It's not Like Linus owns the company. It's just his day job. He's not the first open source programmer who writes proprietary code for a living. If he had a say whether code morphing would be open source or not, maybe he would, but since it's not even his choice it's wrong to call him a hypocrite.
Metcalfe also doesn't seem to get what Linus said about fragmentation. Had he actually listened to it rather than read some 2 line quote in the news, maybe he would have realized that there's actual good fragmentation too (or so Linus says). Fragmentation's bad when it leads to incompatibilities and duplication of effort (which is what happened to UNIX). It can be beneficial though when a product is moving in different directions and would otherwise be held back by the legacy of it's original purpose. As long as they share what's common between them, fragmented projects don't have to be at odds with each other. s.
That's what they said about CD-ROMS. Games no longer needed silly "find the code on page n of the manual" copy protection, since the disk would take up half your hard drive and you couldn't make a copy of it. You could coy music from CDs but it would again be too big to reasonable store. Eventually hard drives caught up and CD burners became reasonably priced for the average user. Mp3s made storing music on your computer reasonable. Now most new CD-ROMs need ways to verify the cd is actually in the drive and are burned in a way to prevent straight bit for bit copying. The pre-existing CD-ROMS and every music CD ever made are still fair game.
It may be inefficient to copy and burn DVDs now, but the CCA knows that computers are going to catch up eventually, and they're trying everything in their power to make sure that that when they do there won't be a vast library of trivially copyable movies for people to swap like so many mp3 albums. Too bad thier protection is a symbolic gesture at best and does little more than let the player vendors actually charge money for something that could be as free as any MPEG or mp3 software.
In your book "The God Particle", you seemed to have a lot riding on the Superconducting Supercollider to make many advances in physics, especially in finding the Higgs-Boson. How much of a setback has the loss of the SCC been for physics? Has anything else come along that has made up for it, if only partially, or are we going to have to wait for another machine of the same scale before we can hope to see the kind of discoveries the SCC would have made?
When they said "simultaneously", I believe they meant as soon as they reasonably could, as opposed to 6 months later. Compared to porting efforts of other games, this is virtually instantaneous. Releasing all 3 versions at exactly the same time would mean they'd all be late; the other 2 wouldn't get done any quicker. Best to get the versions they already have done out as soon as possible, rather than let it sit in some warehouse until the other versions are done.
Judging by that blurb about being under NDA with Transmeta, it looks like xybernaut is looking into such alternatives (if rumors are correct, their "Crusoe" chip should provide x86 compatibility and performance without draining 8 batteries a minute.)
"They" at the beginning there is id btw (id's releasing the binaries) . Loki is publishing/distributing/supporting the linux version for id, instead of Activision, who is pub/dist/supping the win32 version.
They will release the binaries for all 3 versions (Win32, Linux, and Mac) sometime after all 3 are released in retail. You can use the cd of any version with the binaries of any other version. The reason for holding off on the binaries for later is that they don't want everyone to go and buy the windows version and then just use the linux binaries with it. id would have liked to include all 3 in one package, but Activision and many other publishers and developers are VERY interested to see how commercially viable retail Linux games are, and if it's worth the effort to port other games. If the linux version gets good sales, it'd encourage a lot of developers to port their games to linux, so we'd have a lot more than the handful we have now. Let's just hope they don't make us pay seperately for each version.
This would have worked out a lot better if all 3 were available at once, especially since most ppl who have the hardware for it probably still dual boot and would go with the windows version first and wait for the linux patch. Unfortunately, it would have been too much trouble to wait for all 3, especially if it meant missing christmas.
a great input method might be to use a graffiti-like system with the pad on a watch or something on your arm. That would give you the hands-free action of a wearable and the input versatility of a Palm.
Because not everyone has the time or patience to go to all the somewhere elses and sift through the banal stuff and find the slightly interesting stuff. I don't read Wired every single day, but when an article from there is linked on Slashdot, I'll go check it out. It might be a few days old, but if I didn't know about it before, it might as well be new. That's the whole point of Slashdot; find interesting news that's relevant to someone (not necessarily everyone) out there in a short and to the point format, and let everyone pick it apart and share their opinions on it. When Wired includes discussions attached to every story and limits them to a paragraph or two instead of a few informative scentences spread throughout pages of pointless analysis , THEN it will have the exact same stuff as Slashdot.
If digital media formats want to keep this from happening, they're going to have to learn that copy protection shouldn't also mean read protection. For any kind of standard to take hold and be held to, it has to be implemented as universally as possible, otherwise those left out are going to get it to work one way or another, be it a different standard that they have no control over, or a perversion of the first.
You're not entirely right on that. Trade secrecy protection is only invalidated when a company doesn't make a reasonable effort to protect their secret. The dvd consortium did as much as they could to to protect it through NDAs and requiring the keys to be encrypted. The fact that Xing violated that NDA does not change anything. The consortium had made every effort to make sure it was kept secret short of auditing every version of every player, so CSS should still be covered by trade secrecy (assuming it could be applied to begin with). That's how I understand it anyway.
I wonder how law enforcement types are gonna react to something like this. A bunch of numberless, disposable phones and a pager don't sound very easy to tap, and you know how they (the same people who want to embed sattelite phones with GPS locators) are about being able to intercept and locate calls.
Just where are all these terrorists, anyway? I keep getting the feeling that "terrorists" are just the proverbial boogymen to give the military-industrial complex something to do after the cold war. If anything, stuff like this only serves to provoke potential terrorists and gives them a reason to make enemies out of us. Of course, the NSA could be catching them all over the place and we'd never know it. I'm sure they could care less whether we knew they were actually accomplishing something or not.
The one problem with this argument is that If a product fails and a company sues another big one, they actually can get money out of it to cover any damages for the failure. It actually matters that they can get money out of it, and dicourage the other company from allowing that to happen again. Suing over patents is completely different, in that it's far more important to get rid of the other product and hold on to the monopoly than it is to actually get money from the violator. if they were to sue an OSS project over a patent, they wouldn't expect to actually get anything out of it. If it's over liability, however, they need to expect to get something out of suing.
I really don't agree with this line of thinking, but it's a reality that someone's going to face eventually.
At least from what I could gather from the shape of it, that curve inicated that smaller events have more weight than "The Big One". If you were to go by that, it would be even less likely than by bell curve standards. Then again, I got a D in statistics (bad Quake 2!), so what do I know?
Ok, so it's not going to rip a hole in reality and spawn all sorts of Star Trek-like anomalies that will swallow up the earth. Anyway, this link here has VA bragging that it got the contract to make the systems that'll collect all the data from it.
Is there going to be any effort to put in some sort of anti-piracy stuff into Q3? A ask this because I know quite a few people who interperate Q2's only requiring the cd for single player as a go-ahead to install Q2 on as many friends' machines as possible strictly for multiplayer. Obviously, this attitude isn't good for a multiplayer-only game. As much as I want to see all those warez monkeys actually spend some money for a change, i'd hate to see Q3 have some sort of copy protection juggling act that needs a cd in the drive when nothing's being loaded from it.
If Microsoft's marketing dept. were removed they would be forced to compete on their products' own merits . Perhaps some sort of regulation discouraging unsupported and ambiguous claims of faster, easier, etc. could do the whole industry a lot of good. Of course, I wouldn't want to see huge disclaimers just tacked on for every little detail, but if at least some basis for hyped up claims about performance was required, Microsoft would have to focus on having something to hype about (which wouldn't be too easy for them:). Maybe they should also do something about their relation with some of the computer press (more than a few publications have gotten cozy with Bill to promote the platform they cover rather than reviewing MS on an objective basis).
here at NJIT, this year the incoming freshmen all got NT boxes because some students were supposed to be able to run some sort of CAD software. It's been a disaster. All the new (l)users tried installing incompatible hardware, changed some setting that cause BSODs, forgot passwords, and so they had to return them for maintenance over and over again. The one upside to this is that they got systems that weren't last year's piece of crap, so we finally have a lot of people who can play quake 2 (and beacuse of our tight-ass firewall that's all we can play against). Too bad my 2 year old school computer (a Cyrix 120) turned Linux Q2 server can't keep up with them all.
here at NJIT it's entirely Pepsi. I was so used to this that it suprised me yesterday when i saw a coke and pepsi vending machine standing side by side at a gas station. Cutting off students from the diversity of the real world can be quite damaging, and can really skew their perspective. Ah well, at least i get a near limitless supply of Mountain Dew with my meal plan...
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It's not Like Linus owns the company. It's just his day job. He's not the first open source programmer who writes proprietary code for a living. If he had a say whether code morphing would be open source or not, maybe he would, but since it's not even his choice it's wrong to call him a hypocrite.
Metcalfe also doesn't seem to get what Linus said about fragmentation. Had he actually listened to it rather than read some 2 line quote in the news, maybe he would have realized that there's actual good fragmentation too (or so Linus says). Fragmentation's bad when it leads to incompatibilities and duplication of effort (which is what happened to UNIX). It can be beneficial though when a product is moving in different directions and would otherwise be held back by the legacy of it's original purpose. As long as they share what's common between them, fragmented projects don't have to be at odds with each other. s.
That's what they said about CD-ROMS. Games no longer needed silly "find the code on page n of the manual" copy protection, since the disk would take up half your hard drive and you couldn't make a copy of it. You could coy music from CDs but it would again be too big to reasonable store. Eventually hard drives caught up and CD burners became reasonably priced for the average user. Mp3s made storing music on your computer reasonable. Now most new CD-ROMs need ways to verify the cd is actually in the drive and are burned in a way to prevent straight bit for bit copying. The pre-existing CD-ROMS and every music CD ever made are still fair game.
It may be inefficient to copy and burn DVDs now, but the CCA knows that computers are going to catch up eventually, and they're trying everything in their power to make sure that that when they do there won't be a vast library of trivially copyable movies for people to swap like so many mp3 albums. Too bad thier protection is a symbolic gesture at best and does little more than let the player vendors actually charge money for something that could be as free as any MPEG or mp3 software.
Especially about the withdrawl when going home over break. Fortunately I've got a cable modem now to ease the pain :)
In your book "The God Particle", you seemed to have a lot riding on the Superconducting Supercollider to make many advances in physics, especially in finding the Higgs-Boson. How much of a setback has the loss of the SCC been for physics? Has anything else come along that has made up for it, if only partially, or are we going to have to wait for another machine of the same scale before we can hope to see the kind of discoveries the SCC would have made?
When they said "simultaneously", I believe they meant as soon as they reasonably could, as opposed to 6 months later. Compared to porting efforts of other games, this is virtually instantaneous. Releasing all 3 versions at exactly the same time would mean they'd all be late; the other 2 wouldn't get done any quicker. Best to get the versions they already have done out as soon as possible, rather than let it sit in some warehouse until the other versions are done.
"while hepped up on too much orange-flavored Triaminic cough syrup...."
Mmm, god I loved that stuff.
Judging by that blurb about being under NDA with Transmeta, it looks like xybernaut is looking into such alternatives (if rumors are correct, their "Crusoe" chip should provide x86 compatibility and performance without draining 8 batteries a minute.)
"They" at the beginning there is id btw (id's releasing the binaries) . Loki is publishing/distributing/supporting the linux version for id, instead of Activision, who is pub/dist/supping the win32 version.
They will release the binaries for all 3 versions (Win32, Linux, and Mac) sometime after all 3 are released in retail. You can use the cd of any version with the binaries of any other version. The reason for holding off on the binaries for later is that they don't want everyone to go and buy the windows version and then just use the linux binaries with it. id would have liked to include all 3 in one package, but Activision and many other publishers and developers are VERY interested to see how commercially viable retail Linux games are, and if it's worth the effort to port other games. If the linux version gets good sales, it'd encourage a lot of developers to port their games to linux, so we'd have a lot more than the handful we have now. Let's just hope they don't make us pay seperately for each version.
This would have worked out a lot better if all 3 were available at once, especially since most ppl who have the hardware for it probably still dual boot and would go with the windows version first and wait for the linux patch. Unfortunately, it would have been too much trouble to wait for all 3, especially if it meant missing christmas.
a great input method might be to use a graffiti-like system with the pad on a watch or something on your arm. That would give you the hands-free action of a wearable and the input versatility of a Palm.
Because not everyone has the time or patience to go to all the somewhere elses and sift through the banal stuff and find the slightly interesting stuff. I don't read Wired every single day, but when an article from there is linked on Slashdot, I'll go check it out. It might be a few days old, but if I didn't know about it before, it might as well be new. That's the whole point of Slashdot; find interesting news that's relevant to someone (not necessarily everyone) out there in a short and to the point format, and let everyone pick it apart and share their opinions on it. When Wired includes discussions attached to every story and limits them to a paragraph or two instead of a few informative scentences spread throughout pages of pointless analysis , THEN it will have the exact same stuff as Slashdot.
Pleas excuse the ranting.
If digital media formats want to keep this from happening, they're going to have to learn that copy protection shouldn't also mean read protection. For any kind of standard to take hold and be held to, it has to be implemented as universally as possible, otherwise those left out are going to get it to work one way or another, be it a different standard that they have no control over, or a perversion of the first.
You're not entirely right on that. Trade secrecy protection is only invalidated when a company doesn't make a reasonable effort to protect their secret. The dvd consortium did as much as they could to to protect it through NDAs and requiring the keys to be encrypted. The fact that Xing violated that NDA does not change anything. The consortium had made every effort to make sure it was kept secret short of auditing every version of every player, so CSS should still be covered by trade secrecy (assuming it could be applied to begin with). That's how I understand it anyway.
I wonder how law enforcement types are gonna react to something like this. A bunch of numberless, disposable phones and a pager don't sound very easy to tap, and you know how they (the same people who want to embed sattelite phones with GPS locators) are about being able to intercept and locate calls.
Just where are all these terrorists, anyway? I keep getting the feeling that "terrorists" are just the proverbial boogymen to give the military-industrial complex something to do after the cold war. If anything, stuff like this only serves to provoke potential terrorists and gives them a reason to make enemies out of us. Of course, the NSA could be catching them all over the place and we'd never know it. I'm sure they could care less whether we knew they were actually accomplishing something or not.
The one problem with this argument is that If a product fails and a company sues another big one, they actually can get money out of it to cover any damages for the failure. It actually matters that they can get money out of it, and dicourage the other company from allowing that to happen again. Suing over patents is completely different, in that it's far more important to get rid of the other product and hold on to the monopoly than it is to actually get money from the violator. if they were to sue an OSS project over a patent, they wouldn't expect to actually get anything out of it. If it's over liability, however, they need to expect to get something out of suing.
I really don't agree with this line of thinking, but it's a reality that someone's going to face eventually.
Does this apply to the online ordering system for a hard copy of patents they have on the page? :)
At least from what I could gather from the shape of it, that curve inicated that smaller events have more weight than "The Big One". If you were to go by that, it would be even less likely than by bell curve standards. Then again, I got a D in statistics (bad Quake 2!), so what do I know?
Ok, so it's not going to rip a hole in reality and spawn all sorts of Star Trek-like anomalies that will swallow up the earth. Anyway, this link here has VA bragging that it got the contract to make the systems that'll collect all the data from it.
n .php3?session_hash=12450c79866ed3f2852f3a5 fdf070920
http://www.valinuxsystems.com/success/brookhave
Is there going to be any effort to put in some sort of anti-piracy stuff into Q3? A ask this because I know quite a few people who interperate Q2's only requiring the cd for single player as a go-ahead to install Q2 on as many friends' machines as possible strictly for multiplayer. Obviously, this attitude isn't good for a multiplayer-only game. As much as I want to see all those warez monkeys actually spend some money for a change, i'd hate to see Q3 have some sort of copy protection juggling act that needs a cd in the drive when nothing's being loaded from it.
"With all the recent attention around Linux as an operating system..."
What else could it get attention as? A toaster coil?
If Microsoft's marketing dept. were removed they would be forced to compete on their products' own merits . Perhaps some sort of regulation discouraging unsupported and ambiguous claims of faster, easier, etc. could do the whole industry a lot of good. Of course, I wouldn't want to see huge disclaimers just tacked on for every little detail, but if at least some basis for hyped up claims about performance was required, Microsoft would have to focus on having something to hype about (which wouldn't be too easy for them :). Maybe they should also do something about their relation with some of the computer press (more than a few publications have gotten cozy with Bill to promote the platform they cover rather than reviewing MS on an objective basis).
here at NJIT, this year the incoming freshmen all got NT boxes because some students were supposed to be able to run some sort of CAD software. It's been a disaster. All the new (l)users tried installing incompatible hardware, changed some setting that cause BSODs, forgot passwords, and so they had to return them for maintenance over and over again. The one upside to this is that they got systems that weren't last year's piece of crap, so we finally have a lot of people who can play quake 2 (and beacuse of our tight-ass firewall that's all we can play against). Too bad my 2 year old school computer (a Cyrix 120) turned Linux Q2 server can't keep up with them all.
here at NJIT it's entirely Pepsi. I was so used to this that it suprised me yesterday when i saw a coke and pepsi vending machine standing side by side at a gas station. Cutting off students from the diversity of the real world can be quite damaging, and can really skew their perspective. Ah well, at least i get a near limitless supply of Mountain Dew with my meal plan...
um, yeah! I'm last!