other similar bands in their catalog that you might want to check out. I've found a ton of new bands that I like this way. If you're looking for boy bands or whatever from top 40 radio you won't find it there, but if you're looking for new, often less popular music, I think it's a great value. Additionally, they pay the bands (or at least their labels?) each time a song is downloaded, so there's no guilt. :o)
And no, I don't work for emusic; I'm just a very satisfied customer.
I've been thinking of getting this procedure done as well, but haven't looked into too much. What's a typical cost range for having this done?
As someone who experienced a very "wet" campus environment, and later returned to see the trend towards moderation, I can tell you moderation is better.
Would you care to explain by what criteria is moderation better? Is it some subjective descion you've made such as "Sobriety is better than drunkeness." or "Drunkeness is unhealthy and being unhealthy is bad." The point of trying to make is that it's unethical to force (through legislation) your subjective values on others. This is symptomatic of a larger problem in this country: given the choice between freedom and safety, many (most?) people choose safety. As George Carlin said "People are always willing to trade away a little bit of their personal liberty for the feeling, the illusion of safety." Wouldn't it more ethical to allow people to choose what they want? In my opinion it would be better to live 50 years free, than 100 safe years.
Sure, you shouldn't smoke if you value your life, but shouldn't you have the right to kill yourself with cigarettes if you want? You shouldn't drink to excess if you value your health and want to accomplish other things, but if you do want to stew your brain in grain alcohol, shouldn't you be allowed to?
Of course one can argue "We should legislate liquor sales because people drink and drive and cause car crashes, and therefore are harming innocent parties." True, that does happen, and I don't think any rational person would argue in favor of allowing drunks to drive. However, legislating away grain alcohol is unethical because your denying everybody something based on the grounds that it may potentially be used in a negative way. That's just ridiculous. That would be like outlawing cars because they might be used in a bank robbery or outlawing strong encryption because some people might use to transmit kiddie-porn. Instead, wouldn't it be better to punish the crime itself instead of denying everyone of something that has the potential to be used in a crime?
For the record, I'm not from Virginia, I haven't drank grain alcohol in eight or more years, and I'm well past the age of 21. :)
No. No. No.
You PC simply will not play XBox games. The XBox runs its own OS (based on very stripped down version Win2k, but it's not backwards compatible with any other OS) Your PC will play ports of XBox games if and when developers decide to port games; just like your PC will play ports of Playstation games and Nintendo games.
Additionally, MS does not need to sell 32 games per unit. On average, Sony & Nintendo (and MS will pressumably will follow suit) get about US$10 per game in licensing profit for each copy of a game sold. If we assume that MS is loosing about US$100 per XBox sold, they only need to sell 10 games per unit. BUT, that's still not the whole picture. MS will make additional profit on each DVD controller and periphiral it sells. Additionally, as the technology ages its cost of manufacturing goes down faster than the price of the console; so in two years an XBox may cost US$200 to buy, but it may only cost only US$100 to manufacture; eventually hardware manufactures can make money just selling the console and won't need to worry about the number of games sold per unit. Unless the XBox is a total washout, MS is not likely to take a bath on this.
I took a UNIX administration class from Evi while getting my BS in CS at the University of Colorado, Boulder and the class was strongly biased towards HP-UX, which is what all of the undergraduate labs ran. No Solaris, no IRIX, no Linux, no *BSD, no nothing except HP-UX. As far as I know Evi is still teaching there and the labs she runs are still HP-UX only.