Some people think diversity in the marketplace is a good thing, and that it avoids the creation of monopolies like (cough) Microsoft.
It's really an ideological question.. if you support diversity, you support open systems. If not, you take your Microsoma like everyone else and be happy.
This is not at all surprising news. The U.S. nuked nearly every thing in sight back in the '50's when "military science" was an oxymoron. Recall the experiments on live animals, live soldiers, ships, houses, and anything else that could be vaporised by gamma rays. The Cold War put a lot of strange thoughts into the heads of both sides.
Read "A New Ocean" by William Burrows. Apparently the Soviets had also planned to nuke the moon. Back then, Luna was considered by generals on both sides to be a vital weapons platform for raining nuclear terror upon the Earth from 300,000 km. The idea was that since the travel time for a missile from Earth to Moon is at least 2 days, it would be impossible to launch a strike on the moon without detection, and the moon-defense system would in turn rain death upon your country from above, and there would be little you could do to stop a 10 km/s warhead. This was before an early-warning system was in use, of course.
I don't see why there are 500 posts to this topic... this is just good old 1950's U.S. policy;-) Hey, at least we got Apollo out of all this.
Game programming is one of the last black arts of computing. Any code handed down from the priesthood to the serfs is greatly appreciated solely for its educational value.
One side effect: all this free code & wisdom raises the standard for us poor game programmers:-]
There were some strange games back then. I had "KKK Cookout" where you had to roast pointy-head robed guys with a flame thrower. So many new (but not neccessarily good) ideas have been tried in the past, but you never would know because they've been replaced by shoot/fight/click/whatever endless derivatives. Ok, I'll go take my Geritol now...
Ah, Slashdot -- that great purifier of souls -- a karma-enhanced confession booth. While we're here, let me tell you about a dream I had once... it was about a game called "Drag Racing", except you didn't race cars, but there were cross-dressing midgets...
Flipcode has a "lame game" contest, where the object is to make the most laughably inferior game possible. Some of the submissions there are hilarious, for instance "Chicken Racing II". Go check it out, if you have DOS -- most of the lame games are made for this lame OS.
It would be plusgood to have globalspeak because then no one could commit crimespeak or say unpersonful things. Any party worker that uses nativefulspeak is a doubleplus crimethinker. We must work plus speedful to make a newspeak for the good of Ingsoc. Brother Silaron is a doubleplus goodthinker.
The article was premature in saying that Hasbro has won the lawsuit, but they don't need to. GT is one of the bigger fish in the pond, yet they are crumbling before Hasbro's lawsuit. I don't have financial data on the other companies, but I would imagine that they don't have enough cash in the bank to fight Goliath. I predict that they will all fold, eventually.
I'm waiting for my letter from Hasbro myself -- I have a shareware A*teroids-like game that I've been selling for eight years. Registrations are now down to a trickle, but what can I do if threatened? I'm not going to risk all of my personal belongings in a crusade for the good of gaming.
Unfortunately, Hasbro has a good chance of winning if it ever goes to court. The outcomes of "look-and-feel" cases are unpredictable -- it centers around what is "idea" and what is "expression". Ideas can only be protected under patent or trade secret, and "expression" is what is implicitly covered by copyright. (A comprehensive overview of these issues can be found here.)
Legalities aside, my gut tells me this is a very bad omen. The arts (of which I propose game development is a part) thrive through imitation. Would we be better off if no more gangster movies had been made after "The Godfather"? Or if Homer's estate was still around to sue George Lucas for plagarism?
I say munching dots and shooting rocks are ideas, and we should hack on these ideas until there is nothing left, and the best possible dot-munching and rock-shooting games have been made.
I remember Channel 1... it was horrible going to school at 7 AM and immediately being bombarded by peppy anchorpeople and loud fruit-roll-up commercials. The worst part is that you had no choice -- you had to watch. I say kids are marketed to enough via other media outlets, let's leave schools out of the marketing loop and preserve what little attention span sleepy teenagers have during the day.
It doesn't matter. If you live in a society industrialized enough to allow you the leisure time to type that post, you are already polluting the environment 10,000% more than you should be. You capitalist pig.
My advice: Strip naked and tie yourself to a tree, thus preventing yourself from wearing leather, stepping on fragile grass stems, buying Windows 2K, and other horrible activities. (Remember the old Bloom County cartoon -- "Hold it! We're breathing and massacring countless germs!";-)
Why can't we just set their orbital manuvering thrusters to full blast and let them escape the solar system? Then they might run into a super-intelligent race of machines (shades of V'ger) that would give them intelligence, VC funding, and a killer management team, each of which has interviewed for Wired. They'd come back to Earth, launch a killer IPO and make the $6 bil investment back, in spades. They'd probably also merge with Paul Allen and turn into a pure-energy transcendant being.
They should make it so that you can't submit your own artwork. It's too open-ended that way -- contributors are concentrating more on wacky pictures than on good jokes.
That, and some moderators -- unless you're trying to entertain 6-year olds...
What sort of message is Abit sending? Are they too lazy to issue patch files and READMEs? Or is their hardware so nonstandard that they need an entire distro to address all the issues?
My guess is that it's neither, it's just a marketing gimmick. These hardware vendors press a CD anyway for their drivers which should fit on a floppy. So what can we fill up the rest of the space with, hmm... slideshows, game demos? Wait... how 'bout LINUX! It'll show up in all the press release keyword searches!
What if every hardware company follows this lead? Will we need to import the entire source tree for each company's Linux distro into CVS, and hope the 'merge' command makes everything OK? I hope it doesn't come to this.
Lightweight, embeddable languages have been getting a lot of attention recently, especially for their use in computer games like Quake & Unreal. What's your opinion on the current state of scripting languages and how they complement C++? Would you like to see an interpreted or bytecode-compiled version of C++?
I think farmers ought to open-source their crops. I mean, what's with all this archaic "market price" business model, and the propietary use of individual plots of land? They must not get it.
With this, Amazon's annoying patent vigilance, and Toys-R-Us's incompetent shipping department, I don't know where to get Episode I Legos for my nephew!!
Re:The essence of life in Maryland
on
Planet Gattaca
·
· Score: 1
Hmmm... I would have thought that scientists would have discovered bad traffic, high state taxes, and strip malls by now;-)
Why aren't there any more Einsteins at the patent office making sure that crazy stuff like this doesn't get passed? Put this patent in a room full of competent web engineers and ask them if it is an obvious idea. The answer would be an immediate and emphatic "yes".
So where are these people? Ah... they're all in Silicon Valley or similar places making tons of cash off of patent-writing web startups;-)
One of the less-tractible problems with Linux as a web platform is not the quality of its browsers -- it is the hordes of VC-funded companies trying desparately to push their IPO out the door before the carcass of the Internet is picked clean. They are constantly creating technologies that support only the platforms with market share (Microsoft) and don't give two squats about the runners-up.
Witness all the new sites that do fun stuff like give you a Windows-mountable networked drive, synchronize your bookmarks with a little app in the toolbar, the prolitferating Windows media forms, the fun 3D stuff... it's no longer just about the browser; it's about the platform, and it's just hard for a lot of part-time coders to keep up with glory-crazed propietary-technology-creating corporations.
IMHO we had a chance with Java, and it failed us, for purely technical reasons. Too slow, too flaky, too ugly, too late. Folks went back to MFC and the Win32 API, and accepted the 5% loss of market-share by not supporting "fringe" platforms.
The solution? Get Linux on more desktops, get it looking more like a Mac (another runner-up), and hope it works out before Microsoft starts incorporating technologies like wallets in their OS. Oops...
Funny, they used to be at lpr.org, but now "Students for Unity" is there... does LPR have funding issues, or are they just charitable?
Anyway, this site explains in detail what is wrong with patents and what we can do about it. They are even old-school enough to use.xbm's just to prove a point;-)
I recently installed FreeBSD 3.3 on a cheap Compaq I got from uBid. I am now happily using it as my main desktop box. The ports collection is awesome.
Netscape 4.61 for Linux runs very well (meaning it only seg faults every few hours); JDK 1.2 runs well, even with the JIT; and I've heard reports of even Oracle working on FreeBSD (?)
I still run both Linux and FreeBSD for different reasons. I have an old box with an ISA card that makes FreeBSD cough a lung serving NFS (this is a documented bug), so I installed RedHat 6.x and struggled with its experimental kernel NFS instead. Choose your poison!
This might seem drastic, capitalistic, and just plain wrong -- but how about raising the cost of a.com to $300/yr or more? After all,.com's addresses are meant for businesses, most of which would not blink at paying several thousand dollars for a property which is vital to their future -- as the market has shown. Leave.org's and.edu's alone, of course.
Sure, we then get away from the idea of equality -- the.com's are the haves, the.org's are the have-nots -- but come on! Keeping the current cost of registration is like minting a C-note and selling it for a dollar.
Slashdot Mirror
Remember, the Soviet Union collapsed because of too much centralized control, not because of anarchy ;-)
Ahhh, Slashdot... where extremist right-wing propoganda and voice-control technology collide. It's so ... Christmas.
Some people think diversity in the marketplace is a good thing, and that it avoids the creation of monopolies like (cough) Microsoft.
.. if you support diversity, you support open systems. If not, you take your Microsoma like everyone else and be happy.
It's really an ideological question
This is not at all surprising news. The U.S. nuked nearly every thing in sight back in the '50's when "military science" was an oxymoron. Recall the experiments on live animals, live soldiers, ships, houses, and anything else that could be vaporised by gamma rays. The Cold War put a lot of strange thoughts into the heads of both sides.
;-) Hey, at least we got Apollo out of all this.
Read "A New Ocean" by William Burrows. Apparently the Soviets had also planned to nuke the moon. Back then, Luna was considered by generals on both sides to be a vital weapons platform for raining nuclear terror upon the Earth from 300,000 km. The idea was that since the travel time for a missile from Earth to Moon is at least 2 days, it would be impossible to launch a strike on the moon without detection, and the moon-defense system would in turn rain death upon your country from above, and there would be little you could do to stop a 10 km/s warhead. This was before an early-warning system was in use, of course.
I don't see why there are 500 posts to this topic... this is just good old 1950's U.S. policy
Game programming is one of the last black arts of computing. Any code handed down from the priesthood to the serfs is greatly appreciated solely for its educational value.
:-]
One side effect: all this free code & wisdom raises the standard for us poor game programmers
There were some strange games back then. I had "KKK Cookout" where you had to roast pointy-head robed guys with a flame thrower. So many new (but not neccessarily good) ideas have been tried in the past, but you never would know because they've been replaced by shoot/fight/click/whatever endless derivatives. Ok, I'll go take my Geritol now...
Ah, Slashdot -- that great purifier of souls -- a karma-enhanced confession booth. While we're here, let me tell you about a dream I had once... it was about a game called "Drag Racing", except you didn't race cars, but there were cross-dressing midgets...
Flipcode has a "lame game" contest, where the object is to make the most laughably inferior game possible. Some of the submissions there are hilarious, for instance "Chicken Racing II". Go check it out, if you have DOS -- most of the lame games are made for this lame OS.
It would be plusgood to have globalspeak because then no one could commit crimespeak or say unpersonful things. Any party worker that uses nativefulspeak is a doubleplus crimethinker. We must work plus speedful to make a newspeak for the good of Ingsoc. Brother Silaron is a doubleplus goodthinker.
I'm waiting for my letter from Hasbro myself -- I have a shareware A*teroids-like game that I've been selling for eight years. Registrations are now down to a trickle, but what can I do if threatened? I'm not going to risk all of my personal belongings in a crusade for the good of gaming.
Unfortunately, Hasbro has a good chance of winning if it ever goes to court. The outcomes of "look-and-feel" cases are unpredictable -- it centers around what is "idea" and what is "expression". Ideas can only be protected under patent or trade secret, and "expression" is what is implicitly covered by copyright. (A comprehensive overview of these issues can be found here.)
Legalities aside, my gut tells me this is a very bad omen. The arts (of which I propose game development is a part) thrive through imitation. Would we be better off if no more gangster movies had been made after "The Godfather"? Or if Homer's estate was still around to sue George Lucas for plagarism?
I say munching dots and shooting rocks are ideas, and we should hack on these ideas until there is nothing left, and the best possible dot-munching and rock-shooting games have been made.
I remember Channel 1 ... it was horrible going to school at 7 AM and immediately being bombarded by peppy anchorpeople and loud fruit-roll-up commercials. The worst part is that you had no choice -- you had to watch. I say kids are marketed to enough via other media outlets, let's leave schools out of the marketing loop and preserve what little attention span sleepy teenagers have during the day.
It doesn't matter. If you live in a society industrialized enough to allow you the leisure time to type that post, you are already polluting the environment 10,000% more than you should be.
;-)
You capitalist pig.
My advice: Strip naked and tie yourself to a tree, thus preventing yourself from wearing leather, stepping on fragile grass stems, buying Windows 2K, and other horrible activities. (Remember the old Bloom County cartoon -- "Hold it! We're breathing and massacring countless germs!"
I found an article in Salon that might be interesting to reproachful SFO implants.
Why can't we just set their orbital manuvering thrusters to full blast and let them escape the solar system? Then they might run into a super-intelligent race of machines (shades of V'ger) that would give them intelligence, VC funding, and a killer management team, each of which has interviewed for Wired. They'd come back to Earth, launch a killer IPO and make the $6 bil investment back, in spades. They'd probably also merge with Paul Allen and turn into a pure-energy transcendant being.
They should make it so that you can't submit your own artwork. It's too open-ended that way -- contributors are concentrating more on wacky pictures than on good jokes.
That, and some moderators -- unless you're trying to entertain 6-year olds...
What sort of message is Abit sending? Are they too lazy to issue patch files and READMEs? Or is their hardware so nonstandard that they need an entire distro to address all the issues?
My guess is that it's neither, it's just a marketing gimmick. These hardware vendors press a CD anyway for their drivers which should fit on a floppy. So what can we fill up the rest of the space with, hmm... slideshows, game demos? Wait... how 'bout LINUX! It'll show up in all the press release keyword searches!
What if every hardware company follows this lead? Will we need to import the entire source tree for each company's Linux distro into CVS, and hope the 'merge' command makes everything OK? I hope it doesn't come to this.
Lightweight, embeddable languages have been getting a lot of attention recently, especially for their use in computer games like Quake & Unreal. What's your opinion on the current state of scripting languages and how they complement C++? Would you like to see an interpreted or bytecode-compiled version of C++?
I think farmers ought to open-source their crops. I mean, what's with all this archaic "market price" business model, and the propietary use of individual plots of land? They must not get it.
With this, Amazon's annoying patent vigilance, and Toys-R-Us's incompetent shipping department, I don't know where to get Episode I Legos for my nephew!!
Hmmm... I would have thought that scientists would have discovered bad traffic, high state taxes, and strip malls by now ;-)
Why aren't there any more Einsteins at the patent office making sure that crazy stuff like this doesn't get passed? Put this patent in a room full of competent web engineers and ask them if it is an obvious idea. The answer would be an immediate and emphatic "yes".
... they're all in Silicon Valley or similar places making tons of cash off of patent-writing web startups ;-)
So where are these people? Ah
One of the less-tractible problems with Linux as a web platform is not the quality of its browsers -- it is the hordes of VC-funded companies trying desparately to push their IPO out the door before the carcass of the Internet is picked clean. They are constantly creating technologies that support only the platforms with market share (Microsoft) and don't give two squats about the runners-up.
Witness all the new sites that do fun stuff like give you a Windows-mountable networked drive, synchronize your bookmarks with a little app in the toolbar, the prolitferating Windows media forms, the fun 3D stuff... it's no longer just about the browser; it's about the platform, and it's just hard for a lot of part-time coders to keep up with glory-crazed propietary-technology-creating corporations.
IMHO we had a chance with Java, and it failed us, for purely technical reasons. Too slow, too flaky, too ugly, too late. Folks went back to MFC and the Win32 API, and accepted the 5% loss of market-share by not supporting "fringe" platforms.
The solution? Get Linux on more desktops, get it looking more like a Mac (another runner-up), and hope it works out before Microsoft starts incorporating technologies like wallets in their OS. Oops...
For all the bitching and moaning, I haven't yet seen a post that mentions this link:
League for Programming Freedom
Funny, they used to be at lpr.org, but now "Students for Unity" is there ... does LPR have funding issues, or are they just charitable?
Anyway, this site explains in detail what is wrong with patents and what we can do about it. They are even old-school enough to use .xbm's just to prove a point ;-)
I recently installed FreeBSD 3.3 on a cheap Compaq I got from uBid. I am now happily using it as my main desktop box. The ports collection is awesome.
Netscape 4.61 for Linux runs very well (meaning it only seg faults every few hours); JDK 1.2 runs well, even with the JIT; and I've heard reports of even Oracle working on FreeBSD (?)
I still run both Linux and FreeBSD for different reasons. I have an old box with an ISA card that makes FreeBSD cough a lung serving NFS (this is a documented bug), so I installed RedHat 6.x and struggled with its experimental kernel NFS instead. Choose your poison!
This might seem drastic, capitalistic, and just plain wrong -- but how about raising the cost of a .com to $300/yr or more? After all, .com's addresses are meant for businesses, most of which would not blink at paying several thousand dollars for a property which is vital to their future -- as the market has shown. Leave .org's and .edu's alone, of course.
.com's are the haves, the .org's are the have-nots -- but come on! Keeping the current cost of registration is like minting a C-note and selling it for a dollar.
Sure, we then get away from the idea of equality -- the