It's an English *conversion*, so of course there's going to be a lot of markup. If you're so worried about price you could always buy the Zaurus 5600 for significantly less, or you could wait until Sharp releases an English version in the United States.
Not exactly. Netscape released the source code to its browser *before* the AOL buyout. The big question was if AOL would continue to support the browser (Netscape had a very large number of developers working on the open source version full-time). Luckily, after the buyout, AOL affirmed that it would continue to fund development of Mozilla and would continue to employ full-time Mozilla hackers.
The difference there is that AOL had no real choice in the matter. With WASTE the situation was different. Frankel worked for AOL during the time that the code was developed and presumably worked on it during company time (it would seem so from the way he discussed what he was working on in his.plan - it certainly didn't seem like he was working on winamp). Thus the work was probably the property of AOLTW because of standard contract clauses (as has been theorized in countless previous posts in this thread) and, furthermore, Frankel had no right to release the code himself without the authorization of AOL higher-ups - something he obviously didn't have.
In Masters of Doom John Carmack hinted at reaching a level of realism with the Doom 3 engine that would result in the tapering-off of the advancements in graphics. That is to say, Doom 3 is about as real as he can see games getting. If such is the case (or even if he leaves id to focus more on armadillo aerospace) it'll probably [re]ignite the race to develop the most involving, fun game possible (much like the C64 and early PC days when the graphics were so poor that developers were forced to make games fun - a commercial textadv these days would be laughed off the shelves).
I'm getting really tired of only hearing about Romero just because he's louder. In my mind Tom Hall is a far more admirable figure who cofounded monkeystone and is just as worthy of mention.
While Half-Life was great on it's own, regardless of being a "platform," Valve's STEAM is starting to look quite a lot like a full platform itself, and the screenshots they posted of the V-GUI running in/with Half-Life were quite amazing.
That was worded poorly. RISC is an architecture and it's all in the name - "reduced instruction set computer." Dreamcast uses Windows CE, for example, and maybe it's just me, but it sure as hell doesn't look like Windows 2000 to me. From the developers perspective of CE M$ has done a nice job of making the API fairly consistent, but it is quite limited when compared to that of a standard windows install.
Software uniformity is hardly the greatest of the PC game-maker's concerns as hardware configurations are far more diverse. It would seem, however, that the new ATI and nVidia offerings are bringing graphics closer and closer to photo-realistic quality and hopefully once such a quality is reached and the majority of casual gamers have the necessary hardware the focus of PC games will shift back towards the gameplay, storyline, and complexity that simply cannot be matched by console games.
assuming the above occurs, one must also realize that consoles are killing themselves in some aspects. one of the best aspects of early consoles such as the atari 2600 and nintendo was the ease of use - simply pop in a cart and play, no hardware, software, or OS issues. now take a look at the X-Box and PS2 (gamecube doesn't fit the paradigm but also is not as popular and arguably targeted at a much younger audience over all): they have hard-drives, increasingly complex RISC OSs, and are constructed at least partially of modified PC parts. with new features promised such as patches available over the internet and hardware expansions the consoles are turning themselves into nothing more than mini-PCs, and personally I'd rather spend a few hundred more dollars and buy myself a decent desktop PC.
The BSA is a trade organization much like the MPAA, RIAA, IDSA, and former SPA (which is called something like the SIIA now or something, I've forgotten). They possess no legal power whatsoever, but they are watchdogs and they do cause a lot of trouble for both big-time pirates (they brought down #warez4cable and were involved in the PWA [pirates with attitude] case). The most they can do is threaten you and rat you out to the real authorities.
A word of advice, though. Regardless of being able to produce the original CDs, the FBI will almost certainly not persue anyone who's done less than $5000 USD worth of damage to a company in estimated loss sales (the FBI simply doesn't have the resources) - they DEFINATLY wont go after a small non-profit that lost a few CDs. Irregardless of that, unlike the BSA, the government actually has to produce enough evidence to convince a judge to grant a search warrent. So don't worry, you can safely ignore any messages from the BSA.
You also have to keep in mind that no matter how much money you're willing to put up, the more contraversial your content is, the harder it is to find someone that will provide you with an uplink to the net. In an age when companies are attacking the ISPs directly, the ISPs themselves are begining to take the content of customer servers more seriously. Even Google is being attacked simply because they have indexed pages that scare certain organizations.
We are well past the days of FreeAlways; the net has become to mainstream, commercial, and political to be the true utopia of free information that it was originally intended to be.
Stuff like JunkBuster has been around forever, and many scripts for IE (like Voyager 5000) also have this functionality, the only problem is that sometimes disabling all popups results in preventing you from opening up JavaScript popups that are integral parts of the site.
The obvious flip side is that by using such features to "enhance" your visit, you are at the same time working against the site itself. As everyone knows the market is going to fuck, and people using pop-up disabling features/programs are just making the situation worse (that is, unless you are a porn site, then chances are your rolling in it).
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It's an English *conversion*, so of course there's going to be a lot of markup. If you're so worried about price you could always buy the Zaurus 5600 for significantly less, or you could wait until Sharp releases an English version in the United States.
Not exactly. Netscape released the source code to its browser *before* the AOL buyout. The big question was if AOL would continue to support the browser (Netscape had a very large number of developers working on the open source version full-time). Luckily, after the buyout, AOL affirmed that it would continue to fund development of Mozilla and would continue to employ full-time Mozilla hackers. The difference there is that AOL had no real choice in the matter. With WASTE the situation was different. Frankel worked for AOL during the time that the code was developed and presumably worked on it during company time (it would seem so from the way he discussed what he was working on in his .plan - it certainly didn't seem like he was working on winamp). Thus the work was probably the property of AOLTW because of standard contract clauses (as has been theorized in countless previous posts in this thread) and, furthermore, Frankel had no right to release the code himself without the authorization of AOL higher-ups - something he obviously didn't have.
In Masters of Doom John Carmack hinted at reaching a level of realism with the Doom 3 engine that would result in the tapering-off of the advancements in graphics. That is to say, Doom 3 is about as real as he can see games getting. If such is the case (or even if he leaves id to focus more on armadillo aerospace) it'll probably [re]ignite the race to develop the most involving, fun game possible (much like the C64 and early PC days when the graphics were so poor that developers were forced to make games fun - a commercial textadv these days would be laughed off the shelves).
I'm getting really tired of only hearing about Romero just because he's louder. In my mind Tom Hall is a far more admirable figure who cofounded monkeystone and is just as worthy of mention.
How do you think the human mind works? Most thought is nothing more than countless nerves firing (or not) based upon pre and post synaptic potentials.
Was there any mention about the rumors of Apple picking up Universal?
While Half-Life was great on it's own, regardless of being a "platform," Valve's STEAM is starting to look quite a lot like a full platform itself, and the screenshots they posted of the V-GUI running in/with Half-Life were quite amazing.
"SysV is just too complicated..."
Try Slackware.
That was worded poorly. RISC is an architecture and it's all in the name - "reduced instruction set computer." Dreamcast uses Windows CE, for example, and maybe it's just me, but it sure as hell doesn't look like Windows 2000 to me. From the developers perspective of CE M$ has done a nice job of making the API fairly consistent, but it is quite limited when compared to that of a standard windows install.
Ergo, you missed the point.
Software uniformity is hardly the greatest of the PC game-maker's concerns as hardware configurations are far more diverse. It would seem, however, that the new ATI and nVidia offerings are bringing graphics closer and closer to photo-realistic quality and hopefully once such a quality is reached and the majority of casual gamers have the necessary hardware the focus of PC games will shift back towards the gameplay, storyline, and complexity that simply cannot be matched by console games.
assuming the above occurs, one must also realize that consoles are killing themselves in some aspects. one of the best aspects of early consoles such as the atari 2600 and nintendo was the ease of use - simply pop in a cart and play, no hardware, software, or OS issues. now take a look at the X-Box and PS2 (gamecube doesn't fit the paradigm but also is not as popular and arguably targeted at a much younger audience over all): they have hard-drives, increasingly complex RISC OSs, and are constructed at least partially of modified PC parts. with new features promised such as patches available over the internet and hardware expansions the consoles are turning themselves into nothing more than mini-PCs, and personally I'd rather spend a few hundred more dollars and buy myself a decent desktop PC.
A mailing list usually has a dedicated address which can be whitelisted without having to worry about such extraneous nonsense sneaking through.
The BSA is a trade organization much like the MPAA, RIAA, IDSA, and former SPA (which is called something like the SIIA now or something, I've forgotten). They possess no legal power whatsoever, but they are watchdogs and they do cause a lot of trouble for both big-time pirates (they brought down #warez4cable and were involved in the PWA [pirates with attitude] case). The most they can do is threaten you and rat you out to the real authorities.
A word of advice, though. Regardless of being able to produce the original CDs, the FBI will almost certainly not persue anyone who's done less than $5000 USD worth of damage to a company in estimated loss sales (the FBI simply doesn't have the resources) - they DEFINATLY wont go after a small non-profit that lost a few CDs. Irregardless of that, unlike the BSA, the government actually has to produce enough evidence to convince a judge to grant a search warrent. So don't worry, you can safely ignore any messages from the BSA.
You also have to keep in mind that no matter how much money you're willing to put up, the more contraversial your content is, the harder it is to find someone that will provide you with an uplink to the net. In an age when companies are attacking the ISPs directly, the ISPs themselves are begining to take the content of customer servers more seriously. Even Google is being attacked simply because they have indexed pages that scare certain organizations.
We are well past the days of FreeAlways; the net has become to mainstream, commercial, and political to be the true utopia of free information that it was originally intended to be.
Stuff like JunkBuster has been around forever, and many scripts for IE (like Voyager 5000) also have this functionality, the only problem is that sometimes disabling all popups results in preventing you from opening up JavaScript popups that are integral parts of the site. The obvious flip side is that by using such features to "enhance" your visit, you are at the same time working against the site itself. As everyone knows the market is going to fuck, and people using pop-up disabling features/programs are just making the situation worse (that is, unless you are a porn site, then chances are your rolling in it).