If you spend some time in the Northwest, try to make it to Spokane, WA in the spring. There are some amazing waterfalls going through the middle of the town, and they are at their best when the mountain snow is melting.
The town also has some fairly good architecture, and, like most of the Northwest, excellent beer.
On a small aside, this can also be handy as hell when your a computer store looking at a perfectly good server box that the admin (and I use the term lightly) has forgotten the password to. Rather than reinstall the entire box, pull the.sam file off of the hdd and run good ole L0pht... bang! 15 seconds later (if of course the dictionary attack works) and you have the password.
You don't really need to crack the password. There is a boot tool that overwrites the SAM with whatever password you want.
There is a difference - a boss might feel comfortable knowing that you can reset a password if the Admin quits, but might not like the idea that you have some sort of hacking tool that lets you decipher the password, since many bosses use the same passwords for everything from NT logins to online banking.
My understanding is that registration isn't required in order for your work to be copyrighted, and hasn't been required since at least 1976. Everything I read on this give some line about how registering a copyright makes your court case easier if you have so sue someone over infringement, but I wonder how many published works are registered.
According to Brad Templeton, the law is "almost everything created privately and originally after April 1, 1989 is copyrighted and protected whether it has a notice or not."
I know a few people who have talked about "poor man's registration". You take a copy of your work, put it in an envelope, and mail it to yourself. The post office stamp is an official timestamp, which can prove when you came up with the work. If there is ever a dispute, they can open it in the courtroom. If independant creators used methods like this, rather than going through the copyright registration process, then it would probably explain the poster's unexplained drop-off at around 1981.
This is a prescient interview. The market for gaming would explode if game publishers consciously took the time to embed learning scenarios into games.
... The same way that educational T.V. took off because Congress forced the television stations to show a certain amount of educational programming...
I agree, games that teach things can be more fun and more memorable. Some of the most enjoyable games I've ever played had a large learning curve.
However, the brainless will always sell better than the mentally difficult. Quake sold better than Hexen, because ID insists that if a gameplay element slows things down, it gets kicked to the curve.
I tried to find out how much I (as an overseas customer) actually have to pay to get $3 worth of BitPass credits, but even after the
15th click through their pages and "FAQ" I couldn't find out. Do
they accomodate for all charges, or do I end up with 15 EUR deducted
from my VISA card, including charges, currency conversion fees, for
3 dollars of cyber currency?
When in England, I used my U.S. Visa pretty regularly. I had to fill out an expense report, and each transaction was pretty close to the international exchange rate on that day. There may be a few pennies/pence/whatever difference, but you'll get a better rate off the credit card companies than the f!#%ing money changers in the airport.
So, the answer isn't at the BitPass site. Paypal has some answers:
http://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=p/gen/app roved_countries-outside
But the real answer is with the credit card provider, and if they are one of the big boys (Visa, Mastercard, NOT Discover), then you'll probably get the exchange rate, and the merchant will eat any conversion fee from his portion of your three dollars.
This frequency was fixed long ago by the FCC specifically for this use. Not much else transmits at 2450MHz for obvious reasons...
...except:
Many cordless phones
Many consumer wireless devices
Many 802.11x wireless network cards
I don't think microwaves (or the spectrum) should be regulated, but it is annoying that the network goes down when my wife puts in some popcorn. I know, you should always use actual wires for mission critical stuff (like playing MP3s at a party).
But, getting back on topic, most annoying to me, what hasn't been justified is the notion that artists/copyright holders should be compelled to have their works disseminated for free and without control without their consent. The EFF's proposals specifically encourage the use of compulsory licencing in order to grow the P2P sphere. This proposal assumes a number of things, notably that P2P is inherently good and worth encouraging (I'd argue it's neutral, and actually that for the most part it's been designed as a work-around), and, interestingly, that P2P doesn't offer advantages to copyright holders (if it did, the EFF wouldn't be proposing the bypassing of their consent, it wouldn't be an issue.)
Imagine the best legal P2P application. Here's a quick rundown of my imagined service:
I have a legal, electronically compressed copy of every song I own. I can access it from any networked computer (main home computer, laptop, work computer, friends house).
There is a legal number of copies that I can have at any time, and that number is at least three. I can check out a copy for my laptop, so that I can legally play music on a plane ride without having to use the air phone to call back to some DRM server. Perhaps there is a tradeoff - two perfect digital copies, five compressed copies, 100 low-res compressed copies, or some combination.
I can share my legal electronic copies, in whatever manner I choose - I can stream low-quality copies over an internet radio, "lend" a perfect copy to a friend, share a copy over the Internet - and the software keeps track of who has the copy, how many I have left, and lets me revoke the traveling copies.
Each electronic copy has all the information I'd want - the basic stuff like track name, artist, and album, but also album art, lyrics, the artist's website, some ranking of how many other people like the song, what else I might like, etc.
I can buy an album, one song, or the artist's whole catalog - as much or as little as I want. I can also buy it where I want, from competing salesmen.
Some of that is technologically feasible. Some is hard. Some requires the copyright holder to give up some rights (presentation format, number of digital copies), but it can be argued that the artist gets something in return (knowledge of exactly how many copies there are, who is using them, how they are being used, free advertising, etc.).
It's also completely illegal. If I created such a service, the RIAA is under no compulsion to allow it, and can insist that we pretend that we are still talking about vinyl and radio, that albums have to be bought in stores, that sharing has to mirror lending an album.
They won't even come to the table, talk numbers or compromises, because they don't have to. The law is on their side - laws that were made when the primary concern was illegal publishers selling copies of books, not people lending books to each other.
But the people make the laws. And, in this case, the law is written for the benefit of the public. In addition, there isn't much alteration that is necessary - just rule that the owners have to set a reasonable price for electronic copies of their work. That if someone invents a scheme that works, they have to name a price.
The EFF isn't trying to make copying MP3s free and legal. They don;t want a world where one person buys the album, and everyone else copies it as fast as they can. They are trying to make legal electronicly-encoded music a reality, on legal par with other forms of music, and expand the rights of consumers to copy and share that music. Compulsory licensing is one way to do that, to force the record labels to start thing how rather than just call the lawyers.
I wish Amazon would let me correlate delivery addresses with birthdays with cash limits with wish lists, and submit orders automatically whenever everything aligned, so I could completely automate gift-remembering.
Send me your login info, and a list, and I'll send them an Amazon gift certificate at the appropriate time. I'll also do it for a reasonable fee - and make sure it gets paid every month.
This is a system designed to give you a false sense of security. It bothers and harasses people so much that they feel safe when they get on the plane (if the plane doesn't leave before they get through the bullshit). It will not stop the next hijacking at all- although it strongly discourages discretionary air travel, and is rapidly destroying the airline industry.
Homer: Not a bear in sight. The Bear Patrol must be working like a charm.
Lisa: That's specious reasoning, Dad.
Homer: Thank you, dear.
Lisa: By your logic I could claim that this rock keeps tigers away.
Homer: Oh, how does it work?
Lisa: It doesn't work.
Homer: Uh-huh.
Lisa: It's just a stupid rock.
Homer: Uh-huh.
Lisa: But I don't see any tigers around, do you?
[Homer thinks of this, then pulls out some money]
Homer: Lisa, I want to buy your rock.
[Lisa refuses at first, then takes the exchange]
BTW, I disagree with you - I think the airlines were pushing for just the right amount of annoyance, to make people think "Boy! They really are looking for those terrorists!", so that the idiots would start flying again. I read once that on most flights, only the last few passengers are profit - the rest pay for fuel, salaries, cost of the plane, etc. So, if only a few passengers per flight decide to risk driving instead, the airline become unprofitable.
When people get used to the current level of security, and stop worrying as much about terrorists, they'll back off security little by little to save money. I hope.
I imagine a minority of copyright holders will utilize the service if the law goes into effect.
This brings up a problem - most government agencies that charge fees do so to save the taxpayers the cost of government services, or only charge those who use the service. One dollar is not going to cover many of the costs of processing forms, maintaining a database, and paying someone to answer the phone.
I have no problem with taxpayer money going to support something like this, but the industry lobbyists will mention it to lawmakers as a reason to not pass the bill, and it may be hard to argue why it's so important for works from 50 years ago to pass into the public domain. It can be argued, but I doubt I'll see Lessig on CSPAN any time soon.
While this is a reasonable solution to the problems of creeping copyrights, maybe the fee should be something more substantial ($100? $1000?), so that there is a chance that fees will pay for the service.
How many lines of code in the Linux kernel are a direct copyright violation?
It's very extensive. It is many different sections of code ranging from five to 10 to 15 lines of code in multiple places that are of issue, up to large blocks of code that have been inappropriately copied into Linux in violation of our source-code licensing contract. That's in the kernel itself, so it is significant. It is not a line or two here or there. It was quite a surprise for us.
It sounds like they did a diff between their code and the kernel, and didn't really pay any attention if the affected sections were covered by their patent or not. For all we know, many of the matching lines are the GNU copyright statement.
I guess this is what happens when Linux gets good enough to be installed on the desktops of lawyers and managers. Why did we ever insist on world domination?
Nothing, depending on how the matrix is implemented. In the movie, the Matrix simulation is supposed to be a prison with body/minds physically chained to it, and so it's obviously "wrong", but it doesn't have to be.
Oh, come on. Imagine Everquest 3000, 24/7, fully free except for a small, constant donation to Sony Power and Light? You know some people would jump on that service.
Face it, the Matrix is nothing but a human-created MMORG, in the extreme future. Probably Neo and the rest are still in the game, even when they are "out" of the Matrix. They just bought premium accounts. Red Dwarf has already covered all of this.
Double Dipping - A poster getting +5 mods for a post AND a reply to his own post. Usually due to self-correction, addition of extra information, or clueless moderation to the parent post. Interestingly, it appears to happen more often to sincere posters than trolls.
You talk and talk about spreading Linux, getting Linux into the enterprise and the workplace and on Grandma's box. But one day, some CEO or some lawyer is gonna install it, learn how to use grep, and start saying, "Hey! They stole our code!!!". Then, they'll find diff, and start saying, "Wait a second! Whole portions of the Red Hat Kernel are identical to the SCO kernel! The whole net heirarchy! Get me my litigation pen, there's some suing ta do!"
People, Linux is By Hackers, For Hackers. Don't let them get their grubby little hands on it!
If you remember where Trinity types in her password to crack the power system, Z1ON0101, the binary 0101 translates to 5. Is Trinity aware of this being the 5th incarnation through the fact that she too is just a computer program or is this just odd coincidence?
There are lots of instances of 101 - It shows up as room numbers, floor numbers. Well, maybe only five instances.
This concept isn't particularily new. It's easy to write a script that will check a partiular piece of the system by running some sort of diagnostic command (e.g. netstat), parse the output, and make sure everything looks normal. If something doesn't look normal, just stop the process and restart, or whatever you need to do to get some service back up an running, or secured, or whatever is needed to make the system normal again.
"Undo" feature? That's what backups are for.
Perhaps you missed the point. Any person who has been administering computers for 10 years should be able to write that script and perform those backups and get it right in about a month or so.
Or, you could make automatic recovery and undo features part of the operating system. It's not easy, but it only has to be done once, and it would just do the Right Thing.
Linux is a better Unix than we had 30 years ago, but we really need a new generation of operating systems, where the shotgun at least has a safety. I wonder if it can be done within the Linux framework, or whether we are talking about a whole new operating system
I strongly believe that self-replicating nanotechnology is beyond our mortal grasp, and without self-replicating nanomachines, most of the other really big nano-dangers ( and many of the nanodreams ) become nigh on impossible.
You sound a bit like the politian in some low budget zombie movie...
For Instance, take any sort of nanomachine that affects a human body. Nanomachines are very small and very hard to make. Our body is made of many, many cells. To kill, or change, or even repair a signifigant number of those cells, you need an obscene number of nanomachines. Without self-replicating nanos, you're going to be using alot more resources to make the nanos than it will take to achieve the same ends through other means.
This is exactly how the human body heals itself already. When there is damage, cells self-produce to create scar tissue. When there is a foreign invader, cells create an immune response, which often includes replication of invader-specific units (antibodies). Human life starts from a one-celled organism, and grows from there. Someone who has taken biology more recently may correct me on the details, but we already have a model for small-scale self-replication. It may not be the "make an exact copy of myself" form, but we know it's possible, and extremely successful.
Nanobots for medicine may take a similar form to natural defenses, with targeted robots creating copies out of raw materials in the blood stream. You might have to have an initial injection, then take supplimental pills for the raw materials the bots need. Ideally, when the pills run out, the robots die off.
I think we're decades from nanoscale self-replication, but with the biological examples, I'm not willing to say it's impossible.
Yeah, but Duke Nuken Forever will have advanced AI features, that you train by playing the single player game. When you want to play multiplayer, you just upload your trained AI to the opponent's machine, and it runs locally on his computer! 0 ping!
The height of practicality. Jerami Campbell writes "I just saw your article in Slashdot 'Building a stained glass computer case?' I have made several stained glass computer cases, I thought you might be interested in checking them out. You can see all of my cases at lucentrigs.com. I will have a new one finished in a couple of days. It is black glass with a red lava lamp mounted in the front."
Anyone else disappointed that the Lava Lamp case uses 40-Watt lamps? I was kinda hoping there was a overclocked AMD processor at the bottom of that thing...
The user doesn't get to pick which computer they can listen to their music on (Macs only). Forget any device that isn't an iPod, like my current MP3 player (tiny, no cables, rechargeable battery - nice). Don't even think about burning a disc full of 100 MP3s to play in your DVD player. (Have you noticed virtually all new DVD players will play MP3 files?)
He carefully avoid talking about burning an audio CD from Apple's format. However, it seems his basic premise is correct - you can't go from Apple's format to MP3s that will play on MP3-supporting device. You are limited to 70 minutes rather than 650 MB.
I've actually used this feature - it was cheap and easy to create a 5-hour playlist, burn the MP3s to CD, and stick that CD into my DVD player. Result - a good mix of music, I could enjoy my party without obsessing over the playlist, and I didn't need to buy any extra cables/equipment to get my digital music to my DVD's sound system.
Of course, over the next six months I bought the equipment needed to directly play MP3s on the DVD sound system, but that's another story.
Yes, a perfect WineX will not convince developers to start developing for Linux. But, it if is cheaply or freely availible, they may be convinced to load up a workstation with WineX, and make sure Linux+WineX can run the game through development. Game developers are programmers, and programmers in general like the free software movement - if you can ensure your program runs on Linux with little effort on your part, why not?
So, WineX might become the standard for cross-platfrom gaming. Not that developers will make games specifically for WineX, but they may adopt the rule of thumb: if WineX supports it, then it's a good feature, and if WineX doesn't support it, then maybe there's something wrong with it. Since WineX should be able to support any well-documented feature of the Windows or DirectX API, WineX might be a good standard to determine if a feature is well-documented and straight-forward - if it isn't, there may be some hidden features that Microsoft isn't talking about, which may go away with future versions.
Here's an example - there are some games that I have that play decently under Windows 95, but appear broken under Windows XP. Others work as well under XP as they do under 95. My guess is that the "broken" games used some advanced feature that Microsoft abandoned with later versions of Windows/DirectX. A emulation suite like WineX may have indicated that these features weren't fully fleshed out, and steered the programmers away from them.
So, if a subset of the API becomes "easy" to simulate, programmers may be encouraged to only use that subset. Hell, they may even get addicted to the WineX environment, which may give them some debugging capabilities they didn't already have. When Microsoft offers new features, programmers may refuse to use them until they've passed the WineX test - they are well-documented and stable enough to be reliably emulated.
Would they ever make the leap to native Linux games? Probably not. But by restricting themselves to a subset of the API that is easy to emulate, the WineX API becomes a de facto cross-platform standard. Eventually, it may be possible to optimize away many of the inefficencies of an emulator, and the Win-native games may run just as fast on Linux.
This little scenario may be nice, but it's not realistic. The best we can hope for is getting 90% there, and hoping the industry meets us halfway. My best computer runs Windows, because I need the horsepower for games. Until I can play those games on Linux, I'm booting XP on the main box and Linux on the older boxen. A perfect WineX may allow users like me to finally see what Linux can do with modern hardware.
Slashdot Mirror
The town also has some fairly good architecture, and, like most of the Northwest, excellent beer.
You don't really need to crack the password. There is a boot tool that overwrites the SAM with whatever password you want.
There is a difference - a boss might feel comfortable knowing that you can reset a password if the Admin quits, but might not like the idea that you have some sort of hacking tool that lets you decipher the password, since many bosses use the same passwords for everything from NT logins to online banking.
According to Brad Templeton, the law is "almost everything created privately and originally after April 1, 1989 is copyrighted and protected whether it has a notice or not."
I know a few people who have talked about "poor man's registration". You take a copy of your work, put it in an envelope, and mail it to yourself. The post office stamp is an official timestamp, which can prove when you came up with the work. If there is ever a dispute, they can open it in the courtroom. If independant creators used methods like this, rather than going through the copyright registration process, then it would probably explain the poster's unexplained drop-off at around 1981.
I agree, games that teach things can be more fun and more memorable. Some of the most enjoyable games I've ever played had a large learning curve.
However, the brainless will always sell better than the mentally difficult. Quake sold better than Hexen, because ID insists that if a gameplay element slows things down, it gets kicked to the curve.
When in England, I used my U.S. Visa pretty regularly. I had to fill out an expense report, and each transaction was pretty close to the international exchange rate on that day. There may be a few pennies/pence/whatever difference, but you'll get a better rate off the credit card companies than the f!#%ing money changers in the airport.
So, the answer isn't at the BitPass site. Paypal has some answers: http://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=p/gen/app roved_countries-outside
But the real answer is with the credit card provider, and if they are one of the big boys (Visa, Mastercard, NOT Discover), then you'll probably get the exchange rate, and the merchant will eat any conversion fee from his portion of your three dollars.
Many cordless phones
Many consumer wireless devices
Many 802.11x wireless network cards
I don't think microwaves (or the spectrum) should be regulated, but it is annoying that the network goes down when my wife puts in some popcorn. I know, you should always use actual wires for mission critical stuff (like playing MP3s at a party).
Imagine the best legal P2P application. Here's a quick rundown of my imagined service:
I have a legal, electronically compressed copy of every song I own. I can access it from any networked computer (main home computer, laptop, work computer, friends house).
There is a legal number of copies that I can have at any time, and that number is at least three. I can check out a copy for my laptop, so that I can legally play music on a plane ride without having to use the air phone to call back to some DRM server. Perhaps there is a tradeoff - two perfect digital copies, five compressed copies, 100 low-res compressed copies, or some combination.
I can share my legal electronic copies, in whatever manner I choose - I can stream low-quality copies over an internet radio, "lend" a perfect copy to a friend, share a copy over the Internet - and the software keeps track of who has the copy, how many I have left, and lets me revoke the traveling copies.
Each electronic copy has all the information I'd want - the basic stuff like track name, artist, and album, but also album art, lyrics, the artist's website, some ranking of how many other people like the song, what else I might like, etc.
I can buy an album, one song, or the artist's whole catalog - as much or as little as I want. I can also buy it where I want, from competing salesmen.
Some of that is technologically feasible. Some is hard. Some requires the copyright holder to give up some rights (presentation format, number of digital copies), but it can be argued that the artist gets something in return (knowledge of exactly how many copies there are, who is using them, how they are being used, free advertising, etc.).
It's also completely illegal. If I created such a service, the RIAA is under no compulsion to allow it, and can insist that we pretend that we are still talking about vinyl and radio, that albums have to be bought in stores, that sharing has to mirror lending an album.
They won't even come to the table, talk numbers or compromises, because they don't have to. The law is on their side - laws that were made when the primary concern was illegal publishers selling copies of books, not people lending books to each other.
But the people make the laws. And, in this case, the law is written for the benefit of the public. In addition, there isn't much alteration that is necessary - just rule that the owners have to set a reasonable price for electronic copies of their work. That if someone invents a scheme that works, they have to name a price.
The EFF isn't trying to make copying MP3s free and legal. They don;t want a world where one person buys the album, and everyone else copies it as fast as they can. They are trying to make legal electronicly-encoded music a reality, on legal par with other forms of music, and expand the rights of consumers to copy and share that music. Compulsory licensing is one way to do that, to force the record labels to start thing how rather than just call the lawyers.
Send me your login info, and a list, and I'll send them an Amazon gift certificate at the appropriate time. I'll also do it for a reasonable fee - and make sure it gets paid every month.
Nail it to a picture frame, with the caption "If you are going to be an early adopter, occasionally you are going to throw away your money".
From here
BTW, I disagree with you - I think the airlines were pushing for just the right amount of annoyance, to make people think "Boy! They really are looking for those terrorists!", so that the idiots would start flying again. I read once that on most flights, only the last few passengers are profit - the rest pay for fuel, salaries, cost of the plane, etc. So, if only a few passengers per flight decide to risk driving instead, the airline become unprofitable.When people get used to the current level of security, and stop worrying as much about terrorists, they'll back off security little by little to save money. I hope.
I have no problem with taxpayer money going to support something like this, but the industry lobbyists will mention it to lawmakers as a reason to not pass the bill, and it may be hard to argue why it's so important for works from 50 years ago to pass into the public domain. It can be argued, but I doubt I'll see Lessig on CSPAN any time soon.
While this is a reasonable solution to the problems of creeping copyrights, maybe the fee should be something more substantial ($100? $1000?), so that there is a chance that fees will pay for the service.
It's very extensive. It is many different sections of code ranging from five to 10 to 15 lines of code in multiple places that are of issue, up to large blocks of code that have been inappropriately copied into Linux in violation of our source-code licensing contract. That's in the kernel itself, so it is significant. It is not a line or two here or there. It was quite a surprise for us.
It sounds like they did a diff between their code and the kernel, and didn't really pay any attention if the affected sections were covered by their patent or not. For all we know, many of the matching lines are the GNU copyright statement.
I guess this is what happens when Linux gets good enough to be installed on the desktops of lawyers and managers. Why did we ever insist on world domination?
Nothing, depending on how the matrix is implemented. In the movie, the Matrix simulation is supposed to be a prison with body/minds physically chained to it, and so it's obviously "wrong", but it doesn't have to be.
Oh, come on. Imagine Everquest 3000, 24/7, fully free except for a small, constant donation to Sony Power and Light? You know some people would jump on that service.
Face it, the Matrix is nothing but a human-created MMORG, in the extreme future. Probably Neo and the rest are still in the game, even when they are "out" of the Matrix. They just bought premium accounts. Red Dwarf has already covered all of this.
Double Dipping - A poster getting +5 mods for a post AND a reply to his own post. Usually due to self-correction, addition of extra information, or clueless moderation to the parent post. Interestingly, it appears to happen more often to sincere posters than trolls.
People, Linux is By Hackers, For Hackers. Don't let them get their grubby little hands on it!
There are lots of instances of 101 - It shows up as room numbers, floor numbers. Well, maybe only five instances.
Bet that would make things get sorted out pretty quickly.
Well, Senator David Nelson, from Oregon, is on the list. That's one.
"Undo" feature? That's what backups are for.
Perhaps you missed the point. Any person who has been administering computers for 10 years should be able to write that script and perform those backups and get it right in about a month or so.
Or, you could make automatic recovery and undo features part of the operating system. It's not easy, but it only has to be done once, and it would just do the Right Thing.
Linux is a better Unix than we had 30 years ago, but we really need a new generation of operating systems, where the shotgun at least has a safety. I wonder if it can be done within the Linux framework, or whether we are talking about a whole new operating system
Here is the list.
Isn't it strange how much legalese it takes to say "Turn around, drop your pants, and bend over"?
You sound a bit like the politian in some low budget zombie movie...
For Instance, take any sort of nanomachine that affects a human body. Nanomachines are very small and very hard to make. Our body is made of many, many cells. To kill, or change, or even repair a signifigant number of those cells, you need an obscene number of nanomachines. Without self-replicating nanos, you're going to be using alot more resources to make the nanos than it will take to achieve the same ends through other means.
This is exactly how the human body heals itself already. When there is damage, cells self-produce to create scar tissue. When there is a foreign invader, cells create an immune response, which often includes replication of invader-specific units (antibodies). Human life starts from a one-celled organism, and grows from there. Someone who has taken biology more recently may correct me on the details, but we already have a model for small-scale self-replication. It may not be the "make an exact copy of myself" form, but we know it's possible, and extremely successful.
Nanobots for medicine may take a similar form to natural defenses, with targeted robots creating copies out of raw materials in the blood stream. You might have to have an initial injection, then take supplimental pills for the raw materials the bots need. Ideally, when the pills run out, the robots die off.
I think we're decades from nanoscale self-replication, but with the biological examples, I'm not willing to say it's impossible.
Yeah, but Duke Nuken Forever will have advanced AI features, that you train by playing the single player game. When you want to play multiplayer, you just upload your trained AI to the opponent's machine, and it runs locally on his computer! 0 ping!
Anyone else disappointed that the Lava Lamp case uses 40-Watt lamps? I was kinda hoping there was a overclocked AMD processor at the bottom of that thing...
The user doesn't get to pick which computer they can listen to their music on (Macs only). Forget any device that isn't an iPod, like my current MP3 player (tiny, no cables, rechargeable battery - nice). Don't even think about burning a disc full of 100 MP3s to play in your DVD player. (Have you noticed virtually all new DVD players will play MP3 files?)
He carefully avoid talking about burning an audio CD from Apple's format. However, it seems his basic premise is correct - you can't go from Apple's format to MP3s that will play on MP3-supporting device. You are limited to 70 minutes rather than 650 MB.
I've actually used this feature - it was cheap and easy to create a 5-hour playlist, burn the MP3s to CD, and stick that CD into my DVD player. Result - a good mix of music, I could enjoy my party without obsessing over the playlist, and I didn't need to buy any extra cables/equipment to get my digital music to my DVD's sound system.
Of course, over the next six months I bought the equipment needed to directly play MP3s on the DVD sound system, but that's another story.
So, WineX might become the standard for cross-platfrom gaming. Not that developers will make games specifically for WineX, but they may adopt the rule of thumb: if WineX supports it, then it's a good feature, and if WineX doesn't support it, then maybe there's something wrong with it. Since WineX should be able to support any well-documented feature of the Windows or DirectX API, WineX might be a good standard to determine if a feature is well-documented and straight-forward - if it isn't, there may be some hidden features that Microsoft isn't talking about, which may go away with future versions.
Here's an example - there are some games that I have that play decently under Windows 95, but appear broken under Windows XP. Others work as well under XP as they do under 95. My guess is that the "broken" games used some advanced feature that Microsoft abandoned with later versions of Windows/DirectX. A emulation suite like WineX may have indicated that these features weren't fully fleshed out, and steered the programmers away from them.
So, if a subset of the API becomes "easy" to simulate, programmers may be encouraged to only use that subset. Hell, they may even get addicted to the WineX environment, which may give them some debugging capabilities they didn't already have. When Microsoft offers new features, programmers may refuse to use them until they've passed the WineX test - they are well-documented and stable enough to be reliably emulated.
Would they ever make the leap to native Linux games? Probably not. But by restricting themselves to a subset of the API that is easy to emulate, the WineX API becomes a de facto cross-platform standard. Eventually, it may be possible to optimize away many of the inefficencies of an emulator, and the Win-native games may run just as fast on Linux.
This little scenario may be nice, but it's not realistic. The best we can hope for is getting 90% there, and hoping the industry meets us halfway. My best computer runs Windows, because I need the horsepower for games. Until I can play those games on Linux, I'm booting XP on the main box and Linux on the older boxen. A perfect WineX may allow users like me to finally see what Linux can do with modern hardware.