Jeff Minter rocks though. After breaking out my old Jeff Minter games, I decided to find out what he is up to on the web. Looks like this visualization stuff and raising various lluvable llamas (and goats, and other stuff), same as always.
For those less Minter-aware, he wrote Attack of the Mutant Camels, and a lot of other trippy games way back when.
Tell me about it. I lost thousands of dollars on Be stock. When Red Hat announced they were looking at targetting the embedded market (anyone remember Red Boot? I didn't think so), I sold off a large chunk of Red Hat too, after watching Be make the same shift and fall on their face.
That this whole universe as we see it is not an experiment in somebody's supercomputer?
That's pretty close to what a lot of people have thought for some thousands of years. That this is a game, and the the rules are delivered on clay slates to mountaintops, and in the end somebody judges your performance and you get a reward or punishment..
This is an interesting line of reasoning, one that has struck me lately as plausible. With all the argument these days, "Evolution vs Intelligent Design", it seems to me that the two aren't mutually exclusive.
Evolution doesn't really address origins of the universe, and Intelligent Design doesn't preclude evolution.
It seem equally plausible to me that life has continually created new universes every "foo" years, each universe a little different from the last, created with the intent to turn out a little better than the last.
It does strike a deep seated fear, it's difficult for me, and I assume for most people to assume humans and all life are mere automatons. The illusion of free will (or at least some level of self-determination) seems to be something required for sanity.
Well, just as early cartographic maps of the earth were pretty shitty by today's standards, we have to start somewhere.
If this simulation is useful in any way for building new theories that are in turn useful for predicting other things, then it isn't a loss.
Even if the simulation is complete bunk, as long as it is studied and reasons are articulated why it is complete bunk, then it wasn't a loss then either, we then know how not to do such a simulation in the future.
Those funny looking military jacks are designed in ways to help prevent or remove corrosion. One of the reasons you have to be so picky about RCA jacks is there is no shielding, no locking, very little self-cleaning effect, etc.
The RCA jack basically sucks.
You could argue that if you are replacing the jack anyway, it would be better to replace it with a different jack type, and I wouldn't argue with you much there.
He never claimed he didn't use diku/merc, he claimed he had completely removed all the old code, and medievia was completely clean. No one claims donation items don't help you in the game.
It's not as black and white as you try to make it. The legal question is "can a derived work ever be rewritten to the point where it no longer contains any original code?"
As to whether there really is any original code left or not, that's a different matter.
The diku/merc license forbids anyone making money off it, so there's no way any of the original authors could claim damages on something they could never make money from in the first place (without the monumental task of getting permission from every contributer). This is why no one has sued Vryce yet, it would be impossible to show any damages.
Anyway, if they would have used something like the GPL, they might have a case, because it doesn't forbid making money.
Of course, if they had used something like the GPL, this whole petty bickering wouldn't have ever happened because Medievia could charge whatever money they wanted without violating the license.
So, in summation, get over it. The Merc/Diku people wrote an unenforcable license and now have to deal with the consequences.
The article has a strong basis in real improvements. The slashdot title is an insult to it.
The instructions involve things like replacing cheap caps with low-ESR versions, putting in better diodes in the bridge in the power supply, replacing cheap op-amps...
All these things are legit improvements and are also where the corners are really cut in the cheaper players.
So don't dismiss it because of the slashdot submitter/editor's ignorance.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I get that same feeling when someone whines on slashdot about how they want protectionist policies to keep jobs from going overseas.
Leave me the FUCK alone.
The best way to be left alone is to get to a remote location on a vacation island.
If you will just step right this way you can get a free gift certificate after a short presentation on this valuable timeshare offer.
Creating make-work projects doesn't help the economy.
If that were the case, the government might as well pay you to jerk off to porn.
More money moving around doesn't mean value created, when the person paying is artificially forced to pay just to maintain the status quo.
Hello!
We left Britian because it wasn't puritanical enough for us!
What did you expect!
My understanding is that google maps is purposely limited so people can't "see swingsets" in back yards (i.e. pedophiles).
Where did you get a crazy idea like that?
And what makes people think all these pedophiles can't just drive around their own town and find kids?
If people don't check SSL certificates, why do you think they would check a key fingerprint?
You have no right to publish my copyrighted content.
You better sue slashdot. They have willfully infringed your copyright by sending me a copy of your copyrighted content.
You fail it. All websites are some sort of copyrighted work.
The writeup says the archive is being sued by Harding et al. Then later it says it's being sued by one of those Health companies.
I didn't even pick up on the fact there were two similarly named health care companies!
Could we at least get a writeup that doesn't contradict itself?
So who are they being sued by, the lawfirm or the plaintiff that the lawfirm was going up against?
Heh, yeah
Jeff Minter rocks though. After breaking out my old Jeff Minter games, I decided to find out what he is up to on the web. Looks like this visualization stuff and raising various lluvable llamas (and goats, and other stuff), same as always.
For those less Minter-aware, he wrote Attack of the Mutant Camels, and a lot of other trippy games way back when.
Tell me about it. I lost thousands of dollars on Be stock. When Red Hat announced they were looking at targetting the embedded market (anyone remember Red Boot? I didn't think so), I sold off a large chunk of Red Hat too, after watching Be make the same shift and fall on their face.
It does seem as if we have trouble, as a programming community, leveraging previous advances in natural language AI.
I've played some text adventures on the C64 that were smarter than most of the recent entries in the interactive fiction contests.
With things like WordNet out now, I'd have hoped things would have progressed more than they have.
Well I think that's more of a symptom of the religious engineering what they call "intelligent design" in a way that suits their needs.
That this whole universe as we see it is not an experiment in somebody's supercomputer?
That's pretty close to what a lot of people have thought for some thousands of years. That this is a game, and the the rules are delivered on clay slates to mountaintops, and in the end somebody judges your performance and you get a reward or punishment..
This is an interesting line of reasoning, one that has struck me lately as plausible. With all the argument these days, "Evolution vs Intelligent Design", it seems to me that the two aren't mutually exclusive.
Evolution doesn't really address origins of the universe, and Intelligent Design doesn't preclude evolution.
It seem equally plausible to me that life has continually created new universes every "foo" years, each universe a little different from the last, created with the intent to turn out a little better than the last.
It does strike a deep seated fear, it's difficult for me, and I assume for most people to assume humans and all life are mere automatons. The illusion of free will (or at least some level of self-determination) seems to be something required for sanity.
Well, just as early cartographic maps of the earth were pretty shitty by today's standards, we have to start somewhere.
If this simulation is useful in any way for building new theories that are in turn useful for predicting other things, then it isn't a loss.
Even if the simulation is complete bunk, as long as it is studied and reasons are articulated why it is complete bunk, then it wasn't a loss then either, we then know how not to do such a simulation in the future.
Those funny looking military jacks are designed in ways to help prevent or remove corrosion. One of the reasons you have to be so picky about RCA jacks is there is no shielding, no locking, very little self-cleaning effect, etc.
The RCA jack basically sucks.
You could argue that if you are replacing the jack anyway, it would be better to replace it with a different jack type, and I wouldn't argue with you much there.
Do we really want another nanny government organization similar to the CPSC?
The UL already does a lot of what the CPSC does, without government interference and without spending government money.
What we need is a UL for software, independant, private, reputable, third party testing and seal of approvals for software.
He never claimed he didn't use diku/merc, he claimed he had completely removed all the old code, and medievia was completely clean. No one claims donation items don't help you in the game.
It's not as black and white as you try to make it. The legal question is "can a derived work ever be rewritten to the point where it no longer contains any original code?"
As to whether there really is any original code left or not, that's a different matter.
The diku/merc license forbids anyone making money off it, so there's no way any of the original authors could claim damages on something they could never make money from in the first place (without the monumental task of getting permission from every contributer). This is why no one has sued Vryce yet, it would be impossible to show any damages.
Anyway, if they would have used something like the GPL, they might have a case, because it doesn't forbid making money.
Of course, if they had used something like the GPL, this whole petty bickering wouldn't have ever happened because Medievia could charge whatever money they wanted without violating the license.
So, in summation, get over it. The Merc/Diku people wrote an unenforcable license and now have to deal with the consequences.
Well, they obviously aren't random :)
The article has a strong basis in real improvements. The slashdot title is an insult to it.
The instructions involve things like replacing cheap caps with low-ESR versions, putting in better diodes in the bridge in the power supply, replacing cheap op-amps...
All these things are legit improvements and are also where the corners are really cut in the cheaper players.
So don't dismiss it because of the slashdot submitter/editor's ignorance.
DDOS will be even easier. So will spamming. 64 bits is a big address space to hide in.
Because it's *so* hard to find kids online, right?
This is just a silly argument. It's like saying we shouldn't have day care centers because it puts all those kids in one place.
Well, that's the challenge to memorizing Pi, creating rhythm and logic from nearly random numbers.
Not sure if you were kidding or not.
Solving Pi algorithmically in your head would be a larger feat than memorizing it.