One of the major arguments that the MPAA used in their actions against Napster was that there was a company there that was making money off the illegal sharing of files. I knew it was crap when I heard it then. Who's making money off Gnutella?
Re:Konqueror is not developed by TheKompany
on
QT Mozilla Port
·
· Score: 1
My bad. A couple of guys who work for it are on the KDE developer's page and it's called a successor to kfm, so I just stretched out an extra connection.
Re:Mozilla vs. Konq, development time...
on
QT Mozilla Port
·
· Score: 2
Just a few thoughts on obvious reasons why you can't compare the two. I'm not going to try taking into account the project management dynamics of the two different groups (K vs. Mozilla) because as outsiders we can only speculate on things like bad management, morale, working conditions, etc.
Konqueror:
Is being developed by the same group that is working on a complete gui environment.
Is being developed using an already established widget toolset.
Is meant to run well first and foremost on Linux, and specifically KDE.
Is being developed by a kompany that has a good history of working and completing individual application projects.
Mozilla:
Is the flagship product of the Mozilla group. It's even being built with the framework for other aps to derive from.
Isn't working from an established widget toolset. They've been working within various environments including Windows, Linux, and Mac. It is very important that Mozilla works on all three of these platforms.
Was started entirely from scratch. This in itself was important to the team.
cough cough is associated with the same people who brought you Netscape cough cough
The reason that Konqueror works so well within Qt-enabled X is the same reason that Explorer works so well within Windows. If soemone introduced you to some new gui environment and said "build me a perfect browser", it would probably take longer for you than for someone who'd already been working within that environment, let alone if you had to actually make your browser work over several gui environments. I can only imagine the hell that is trying to get something to render uniformly over several platforms. With Konqueror, that's QT's responsibilty and headache, not the Kompany's.
I don't suppose this distro will include 3D acceleration drivers on the install by default, will it? Like, on top of just recognizing the video card (in my case a Voodoo3 3000), will it also install the drivers for Mesa and Glide and 3D acceleration, or will that be an extra step? I don't mean just giving me the rpms and telling me to do it myself...
Sorry if that's a dumb question. I've been using Linux for 2 years now but I still have never gotten the hang of getting drivers loaded automatically... and no, I wasn't too busy surfing pr0n.
Okay, so keep all those in mind. Now, how can you help? For starters, take this press release and throw it in the trash:
I don't know what newspapers you've worked for as a reporter, but there are plenty of newspapers that overwork their employees to the tune of five stories a week. You can bet that one or two of those are not going to be Woodward and Bernstein type stuff. If it's got any relevence, or if it'll fill that extra bit of space, then it's fair game. Believe me, with the crap that gets through anyway, a small company looking for extra PR might as well get in on it. I've known plenty of journalists who had to go through the process of rewriting press releases to fill a last minute gap. They didn't like it, but they did it, and many still do, if only to keep from getting burned out so they can save up energy for the really important stories.
A press release that actually gets picked up has to provide the basis for a story, which more or less means it has to relate directly to things that the reporter knows about and would otherwise be writing about. Reporters do not write about marketspeak crap, except to make fun of it.
Once again, press releases like the ones you've described don't only end up in the office of the Washington Post, but also TRADE publications, and these ones have no problem writing stuff full of marketspeak crap. What's more, the people buying and reading this publications don't mind the marketspeak crap. There are some trade journals and magazines that people pick up exclusively for the ads, and these are the same people who can stomach the odd bit of promotional writing.
Of course, this all depends on the scale of marketing you want to do for yourself, but this is easy stuff to do:
Bring someone in to do this. People who study writing or journalism or sometimes even English in university often end up doing PR writing (at least that was the case with many English and Writing grads I've known). Trust me, it's a buyer's market for press release people. Any department worth their salt will be eager to find people who'll hire their grads to do this sort of work. If you want someone to help you with the business end of things, consider a business or marketing major who's got decent writing/communications skills.
Work with this person to develop a media strategy. Start with press releases, they're easy and cheap, and target them towards trade publications, industry-related websites, etc. Make sure that you not only go for volume (hitting every media center you can) but most importantly media outlets that cater to your intended audience. These are the ones that will look at a press release and turn it into a story -- trade publications are usually pretty devoted to the trades that they cover, they tend to promote rather than search through your garbage for hot scandals. At best, the more generic media outlets might take a pass at offering you the free advertising, unless it's got some residual news effect (offering jobs, overturning another popular business option, etc.).
Have this media relations person get on a first-name basis with as many contacts within the media as possible. Slow news days are inevitable, and when there's copy to fill, they might consider sending a fluff story your way if it's got some relevence. Also, if some sort of issue crops up in your industry, writers might start calling you for easy quotes, and each quote will come with an attribution which should include your company and what it does (makes their quotes legitimate).
Consider exploiting any other connection you might have with a media source. Have you hired a grad from a given program? That program will probably love to brag about it within their own circulars and newsletters. Get on top of it and offer them interviews. Upcoming committee on your industry at City Hall? Show up and ask as many smart questions as you can. If they're good ones the journalists there will take note and remember you.
If you've got the time and money, considering high-profile sponsorships of events, or place advertising within the media (any media outlet, including the generic ones, will take your money to promote you). Just make sure you don't do it indiscriminantly, grandmother's don't buy sneakers for themselves, so Nike doesn't do old folks homes.
If this person you've hired has nothing to do, have them do follow-up work on past customers. It reminds them you exist and you care and are ready to help them if they need it. Customers appreciate this.
OSS projects have been able to gain a foothold in many server applications because of the wide utility of highly commoditized, simple protocols. By extending these protocols and developing new protocols, we can deny OSS projects entry into the market.
Taken from the Halloween Documents. Scroll down to De-commoditize protocols & applications.
Maybe this isn't hijacking an open standard as much as subverting one through software crippling... Either way, it's hard to ignore the fact that a software company that relies on proprietary formats is looking for a way to do away with an open format. We should be fighting this on principle. I suppose that's preaching to the converted, though...
If this game is successful, and many people playtest the engine and submit bug reports and the folks at Tribes2 keep on top of it, you might see a whole slew of mods that may rival Half-Life's in terms of quality, only this time on the Linux desktop. It'll be a real shot in the arm for linux game development to have this stuff available at large, if it catches on.
There are some publishing restrictions on the license that you'll probably want to check out if you think this is the way you want to go, but if it'll bring over any programmers from the Windows ballpark, or at least prepare Windows game programmers to work with a game engine that has success on the Linux platform, that increases the chance that we'll get more and better games.
What are they going to replace Clippy with? Do they really think they can scapegoat their help strategy problems onto an animated graphic?
This is the same company that took a (relatively) decent help system for VBA in Office 97 and replaced it with one that only highlights half the subjects and is constantly telling you "To locate information on this keyword, please select one of the subentries in the list" even though all those subentries are grayed out.
This is the same company that, when Hotmail goes down over server issues, offers you a page entitled "Having login problems?" that basically asks several questions that suggest in a polite way that the surfer is a retard who doesn't know anything about internet connections, even though it's THEIR FAULT.
Yes, Clippy sucked, but I'm not entirely confident that they're going to replace it with anything better.
Don't suppose any of the Gnome people are reading this, but can we assume that Bonobo is going to be held to a set standard that won't change drastically over short periods of time?
I'd like to say that I trust Miguel and the folks at Ximian to give us a good programming model, but based on the GTK+ toolset and all, I kind of don't. Simple widgets like list and tree widgets went from GtkList and GtkTree in 1.0 to GtkCList and GtkCTree in 1.2 and last time I checked both were getting dropped in a later release for some entirely new widget that combined the two. This isn't exactly developer friendly.
Also, after the latest Gnome download suddenly some of my older GTK+ apps are exhibiting weird behaviour -- okay, it's a problem with high scores in Same Gnome, but last time I checked, that was a widget tied directly to GTK+, and if that's no longer working, what other unexpected surprises are there going to be? What steps are being taken to make sure that stuff written for Bonobo 1.0 compliance won't become outdated before we reach Bonobo 2.0?
Basically, as someone who was really looking forward to getting into GUI programming in Linux, it was a little disheartening to find out that I was learning obsolete material. Considering Bonobo is being touted as a programming philosophy as much as it is a library, how rock-steady is that philosophy going to be?
I suppose all the hardcore Gnome and GTK+ coders will come out of the woodwork and flame me to hell and back, but I had to ask. It's not like my karma can get much lower, anyway...
Good lord, all sorts of off-topic questions come to mind...
What happens if this guy broadcast the image all over the place? What happened if they substituted a dramatic presentation for a speech? Could you get the Battle for Naboo in your living room?
This is weird. One of the things George Clooney said as an actor made the big difference between film acting and tv acting was that on tv, the audience feels bigger than the people they're watching. What would happen if it suddenly got put into 3d and you've got two-foot tall Hollywood stars running around? Will this be the end of flat-screen presentations period?
Will this sort of thing eventually replace computer monitors for things like games? It sure would make the 3D a lot more realistic looking, although maybe only in closed-boundary areas...
The possible infringement is not two letters, it's two letters preceded by the word "Open".
Unfortunately, it's not this narrow.
Taken from www.mesa3d.org:
Please do not refer to the library as MesaGL (for legal reasons). It's just Mesa or The Mesa 3-D graphics library.
Now there's obviously extra touchy ground here because Mesa is trying to be a free implementation of OpenGL, but still, the main point of contention here is the use of the acronym "GL" regardless of what preceeds it. I'm a little annoyed that all our alphabet are belong to them.
1. Seriously, if you're going to allow trademarks on acronyms of two letters, basically you're opening up the world to being owned by 26x26 companies. It wouldn't surprise me if OpenGL went after Free Graphics Libraries because it can be reduced to an acronym that "could be confused with" OpenGL. Heck, rec.comics.superheroes might have to look out in all its Green Lantern threads...
2. Plus, if the lawyers are going to skew the lines between companies that have only one letter difference, what's to stop them from going after companies named with the exact same letters, but in a slightly different order (ie: OpenLG)? A redundant thought, perhaps, but methinks the english language is going to need to expand in order to keep trademark law happy.
3. Finally, it's annoying that in a world of people who make a living who have to be smart enough to know the difference between OpenGL and Mesa and DirectX etc. that they can get away with a silly argument that some small project somewhere can be confused with their product.
Amazing how the earth managed to orbit the sun uninterrupted for millions and millions of years without lawyers. Why do we need them now?
My instinct disagrees with this, although maybe someone more closely associated or familiar with the development can clear this up.
2.2 went through 18 revisions over the course of over two years? That's around 3 revisions every four months. Currently we're at 3 revisions every three months. If the last kernel generation is an indicator, won't we still have to wait until the spring or summer of 2003 before 2.6.0?
y|| = y + OR
() = logical ALL
r = notice where it's located
B = this is a tough one
l = what is this in hungarian notation?
2 = another stumper
us = left as is, couldn't find a symbol for it...
My question is, what does this do to every other lawsuit claiming a website, movie, video game or song lead someone to a violent act?"
The websites that you're worried about:
1....are not condoning a violent act against a particular person. As any karma whore knows, recognition on the internet on a widespread basis can be its own reward.
2....are not facilitating this act by publishing specific names. Even the Klu Klux Klan has the decency to keep their hatred generalized (well, for the most part) and not cross off names of lynched blacks on a list for all to see.
3....are using violence as an artistic tool, either for entertainment, aesthetic or ironic purposes. In no way can one argue that because I write an exciting story where bad guys get killed, that I want you to find people in real life whose names match the names of my characters and kill them using methods that match my story. If we're going to hold art accountable for the violence of humanity then someone better start a war crimes trial for the Illiad.
Maybe search engines relying on older methods are having problems, but using Google, I honestly haven't had a problem locating material quickly at all. You just have to have the right approach in searching for things...
Forget about possible titles of the page. Choose one to three words that you think will be with the body of the page you're looking for. Choose words that will describe the theme of the website. Use nouns, mostly, verbs have too many modifiers.
Avoid negatives, articles ("a", "the") or words that are frequently misspelled or have different international spellings ("colour" vs. "color").
Use correct spellings of last names for celebrities. If you can't figure out the correct spelling of a celebrity from the entertainment industry, figure out the name of an associative body of work (movie, tv show), and check out imdb. If you know how to spell "Mystery Men", you'll know how many L's there are in "Garofalo" (or is it "Gerafallo"?). Then head to your search engine armed with that correct spelling.
To narrow the search (ie: "Jordan" might turn up a ton of different references), try to use a second word that will narrow the context (ie: "Jordan Bulls").
Avoid using brand names unless you want.com sites returned first. Chances are they'll show up on searches anyway.
Search only on Google (or Google-based engines) as it uses IMO the best methodology for ranking sites -- chances are you'll want to see what everyone else is seeing too, and it's based on referential merit that the sites are ranked.
Heh, and if you're searching for a specific porn site, good luck. Pretty much every method possible of getting your site ranked higher in the searches has been used. I mean, have you seen some of those Meta tag listings?
Like I said, most of this is common sense and redundant to most people who've searched for stuff before. But you'd be amazed how many people have no idea how to find the information they need, when you can get it in less than ten seconds, including the time needed to plan the search and type in the query. I try to use this sort of list when telling people how to find info., sort of like teaching a person to fish so they can feed themselves for a lifetime.
Potentially, all this is going to do is discourage gaming companies from making any changes to their game code, because they won't have to actually port anything. This keeps control in the hands of Microsoft with their DirectX API, and even further discourages the use of Mesa or OpenGL.
"OpenGL? Sure, we COULD'VE used it, but heck, even Linux is mostly an OpenGL platform and THEY are buying DirectX games."
And while normally I'd say that competition is a good thing, alternatives aren't exactly being talked about much in Slashdot articles. Compared to DirectX and wine, you don't hear much about the SDL on Slashdot.
What's keeping Microsoft in the driver's seat isn't so much the quality of their software, it's their hold on proprietary APIs and file formats. Sometimes I think all this is going to do is strengthen that. It'll benefit existing companies first and foremost, consumers who want DirectX games second, and efforts like SDL not at all.
If the book really is publishable, look into getting an agent. They'll be able to tell you what sorts of rights you will or won't have over the content after publication, as well as where you can publish outside of print media (ie: movie and web rights), and whether or not you retain any sort of copywrites or trademark control over the book or content or characters within the book (and hence be as permissive with fan sites as you like). Get familiar with as many kinds of rights that are available to you -- the more you restrict the rights of a publisher over your book (they get the first print run but that's it), the more control you retain over your work, although the less you are likely to be compensated for it.
You're probably familiar with the various Writer's Guides to Publishing. Get one of them, the latest ones might have contacts with various agents open to looking for new material. More likely, they'll be hesitent to deal with unpublished newcomers, so see if you can get a connected friend within the publishing industry (a writer currently with an agent could help).
Publishing companies do provide that nice sense of legitimacy to their production and distribution, but the tradeoffs are immense as well. You might want to find a small press that's open to new manuscripts -- they tend to work with new writers more than commoditize them, although the distribution isn't likely to be as big.
I mean, wouldn't it have been smarter to wait until the Linux-based PC had taken off as a gaming platform? There's a ton of promise, on the development side with the SDL and the DirectX work that Wine's doing, as well as considering the games that have already been or are being ported (see linuxgames), but at this point, Linux as a gaming OS really is empty hype. Especially considering how video game consoles are usually sold with less of a profit margin than the games, how can they expect to do this without the games already there, ready to go?
Or am I missing something obvious here? Were there a whole slew of titles that they were ready to port?
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, not the MPAA, but the music industry. Ignore the rant, although I'm still pissed off.
One of the major arguments that the MPAA used in their actions against Napster was that there was a company there that was making money off the illegal sharing of files. I knew it was crap when I heard it then. Who's making money off Gnutella?
My bad. A couple of guys who work for it are on the KDE developer's page and it's called a successor to kfm, so I just stretched out an extra connection.
Just a few thoughts on obvious reasons why you can't compare the two. I'm not going to try taking into account the project management dynamics of the two different groups (K vs. Mozilla) because as outsiders we can only speculate on things like bad management, morale, working conditions, etc.
Konqueror:
Is being developed by the same group that is working on a complete gui environment.
Is being developed using an already established widget toolset.
Is meant to run well first and foremost on Linux, and specifically KDE.
Is being developed by a kompany that has a good history of working and completing individual application projects.
Mozilla:
Is the flagship product of the Mozilla group. It's even being built with the framework for other aps to derive from.
Isn't working from an established widget toolset. They've been working within various environments including Windows, Linux, and Mac. It is very important that Mozilla works on all three of these platforms.
Was started entirely from scratch. This in itself was important to the team.
cough cough is associated with the same people who brought you Netscape cough cough
The reason that Konqueror works so well within Qt-enabled X is the same reason that Explorer works so well within Windows. If soemone introduced you to some new gui environment and said "build me a perfect browser", it would probably take longer for you than for someone who'd already been working within that environment, let alone if you had to actually make your browser work over several gui environments. I can only imagine the hell that is trying to get something to render uniformly over several platforms. With Konqueror, that's QT's responsibilty and headache, not the Kompany's.
I don't suppose this distro will include 3D acceleration drivers on the install by default, will it? Like, on top of just recognizing the video card (in my case a Voodoo3 3000), will it also install the drivers for Mesa and Glide and 3D acceleration, or will that be an extra step? I don't mean just giving me the rpms and telling me to do it myself...
Sorry if that's a dumb question. I've been using Linux for 2 years now but I still have never gotten the hang of getting drivers loaded automatically... and no, I wasn't too busy surfing pr0n.
Okay, so keep all those in mind. Now, how can you help? For starters, take this press release and throw it in the trash:
I don't know what newspapers you've worked for as a reporter, but there are plenty of newspapers that overwork their employees to the tune of five stories a week. You can bet that one or two of those are not going to be Woodward and Bernstein type stuff. If it's got any relevence, or if it'll fill that extra bit of space, then it's fair game. Believe me, with the crap that gets through anyway, a small company looking for extra PR might as well get in on it. I've known plenty of journalists who had to go through the process of rewriting press releases to fill a last minute gap. They didn't like it, but they did it, and many still do, if only to keep from getting burned out so they can save up energy for the really important stories.
A press release that actually gets picked up has to provide the basis for a story, which more or less means it has to relate directly to things that the reporter knows about and would otherwise be writing about. Reporters do not write about marketspeak crap, except to make fun of it.
Once again, press releases like the ones you've described don't only end up in the office of the Washington Post, but also TRADE publications, and these ones have no problem writing stuff full of marketspeak crap. What's more, the people buying and reading this publications don't mind the marketspeak crap. There are some trade journals and magazines that people pick up exclusively for the ads, and these are the same people who can stomach the odd bit of promotional writing.
Of course, this all depends on the scale of marketing you want to do for yourself, but this is easy stuff to do:
Bring someone in to do this. People who study writing or journalism or sometimes even English in university often end up doing PR writing (at least that was the case with many English and Writing grads I've known). Trust me, it's a buyer's market for press release people. Any department worth their salt will be eager to find people who'll hire their grads to do this sort of work. If you want someone to help you with the business end of things, consider a business or marketing major who's got decent writing/communications skills.
Work with this person to develop a media strategy. Start with press releases, they're easy and cheap, and target them towards trade publications, industry-related websites, etc. Make sure that you not only go for volume (hitting every media center you can) but most importantly media outlets that cater to your intended audience. These are the ones that will look at a press release and turn it into a story -- trade publications are usually pretty devoted to the trades that they cover, they tend to promote rather than search through your garbage for hot scandals. At best, the more generic media outlets might take a pass at offering you the free advertising, unless it's got some residual news effect (offering jobs, overturning another popular business option, etc.).
Have this media relations person get on a first-name basis with as many contacts within the media as possible. Slow news days are inevitable, and when there's copy to fill, they might consider sending a fluff story your way if it's got some relevence. Also, if some sort of issue crops up in your industry, writers might start calling you for easy quotes, and each quote will come with an attribution which should include your company and what it does (makes their quotes legitimate).
Consider exploiting any other connection you might have with a media source. Have you hired a grad from a given program? That program will probably love to brag about it within their own circulars and newsletters. Get on top of it and offer them interviews. Upcoming committee on your industry at City Hall? Show up and ask as many smart questions as you can. If they're good ones the journalists there will take note and remember you.
If you've got the time and money, considering high-profile sponsorships of events, or place advertising within the media (any media outlet, including the generic ones, will take your money to promote you). Just make sure you don't do it indiscriminantly, grandmother's don't buy sneakers for themselves, so Nike doesn't do old folks homes.
If this person you've hired has nothing to do, have them do follow-up work on past customers. It reminds them you exist and you care and are ready to help them if they need it. Customers appreciate this.
And don't forget the value of word-of-mouth.
OSS projects have been able to gain a foothold in many server applications because of the wide utility of highly commoditized, simple protocols. By extending these protocols and developing new protocols, we can deny OSS projects entry into the market.
Taken from the Halloween Documents. Scroll down to De-commoditize protocols & applications.
Maybe this isn't hijacking an open standard as much as subverting one through software crippling... Either way, it's hard to ignore the fact that a software company that relies on proprietary formats is looking for a way to do away with an open format. We should be fighting this on principle. I suppose that's preaching to the converted, though...
You can get a developer's license of the engine for cheap ($100 and some publishing restrictions)
If this game is successful, and many people playtest the engine and submit bug reports and the folks at Tribes2 keep on top of it, you might see a whole slew of mods that may rival Half-Life's in terms of quality, only this time on the Linux desktop. It'll be a real shot in the arm for linux game development to have this stuff available at large, if it catches on.
There are some publishing restrictions on the license that you'll probably want to check out if you think this is the way you want to go, but if it'll bring over any programmers from the Windows ballpark, or at least prepare Windows game programmers to work with a game engine that has success on the Linux platform, that increases the chance that we'll get more and better games.
What are they going to replace Clippy with? Do they really think they can scapegoat their help strategy problems onto an animated graphic?
This is the same company that took a (relatively) decent help system for VBA in Office 97 and replaced it with one that only highlights half the subjects and is constantly telling you "To locate information on this keyword, please select one of the subentries in the list" even though all those subentries are grayed out.
This is the same company that, when Hotmail goes down over server issues, offers you a page entitled "Having login problems?" that basically asks several questions that suggest in a polite way that the surfer is a retard who doesn't know anything about internet connections, even though it's THEIR FAULT.
Yes, Clippy sucked, but I'm not entirely confident that they're going to replace it with anything better.
Don't suppose any of the Gnome people are reading this, but can we assume that Bonobo is going to be held to a set standard that won't change drastically over short periods of time?
I'd like to say that I trust Miguel and the folks at Ximian to give us a good programming model, but based on the GTK+ toolset and all, I kind of don't. Simple widgets like list and tree widgets went from GtkList and GtkTree in 1.0 to GtkCList and GtkCTree in 1.2 and last time I checked both were getting dropped in a later release for some entirely new widget that combined the two. This isn't exactly developer friendly.
Also, after the latest Gnome download suddenly some of my older GTK+ apps are exhibiting weird behaviour -- okay, it's a problem with high scores in Same Gnome, but last time I checked, that was a widget tied directly to GTK+, and if that's no longer working, what other unexpected surprises are there going to be? What steps are being taken to make sure that stuff written for Bonobo 1.0 compliance won't become outdated before we reach Bonobo 2.0?
Basically, as someone who was really looking forward to getting into GUI programming in Linux, it was a little disheartening to find out that I was learning obsolete material. Considering Bonobo is being touted as a programming philosophy as much as it is a library, how rock-steady is that philosophy going to be?
I suppose all the hardcore Gnome and GTK+ coders will come out of the woodwork and flame me to hell and back, but I had to ask. It's not like my karma can get much lower, anyway...
Good lord, all sorts of off-topic questions come to mind...
What happens if this guy broadcast the image all over the place? What happened if they substituted a dramatic presentation for a speech? Could you get the Battle for Naboo in your living room?
This is weird. One of the things George Clooney said as an actor made the big difference between film acting and tv acting was that on tv, the audience feels bigger than the people they're watching. What would happen if it suddenly got put into 3d and you've got two-foot tall Hollywood stars running around? Will this be the end of flat-screen presentations period?
Will this sort of thing eventually replace computer monitors for things like games? It sure would make the 3D a lot more realistic looking, although maybe only in closed-boundary areas...
Who modded this up as INFORMATIVE?!?
The possible infringement is not two letters, it's two letters preceded by the word "Open".
Unfortunately, it's not this narrow.
Taken from www.mesa3d.org:
Please do not refer to the library as MesaGL (for legal reasons). It's just Mesa or The Mesa 3-D graphics library.
Now there's obviously extra touchy ground here because Mesa is trying to be a free implementation of OpenGL, but still, the main point of contention here is the use of the acronym "GL" regardless of what preceeds it. I'm a little annoyed that all our alphabet are belong to them.
1. Seriously, if you're going to allow trademarks on acronyms of two letters, basically you're opening up the world to being owned by 26x26 companies. It wouldn't surprise me if OpenGL went after Free Graphics Libraries because it can be reduced to an acronym that "could be confused with" OpenGL. Heck, rec.comics.superheroes might have to look out in all its Green Lantern threads...
2. Plus, if the lawyers are going to skew the lines between companies that have only one letter difference, what's to stop them from going after companies named with the exact same letters, but in a slightly different order (ie: OpenLG)? A redundant thought, perhaps, but methinks the english language is going to need to expand in order to keep trademark law happy.
3. Finally, it's annoying that in a world of people who make a living who have to be smart enough to know the difference between OpenGL and Mesa and DirectX etc. that they can get away with a silly argument that some small project somewhere can be confused with their product.
Amazing how the earth managed to orbit the sun uninterrupted for millions and millions of years without lawyers. Why do we need them now?
My instinct disagrees with this, although maybe someone more closely associated or familiar with the development can clear this up.
2.2 went through 18 revisions over the course of over two years? That's around 3 revisions every four months. Currently we're at 3 revisions every three months. If the last kernel generation is an indicator, won't we still have to wait until the spring or summer of 2003 before 2.6.0?
y|| = y + OR
() = logical ALL
r = notice where it's located
B = this is a tough one
l = what is this in hungarian notation?
2 = another stumper
us = left as is, couldn't find a symbol for it...
(y||)B l2us
r
C'mon, it's obvious.
My question is, what does this do to every other lawsuit claiming a website, movie, video game or song lead someone to a violent act?"
The websites that you're worried about:
1. ...are not condoning a violent act against a particular person. As any karma whore knows, recognition on the internet on a widespread basis can be its own reward.
2. ...are not facilitating this act by publishing specific names. Even the Klu Klux Klan has the decency to keep their hatred generalized (well, for the most part) and not cross off names of lynched blacks on a list for all to see.
3. ...are using violence as an artistic tool, either for entertainment, aesthetic or ironic purposes. In no way can one argue that because I write an exciting story where bad guys get killed, that I want you to find people in real life whose names match the names of my characters and kill them using methods that match my story. If we're going to hold art accountable for the violence of humanity then someone better start a war crimes trial for the Illiad.
Maybe search engines relying on older methods are having problems, but using Google, I honestly haven't had a problem locating material quickly at all. You just have to have the right approach in searching for things...
Like I said, most of this is common sense and redundant to most people who've searched for stuff before. But you'd be amazed how many people have no idea how to find the information they need, when you can get it in less than ten seconds, including the time needed to plan the search and type in the query. I try to use this sort of list when telling people how to find info., sort of like teaching a person to fish so they can feed themselves for a lifetime.
Wouldn't mind seeing those #$%! blue guys being shoved into a printing press, I'll tell you that.
Potentially, all this is going to do is discourage gaming companies from making any changes to their game code, because they won't have to actually port anything. This keeps control in the hands of Microsoft with their DirectX API, and even further discourages the use of Mesa or OpenGL.
"OpenGL? Sure, we COULD'VE used it, but heck, even Linux is mostly an OpenGL platform and THEY are buying DirectX games."
And while normally I'd say that competition is a good thing, alternatives aren't exactly being talked about much in Slashdot articles. Compared to DirectX and wine, you don't hear much about the SDL on Slashdot.
What's keeping Microsoft in the driver's seat isn't so much the quality of their software, it's their hold on proprietary APIs and file formats. Sometimes I think all this is going to do is strengthen that. It'll benefit existing companies first and foremost, consumers who want DirectX games second, and efforts like SDL not at all.
If the book really is publishable, look into getting an agent. They'll be able to tell you what sorts of rights you will or won't have over the content after publication, as well as where you can publish outside of print media (ie: movie and web rights), and whether or not you retain any sort of copywrites or trademark control over the book or content or characters within the book (and hence be as permissive with fan sites as you like). Get familiar with as many kinds of rights that are available to you -- the more you restrict the rights of a publisher over your book (they get the first print run but that's it), the more control you retain over your work, although the less you are likely to be compensated for it.
You're probably familiar with the various Writer's Guides to Publishing. Get one of them, the latest ones might have contacts with various agents open to looking for new material. More likely, they'll be hesitent to deal with unpublished newcomers, so see if you can get a connected friend within the publishing industry (a writer currently with an agent could help).
Publishing companies do provide that nice sense of legitimacy to their production and distribution, but the tradeoffs are immense as well. You might want to find a small press that's open to new manuscripts -- they tend to work with new writers more than commoditize them, although the distribution isn't likely to be as big.
I mean, wouldn't it have been smarter to wait until the Linux-based PC had taken off as a gaming platform? There's a ton of promise, on the development side with the SDL and the DirectX work that Wine's doing, as well as considering the games that have already been or are being ported (see linuxgames), but at this point, Linux as a gaming OS really is empty hype. Especially considering how video game consoles are usually sold with less of a profit margin than the games, how can they expect to do this without the games already there, ready to go?
Or am I missing something obvious here? Were there a whole slew of titles that they were ready to port?
All your Beowulf-clustered Scientologist are non-patentable to us!
Heck, my karma was getting too high anyway...