The Wikipedia says it's free, and even provides a link to download the full game.
Not anymore, the link, that is. =) (I removed it on grounds that Wikipedia is not an abandonware guide, and it was a misplaced external link anyway.)
I don't see where the article says it's free to download, though. The article has stated the following for quite a while now:
Sierra released Betrayal at Krondor free of charge in 1997 to promote the game Betrayal in Antara. Contrary to popular belief, Vivendi Universal Games has stated that the game is not free to be redistributed by others.
Yeah, I remember that very well. I was always intending to check out Betrayal of Krondor, but I never got around to it. I had read Feist's book up to that point as well.
Hardcover edition of Krondor: the Betrayal came with a copy of Betrayal at Krondor. At least back when it was new. Don't know if it still does. (Not the best possible version since it didn't have CD audio tracks - though in my particular variant of the budget edition they even managed to mess those up - but it did have something the other versions didn't have: Feist's interview.)
And they apparently still sell the game for a few pennies, um, somewhere. I think Home of the Underdogs had the link to a site that sells it. Or try eBay.
It's a wonderful game, got me introduced to Feist's worlds and I think it's just about the greatest PC RPG ever made right after Ultima series. Really shame it's not freeware anymore.
Could someone please bring us some sanity to the command line, please???
The following might sound like a troll. It isn't. I love mencoder because it's just about the only video capture app that happens to even remotely work on my particular situation, and only modern video capture app I've seen, too - can do weird and obscure new things like V4L2 and ALSA, and its home page doesn't say "Updates coming next week! (last updated: Dec 2002)".
It's just it's command line syntax I have a slight problem with.
As a transcoding application, it's probably fine, but as a TV recording app, it just isn't that great because in order to do some even rudimentary capturing you need to specify a lot and a LOT of parameters. It would be nice to have a bunch of profile files, so that I could say "mencoder -conf big_mpeg4.conf -o randomgamecubing.avi" to capture full-screen MPEG4 and "mencoder -conf tiny_xvid.conf randomtvcrap.avi" to encode some 352x288 XviD?
The current solution is actually one of the most annoying solutions I've done so far - writing a shell script to handle that. Then, as in case of most shell scripts, it turned into a Ruby script. And then... ummmm... can anyone say if this piece of junk is, in any way, better than a configuration file? I don't think so myself.
Holy damn, if we don't get configuration files to mencoder, I may need to rewrite this thing in Common Lisp, and I assure that at that point, no one's going to have fun!
"...we shall fight in the <iframe>s, we shall fight in the <object>s, we shall fight in the <script> tags and in the Flash files, we shall fight around the window.open(); we shall never surrender..."
My small crystallization of the whole word processing: You write text. Computer formats it.
If you want the computer to not mess up your formatting, you've got to think like a machine and understand the structure of the formatting. Humans, by default, only care about superficial formatting: "this is in wrong place, let's move it a bit." Computer sees a bunch of formatting instructions.
The biggest problem with WYSIWYG word processing is... well, basically the exact same problem with WYSIWYG HTML editors: You think you have the utter and ultimate control over the presentation, while you actually don't have that luxury. You merely have real-time response to the formatting decisions. Some other day (and in some other version of the program), the formatting decisions the program makes will be different. When using word processor, you have to stop thinking about the formatting and just let it do the thing for you.
Word processing and typesetting are separate tasks. If you don't understand that, and do typesetting decisions while you're doing word processing, you end up in a completely wrong place.
You have to assume your tab key doesn't know damn where to align the text - if you're submitting text for publication somewhere, it's likely to go completely wrong anyway. You have to not rely on spaces being always "space" width at all. (I export my OO.o docs to HTML which gets converted to LaTeX for PDF generation. HTML doesn't care damn about extraneous whitespace. Neither really does LaTeX.)
If you want to preserve formatting instructions at all, OpenOffice.org's style system is your bestest friend ever. You can't produce robust formatting without that thing, so learn it and learn it well.
Well, the article mentions how it really happened - Microsoft designed a thing and kept quiet about it, then when people caught wind of that, they tried to cover it up, then acknowledged they made it but it wasn't really all that big or serious.
The only big question is why it made to the list - Microsoft has a lot of smart people that come up with a lot of good ideas, and they probably have to reject unmarketable, potentially ridiculous ideas like this from their own staff every day (along with other improbable ideas like "let's support OpenDocument" =).
If you are bitching about opening only a single file in your entire program, then deal with all the 30 extra keystrokes you'll have to type. If you find yourself opening files as buffered streams all over the place, then be a smart programmer and create a subroutine to handle opening of files.
Once upon a time, there was a country of Fictivia. They were known for their military might.
Imagine a really good-looking fighter airplane, Alkaline Tactical Fighter 50, the new pride and joy of FAF (Fictivian Air Force). Really streamlined, can go Mach 20 and do loops all over the place and the pilot won't even blink. Marvel of technological ingenuity.
Then, next year, comes a new radar system. The thing is, the plane was never designed to be extensible. None of the FAF's planes are designed to be extensible; they're not even compatible with FAF's own stuff. All planes have only their own, custom design parts, designed only for those specific planes.
FAF's engineers have no choice but to bolt the new system just behind the cockpit. On the outside. It looks really ugly in the airshows, but to surprise of everyone, the plane still flies at mach 20. The reason for that is that for this particular radar model, they this nice, aerodynamic compartment. They just have to make these in mass production, and slightly redesign them for all models of the planes. No problem at all. It's just that there's a lot of suppliers for these parts and they all seem to do the bits a bit differently, that's all.
The country of Fictivia has a neighboring country and military ally, Dramatia.
Dramatian Air Force Technology Center (DAFTCEN) solved this problem by having a modular design for all of their stuff. Their new plane, Gemdust Interceptor 180, is fully modular. The module system, CANARD, is interesting in that it doesn't matter if there's a module plugged in or not; the system will notice if something is missing and works around it. It will also not care what the module really is, as long as it can respond to certain inputs in a certain way. Not that anyone would want to plug in anything but the supplied modules, they're well designed anyway. New radar system? Just plug it in.
That's basically the difference between Java and Ruby.
it is free from complexity (OpenOffice looks and works like Microsoft Office)
Ummmm... what? This is a bit bad example. I've been using word processors since WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS was shit hot. I sat in front of StarOffice back in day (version 4, I think) and the only thing that puzzled me - for mere couple of minutes, tops! - was the weird desktop thing (which was removed in OpenOffice.org; trust me, if you've only used OO.o, do yourself a favor and never learn what contraption this sad piece of history was). If you've used one word processor, you know how to use them all, and changing from one word processor to another is never going to be painful at all. At least not after the first week.
OpenOffice.org Writer doesn't look and work like Word, that's true. Instead, it looks and works like any other word processing program.
All I'm saying is OO.o is not the archetypical awful open source GUI thing. It's not confusing people. I've seen quite a few people who aren't very technical and have switched to AbiWord and OpenOffice.org Writer, and not looked back.
Now MythTV, on the other hand - if you really need to look at the documentation to watch TV...
Why do none of your other language examples have an explicit buffer layer? You should add that, then see what the result is:P
Ruby now: in = File.open('foo.in')
Ruby after adding the buffering layer: in = File.open_buffered('foo.in')
You see, Ruby, being a dynamic language, has extensible classes. You can add new operations and features to existing classes. In Java, if you want a new way of reading stuff, you make a new class to do that, like a BufferedReader, then demand that class to be used in all situations anyway, because you never integrate the core features to the existing classes.
In a sane Java environment, you'd have a File f and you could ask for reader = f.getBufferedReader(); or whatever. But you can't. That would imply that File class would have to be somehow aware of the existence of BufferedReader, right? In dynamic languages, you could do this dynamically. In Java, you have to program it in the core API. It's doable. Yet they refuse to implement this, because you don't need these syntactic shortcuts to survive, and not specifying any specific relations is more flexible and more to the spirit of object orientation, right? People are opening BufferedReaders by hand all the time!...yet few people remember the frigging syntax by heart.
For my money, Sneakers was probably the best computer geek movie.
Agreed on that one. =)
At least until someone makes Cryptonomicon into a movie (on second thought, as much as I liked that book I think the movie would probably suck)
A movie would suck. We're talking about a real doorstopper here, those things don't turn into movies that easily. In any case, one day, I just figured out that if they made a TV series (a longish one at that?), Cryptonomicon would be just perfect for that.
For bulk of my bookmarks, I probably want to keep them in ma.gnolia. That's for "filed" bookmarks that I use a bit less frequently. But there's little reason to use net bookmark service for some things that you use really frequently; I much rather have Slashdot, Wikipedia, Bloglines, GMail, etc on my bookmarks toolbar where I can access them easily.
Nothing, really, just that it's harder to parse. Just that now, you need to fire up your XML parser if you want to extract information out of it. In SQLite, you can bind to it and do a SELECT whatever FROM bookmarks WHERE...; and don't need to parse anything. Just like all SQL queries.
Another thing is that there's a big handful of file formats used to store configuration data. Bookmarks XML isn't used in any other situation, and in addition to that the profile directory has various plain text formats, Mork, BerkleyDB, RDF, JavaScript...
I guess you need to file a feature request that asks bookmarks to be shown at startup... though I guess they will be thinking of that anyway =)
Basically, in Netscape 4, bookmarks were stored in a quasi-HTML file, and history in a DB file.
In Mozilla, bookmarks are stored in a XML-that-almost-look-like-HTML format, while the history is stored in the most insane file format ever devised by mortal mind. It's called MORK. Remember that name. Remember it well. (Seriously, take a look at your history.db. It's a text file. It really is. Or it might look like one from a good distance.)
While in the new grand concept, everything is stored in a SQLite database - simple, well tested, portable, efficient, doesn't make Firefox much bigger than it already is, and above all, programmer-friendly file format that isn't causing peoples' brains to ooze out of their ears when they try to figure it out.
Wouldn't it be far more daredevil-ish to use a browser that ISN'T Firefox???
They said "daredevil", not "suicidal". Using IE is just like going mountain-climbing with a bit of packaging string from 1800s instead of a really good rope.
If you use Firefox, you can go to all sorts of dangerous places and the only worry you have is that your computer is broadcasting it's IP address. While if you try to use IE to do these tricks, you die.
Just imagine if they opened up the source for Word Perfect 5.1 for DOS.
Oh, boy, that would have been really cool. One of the greatest word processing programs. Ever.
For word processing, of course. Not particularly a good program for lame attempts at doing DTP, even if it had rudimentary support for that too.
Somewhere along the way, people forgot that, ultimately, word processing and typesetting are separate tasks, and if you really look at the current contenders, they're not really good at either...
Linux does adhere to the POSIX standard. Linus has seen the specification, I hear. RMS has seen the specification and liked it so much that, in throes of passion, named one environment variable POSIX_ME_HARDER. The kernel and the GNU C library and userstuff both implement what's a reasonable user environment, with a specific POSIX compliance mode (POSIXLY_CORRECT, the latter spelling of the aforementioned variable) for things that don't really make much sense from user perspective but the standards want them.
Now here's one catch that the pushers of "open" (open as in "The Open Group", not open as in "Open Source") standards tend to do: The specs are free (or at least available if you show the standards body some money), everyone's free to implement the thing, but the real money sink are the conformance testing and trademark use rights (which usually imply the conformance has been taken care of). Ask anyone who has tried to implement Java! POSIX and Unix system specifications are the same.
And as pointed out, the POSIX certification of at least one Linux distribution has been taken care of, which means that if you really care about the standards adherence, you can get yours tested too and it will likely pass just fine.
And Microsoft's approach to POSIX is a bit different: They only implemented what's absolutely necessary and don't have any ambitions of going beyond that. Just sitting in front of a WinXP system without knowing anything beyond "yes, Windows does POSIX" would get me a rude surprise. "Where's my Bourne shell?" "Well, actually we only implemented the bare-minimum POSIX C API" "All right, where's my frigging C compiler?" "Er..." You need to Download Something to get any real work done.
Bring back Betrayal at Krondor!
on
Abandoned Games
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
This doesn't concern me personally. I have three legit store-bought copies of the game already.
But why oh why oh why did the folks at Vivendi "We put the 'Battle' in Bnetd" Universal decide to pull (well, rather, not re-arrange the redistribution) the Betrayal at Krondor from freeware? It's a wonderful game, one of the greatest RPGs ever made for PC. And there it sits, dusty, once again doomed to be "abandonware". I may sound a bit silly when babbling about the mythical Golden Era when people could download the game, legally and all, from Sierra. But it is a nice game. *sigh*
3D Game Construction Kit doesn't exist because the dynamics of a 3D game are so HUGE.
1) Blender is a "click and point and voila, you have a 3D game" thing. =)
2) There was, in fact, a 3D Construction Kit for 8-bit and 16-bit machines alike, built by Incentive + Domark, I think. Basically a point-and-click-and-some-scripting interface to their Freescape 3D engine (which was used in Castle Master and Driller, I think). Google Video seems to have the demo/tutorial video tape that came with it... I had this thing and it was pretty darn impressive and simple. (Ran dog slow on a C64, though, made me hope for an Amiga...)
Try Blender. It is good if you want to start learning how to make 3D stuff - some may say it's really difficult to get started with, but I say it's sometimes better to just do things with weight on your feet =) - and it has a really simple 3D game engine that's basically "join stuff with your mouse". You can script it pretty easily in Python. Blender also exports stuff pretty widely, so you can use it to model stuff for "real" 3D engines. (I've heard Blender + GtkRadiant + CrystalSpace rocks.)
And yes, 3D modeling for games is difficult when you start. Don't give up. I'm not a gigantic big expert either, but Blender is simple enough and I've seen people do amazing things with it.
Good scare, but I don't think this is really all that bad.
I think GeoCities has had this sort of bit on their ToS for quite a while. Basically, "We're serving ads on your web page. There's nothing you can do about it, and if we find out you've been trying to nuke the ads, we ban you."
They're not going to ban AdBlock users. They're going to ban people who use the ad-supported Sponsored+ things on their own journals, and try to sneak around the ad-displaying code.
If they'd really try to ban AdBlock users, they'd have to open a completely idiotic, uncontrollable, and not to mention bloody and oh-God-does-this-ever-make-us-look-bad can of worms. I mean, ban everyone who browses with elinks, or just turn the JavaScript off. That would be a lot of banhammering and a lot of displeased users and not to even mention lost potential customers.
Slashdot Mirror
Already done. Presenting the winner, second place and the honorable mention...
Not anymore, the link, that is. =) (I removed it on grounds that Wikipedia is not an abandonware guide, and it was a misplaced external link anyway.)
I don't see where the article says it's free to download, though. The article has stated the following for quite a while now:
Hardcover edition of Krondor: the Betrayal came with a copy of Betrayal at Krondor. At least back when it was new. Don't know if it still does. (Not the best possible version since it didn't have CD audio tracks - though in my particular variant of the budget edition they even managed to mess those up - but it did have something the other versions didn't have: Feist's interview.)
And they apparently still sell the game for a few pennies, um, somewhere. I think Home of the Underdogs had the link to a site that sells it. Or try eBay.
It's a wonderful game, got me introduced to Feist's worlds and I think it's just about the greatest PC RPG ever made right after Ultima series. Really shame it's not freeware anymore.
::arms in the air and a desperate look at the heavens::
Well, you learn something new every day.
...let's talk about mencoder.
Could someone please bring us some sanity to the command line, please???
The following might sound like a troll. It isn't. I love mencoder because it's just about the only video capture app that happens to even remotely work on my particular situation, and only modern video capture app I've seen, too - can do weird and obscure new things like V4L2 and ALSA, and its home page doesn't say "Updates coming next week! (last updated: Dec 2002)".
It's just it's command line syntax I have a slight problem with.
As a transcoding application, it's probably fine, but as a TV recording app, it just isn't that great because in order to do some even rudimentary capturing you need to specify a lot and a LOT of parameters. It would be nice to have a bunch of profile files, so that I could say "mencoder -conf big_mpeg4.conf -o randomgamecubing.avi" to capture full-screen MPEG4 and "mencoder -conf tiny_xvid.conf randomtvcrap.avi" to encode some 352x288 XviD?
The current solution is actually one of the most annoying solutions I've done so far - writing a shell script to handle that. Then, as in case of most shell scripts, it turned into a Ruby script. And then... ummmm... can anyone say if this piece of junk is, in any way, better than a configuration file? I don't think so myself.
Holy damn, if we don't get configuration files to mencoder, I may need to rewrite this thing in Common Lisp, and I assure that at that point, no one's going to have fun!
"...we shall fight in the <iframe>s, we shall fight in the <object>s, we shall fight in the <script> tags and in the Flash files, we shall fight around the window.open(); we shall never surrender..."
My small crystallization of the whole word processing: You write text. Computer formats it.
If you want the computer to not mess up your formatting, you've got to think like a machine and understand the structure of the formatting. Humans, by default, only care about superficial formatting: "this is in wrong place, let's move it a bit." Computer sees a bunch of formatting instructions.
The biggest problem with WYSIWYG word processing is... well, basically the exact same problem with WYSIWYG HTML editors: You think you have the utter and ultimate control over the presentation, while you actually don't have that luxury. You merely have real-time response to the formatting decisions. Some other day (and in some other version of the program), the formatting decisions the program makes will be different. When using word processor, you have to stop thinking about the formatting and just let it do the thing for you.
Word processing and typesetting are separate tasks. If you don't understand that, and do typesetting decisions while you're doing word processing, you end up in a completely wrong place.
You have to assume your tab key doesn't know damn where to align the text - if you're submitting text for publication somewhere, it's likely to go completely wrong anyway. You have to not rely on spaces being always "space" width at all. (I export my OO.o docs to HTML which gets converted to LaTeX for PDF generation. HTML doesn't care damn about extraneous whitespace. Neither really does LaTeX.)
If you want to preserve formatting instructions at all, OpenOffice.org's style system is your bestest friend ever. You can't produce robust formatting without that thing, so learn it and learn it well.
In closing, two words: Reveal Codes.
Well, the article mentions how it really happened - Microsoft designed a thing and kept quiet about it, then when people caught wind of that, they tried to cover it up, then acknowledged they made it but it wasn't really all that big or serious.
The only big question is why it made to the list - Microsoft has a lot of smart people that come up with a lot of good ideas, and they probably have to reject unmarketable, potentially ridiculous ideas like this from their own staff every day (along with other improbable ideas like "let's support OpenDocument" =).
Once upon a time, there was a country of Fictivia. They were known for their military might.
Imagine a really good-looking fighter airplane, Alkaline Tactical Fighter 50, the new pride and joy of FAF (Fictivian Air Force). Really streamlined, can go Mach 20 and do loops all over the place and the pilot won't even blink. Marvel of technological ingenuity.
Then, next year, comes a new radar system. The thing is, the plane was never designed to be extensible. None of the FAF's planes are designed to be extensible; they're not even compatible with FAF's own stuff. All planes have only their own, custom design parts, designed only for those specific planes.
FAF's engineers have no choice but to bolt the new system just behind the cockpit. On the outside. It looks really ugly in the airshows, but to surprise of everyone, the plane still flies at mach 20. The reason for that is that for this particular radar model, they this nice, aerodynamic compartment. They just have to make these in mass production, and slightly redesign them for all models of the planes. No problem at all. It's just that there's a lot of suppliers for these parts and they all seem to do the bits a bit differently, that's all.
The country of Fictivia has a neighboring country and military ally, Dramatia.
Dramatian Air Force Technology Center (DAFTCEN) solved this problem by having a modular design for all of their stuff. Their new plane, Gemdust Interceptor 180, is fully modular. The module system, CANARD, is interesting in that it doesn't matter if there's a module plugged in or not; the system will notice if something is missing and works around it. It will also not care what the module really is, as long as it can respond to certain inputs in a certain way. Not that anyone would want to plug in anything but the supplied modules, they're well designed anyway. New radar system? Just plug it in.
That's basically the difference between Java and Ruby.
Ummmm... what? This is a bit bad example. I've been using word processors since WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS was shit hot. I sat in front of StarOffice back in day (version 4, I think) and the only thing that puzzled me - for mere couple of minutes, tops! - was the weird desktop thing (which was removed in OpenOffice.org; trust me, if you've only used OO.o, do yourself a favor and never learn what contraption this sad piece of history was). If you've used one word processor, you know how to use them all, and changing from one word processor to another is never going to be painful at all. At least not after the first week.
OpenOffice.org Writer doesn't look and work like Word, that's true. Instead, it looks and works like any other word processing program.
All I'm saying is OO.o is not the archetypical awful open source GUI thing. It's not confusing people. I've seen quite a few people who aren't very technical and have switched to AbiWord and OpenOffice.org Writer, and not looked back.
Now MythTV, on the other hand - if you really need to look at the documentation to watch TV...
Ruby now: in = File.open('foo.in')
Ruby after adding the buffering layer: in = File.open_buffered('foo.in')
You see, Ruby, being a dynamic language, has extensible classes. You can add new operations and features to existing classes. In Java, if you want a new way of reading stuff, you make a new class to do that, like a BufferedReader, then demand that class to be used in all situations anyway, because you never integrate the core features to the existing classes.
In a sane Java environment, you'd have a File f and you could ask for reader = f.getBufferedReader(); or whatever. But you can't. That would imply that File class would have to be somehow aware of the existence of BufferedReader, right? In dynamic languages, you could do this dynamically. In Java, you have to program it in the core API. It's doable. Yet they refuse to implement this, because you don't need these syntactic shortcuts to survive, and not specifying any specific relations is more flexible and more to the spirit of object orientation, right? People are opening BufferedReaders by hand all the time! ...yet few people remember the frigging syntax by heart.
Agreed on that one. =)
A movie would suck. We're talking about a real doorstopper here, those things don't turn into movies that easily. In any case, one day, I just figured out that if they made a TV series (a longish one at that?), Cryptonomicon would be just perfect for that.
Both have their place.
For bulk of my bookmarks, I probably want to keep them in ma.gnolia. That's for "filed" bookmarks that I use a bit less frequently. But there's little reason to use net bookmark service for some things that you use really frequently; I much rather have Slashdot, Wikipedia, Bloglines, GMail, etc on my bookmarks toolbar where I can access them easily.
Nothing, really, just that it's harder to parse. Just that now, you need to fire up your XML parser if you want to extract information out of it. In SQLite, you can bind to it and do a SELECT whatever FROM bookmarks WHERE ...; and don't need to parse anything. Just like all SQL queries.
Another thing is that there's a big handful of file formats used to store configuration data. Bookmarks XML isn't used in any other situation, and in addition to that the profile directory has various plain text formats, Mork, BerkleyDB, RDF, JavaScript...
I guess you need to file a feature request that asks bookmarks to be shown at startup... though I guess they will be thinking of that anyway =)
Basically, in Netscape 4, bookmarks were stored in a quasi-HTML file, and history in a DB file.
In Mozilla, bookmarks are stored in a XML-that-almost-look-like-HTML format, while the history is stored in the most insane file format ever devised by mortal mind. It's called MORK. Remember that name. Remember it well. (Seriously, take a look at your history.db. It's a text file. It really is. Or it might look like one from a good distance.)
While in the new grand concept, everything is stored in a SQLite database - simple, well tested, portable, efficient, doesn't make Firefox much bigger than it already is, and above all, programmer-friendly file format that isn't causing peoples' brains to ooze out of their ears when they try to figure it out.
They said "daredevil", not "suicidal". Using IE is just like going mountain-climbing with a bit of packaging string from 1800s instead of a really good rope.
If you use Firefox, you can go to all sorts of dangerous places and the only worry you have is that your computer is broadcasting it's IP address. While if you try to use IE to do these tricks, you die.
Any questions?
=)
Oh yeah, Jack Thompson and Wikitruth.info would have made a perfect pair, they use basically the same methodology, after all...
Too bad Wikitruth.info decided to publish the wrong version of the article, so JT might have some problems cooperating with them.
People who hand out blocks of IP addresses and keep track who has what.
Known to most of people through situations like whois -h whois.arin.net 11.22.33.44
Oh, boy, that would have been really cool. One of the greatest word processing programs. Ever.
For word processing, of course. Not particularly a good program for lame attempts at doing DTP, even if it had rudimentary support for that too.
Somewhere along the way, people forgot that, ultimately, word processing and typesetting are separate tasks, and if you really look at the current contenders, they're not really good at either...
"What I See Is 'Got Ya?'" SCO's new slogan? =) =)
Linux does adhere to the POSIX standard. Linus has seen the specification, I hear. RMS has seen the specification and liked it so much that, in throes of passion, named one environment variable POSIX_ME_HARDER. The kernel and the GNU C library and userstuff both implement what's a reasonable user environment, with a specific POSIX compliance mode (POSIXLY_CORRECT, the latter spelling of the aforementioned variable) for things that don't really make much sense from user perspective but the standards want them.
Now here's one catch that the pushers of "open" (open as in "The Open Group", not open as in "Open Source") standards tend to do: The specs are free (or at least available if you show the standards body some money), everyone's free to implement the thing, but the real money sink are the conformance testing and trademark use rights (which usually imply the conformance has been taken care of). Ask anyone who has tried to implement Java! POSIX and Unix system specifications are the same.
And as pointed out, the POSIX certification of at least one Linux distribution has been taken care of, which means that if you really care about the standards adherence, you can get yours tested too and it will likely pass just fine.
And Microsoft's approach to POSIX is a bit different: They only implemented what's absolutely necessary and don't have any ambitions of going beyond that. Just sitting in front of a WinXP system without knowing anything beyond "yes, Windows does POSIX" would get me a rude surprise. "Where's my Bourne shell?" "Well, actually we only implemented the bare-minimum POSIX C API" "All right, where's my frigging C compiler?" "Er..." You need to Download Something to get any real work done.
This doesn't concern me personally. I have three legit store-bought copies of the game already.
But why oh why oh why did the folks at Vivendi "We put the 'Battle' in Bnetd" Universal decide to pull (well, rather, not re-arrange the redistribution) the Betrayal at Krondor from freeware? It's a wonderful game, one of the greatest RPGs ever made for PC. And there it sits, dusty, once again doomed to be "abandonware". I may sound a bit silly when babbling about the mythical Golden Era when people could download the game, legally and all, from Sierra. But it is a nice game. *sigh*
1) Blender is a "click and point and voila, you have a 3D game" thing. =)
2) There was, in fact, a 3D Construction Kit for 8-bit and 16-bit machines alike, built by Incentive + Domark, I think. Basically a point-and-click-and-some-scripting interface to their Freescape 3D engine (which was used in Castle Master and Driller, I think). Google Video seems to have the demo/tutorial video tape that came with it... I had this thing and it was pretty darn impressive and simple. (Ran dog slow on a C64, though, made me hope for an Amiga...)
Try Blender. It is good if you want to start learning how to make 3D stuff - some may say it's really difficult to get started with, but I say it's sometimes better to just do things with weight on your feet =) - and it has a really simple 3D game engine that's basically "join stuff with your mouse". You can script it pretty easily in Python. Blender also exports stuff pretty widely, so you can use it to model stuff for "real" 3D engines. (I've heard Blender + GtkRadiant + CrystalSpace rocks.)
And yes, 3D modeling for games is difficult when you start. Don't give up. I'm not a gigantic big expert either, but Blender is simple enough and I've seen people do amazing things with it.
Oh, please no, that's so 1984...
...oh, wait, the way the world is slowly turning, maybe we should just go for it.
Good scare, but I don't think this is really all that bad.
I think GeoCities has had this sort of bit on their ToS for quite a while. Basically, "We're serving ads on your web page. There's nothing you can do about it, and if we find out you've been trying to nuke the ads, we ban you."
They're not going to ban AdBlock users. They're going to ban people who use the ad-supported Sponsored+ things on their own journals, and try to sneak around the ad-displaying code.
If they'd really try to ban AdBlock users, they'd have to open a completely idiotic, uncontrollable, and not to mention bloody and oh-God-does-this-ever-make-us-look-bad can of worms. I mean, ban everyone who browses with elinks, or just turn the JavaScript off. That would be a lot of banhammering and a lot of displeased users and not to even mention lost potential customers.