I think someone's already mentioned how much web apps can cost to build, but do you have any idea what it takes to build a storage system to actually HOLD those mp3's?
Companies don't just go out and buy the lastest whiz-bang commodity 500G ultragib storageplus sata drive or something. To hold thousands to hundreds of thousands of mp3's in such a way that there's no single point of failure costs alot of money. You're talking hugeass raid arrays. Redundant power supplies. Power backups. Backup power backups. Backup servers. That costs hugeass amounts of money.
Then you have the expenditure of maintaining it, keeping it up to date, etc. Technology isn't static. Failed hardware doesn't replace itself. Redundancy drives the total price up.
In short: Throwing up some amateur site running on a LAMP setup admin'd by almost clueless people running cheap, 4 year old commodity hardware is fine. When you start charging people for it, you BETTER be able to guarantee it stays up, or be prepared to face the full wrath of scorned customers. (People downloading music AND the artists putting the music up)
That said, I think $0.25 isn't that bad. I think if you modeled it correctly, you could make a ton of money off it. You'd have to crunch the numbers, though. Remember, iTunes actually started out as a way to push iPod and other Apple product sales. So their numbers aren't necessarily for self-sufficiency of the iTMS itself, although its likely they are by now.
You know, I used to think the movie industry was just slow. I mean, noone really enjoys those incredibly crappy handheld cam recordings of movies complete with people making noise, babies crying, and people getting up to goto the bathroom/consession stands midway through.
I think they're going totally in the wrong direction. They need to fling $30m at creating a online distribution model that doesn't cost an arm and a leg. That would stop online piracy. I mean, why spend 2-12 hours download the latest harry potter movie only to find out its a cam rip or its the latest "lebian space vixens" porn movie when you can download it for a buck or two?
I honestly hope this goes nowhere. And I hope they throw more money at pissing people off. Already since the first round of lawsuits I've stopped renting, buying and going to movie theatres. They need to get a clue. People downloading crap off the 'net would likely pay a small sum to download non-crap off the 'net, ala iTunes.
Something needs to be done. Even with the source, half the time I have to make all sorts of include changes. What is so hard about providing a common build and install process? If you get Apache, OpenOffice, and Mozilla to adopt a convention, everything else will follow.
I think you're pointing the finger at the wrong entity. the configure/makefile stuffs that the vast majority of the packages use actually works. Granted, as a BSD user I usually end up having to install crap like automake/autoconf/gmake, etc, but still. The real issue is that EACH DISTRO wants to do things differently enough that its really not possible to create something to "just install" unless you want either binary packages being flung in specific locations or the developer has to spend a gadzillion hours making sure that their scripts properly autodetect what all's changed in your distro.
What needs to happen is *Linux* needs to get off its collective arse and create a standardized base system so that people writing apps don't have to worry about the differences between distro 1 and distro 2, they know that the system libs they want are always in the correct relative place, ie #include Net/DoitNow.h, and that DoitNow.h is basically the same on distro 1 that it is on distro 2.
That's not to say that every distro should be the same. Variety is the spice of life. But if you use more than your favorite distro (and distros its directly based off of), you'll realize that the whole linux userland idea is fubar'd. Its completely impossible to expect anything at all from it other than everything'll be different.
I think the reasons above is pretty much WHY when non linux geeks think of linux, they tend to think of Redhat and to a lesser extent SuSE and Debian.
You don't find it to be a truely incredible coincidence that the spanish guys visited his data two days before making an announcement with ONLY three days worth of observation data? And then returned to the site afterwards and looked at the archival data only to release even MORE data that could've been taken from the site only days after looking at the site again?
In this case, you've got this: Someone at a certain ip looked at some data on the website. About 2-3 days later, someone using the *same* ip manages to make an announcement that just magically happens to match the kind of data they saw?
And then a few days later a different ip looks at even more data that wasn't looked at before, and then magically they release an update with even MORE data that just happens to match what they accessed.
THAT's not fishy? I don't know what would be. How 'bout if I wanted your pony, and you said no, and then you lose it, but I magically happen to aquire a pony that's remarkably like yours? Would you think I stole your pony?;)
I've been doing this for years, guys. Its called research. You look at what you want, "stuff to blow up cool". Then, you find out what blows stuff up cool. You go back a half a step or so where you're not being gouged by bleeding-edge prices, but the performance difference is close to negligable "Look! I only get 150fps instead of 190fps in ut2004 with everything turned on!".
I build ALL my gaming rigs for $1,000 or so. And they all rock. You just need to know where your bottlenecks are, and what you can do to fix them in a price-conscious way.
I also build servers using this. Never, ever, ever buy bleeding-edge. You're only getting screwed. In six months it'll be commodity hardware anyways.
I'm pretty sure I speak for most of us when I say that if I wanted to read stuff on gamespot religiously, I'd go over to gamespot and read it. When did/. turn into a rss aggregator for gamespot? Pretty crazy when 7 out of 10 or so of the stories are all from gamespot. wtf?
No they can't. They can go 0-15 in 'low' or 20-25 in 'high' gear. According to the manufacturer's specs. And the ones I've seen have never gone above 25.
Yea, there's a couple people in the town I live in that bought them and started driving them around. Needless to say they were driving the local populace (including me) absolutely nuts. They can only go 20-25mph or so.
Eventually the city council passed a local ordinance banning them from any street where the speed limit is greater than 25 mph. So they're actually quite useless for driving around town.
What GEM needs to do is make a model that can go 25-35 or so. Then they'd be recieved better by the communities that have to put up with them.
That's incredibly short sighted. It is a waste of time, but isn't any hobby? What did you do that weekend? Did you make any numbers bigger that would pay off your mortgage, or did you spend money that you could've otherwise used to pay off principle on it?
Your nephew spent all weekend playing WoW and getting from level 47 to 48 because the fun isn't with the number changing, but with the adventure and challenge that comes with it.
Remember, its not necessarily getting there that counts. Its how you get there and the adventure you have doing it.
Just a disclaimer. I actually use OO.o pretty much exclusively. The one HUGE HUGE HUGE HUGE problem I have with it is its seemingly lack of hotkeys for stuff.
In MS Office Excel, if I want to say change say the formatting of a cell or bunch of selected cells/rows/columns/etc I just hit alt-1, and a nice dialogue comes up with the formatting stuffs.
In OO.o, there doesn't seem to be any as of the 1.9.100 build. Which is billed as 2.x on the site, by the way.
1) The right to not be lied to/misled about the in-game quantities of items/npcs/monsters/etc.
I REALLY REALLY hate it when they say "contains over 300 superfabulous artifacts!" when really there's really only 20 base types, each with 15 different color schemes. Except the ultimate weapon, which bumps the total to 301. So you have "over 300".
2) The right to not be lied to as to events in the game.
Ever see those games that show a plethora of screenshots depicting a massive battle of orcs vs gnomes? Yea. That was likely either pre-rendered or it was the final battle in the game, which will render at 2fps on even the most bleeding-edge box two years hence.
I'm really tired of seeing beautiful vistas and breathtaking scenes, and all manner of awesomenesses only to find that they happen once. And you can never go there again. What the hell?
3) The right to not be misled by the game mechanics.
When I buy a game that says I can program my own robot ai, I don't expect that by "program" they mean "buy a robot" and by "ai" they mean "randomly does stuff". I won't name games, but imo there hasn't really been a 'program the ai' type game since carnage heart for the ps1. (talking about console games here). I also don't want to see "fully immersive non-linear game" when by "non-linear" they mean that you can choose between two heroes in the beginning. that's bs.
4) To not be lied to about the game length.
When a game says "40 hours" these days, I generally assume that they take into consideration putzing around, doing sidequests, getting uber-leet ultra weapons of mass vorpalization, maxxing out spells/skills/etc. They should instead tell me how many quests/goals I have. That's a more truthful representation even if its going to be twisted so that every npc chat is a 'goal' in the game.
5) To not need 5 patches before I can get to level 2.
Self-explainatory. QA should've picked up on this LOOOONG before the decision to 'go gold'. If they can't put out a beatable game, I'm not going to buy it.
There's more, but that generally sums up why more and more people are willing to 'pirate' and 'steal' games. Turnabout is fair play, no?
Maybe, but I highly doubt it as they're not discriminating against the person on the basis of their deformity but on shoeless/barefoot people in general.
All the grotesquely deformed person has to do is put a bag over their foot, and everything's good.:)
I hate to say this, but maybe you should use the windows boot loader. Its not hard to get it to boot linux, and then you don't have the issues of grub borking.
I actually had to do this recently on a company-issued laptop. Seems to work okay so far.
Electricity may not be a fuel in the conventional sense, but it IS a fuel. Also, there seems to be a horrid misconception that electric cars are 'clean'. Most of the energy in the US is generated from either non-renewable resources or pollution creating ones. So yes, cars still require 'fuel'. Just because it comes in kw/h instead of gallons or litres doesn't make them some sort of magical perpetual motion machines.
With all the talk about patents lately, I thought the title read "Watch Like Device for At-Risk Patents". Now that would be a novel idea. Something you could wear that would tell you if you're about to commit IP infringement.
all Linux/BSD distributions use their own mirror networks.
The first of which is usually the "official" server(s) for the package. So, you'd still see a substantial amount of downloads from linux/bsd users. Unless of course, your distro/whatever actually has their own package repository and refers users to that first. Then the Firefox people wouldn't see any downloads from them. But in my experience that's extremely rare.
I actually do the same for my network. There are a few customers who pay for their own public ip/blocks, but the vast majority are on the 192.168/16 or 10/8 ip blocks (I use the 172.16/12 block for other things). Also, just using squid and setting it up as a transparent proxy then telling it to reject certain size httpd requests and such can really cut down on the availability of port 80 exploits. For port 25.. That really shouldn't be allowed incoming/outgoing except to the ISP's servers.
SMTP is probably where the majority of the issues actually stem from. Admins seem to not know or be apathetic towards properly setting them up. Just doing something as simple as pushing stuff through clamav and/or using some simple filters will catch the majority of the cruft that seems to like to infect windows boxes.. Its really kind of sad when you think about it.
Doesn't every ISP already have the typical windows ports blocked already?
I mean, in every one of my routers I block 135-139,445 TCP/UDP. (Yes, I know, there's one or two that aren't windows specific, but its easier on the FW rules considering its exceedingly rare for any legitimate traffic to go over the 'net on 'em)
Maybe the yellow alert is warrented, but imo its jumping the gun. And to those network admins who haven't gotten the hint yet and blocked those ports, DO IT NOW! Thanks. Oh, and while we're at it, make some decent anti-spoofing filters too, huh? Only things that should be leaving your network are *your* ips, and conversely the only things entering should *not* be yours. Lets all work together to make a better 'net huh?:)
1) depends on your video card. I do believe that nvidia does release drivers every 6 months, and I could've swore I heard that the newer radeons just got supported as well.
CO2 (and a LOT of other greenhouse gases, btw) aren't 'organic'. You're thinking of things like methane which are typically formed by biological organisms.
It wouldn't really work unless the webpage/site is already friggin huge. Mostly because to be of any use you first have to download the torrent. Over HTTP. And then unpack it, get a list of the peers, start trying to connect to them, hash out who has what and who's going to give you what and who you're going to give what. And then the transfer starts. And maybe one of the peers dies, so you have to go grab that chunk from someone else. After going through the last few steps a couple times, you're done!
But really, all those small bits of latency add up very quickly. The only way you could reduce it would be to in parallel try to grab the same chunk multiple times from multiple peers. In essence, you'd likely vastly multiply the amount of bandwidth, memmory and CPU usage this will take. (Take that all you "we have enough (cpu|bandwidth|memory|hdspace) so stop giving us more" people!)
Realistically, BT is really only usable for file transfers of any significant size.
What IS feasible is a distributed caching system like Akamai's. I don't even pretend to have a clue how their stuff works, but I'd imagine something like that would be much much better than any BT-derived solution.
"Abandonware" isn't free anymore than warezed games are (which is basically what the vast majority of that abandonware is, old warez). I think the jist of the submission were games that were actually free. As in released into the public domain, or have some sort of 'free' license associated with it.
Here's an idea. Just take the FreeBSD codebase, write a little sed script to add the GPL license to everything, and call it.. GPLBSD!
You can actually do that too. Because you can do anything with the code you want, all you need to do is make sure that the copyright info is displayed somewhere.
Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met: 1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright
notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer. 2. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright
notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the
documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
I'm actually half tempted to do this myself to just shut up everyone who only uses Linux because its GPL'd. You CAN GPL BSD-licensed code. As long as you obey those two little clauses, you can do anything whatsoever you want to it and noone will try to stop you.
Slashdot Mirror
I think someone's already mentioned how much web apps can cost to build, but do you have any idea what it takes to build a storage system to actually HOLD those mp3's?
Companies don't just go out and buy the lastest whiz-bang commodity 500G ultragib storageplus sata drive or something. To hold thousands to hundreds of thousands of mp3's in such a way that there's no single point of failure costs alot of money. You're talking hugeass raid arrays. Redundant power supplies. Power backups. Backup power backups. Backup servers. That costs hugeass amounts of money.
Then you have the expenditure of maintaining it, keeping it up to date, etc. Technology isn't static. Failed hardware doesn't replace itself. Redundancy drives the total price up.
In short: Throwing up some amateur site running on a LAMP setup admin'd by almost clueless people running cheap, 4 year old commodity hardware is fine. When you start charging people for it, you BETTER be able to guarantee it stays up, or be prepared to face the full wrath of scorned customers. (People downloading music AND the artists putting the music up)
That said, I think $0.25 isn't that bad. I think if you modeled it correctly, you could make a ton of money off it. You'd have to crunch the numbers, though. Remember, iTunes actually started out as a way to push iPod and other Apple product sales. So their numbers aren't necessarily for self-sufficiency of the iTMS itself, although its likely they are by now.
You know, I used to think the movie industry was just slow. I mean, noone really enjoys those incredibly crappy handheld cam recordings of movies complete with people making noise, babies crying, and people getting up to goto the bathroom/consession stands midway through.
I think they're going totally in the wrong direction. They need to fling $30m at creating a online distribution model that doesn't cost an arm and a leg. That would stop online piracy. I mean, why spend 2-12 hours download the latest harry potter movie only to find out its a cam rip or its the latest "lebian space vixens" porn movie when you can download it for a buck or two?
I honestly hope this goes nowhere. And I hope they throw more money at pissing people off. Already since the first round of lawsuits I've stopped renting, buying and going to movie theatres. They need to get a clue. People downloading crap off the 'net would likely pay a small sum to download non-crap off the 'net, ala iTunes.
Something needs to be done. Even with the source, half the time I have to make all sorts of include changes. What is so hard about providing a common build and install process? If you get Apache, OpenOffice, and Mozilla to adopt a convention, everything else will follow.
I think you're pointing the finger at the wrong entity. the configure/makefile stuffs that the vast majority of the packages use actually works. Granted, as a BSD user I usually end up having to install crap like automake/autoconf/gmake, etc, but still. The real issue is that EACH DISTRO wants to do things differently enough that its really not possible to create something to "just install" unless you want either binary packages being flung in specific locations or the developer has to spend a gadzillion hours making sure that their scripts properly autodetect what all's changed in your distro.
What needs to happen is *Linux* needs to get off its collective arse and create a standardized base system so that people writing apps don't have to worry about the differences between distro 1 and distro 2, they know that the system libs they want are always in the correct relative place, ie #include Net/DoitNow.h, and that DoitNow.h is basically the same on distro 1 that it is on distro 2.
That's not to say that every distro should be the same. Variety is the spice of life. But if you use more than your favorite distro (and distros its directly based off of), you'll realize that the whole linux userland idea is fubar'd. Its completely impossible to expect anything at all from it other than everything'll be different.
I think the reasons above is pretty much WHY when non linux geeks think of linux, they tend to think of Redhat and to a lesser extent SuSE and Debian.
You don't find it to be a truely incredible coincidence that the spanish guys visited his data two days before making an announcement with ONLY three days worth of observation data? And then returned to the site afterwards and looked at the archival data only to release even MORE data that could've been taken from the site only days after looking at the site again?
;)
In this case, you've got this: Someone at a certain ip looked at some data on the website. About 2-3 days later, someone using the *same* ip manages to make an announcement that just magically happens to match the kind of data they saw?
And then a few days later a different ip looks at even more data that wasn't looked at before, and then magically they release an update with even MORE data that just happens to match what they accessed.
THAT's not fishy? I don't know what would be. How 'bout if I wanted your pony, and you said no, and then you lose it, but I magically happen to aquire a pony that's remarkably like yours? Would you think I stole your pony?
I've been doing this for years, guys. Its called research. You look at what you want, "stuff to blow up cool". Then, you find out what blows stuff up cool. You go back a half a step or so where you're not being gouged by bleeding-edge prices, but the performance difference is close to negligable "Look! I only get 150fps instead of 190fps in ut2004 with everything turned on!".
I build ALL my gaming rigs for $1,000 or so. And they all rock. You just need to know where your bottlenecks are, and what you can do to fix them in a price-conscious way.
I also build servers using this. Never, ever, ever buy bleeding-edge. You're only getting screwed. In six months it'll be commodity hardware anyways.
I'm pretty sure I speak for most of us when I say that if I wanted to read stuff on gamespot religiously, I'd go over to gamespot and read it. When did
No they can't. They can go 0-15 in 'low' or 20-25 in 'high' gear. According to the manufacturer's specs. And the ones I've seen have never gone above 25.
Yea, there's a couple people in the town I live in that bought them and started driving them around. Needless to say they were driving the local populace (including me) absolutely nuts. They can only go 20-25mph or so.
Eventually the city council passed a local ordinance banning them from any street where the speed limit is greater than 25 mph. So they're actually quite useless for driving around town.
What GEM needs to do is make a model that can go 25-35 or so. Then they'd be recieved better by the communities that have to put up with them.
That's incredibly short sighted. It is a waste of time, but isn't any hobby? What did you do that weekend? Did you make any numbers bigger that would pay off your mortgage, or did you spend money that you could've otherwise used to pay off principle on it?
Your nephew spent all weekend playing WoW and getting from level 47 to 48 because the fun isn't with the number changing, but with the adventure and challenge that comes with it.
Remember, its not necessarily getting there that counts. Its how you get there and the adventure you have doing it.
Just a disclaimer. I actually use OO.o pretty much exclusively. The one HUGE HUGE HUGE HUGE problem I have with it is its seemingly lack of hotkeys for stuff.
In MS Office Excel, if I want to say change say the formatting of a cell or bunch of selected cells/rows/columns/etc I just hit alt-1, and a nice dialogue comes up with the formatting stuffs.
In OO.o, there doesn't seem to be any as of the 1.9.100 build. Which is billed as 2.x on the site, by the way.
Just a helpful hint to convert MSO users to OO.o:
Hotkeys.
Elshar
1) The right to not be lied to/misled about the in-game quantities of items/npcs/monsters/etc.
I REALLY REALLY hate it when they say "contains over 300 superfabulous artifacts!" when really there's really only 20 base types, each with 15 different color schemes. Except the ultimate weapon, which bumps the total to 301. So you have "over 300".
2) The right to not be lied to as to events in the game.
Ever see those games that show a plethora of screenshots depicting a massive battle of orcs vs gnomes? Yea. That was likely either pre-rendered or it was the final battle in the game, which will render at 2fps on even the most bleeding-edge box two years hence.
I'm really tired of seeing beautiful vistas and breathtaking scenes, and all manner of awesomenesses only to find that they happen once. And you can never go there again. What the hell?
3) The right to not be misled by the game mechanics.
When I buy a game that says I can program my own robot ai, I don't expect that by "program" they mean "buy a robot" and by "ai" they mean "randomly does stuff". I won't name games, but imo there hasn't really been a 'program the ai' type game since carnage heart for the ps1. (talking about console games here). I also don't want to see "fully immersive non-linear game" when by "non-linear" they mean that you can choose between two heroes in the beginning. that's bs.
4) To not be lied to about the game length.
When a game says "40 hours" these days, I generally assume that they take into consideration putzing around, doing sidequests, getting uber-leet ultra weapons of mass vorpalization, maxxing out spells/skills/etc. They should instead tell me how many quests/goals I have. That's a more truthful representation even if its going to be twisted so that every npc chat is a 'goal' in the game.
5) To not need 5 patches before I can get to level 2.
Self-explainatory. QA should've picked up on this LOOOONG before the decision to 'go gold'. If they can't put out a beatable game, I'm not going to buy it.
There's more, but that generally sums up why more and more people are willing to 'pirate' and 'steal' games. Turnabout is fair play, no?
Maybe, but I highly doubt it as they're not discriminating against the person on the basis of their deformity but on shoeless/barefoot people in general.
All the grotesquely deformed person has to do is put a bag over their foot, and everything's good.
I hate to say this, but maybe you should use the windows boot loader. Its not hard to get it to boot linux, and then you don't have the issues of grub borking.
I actually had to do this recently on a company-issued laptop. Seems to work okay so far.
Electricity may not be a fuel in the conventional sense, but it IS a fuel. Also, there seems to be a horrid misconception that electric cars are 'clean'. Most of the energy in the US is generated from either non-renewable resources or pollution creating ones. So yes, cars still require 'fuel'. Just because it comes in kw/h instead of gallons or litres doesn't make them some sort of magical perpetual motion machines.
Good try though.
Oh, and for the curious:
http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/aer/txt/ptb0102.html
With all the talk about patents lately, I thought the title read "Watch Like Device for At-Risk Patents". Now that would be a novel idea. Something you could wear that would tell you if you're about to commit IP infringement.
The first of which is usually the "official" server(s) for the package. So, you'd still see a substantial amount of downloads from linux/bsd users. Unless of course, your distro/whatever actually has their own package repository and refers users to that first. Then the Firefox people wouldn't see any downloads from them. But in my experience that's extremely rare.
I actually do the same for my network. There are a few customers who pay for their own public ip/blocks, but the vast majority are on the 192.168/16 or 10/8 ip blocks (I use the 172.16/12 block for other things). Also, just using squid and setting it up as a transparent proxy then telling it to reject certain size httpd requests and such can really cut down on the availability of port 80 exploits. For port 25.. That really shouldn't be allowed incoming/outgoing except to the ISP's servers.
SMTP is probably where the majority of the issues actually stem from. Admins seem to not know or be apathetic towards properly setting them up. Just doing something as simple as pushing stuff through clamav and/or using some simple filters will catch the majority of the cruft that seems to like to infect windows boxes.. Its really kind of sad when you think about it.
Doesn't every ISP already have the typical windows ports blocked already?
I mean, in every one of my routers I block 135-139,445 TCP/UDP. (Yes, I know, there's one or two that aren't windows specific, but its easier on the FW rules considering its exceedingly rare for any legitimate traffic to go over the 'net on 'em)
Maybe the yellow alert is warrented, but imo its jumping the gun. And to those network admins who haven't gotten the hint yet and blocked those ports, DO IT NOW! Thanks. Oh, and while we're at it, make some decent anti-spoofing filters too, huh? Only things that should be leaving your network are *your* ips, and conversely the only things entering should *not* be yours. Lets all work together to make a better 'net huh?
No, noone is going to convince you. This isn't a sales pitch. (Why was that moded interesting? Its not).
Also, BSD is NOT linux. Read for yourself what they do. Here they are.
http://www.freebsd.org/
http://www.openbsd.org/
http://www.netbsd.org/
1) depends on your video card. I do believe that nvidia does release drivers every 6 months, and I could've swore I heard that the newer radeons just got supported as well.
2) pkg_add -r
CO2 (and a LOT of other greenhouse gases, btw) aren't 'organic'. You're thinking of things like methane which are typically formed by biological organisms.
It wouldn't really work unless the webpage/site is already friggin huge. Mostly because to be of any use you first have to download the torrent. Over HTTP. And then unpack it, get a list of the peers, start trying to connect to them, hash out who has what and who's going to give you what and who you're going to give what. And then the transfer starts. And maybe one of the peers dies, so you have to go grab that chunk from someone else. After going through the last few steps a couple times, you're done!
But really, all those small bits of latency add up very quickly. The only way you could reduce it would be to in parallel try to grab the same chunk multiple times from multiple peers. In essence, you'd likely vastly multiply the amount of bandwidth, memmory and CPU usage this will take. (Take that all you "we have enough (cpu|bandwidth|memory|hdspace) so stop giving us more" people!)
Realistically, BT is really only usable for file transfers of any significant size.
What IS feasible is a distributed caching system like Akamai's. I don't even pretend to have a clue how their stuff works, but I'd imagine something like that would be much much better than any BT-derived solution.
That's just my $0.02
Sure they did. They targetted the geeky /. community and their desire to have cool geeky stuff noone else would care about. :D
"Abandonware" isn't free anymore than warezed games are (which is basically what the vast majority of that abandonware is, old warez). I think the jist of the submission were games that were actually free. As in released into the public domain, or have some sort of 'free' license associated with it.
Abandonware isn't 'free'. Its warez.
You can actually do that too. Because you can do anything with the code you want, all you need to do is make sure that the copyright info is displayed somewhere.
Taken from: BSD License
I'm actually half tempted to do this myself to just shut up everyone who only uses Linux because its GPL'd. You CAN GPL BSD-licensed code. As long as you obey those two little clauses, you can do anything whatsoever you want to it and noone will try to stop you.