In point of fact, all of them are being shared except for the Milli Vanilli tracks. Consider the continued popularity of Phil Collins, Madonna, and Janet Jackson. Paula Abdul got a new lease on life thanks to American Idol, and her music is being rediscovered by kids who only know her from that. I'll lay you odds that if you fire up a Gnutella client, you'll find that every one of those songs is being shared by a couple of dozen users.
ST:TNG has a pegasus, and an episode named after it
SG1/Atlantis has an entire pegasus galaxy
Therefore BSG had to have a pegasus!
Uh, hello? The original BSG had a Battlestar Pegasus, and its Admiral Kane was played by Lloyd Bridges (thus providing karmic balance: Katee Sackoff > Dirk Benedict, but Lloyd Bridges >> a PMSed Ensign Ro). Therefore, TNG and Stargate ripped off BSG. This is something that only a slight amount of research could have informed you of.
Those who don't research their history are doomed to end up looking like a fool on/..
Uh, because I have one computer, don't have the space to devote to a second box, and I don't feel like buying and configuring a router. So a software firewall is the best option for me. At least I'm smart enough to not use MS's built-in.
Hell, I work in food science. If it hits the floor, it gets inedibled, period. Of course, the floors in your average slaughterhouse...no, wait, I've seen the kitches of some of my friends. The floors in a slaughterhouse are downright clean compared to some of them. Why do I suddenly feel the need to pull out a mop and bucket?
Sorry, wrong. Took me less than a day to download a copy of UT2K4 from BT (and less than a day for the equally-as-large Far Cry as well). All depends how many people are seeding and leeching, and with a game as highly wanted as UT2K4, there were a LOT of people doing it. BT's become a primary end-user distribution channel for games due to its speed.
I think you may have misunderstood me. I didn't really mean MPlayer specifically, but rather any media player other than WMP.
But you geared the entire discussion around the question of why people running Windows don't use MPlayer, a question which I answered (namely because the makers of MPlayer don't provide Windows binaries). As I said, I don't use WMP. I can't stand it. It's a resource hog, and there's nothing that can play on it that BSPlayer or ZoomPlayer can't handle. I pimped BSPlayer because it's free as in beer and works like a charm.
That's the general problem with Windows. It's not just WMP, but the IE/NS-duel and MSO/OO.o are just yet other examples. Since MS controls the base OS all by themselves (ie. there's no specification for Windows such as eg. POSIX is for UNIX/Linux), of course their applications are better integrated with the rest of the system, since MS can actually integrate the system with the applications instead of the other way around, as all other vendors have to do. Thus, of course people use their programs.
Agreed. However, for a lot of people, it's a situation of using the right tool for the right job. For a lot of people, the right tool is Word or IE or even WMP, since they are feature-rich programs that provide a good deal of power in an easy-to-use package (and in the case of IE and WMP, don't require any additional work on the part of the user...if it's patched and updated, of course). But the word is getting out there that there are alternatives. I know that I've been turning people away from WMP for a while now.
As for your "choice" to use Windows, I'd like to re-run the old quotation (I don't know it natively in English, though...) "I'd kill you for your choice, but I'd die for your right to choose it". Go ahead and use Windows - that doesn't mean that anyone shouldn't be free to try and convince you otherwise.
Don't worry, that's just my sig line. The reason I came up with it is that I'm sick of being evangelized to over here. Yes, I know the benefits of FOSS, but I choose to use Windows because I'm satisfied with it and it does what I want and need (*coughGamescough*). We're not all sheep, brainwashed, or stupid because we run Windows.
Oh, and the quote I think you're trying to paraphrase is "I may not agree with what you say, but I defend to the death your right to say it." And it wasn't by a native English speaker, unless you know something about Voltaire that I don't.
While the US is a federation of states, its citizens largely see themselves (in front of the rest of the world) as being US in identity - whatever state they come from is less important.
On the other hand, the EU is also a federation of states (in a slightly weaker way), but its citizens see themselves distinctly as having national identities and would represent themselves by their nationality rather than being of the EU.
Agreed. However, this attitude of US National Identity didn't become prevalent until after the Civil War. Before that, Americans did tend to think of themselves as belonging more to a particular state than the nation as a whole. Just examine the structure of the military on both sides in the Civil War and you can see that in microcosm.
In other words, it took an armed conflict to get Americans to start thinking of themselves as Americans. And this was a country that was in existence for a little over eighty years at the time. Now consider the fact that many of Europe's nation states have national identities that date back more than a thousand years in their current form (France, for instance) and you can see how the problem of subsuming national identites is going to be enormous. It's even worse in Europe considering the fact that those national identities tended to be formed out of soverign regions that developed their own sort of national identity and that there are numerous divisions on the ethnic/regional level.
Look at the Flemish and Walloons in Belgium, for example. Look at Wales, which has been under English control (some say "occupation") since the 13th Century yet still retains a strong national identity. Cornwall's been in the same boat since the 9th Century, yet there are still people there who think of themselves as Cornish first and members of the UK second. You can bring up the Catalan view in Spain if you'd like.
The viewpoint of "citizenship" wasn't as established in the US as in Europe, but it still took something as catastrophic as a war to change it. What will it take in Europe?
Of course, noone uses MPlayer (on Windows, that is) since Windows Media Player comes with Windows. Why would they take the time to switch, after all, especially when they're not even made aware of MPlayer's existance?
Taking a look at MPlayer's page which you kindly linked to, I'd say there's another big reason why no one who uses Windows uses MPlayer: I didn't see any pre-compiled Windows binaries available for download, just source and a Red Hat RPM. Maybe more people would download and run MPlayer if a pre-compiled binary was available for Windows. Yes, I'm certain that there are websites around that provide pre-compiled Windows binaries for MPlayer, but when there's nothing on the official site, along with a nice big message saying that they don't endorse any of those, there isn't much encouragement to want to switch.
I'm a Windows user, and I never use WMP. The free-as-in-beer BSPlayer along with a good codec pack solves my video needs nicely (except for Real, where any substitute doesn't work well, and QuickTime, which is perfectly fine with Apple's player). After hearing all of the posts here about the fact that MPlayer's the cat's ass, I'd love to try it, but I don't feel like trying to compile it.
Make it available, and people will download it and use it given a little bit of info. It's not like WMP is beloved by Windows users. Provide an alternative, and people will use it.
>>I would think that the P2P and widespread broadband would facilitate the spread of "warez" more than an organized group. Wasnt much of their work focused on repackaging software by "ripping" the music and movies to make it smaller and easier to transport?
Some groups do that, like Class. Most of the higher visibility groups like Deviance and Fairlight (which has been around forever; I remember them doing C64 warez and demos) concentrate on the full thing, CD images with cracks included on the disk (if necessary). It was the widespread adoption of broadband that caused the decrease in demand for rips. A few years ago, rips and add-ons were a lot easier to find than full CDs. Now it's difficult to find the rip/add-on format and dead easy to find the full CD versions of programs. The end-user-level distro of rips/add-ons seems to be confined to Usenet, while eDonkey and BitTorrent is chock-full of full CDs.
>>The moment Linux becomes a game platform that is as supported as Windows, console sales will plunge.
Yet another prediction that will never come to fruition. Many important things will have to change in order for there to be that level of support. I won't even get into the chicken/egg paradox of "no one's doing games for Linux because they won't sell, but no one's buying games for Linux because they're not available". Let's just say that there were Linux games available. What hurdles have to be overcome?
1) Native DirectX support in Linux. No WINE, no emulation, no anything. Native execution of DirectX code. If you want the game to play as it was written, that has to be there. It's doable, but it'll make Samba look like a walk in the park. And the FOSS community isn't willing to put in that level of effort, especially considering that DirectX is a moving target and keeping up with it will be as difficult as getting the work done in the first place.
2) Video driver support. ATi won't do it anymore, and the level of complaining that goes on concerning NVidia's binary-only drivers must turn them off from trying to cooperate with the FOSS community. Too many people take the attitude of "If we let NVidia get away with it...", draw a line in the political sand, and don't realize how much that cripples gaming on Linux, which even the zealots admit is a key to making headway in the desktop war.
3) A change in attitude among Linux developers. There are too many programmers out there who believe that the only suitable environment for a computer is an office and the only suitable tasks for a computer are office or network-oriented. The "if you want to game electronically, get a console" attitude is infectious and plays to the native elitism of Linux in general.
4) The "you can always dual boot" attitude. This hooks into #3. Every time someone says that, it's a telling sign that they don't want Linux to be a general-purpose operating system, thus condemning it to a niche.
So, in other words, it could happen, but unless some major changes take place in the community, it won't.
Only on the server level. The Internet, though, encompasses more than servers. It's an interaction between servers, routers, and desktops (not to mention the lines of transmission between them). Linux does not dominate in routers, and sure as hell doesn't dominate in desktops.
"The Internet is the carrier for open source."
Irrelevant, really. If the world was still dominated by BBSes, open source would still spread, and, in fact, did during that time (anyone still remember the term "freeware"?).
"The Internet is also the platform through which open source is developed."
And the chaos that is part and parcel of the Internet (the same chaos that allows the Internet to actually function) tends to cripple FOSS projects due to the "too many cooks" principle. The most successful FOSS projects have always kept their core creators as a limited, contained group.
"It's simply going to be more secure than proprietary software."
Spouting the party line. No, it's not going to be more secure first thing out of the box, so to speak. It'll be more secure because of the perpetual code audits by many eyes. Not really "simple" per se.
"Open source benefits from anti-American sentiments."
Good for the rest of the world. Bad for the fact that the US has a very large concentration of tech pros who might become alienated by this attitude and stop contributing.
"Incentives around open source include the respect of one's peers."
-1, Overrated. Just another reiteration of the "scratch an itch" principle. And as someone else said, this has a tendency to devolve into mutual pats on the back and development of cliques, which is not a productive way of operating.
"Open source means standing on the shoulders of giants."
Which "giants"? IBM, whose support for Linux has been mostly self-serving and a way to escape the massive proprietary mentality that's crippled them in the past? HP/Compaq, Dell, and other companies who won't release a Linux desktop machine without begging, pleading, and sellings of first-born children to become Carly's and Mike's bondspeople? Or is it software giants like Microsoft (tee hee) or Adobe (Photoshop on Linux may never exist)? The only "giant" he can be speaking of is the progenitor of the project that became Mozilla, and, gee, who was partially responsible for that?
"Servers have always been expensive and proprietary, but Linux runs on Intel."
Implying that servers don't run on Intel. Guess that I must have been imagining Itanic boxes or (to extend it into the immediately family) Opteron boxes, which are outselling the proprietary Sun and Unix servers these days. Maybe he's talking about the commoditization of servers that x86/Itanic has allowed, in which case, there are solutions other than Linux from names more trusted in the server area. Or is Solaris x86 a figment of Marc's imagination?
"Embedded devices are making greater use of open source."
But are still a niche market. Revisit this argument in another ten years.
"There are an increasing number of companies developing software that aren't software companies."
As someone said, virtually any large corporation has an IT staff working on in-house solutions for their own particular needs. How many of these programs get released to the community? Virtually none, because there's no use. And if you take another tack to his argument, namely that there are software contributions out there from non-software companies, is anyone going to trust them?
"Companies are increasingly supporting Linux."
In the areas where Linux has made inroads, namely commodity servers. People in IT can't see this because of their concentration on servers, but the real war is yet to be fought, namely on the desktops, and that one will be a decade-long slog at the very least.
"It's free."
Again, someone else brought up TCO, and right now, the up-front costs
If they did this as a round table, I would have been sad to have missed it. You just know that at some point in the discussion, Raskin and Hertzfeld would have gotten into a fistfight over who the real father of the Mac was. "Two geeks enter, one geek leaves..."
Only newbies/lamers use P2P, IRC or Usenet. Granted, they are the most widely used methods of 'distribution' to end users, but most real warez groups only want the respect from their peers, not from the leecher masses. They couldn't care less what happens outside their small circle. There are plenty of parasites who work below them to get the stuff to all the (semi-)public distribution channels, but they usually have little to do with the crackers and the initial distributors.
And that's how it's worked since the BBS days, when I knew some members of groups in the C64 scene (I go far back enough in this particular area that I remember when there was still resistance to the term "warez", which some people thought was too "cute"; it's one of the few term in "l33tspeak" that has gained widespread acceptance. I still feel uncomfortable about using the term).
What I was talking about in re IRC, Usenet, and P2P was distribution to end users. The post I was responding to was saying that warez groups were responsible for directing traffic to the dregs of the software piracy world known as warez sites. I brought up the fact that the end downloaders most likely to use those sites discover very quickly that they aren't the place to get anything useful, and turn to places that were more certain and less likely to bombard you with porn ads and useless redirects to Top Lists. We both know how the groups themselves operate, and they're so far disconnected from those bottom-feeders that it's disingenuous to blame them for those sites, and it's equally disingenuous to blame the end downloaders as well, since it's pretty much only the unaware who get caught using them.
...it's the old "what if I stood on one side of the border, and shot someone on the other side" argument. If he was exclusively working inside Australia, uploading to noone but Australians it'd be a non-issue, no matter if the IP holders lived in the US. Say you were counterfeiting Scotch whiskey in the US. The crime would be in the US, no matter how Scottish the victims would be or not, it'd never end up in a Scottish court.
Well, it might end up in a Scottish court if someone was importing it (legal or otherwise) into Scotland and there was a violation of trademark taking place. But that's the only case I can think of.
I don't think Scotland has anything like the German beer laws that you can hang a person like this on (and counterfeiting Scotch is, in my mind, a hanging offense). However, there could be some "truth in labeling" laws coming into play here. I work in the meat industry here in the US, and we have a number of rather Byzantine truth-in-labeling laws regarding meat products. For instance, if something has a country name or state name in the name of the product, you have to append "Made in USA" or "Made in $NAMEOFSTATE" to the product name. The only exceptions are Italian sausage and Polish sausage (and perhaps Westphalian ham). The equivalent here would be something like "Glen Sheepfucker, Scotch Whiskey, Made In Kentucky".
As someone who's done label auditing for approval for use, I tend to get a bit obsessed about things like that. Sorry.
Here's a few boosts to get your clue train back on track:
1) I haven't seen anything in any Drink or Die.nfo file that advertised a warez website. In fact, I never see anything in any distro group's packaging that advertises a warez website. The only time you ever see ads like that in a distro package is when the ads are FROM the website you're downloading from.
2) Anyone with more than a week's experience in software piracy knows not to go to a warez website to get anything. Noobs will try it at first, get sick of the porn ads, redirects, dirty tricks, etc., and then gravitate to where the real distribution takes places: IRC, Usenet, or P2P, including your beloved BitTorrent. Or do you think that BT is used to only distribute Linux distros?
3) Their major crime, in your mind, is "stealing bandwidth". Their "theft of bandwidth" is nothing compared to the theft of bandwidth occurring due to spyware, and that's nothing compared to the same regarding the recent spate of trojans and worms that we've all been suffering with.
4) It's not the pirates' fault that you didn't secure or monitor your FTP. That's your fault. Take some responsibility.
There are lots of arguments to be made against software piracy, but yours isn't among them.
>>"Yeah, I know I was planning on driving to Chicago tomorrow, but I thought there'd be no problem installing a new head gasket twenty minutes before I planned to leave... How was I supposed to know this was not a good idea?" Oh for Christ's sake.
The last time I drove to Chicago (for Christmas to visit my family), I needed to have my head gasket replaced beforehand. It took them a day longer than they said it would, I was able to get my car just before COB on Christmas Eve, and barely made it after an eight-hour drive. Thanks for the unpleasant memories.
Oh, by the way, here's the breakdown of blood in the current Royal Family, just in case you thought my assertion was a little provocative:
Queen Elizabeth is half-British (Scottish, specifically), 7/16ths German, and 1/16th Danish. This comes from the fact that King Edward VII was totally German (as were his parents Queen Victoria and Prince Albert). He married Queen Alexandra, who was half-Danish, half-German. Their three-quarters German/one-quarter Danish son George V married Queen Mary, who was completely German. That made George VI seven-eights German, one-eighth Danish. Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon was completely Scottish, and therefore not crap. And so we have their daughter Lillibet as she stands above.
Brenda married the half-Danish, half-German Prince Philip. This makes Prince Charles one-quarter British, 15/32nds German, and 9/32nds Danish. Lady Diana Spencer was 100% Brit, thereby making HRH Prince William of Wales 5/8ths British, 15/64ths German, and 9/64ths Danish.
Actually, William the Bastard was a Viking with family origins in the Norwegian-ruled Orkneys. William's great-great-great-great-grandfather was Ragnald, first earl of Orkney, and William was a direct male descendant of Ragnald through Ragnald's son Rolf, first Duke of Normandy. They ended up marrying into the families of the Capetian dynasty of France and into the family of Aquitaine as well, but they weren't really French, any more so than the British royal family is truly British (I think it'll be only when Wills gets the throne that someone with a majority of UK blood will be reigning, for the first time since Queen Anne; the Windsors are primarily German with injections of Danish royal blood courtesy of Queen Alexandra and Prince Philip).
The Normans were regarded even in their day as Vikings with a veneer of French civilization. They were regarded as the equivalent of 17th and 18th Century Russians, who, due to their rather unsanitary personal habits, were regarded by courts in Europe to be "baptized bears".
So, in the final wash, it was Yet Another Viking Invasion Of England, albeit this one more successful than the others because the family stuck around for a while (until Richard III, in fact).
But OpenOffice won't ever be 100% compatible with MS Office. Your better off waiting for the Second Coming. In the end shouldn't we be rooting for Open Office since its truly free? I mean that is our goal right? Quality Free software for everyone. The only way that's going to happen is if someone big like IBM adopts and pimps OpenOffice. With someone that big real change can happen and migrating to OpenOffice stops looking like a hopeless cause in the business world.
You're absolutely right. We should be rooting for OpenOfiice. However, we don't live in an ideal world. When I have HR people wanting me to e-mail my resume in Word format (I've never been asked to send it in any other), I want to be sure that the HR person can open it without losing formatting, etc. And I don't work in a tech industry, so these people don't know what an.rtf is to save their lives. I'd probably scare the crap out of them if I sent it in.pdf. They're office drones, which means, these days, that they're most likely to end up being Office drones.
In order to compete on price and performance bases in business, OpenOffice or any suite that IBM comes up with will have to have the ability to write an Office document with as much or greater a level of accuracy as Office does now.
If you start off wanting ever feature of MS Office you'll end up with MS Office. No free software is going to ever be able to match MS Office perfectly feature for feature. Does that mean you just give up and keeping laying down for Microsoft?
Is IBM stabbing us the in back? No. Are you wrong to say stick with MS Office until a perfect feature for feature equivalent arrives? Big Yes.
I never said anything about wanting feature-for-feature. All I said was that the one thing needed was the ability to write a document that won't be munged by Office. God knows I don't want every single feature that Office has. Office is a huge piece of bloat that I only use when necessary. It sure isn't my text editor of choice. I'm one of those 80/20 types and I create my documents with other 80/20 types in mind. I even try to avoid using macros unless it's absolutely necessary.
We don't need feature-for-feature from an office suite. What we do need, in order to gain headway against Office, is the most common features (which OpenOffice is close to achieving) and compatibility on the write level with Office documents. Then you have a weapon to sell to PHBs: "It does everything we do with Office now, it's free, and it can write an Office format document so we won't lose compatibility."
Oh, how many posts are now being composed in how many minds that state that IBM has now betrayed the FOSS Movement by not acknowledging the greatness of OpenOffice? How dare they!?
Come on, people, calm down. If IBM is doing this, they're acknowledging what everyone without ideological blinders admits: until OpenOffice can write a file that's 100% compatible with its Office equivalent, it won't make any headway. MS is too entrenched at this point. I can hear those same people as above screaming about Linux, but it's also a different battleground being fought in the office suite theater than in the desktop OS one. It's a hearts, minds, and heads battle rather than an economic one (which is the only argument that has been proven effective on non-tech types when it comes to converting systems to Linux). We've all heard the stories about the intransigent secretaries. That's where the fight will take place, and it's going to be a much harder battle that needs a much more polished product.
I'm hoping that IBM realizes that it owns Lotus and uses that particular brand for this effort. It still has some cachet in corporate circles.
Ultima IX, "on time"? No, definitely not. It had at least three release date delays that I know of (and was being hyped in the game magazines for two years minimum prior to its release). It's an example of another plague in the game industry: the Blue-Balled Publisher combined with Don't Worry, We'll Just Patch Syndrome.
Origin worked on Ultima IX for five and a half years prior to its release. Albeit they were doing it half-heartedly because most of their resources were devoted to maintaining and improving UO, but it was still five and a half years of work. EA finally lost it, as you said, and they said "ship or else". Everyone at Origin got demoralized by the demands, and they put together enough of the game to ship, knowing that the game was barely playable.
The game had three patches in total. The first patch corrected the bug where one accidental misstep in an area that had to be traversed as part of the main quest would destroy your chances of finishing the game (not just a "quest-killer", a "game-killer"), and that was out within two weeks of release. Before the release of the third patch, people at Origin said in public, "This is it. We're giving up on this. After this patch is out, we're dropping this thing like a hot potato. If you want to play it, good luck." If not for EA's demands destroying morale (which led to Garriott taking the gas pipe), they might have continued until they got to the point where most of the bugs were, if not fixed, at least contained to the point where the game could be enjoyed.
After the third patch, the game was barely playable, enough so that I was able to finish it. The only reason I did was because I'd actually bought the damn thing (on sale) and didn't want to waste my money. I could have completed it in half the time if the game didn't move at single-digit frames on pretty high-level hardware for the time. I think that with today's hardware, you can barely get 20 FPS out of it. This was probably the least satisfying gaming experience I've ever had.
As for Blizzard, I will NEVER forgive them for putting spyware into the initial release of Starcraft. I expect malware to start sending the entire contents of my address book and other personal information back home. I do not expect a AAA title from a respected publisher to do that. It doesn't matter that they released a patch to end that; they were forced to do that under threat of a class-action suit that was filed against them. Against my better judgment, I bought Diablo II and its expansion, but I almost never play it.
Blizzard's slow side into irrelevance is entertaining to watch. WoW will sell due to the name, but after that? How is any type of Diablo-style game going to look now that Chris Taylor has bitch-slapped them with Dungeon Siege, which is what Diablo II should have been? That game must be a burr under the saddle of the game-loving crunchies out there, being better than their precious Blizzard offering AND being released under MS's aegis.
(By the way, anyone else notice that MS actually gives their developers time to get stuff right? There's no push to get Halo 2 out, for instance, and Gas-Powered took over a year to get the expansion to DS out. The only really bad element I've noted in an MS game recently (ignore Mechwarrior IV, please) is the suck-ass career mode in Links 2003, which the guys at Access/MS didn't want to fix because they were concentrating on Links 2004 for X-Box. Could MS actually be a...cough, gasp...model game publisher in their relationships with their dev houses, whether internal or external?)
And why focus on companies that delay and delay when there are companies out there that can produce AAA titles on time (or with minimal delay)? Shouldn't we support them? That's why Bioware gets my money every time. Ray and the boys ship on time and ship quality every time. Same with Firaxis, but they've got the ultimate old-school god at the top guiding them, and Sid's personality dominates that company. Personally, I can't wait until later this year to see what he does updating Pirates (which I fell in love with on the Amiga).
We consumers have to put our money behind the right people. If you have qualms about a company, don't pony up for their games, period.
Already games have appeared for linux such as ut2k3 and Neverwinter Nights. More and more people see Linux as a viable platform for games (e.g. Doom 3).
So when are two of my favorites, Halo and Links, going to come out for Linux?* I'll switch when that occurs, thank you. So far, I'm not impressed with Linux's gaming ability.
* - For those of you who are clueless crunchies, please note the dripping sarcasm embodied in the fact of who publishes those two games (chosen on purpose for that reason).
IBM's commercials are the biggest bunch of pretentious, pseudo-intellectual crap that I've seen since...well, any post from any holier-than-thou Slashbot crunchie. It's not going to help Linux; it's going to either confuse the audience or turn them off of using it.
If Linux is all about choice, why do people here complain when I choose not to use it?
>>Exactly right. Lilo and Stitch won big because it was an officially-sanctioned "skunk works" type project, designed to not go through the committees and focus groups. It was the vision of its creators, and it was wonderful and made money. (The sequel was another matter...sigh.) I guess Disney didn't learn diddly squat from it.
There was no lesson to be learned. Once it hit the theaters, it became Disney "product" and thus underwent the same treatment as virtually every other Disney movie since The Little Mermaid: movie, then direct-to-video sequel, then TV series. Aladdin blazed the trail, The Lion King paved the road, and others have followed, with the Pocahontas series premiering later this year (I fully expect it to join a Brother Bear series in a Native American Hour block). Lilo and Stitch, though, took the most cynical path of all: the sequel was not only a badly-done set-up for the TV series, but demanded that the series follow a very specific formula, which has made the series pretty dire.
Yeah, sometimes they change the order around and/or leave out steps (The Little Mermaid in the first case, Hercules in the latter), but that's not the issue. The point is that artistic creativity doesn't matter when Disney knows they can make money for themselves and their cable networks by following set steps to maximize the revenue from each and every project. They treat animation as commodity, not art. So why are we surprised at the decision to close the 2D studios?
Slashdot Mirror
In point of fact, all of them are being shared except for the Milli Vanilli tracks. Consider the continued popularity of Phil Collins, Madonna, and Janet Jackson. Paula Abdul got a new lease on life thanks to American Idol, and her music is being rediscovered by kids who only know her from that. I'll lay you odds that if you fire up a Gnutella client, you'll find that every one of those songs is being shared by a couple of dozen users.
So don't be facetious, child.
ST:TNG has a pegasus, and an episode named after it
SG1/Atlantis has an entire pegasus galaxy
Therefore BSG had to have a pegasus!
Uh, hello? The original BSG had a Battlestar Pegasus, and its Admiral Kane was played by Lloyd Bridges (thus providing karmic balance: Katee Sackoff > Dirk Benedict, but Lloyd Bridges >> a PMSed Ensign Ro). Therefore, TNG and Stargate ripped off BSG. This is something that only a slight amount of research could have informed you of.
Those who don't research their history are doomed to end up looking like a fool on /..
Uh, because I have one computer, don't have the space to devote to a second box, and I don't feel like buying and configuring a router. So a software firewall is the best option for me. At least I'm smart enough to not use MS's built-in.
Hell, I work in food science. If it hits the floor, it gets inedibled, period. Of course, the floors in your average slaughterhouse...no, wait, I've seen the kitches of some of my friends. The floors in a slaughterhouse are downright clean compared to some of them. Why do I suddenly feel the need to pull out a mop and bucket?
Sorry, wrong. Took me less than a day to download a copy of UT2K4 from BT (and less than a day for the equally-as-large Far Cry as well). All depends how many people are seeding and leeching, and with a game as highly wanted as UT2K4, there were a LOT of people doing it. BT's become a primary end-user distribution channel for games due to its speed.
Your two cents are therefore worth nothing.
But you geared the entire discussion around the question of why people running Windows don't use MPlayer, a question which I answered (namely because the makers of MPlayer don't provide Windows binaries). As I said, I don't use WMP. I can't stand it. It's a resource hog, and there's nothing that can play on it that BSPlayer or ZoomPlayer can't handle. I pimped BSPlayer because it's free as in beer and works like a charm.
That's the general problem with Windows. It's not just WMP, but the IE/NS-duel and MSO/OO.o are just yet other examples. Since MS controls the base OS all by themselves (ie. there's no specification for Windows such as eg. POSIX is for UNIX/Linux), of course their applications are better integrated with the rest of the system, since MS can actually integrate the system with the applications instead of the other way around, as all other vendors have to do. Thus, of course people use their programs.
Agreed. However, for a lot of people, it's a situation of using the right tool for the right job. For a lot of people, the right tool is Word or IE or even WMP, since they are feature-rich programs that provide a good deal of power in an easy-to-use package (and in the case of IE and WMP, don't require any additional work on the part of the user...if it's patched and updated, of course). But the word is getting out there that there are alternatives. I know that I've been turning people away from WMP for a while now.
As for your "choice" to use Windows, I'd like to re-run the old quotation (I don't know it natively in English, though...) "I'd kill you for your choice, but I'd die for your right to choose it". Go ahead and use Windows - that doesn't mean that anyone shouldn't be free to try and convince you otherwise.
Don't worry, that's just my sig line. The reason I came up with it is that I'm sick of being evangelized to over here. Yes, I know the benefits of FOSS, but I choose to use Windows because I'm satisfied with it and it does what I want and need (*coughGamescough*). We're not all sheep, brainwashed, or stupid because we run Windows.
Oh, and the quote I think you're trying to paraphrase is "I may not agree with what you say, but I defend to the death your right to say it." And it wasn't by a native English speaker, unless you know something about Voltaire that I don't.
Agreed. However, this attitude of US National Identity didn't become prevalent until after the Civil War. Before that, Americans did tend to think of themselves as belonging more to a particular state than the nation as a whole. Just examine the structure of the military on both sides in the Civil War and you can see that in microcosm.
In other words, it took an armed conflict to get Americans to start thinking of themselves as Americans. And this was a country that was in existence for a little over eighty years at the time. Now consider the fact that many of Europe's nation states have national identities that date back more than a thousand years in their current form (France, for instance) and you can see how the problem of subsuming national identites is going to be enormous. It's even worse in Europe considering the fact that those national identities tended to be formed out of soverign regions that developed their own sort of national identity and that there are numerous divisions on the ethnic/regional level.
Look at the Flemish and Walloons in Belgium, for example. Look at Wales, which has been under English control (some say "occupation") since the 13th Century yet still retains a strong national identity. Cornwall's been in the same boat since the 9th Century, yet there are still people there who think of themselves as Cornish first and members of the UK second. You can bring up the Catalan view in Spain if you'd like.
The viewpoint of "citizenship" wasn't as established in the US as in Europe, but it still took something as catastrophic as a war to change it. What will it take in Europe?
Taking a look at MPlayer's page which you kindly linked to, I'd say there's another big reason why no one who uses Windows uses MPlayer: I didn't see any pre-compiled Windows binaries available for download, just source and a Red Hat RPM. Maybe more people would download and run MPlayer if a pre-compiled binary was available for Windows. Yes, I'm certain that there are websites around that provide pre-compiled Windows binaries for MPlayer, but when there's nothing on the official site, along with a nice big message saying that they don't endorse any of those, there isn't much encouragement to want to switch.
I'm a Windows user, and I never use WMP. The free-as-in-beer BSPlayer along with a good codec pack solves my video needs nicely (except for Real, where any substitute doesn't work well, and QuickTime, which is perfectly fine with Apple's player). After hearing all of the posts here about the fact that MPlayer's the cat's ass, I'd love to try it, but I don't feel like trying to compile it.
Make it available, and people will download it and use it given a little bit of info. It's not like WMP is beloved by Windows users. Provide an alternative, and people will use it.
>>I would think that the P2P and widespread broadband would facilitate the spread of "warez" more than an organized group. Wasnt much of their work focused on repackaging software by "ripping" the music and movies to make it smaller and easier to transport?
Some groups do that, like Class. Most of the higher visibility groups like Deviance and Fairlight (which has been around forever; I remember them doing C64 warez and demos) concentrate on the full thing, CD images with cracks included on the disk (if necessary). It was the widespread adoption of broadband that caused the decrease in demand for rips. A few years ago, rips and add-ons were a lot easier to find than full CDs. Now it's difficult to find the rip/add-on format and dead easy to find the full CD versions of programs. The end-user-level distro of rips/add-ons seems to be confined to Usenet, while eDonkey and BitTorrent is chock-full of full CDs.
>>The moment Linux becomes a game platform that is as supported as Windows, console sales will plunge.
Yet another prediction that will never come to fruition. Many important things will have to change in order for there to be that level of support. I won't even get into the chicken/egg paradox of "no one's doing games for Linux because they won't sell, but no one's buying games for Linux because they're not available". Let's just say that there were Linux games available. What hurdles have to be overcome?
1) Native DirectX support in Linux. No WINE, no emulation, no anything. Native execution of DirectX code. If you want the game to play as it was written, that has to be there. It's doable, but it'll make Samba look like a walk in the park. And the FOSS community isn't willing to put in that level of effort, especially considering that DirectX is a moving target and keeping up with it will be as difficult as getting the work done in the first place.
2) Video driver support. ATi won't do it anymore, and the level of complaining that goes on concerning NVidia's binary-only drivers must turn them off from trying to cooperate with the FOSS community. Too many people take the attitude of "If we let NVidia get away with it...", draw a line in the political sand, and don't realize how much that cripples gaming on Linux, which even the zealots admit is a key to making headway in the desktop war.
3) A change in attitude among Linux developers. There are too many programmers out there who believe that the only suitable environment for a computer is an office and the only suitable tasks for a computer are office or network-oriented. The "if you want to game electronically, get a console" attitude is infectious and plays to the native elitism of Linux in general.
4) The "you can always dual boot" attitude. This hooks into #3. Every time someone says that, it's a telling sign that they don't want Linux to be a general-purpose operating system, thus condemning it to a niche.
So, in other words, it could happen, but unless some major changes take place in the community, it won't.
"The Internet is powered by open source."
Only on the server level. The Internet, though, encompasses more than servers. It's an interaction between servers, routers, and desktops (not to mention the lines of transmission between them). Linux does not dominate in routers, and sure as hell doesn't dominate in desktops.
"The Internet is the carrier for open source."
Irrelevant, really. If the world was still dominated by BBSes, open source would still spread, and, in fact, did during that time (anyone still remember the term "freeware"?).
"The Internet is also the platform through which open source is developed."
And the chaos that is part and parcel of the Internet (the same chaos that allows the Internet to actually function) tends to cripple FOSS projects due to the "too many cooks" principle. The most successful FOSS projects have always kept their core creators as a limited, contained group.
"It's simply going to be more secure than proprietary software."
Spouting the party line. No, it's not going to be more secure first thing out of the box, so to speak. It'll be more secure because of the perpetual code audits by many eyes. Not really "simple" per se.
"Open source benefits from anti-American sentiments."
Good for the rest of the world. Bad for the fact that the US has a very large concentration of tech pros who might become alienated by this attitude and stop contributing.
"Incentives around open source include the respect of one's peers."
-1, Overrated. Just another reiteration of the "scratch an itch" principle. And as someone else said, this has a tendency to devolve into mutual pats on the back and development of cliques, which is not a productive way of operating.
"Open source means standing on the shoulders of giants."
Which "giants"? IBM, whose support for Linux has been mostly self-serving and a way to escape the massive proprietary mentality that's crippled them in the past? HP/Compaq, Dell, and other companies who won't release a Linux desktop machine without begging, pleading, and sellings of first-born children to become Carly's and Mike's bondspeople? Or is it software giants like Microsoft (tee hee) or Adobe (Photoshop on Linux may never exist)? The only "giant" he can be speaking of is the progenitor of the project that became Mozilla, and, gee, who was partially responsible for that?
"Servers have always been expensive and proprietary, but Linux runs on Intel."
Implying that servers don't run on Intel. Guess that I must have been imagining Itanic boxes or (to extend it into the immediately family) Opteron boxes, which are outselling the proprietary Sun and Unix servers these days. Maybe he's talking about the commoditization of servers that x86/Itanic has allowed, in which case, there are solutions other than Linux from names more trusted in the server area. Or is Solaris x86 a figment of Marc's imagination?
"Embedded devices are making greater use of open source."
But are still a niche market. Revisit this argument in another ten years.
"There are an increasing number of companies developing software that aren't software companies."
As someone said, virtually any large corporation has an IT staff working on in-house solutions for their own particular needs. How many of these programs get released to the community? Virtually none, because there's no use. And if you take another tack to his argument, namely that there are software contributions out there from non-software companies, is anyone going to trust them?
"Companies are increasingly supporting Linux."
In the areas where Linux has made inroads, namely commodity servers. People in IT can't see this because of their concentration on servers, but the real war is yet to be fought, namely on the desktops, and that one will be a decade-long slog at the very least.
"It's free."
Again, someone else brought up TCO, and right now, the up-front costs
If they did this as a round table, I would have been sad to have missed it. You just know that at some point in the discussion, Raskin and Hertzfeld would have gotten into a fistfight over who the real father of the Mac was. "Two geeks enter, one geek leaves..."
And that's how it's worked since the BBS days, when I knew some members of groups in the C64 scene (I go far back enough in this particular area that I remember when there was still resistance to the term "warez", which some people thought was too "cute"; it's one of the few term in "l33tspeak" that has gained widespread acceptance. I still feel uncomfortable about using the term).
What I was talking about in re IRC, Usenet, and P2P was distribution to end users. The post I was responding to was saying that warez groups were responsible for directing traffic to the dregs of the software piracy world known as warez sites. I brought up the fact that the end downloaders most likely to use those sites discover very quickly that they aren't the place to get anything useful, and turn to places that were more certain and less likely to bombard you with porn ads and useless redirects to Top Lists. We both know how the groups themselves operate, and they're so far disconnected from those bottom-feeders that it's disingenuous to blame them for those sites, and it's equally disingenuous to blame the end downloaders as well, since it's pretty much only the unaware who get caught using them.
Well, it might end up in a Scottish court if someone was importing it (legal or otherwise) into Scotland and there was a violation of trademark taking place. But that's the only case I can think of.
I don't think Scotland has anything like the German beer laws that you can hang a person like this on (and counterfeiting Scotch is, in my mind, a hanging offense). However, there could be some "truth in labeling" laws coming into play here. I work in the meat industry here in the US, and we have a number of rather Byzantine truth-in-labeling laws regarding meat products. For instance, if something has a country name or state name in the name of the product, you have to append "Made in USA" or "Made in $NAMEOFSTATE" to the product name. The only exceptions are Italian sausage and Polish sausage (and perhaps Westphalian ham). The equivalent here would be something like "Glen Sheepfucker, Scotch Whiskey, Made In Kentucky".
As someone who's done label auditing for approval for use, I tend to get a bit obsessed about things like that. Sorry.
Here's a few boosts to get your clue train back on track:
.nfo file that advertised a warez website. In fact, I never see anything in any distro group's packaging that advertises a warez website. The only time you ever see ads like that in a distro package is when the ads are FROM the website you're downloading from.
1) I haven't seen anything in any Drink or Die
2) Anyone with more than a week's experience in software piracy knows not to go to a warez website to get anything. Noobs will try it at first, get sick of the porn ads, redirects, dirty tricks, etc., and then gravitate to where the real distribution takes places: IRC, Usenet, or P2P, including your beloved BitTorrent. Or do you think that BT is used to only distribute Linux distros?
3) Their major crime, in your mind, is "stealing bandwidth". Their "theft of bandwidth" is nothing compared to the theft of bandwidth occurring due to spyware, and that's nothing compared to the same regarding the recent spate of trojans and worms that we've all been suffering with.
4) It's not the pirates' fault that you didn't secure or monitor your FTP. That's your fault. Take some responsibility.
There are lots of arguments to be made against software piracy, but yours isn't among them.
>>"Yeah, I know I was planning on driving to Chicago tomorrow, but I thought there'd be no problem installing a new head gasket twenty minutes before I planned to leave... How was I supposed to know this was not a good idea?" Oh for Christ's sake.
The last time I drove to Chicago (for Christmas to visit my family), I needed to have my head gasket replaced beforehand. It took them a day longer than they said it would, I was able to get my car just before COB on Christmas Eve, and barely made it after an eight-hour drive. Thanks for the unpleasant memories.
Oh, by the way, here's the breakdown of blood in the current Royal Family, just in case you thought my assertion was a little provocative:
Queen Elizabeth is half-British (Scottish, specifically), 7/16ths German, and 1/16th Danish. This comes from the fact that King Edward VII was totally German (as were his parents Queen Victoria and Prince Albert). He married Queen Alexandra, who was half-Danish, half-German. Their three-quarters German/one-quarter Danish son George V married Queen Mary, who was completely German. That made George VI seven-eights German, one-eighth Danish. Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon was completely Scottish, and therefore not crap. And so we have their daughter Lillibet as she stands above.
Brenda married the half-Danish, half-German Prince Philip. This makes Prince Charles one-quarter British, 15/32nds German, and 9/32nds Danish. Lady Diana Spencer was 100% Brit, thereby making HRH Prince William of Wales 5/8ths British, 15/64ths German, and 9/64ths Danish.
Actually, William the Bastard was a Viking with family origins in the Norwegian-ruled Orkneys. William's great-great-great-great-grandfather was Ragnald, first earl of Orkney, and William was a direct male descendant of Ragnald through Ragnald's son Rolf, first Duke of Normandy. They ended up marrying into the families of the Capetian dynasty of France and into the family of Aquitaine as well, but they weren't really French, any more so than the British royal family is truly British (I think it'll be only when Wills gets the throne that someone with a majority of UK blood will be reigning, for the first time since Queen Anne; the Windsors are primarily German with injections of Danish royal blood courtesy of Queen Alexandra and Prince Philip).
The Normans were regarded even in their day as Vikings with a veneer of French civilization. They were regarded as the equivalent of 17th and 18th Century Russians, who, due to their rather unsanitary personal habits, were regarded by courts in Europe to be "baptized bears".
So, in the final wash, it was Yet Another Viking Invasion Of England, albeit this one more successful than the others because the family stuck around for a while (until Richard III, in fact).
You're absolutely right. We should be rooting for OpenOfiice. However, we don't live in an ideal world. When I have HR people wanting me to e-mail my resume in Word format (I've never been asked to send it in any other), I want to be sure that the HR person can open it without losing formatting, etc. And I don't work in a tech industry, so these people don't know what an .rtf is to save their lives. I'd probably scare the crap out of them if I sent it in .pdf. They're office drones, which means, these days, that they're most likely to end up being Office drones.
In order to compete on price and performance bases in business, OpenOffice or any suite that IBM comes up with will have to have the ability to write an Office document with as much or greater a level of accuracy as Office does now.
If you start off wanting ever feature of MS Office you'll end up with MS Office. No free software is going to ever be able to match MS Office perfectly feature for feature. Does that mean you just give up and keeping laying down for Microsoft?
Is IBM stabbing us the in back? No. Are you wrong to say stick with MS Office until a perfect feature for feature equivalent arrives? Big Yes.
I never said anything about wanting feature-for-feature. All I said was that the one thing needed was the ability to write a document that won't be munged by Office. God knows I don't want every single feature that Office has. Office is a huge piece of bloat that I only use when necessary. It sure isn't my text editor of choice. I'm one of those 80/20 types and I create my documents with other 80/20 types in mind. I even try to avoid using macros unless it's absolutely necessary.
We don't need feature-for-feature from an office suite. What we do need, in order to gain headway against Office, is the most common features (which OpenOffice is close to achieving) and compatibility on the write level with Office documents. Then you have a weapon to sell to PHBs: "It does everything we do with Office now, it's free, and it can write an Office format document so we won't lose compatibility."
Oh, how many posts are now being composed in how many minds that state that IBM has now betrayed the FOSS Movement by not acknowledging the greatness of OpenOffice? How dare they!?
Come on, people, calm down. If IBM is doing this, they're acknowledging what everyone without ideological blinders admits: until OpenOffice can write a file that's 100% compatible with its Office equivalent, it won't make any headway. MS is too entrenched at this point. I can hear those same people as above screaming about Linux, but it's also a different battleground being fought in the office suite theater than in the desktop OS one. It's a hearts, minds, and heads battle rather than an economic one (which is the only argument that has been proven effective on non-tech types when it comes to converting systems to Linux). We've all heard the stories about the intransigent secretaries. That's where the fight will take place, and it's going to be a much harder battle that needs a much more polished product.
I'm hoping that IBM realizes that it owns Lotus and uses that particular brand for this effort. It still has some cachet in corporate circles.
Ultima IX, "on time"? No, definitely not. It had at least three release date delays that I know of (and was being hyped in the game magazines for two years minimum prior to its release). It's an example of another plague in the game industry: the Blue-Balled Publisher combined with Don't Worry, We'll Just Patch Syndrome.
Origin worked on Ultima IX for five and a half years prior to its release. Albeit they were doing it half-heartedly because most of their resources were devoted to maintaining and improving UO, but it was still five and a half years of work. EA finally lost it, as you said, and they said "ship or else". Everyone at Origin got demoralized by the demands, and they put together enough of the game to ship, knowing that the game was barely playable.
The game had three patches in total. The first patch corrected the bug where one accidental misstep in an area that had to be traversed as part of the main quest would destroy your chances of finishing the game (not just a "quest-killer", a "game-killer"), and that was out within two weeks of release. Before the release of the third patch, people at Origin said in public, "This is it. We're giving up on this. After this patch is out, we're dropping this thing like a hot potato. If you want to play it, good luck." If not for EA's demands destroying morale (which led to Garriott taking the gas pipe), they might have continued until they got to the point where most of the bugs were, if not fixed, at least contained to the point where the game could be enjoyed.
After the third patch, the game was barely playable, enough so that I was able to finish it. The only reason I did was because I'd actually bought the damn thing (on sale) and didn't want to waste my money. I could have completed it in half the time if the game didn't move at single-digit frames on pretty high-level hardware for the time. I think that with today's hardware, you can barely get 20 FPS out of it. This was probably the least satisfying gaming experience I've ever had.
As for Blizzard, I will NEVER forgive them for putting spyware into the initial release of Starcraft. I expect malware to start sending the entire contents of my address book and other personal information back home. I do not expect a AAA title from a respected publisher to do that. It doesn't matter that they released a patch to end that; they were forced to do that under threat of a class-action suit that was filed against them. Against my better judgment, I bought Diablo II and its expansion, but I almost never play it.
Blizzard's slow side into irrelevance is entertaining to watch. WoW will sell due to the name, but after that? How is any type of Diablo-style game going to look now that Chris Taylor has bitch-slapped them with Dungeon Siege, which is what Diablo II should have been? That game must be a burr under the saddle of the game-loving crunchies out there, being better than their precious Blizzard offering AND being released under MS's aegis.
(By the way, anyone else notice that MS actually gives their developers time to get stuff right? There's no push to get Halo 2 out, for instance, and Gas-Powered took over a year to get the expansion to DS out. The only really bad element I've noted in an MS game recently (ignore Mechwarrior IV, please) is the suck-ass career mode in Links 2003, which the guys at Access/MS didn't want to fix because they were concentrating on Links 2004 for X-Box. Could MS actually be a...cough, gasp...model game publisher in their relationships with their dev houses, whether internal or external?)
And why focus on companies that delay and delay when there are companies out there that can produce AAA titles on time (or with minimal delay)? Shouldn't we support them? That's why Bioware gets my money every time. Ray and the boys ship on time and ship quality every time. Same with Firaxis, but they've got the ultimate old-school god at the top guiding them, and Sid's personality dominates that company. Personally, I can't wait until later this year to see what he does updating Pirates (which I fell in love with on the Amiga).
We consumers have to put our money behind the right people. If you have qualms about a company, don't pony up for their games, period.
So when are two of my favorites, Halo and Links, going to come out for Linux?* I'll switch when that occurs, thank you. So far, I'm not impressed with Linux's gaming ability.
* - For those of you who are clueless crunchies, please note the dripping sarcasm embodied in the fact of who publishes those two games (chosen on purpose for that reason).
IBM's commercials are the biggest bunch of pretentious, pseudo-intellectual crap that I've seen since...well, any post from any holier-than-thou Slashbot crunchie. It's not going to help Linux; it's going to either confuse the audience or turn them off of using it.
If Linux is all about choice, why do people here complain when I choose not to use it?
Well, it sure isn't the Borg, considering who the target of MyDoom-B is...
There was no lesson to be learned. Once it hit the theaters, it became Disney "product" and thus underwent the same treatment as virtually every other Disney movie since The Little Mermaid: movie, then direct-to-video sequel, then TV series. Aladdin blazed the trail, The Lion King paved the road, and others have followed, with the Pocahontas series premiering later this year (I fully expect it to join a Brother Bear series in a Native American Hour block). Lilo and Stitch, though, took the most cynical path of all: the sequel was not only a badly-done set-up for the TV series, but demanded that the series follow a very specific formula, which has made the series pretty dire.
Yeah, sometimes they change the order around and/or leave out steps (The Little Mermaid in the first case, Hercules in the latter), but that's not the issue. The point is that artistic creativity doesn't matter when Disney knows they can make money for themselves and their cable networks by following set steps to maximize the revenue from each and every project. They treat animation as commodity, not art. So why are we surprised at the decision to close the 2D studios?