The objective of education is suppose to get people ready for life. Guess what, the vast majority of kids are going to work in an environment where Windows is used.
When I was a kid, our computer courses taught us how to use Teko Plus (though I personally preferred WordPerfect 5.1 that was also there), program in GW-BASIC, and do spreadsheet and database stuff in Microsoft Works 1.x. There was also some leet graphics stuff in PC-LOGO. And later courses even had some dBase III+ and Turbo Pascal.
As a result, I think I got a rather good idea on what the practical stuff and potential of word processing and spreadsheets and computerized databases was. I didn't learn much of the programming myself (being one that was grown on Commodore 64, and the only thing you could do on the damn thing was programming and games), but the point was, we were given these great toys with thich we could write stuff and such. We were shown some practical things one could do with the word processors. That was the great lesson.
Do you think I have great deal of use for Teko Plus skills right now? These days that thing is a glorious chapter in the Finnish computer history and nothing more - the product is long dead and gone. But did I get a good idea of "if you know how to use one of them, you know how to use them all"? Yeah!
The computer world changes all the time, and you have to be able to transfer your skills as the time comes. Not even Microsoft's own programs stay put!
Yeah, the major pain here is that hardware keyloggers can be installed on the keyboard cable.
Does anyone know if there's small USB keyboards around? It wouldn't be that difficult to make a small keyboard (something similar to what Nokia Communicator uses, or one of those you can plug into cellphones) with USB plug. If you need to enter anything sensitive, just plug that to the USB hole and off you go. No need to trust that ordinary keyboard...
The only way to leech that would be stick a keylogger directly on an USB bus. Which gives me an evil idea...
Next generation keyloggers might look like perfectly ordinary USB hubs that just "happen" to record keypresses - looks and behaves just like ordinary hubs, until you plug them off, flip a switch on the bottom, plug in, and suddenly the system recognizes it as a hub and a storage device, just point your file manager at it and read "keypresses.txt"... =/
And here I am today, deeply pondering and re-reviewing the underlying design and capabilities of my web app which uses flexible relation-based metadata (kept in PostgreSQL) and simple, yet powerful frontend (made with Ruby on Rails), providing extensible, flexible, easy to maintain, user-friendly system with rich front end, good editing capabilities, and multi-user security and collaborative features... (basically the whole boatload of buzzwords and there's more where it came from...)...for storing furry images.
The application is shaping up really nicely. Probably going to rock for any purpose if you have tons of drawings and other artwork to archive, and tag the heck out of everything. I just kept wondering how the heck I'm going to explain people these various porr-noggg-raphy-related fields. But knowing that people do code sophisticated software for these purposes as well, I guess I'll just mention those features with straight face. =)
Yahoo, yeah, now there's a really weird place, which only happens to come into existence when people really want to use what seemed like the right tools at the time... They have stuff in both Common Lisp and PHP. I can kind of understand CL but PHP is still kind of weird.
(And they have quite a bit of stuff in other languages as well, to be fair - Java and Perl at least. I think I saw a.py or two in an Yahoo URL somewhere a few times. I always kind of liked the fact that they don't make their language choices very apparent unless you point them specifically out.)
Rrrrrrgh. People who suggest Python as Perl replacement are bonkers. People who suggest PHP instead of Perl or Python are clearly insane.
My honest opinion is Ruby beats either as a Perl replacement - Ruby retains a lot of Perl ideas while succeeding in providing a very clean syntax.
And people these days can't even do language trolls properly. Let me try. Ahem. hm. hm. hm. (climbs to mountaintop and shouts:) "We should rewrite the Perl programs in Common Lisp!" (dramatic echo) (gasping heard all over the world) (climbs down) There, much better. Now let's rewrite the apps in both common lisp and ruby! Before Perl 6 ships and we need to rewrite everything again, of course! Go on, hurry!
you will be googleated. Or googleaten. Whichever.
Borgle.
So that's what it sounds like when the Borg have problems digesting the food... and I always thought they just recharged or whatever... well, I guess they can't always adapt fast enough.
("Captain, may I suggest remodulating the food replicator inputs?")
Plus, this requires people to either do s0m3 qU3st10nAbl3 s0rch1ng to find the ROMs to play on the emulator, or get special hardware to transfer their games from the cartridges, then somehow get the emulator and ROMs to boot. All the while DS' GBA emulation is "just stick the cartridge in, power on, and tap 'Play GBA game' or push down-down-A."
(Okay, DS doesn't play mono-GB or GBC games either. Big deal, I seem to favor new games and I have GBA and GC GBPlayer for those moments I feel I should play the older games...)
Plus, unless you have actual hardware support, or the CPU several hundred to thousands of times faster than the original, emulation isn't going to work properly. I mean, my old P3-600 PC couldn't run VBA at good speed, my *new* XP3000+ PC still has noticeable slowdowns at times... how is PSP supposed to emulate GBA properly??? I've been nourished with hardware-based emulation, I have pretty high standards on what's proper, you know =)
Not really. I don't know pretty much damn about morse code, and while my first thoughts when I heard this beeping was "hey, isn't that SOS?" they were pretty much followed by "no, only two dahs." It does sound different.
Plus, (as noted, I don't know much about morse so correct me if I'm wrong), SOS distress call is supposed to be sent like a single letter (all of the dits and dahs in one group), while the Nokia beep distinctly separates the letters with short pauses ("dit dit dit... dah dah... dit dit dit") - completely different rhythm!
In other words, it probably won't confuse anyone but people who don't know Morse at all, and as I am among those people, I already told how it didn't really fool me that long, either.
And people who really try to get some help with SOS probably beep that stuff all the time.
eMule is good for downloading tons of weird stuff if you're not in a terrible hurry. Two minutes of googling is far better for finding actually working websites with ROMs...
eMule is great for finding all sorts of Weird Pirate Crap(tm) like "not as much homebrew as brewn-in-shady-store-backroom" games and multicarts. And it's a perfect illustration of the intellectual property rights degradation inherent in the system! (Petty P2Ping emulator-using) pirates pirating from (real-world cheap-plastic-hawking) pirates! And if you leave the downloaded file in shared directory, you've got pirates pirating from pirates who pirated from pirates. An illustration of the decadence of morals in modern information society, or a deliberate, diabolically clever scheme used to explode the heads of the game distributors? You decide!
They have various versions of GIMP (Including a special "real estate" edition!), OpenOffice.org, Audacity, CDex, QCAD, Blender and Art of Illusion, last time I counted.
This company has been around at least 'til 2003, and I highly doubt that they would have survived unless they actually put the source code on CDs they sell. So they're probably not GPL violators. Just using really, really deceptive marketing and making themselves look like complete slimeballs.
Though I have doubts about them providing source in all cases. For example, only their most expensive ripoff of Audacity seems to include "source code licensing".
I have a vague recollection that someone at that PearPC thread had taken a look at the codec and found it to be an XviD ripoff. Don't know about the applet, but I know jffmpeg support XviD and people have probably already done various other MPEG4 player applets... so it isn't particularly far-fetched.
By "OGG in AVI" you probably mean "Vorbis in RIFF".
And it's probably a bad idea, RIFF wasn't really made to contain anything really complex, like Vorbis. I don't know how things are nowadays, but last time I tried, Vorbis ACM codec was pretty much busted. Everybody seemed to recommend tossing AVI/RIFF as a container format and using Ogg instead (multiplexing with oggmux and display with Ogg and Vorbis DirectShow filters.).
In Finland, for MP3 players, Teosto charges 0.005 euros per minute on average capacity. For devices over 2.2 gigabytes, they have capped the levy to 15 euros! And that max actually went down recently, from 25 euros per 3.96GB!
And quite frankly that's enough to make me use emacs, but i can't remember if OS X runs on emacs;)
OS X ships with GNU Emacs, right on default install. No X11 support enabled though, which kind of sucks - hard to evangelise about the virtues of One True Text Editor when the only interface you have is Terminal and I've so much grown used to X11 XEmacs on Linux. I hear some folks are working on getting XEmacs Carbonized, which would be nice.
So yes, OS X runs emacs. Now, as for Emacs running OS X... hmm... can't see why not, it bloody well does everything else. Not sure if anyone's tried though.
I would start with Haskell or Scheme and move on to LISP once you had your bearings.
I'd tell people to start with Scheme, all the while looking at how the things they learn in Scheme get done in Common Lisp.
Haskell, in my opinion, wouldn't be that great as a starter language. For someone who hasn't used functional languages, Lisp dialects are usually confusing but I'd guess Haskell would be downright incomprehensible. Monadic I/O, anyone? At least Lisp lets you use I/O side effects where they make sense =)
DjVu absolutely rocks when storing scans. I can scan 300dpi pages like a whirlwind and djvulibre tools crunch them into very, very small files while pretty much retaining the quality.
The only problem is that PDF is more than just a raster format - it's very suitable for storing stuff that was created on a computer, rendered directly from the application. DjVu is great for digitization of off-line material. Small differences...
AutoREALM is pretty nice, however, there's some small clumsiness in the UI. It's the kind of software that you want to use to create really complex maps, because it sure isn't smooth enough to do anything really simple.
It's sure very powerful, has some nice drawing tools and such. Very nice layering functionality too. The symbol library feature helps too.
The only problems I had were with snapping/accurate ends, zooming and panning (there's a separate pan tool, no mouse shortcut, and panning tends to screw up the display until done). Also, in this day and age, I'd definitely expect the program to do EPS or SVG exporting, but nooo-oo, not yet! Okay, it's been an year since I used it - hope it's being improved a bit...
AutoREALM had one curious feature, too - name generator, based on context-free grammars. I found it a pretty strange coincidence that I spent this day tweaking my context-free grammar based text generator, and the first thing I see in Slashdot after that is some question about AutoREALM. This generator of mine happens to have one AutoREALM grammar as an online demo =)
I knew people would start posting about Final Fantasy stuff. So, to keep proper balance in the world, here's some from Ultima series.
Wayyyyyyy back when I was kid. My very own Commodore 64. Watching Ultima V's intro scene and such (since that was pretty much everything that worked properly in the warezed copy =) I didn't know English very much at the time, so I was just looking at the pretty pictures. Then I realized something very very odd: This game thing actually has a story. You know, video games were supposed to be about shooting things and stuff. (And this was in the C64 era. You couldn't really fit a very long story in 64 kb =)
Wayyyy later (but while I was still quite young) I got a legit copy of the PC Ultima V. I had realized that you can simply press enter to end dialogue instead of saying "bye". Heee! I was going to become a Metagaming Teenager! But then I ran into this one guy in the game that just told me that it was impolite to run away like that! Hrrrm... so much for becoming a Metagaming Teenager then.
Fast forward to last year...
In Ultima VII, one beautiful day, I had throughoutly wasted time in the mines of Minoc. No apparent clues could have been found, let alone anything that could have possibly helped me financially (how un-Avatarlike for me to think of such matters, but hey, this is Ultima VII part 1, no so Everlasting Goblet yet and money buys food). I stepped out of the mines, back to the bright daylike. And my eyes actually hurt. I noticed that the immersion was actually working really well. I was actually filling Avatar's part of the dialogues in my head. (that's what makes this role-playing game, see?) I felt the need to shout at fools who blocked my horse cart's way.
And of course, here's the obligatory EA-bashing bit - note, spoilers for Ultima IX. In the end of the first dungeon, I talked with a Wyrmguard who claimed that he was Iolo, and said that I could easily note that he was who he said since his bow and lute were in the other room. That sounded like the most dumb set-up ever. The guy must be holding Iolo up somewhere, I guessed. Besides, Iolo uses a crossbow! An obvious imposter, and a dumb one at that. So I killed him.... Too bad the setup actually was that dumb. That was Iolo. I killed Avatar's best friend due to a colossally stupid set-up and a factual error in weaponry. I was very, very angry at myself and really hated EA for rushing this travestry to the market.
Dead for tax purposes? That isn't going to work. Remember the Curse of the Mummy: One of the Pharaohs awakened from 6000-year slumber, and the first thing he saw was the tax man demanding some teeny bit late dues.
If international waters start 3 miles out, I'm sure you can name a few radio technologies that have no trouble covering more distance than that.
Yes, but if you're doing something "nasty" with this thing, the problem is, you can practically only use them if you're sitting on the shore. The moment you try to get this thing to the public Internet, nasty people come and pull the plug, probably - since the router is under their juridisdiction.
This is really why data havens haven't caught on. You can keep data in, but if you annoy the wrong people, you can't get data out unless you go there in person.
How long have most of these games been around? Why aren't they getting talked about more?
Some of these have been around quite a while, or have made significant leaps during their short existence. For example, Cube has been around only for a year or two but it's very mature. BZFlag has been around forever and then some, and has been very popular for all the time. (It was quite an amazing game ages ago, the old beards say, but kids and their toys nowadays have made them to add just a bit more eye candy and probably will add more later...)
Why aren't they talked about more? Well... um... I don't know. Some of the games are still experimental or not very good; I know BZFlag is fun in small doses, yet I rather play ETF if I want to kill somebody for work. Or, if some games are good, they're kind of like Nethack - already part of the landscape. Everyone knows Nethack exists, it is there, and is the best bloody action-RPG ever made. You don't need to discuss it every time someone mentions RPGs. Imagine, if you will: "Hey, there's this game called Nethack, ever heard of it?" "Yeah, I know, I've been trying to beat it for the last 15 years, goddamnit. And I play every day." See?
hmm i see no mention of thier old name on that site. Do you have any evidence that its the same project?
Actually, the history of the renaming went like this: There was FreeCraft, which included the core engine, Warcraft II data ripper/support files, and Freecraft Media Project (which was supposed to produce free artwork - hilariously blasphemous stuff*).
After Blizzard C&D'd the whole lot, the original developers said bye-bye. New people started the work. Core engine was renamed to Stratagus, the Warcraft II ripper/data thing was called Wargus (which was originally just included in Stratagus, but quite soon split to another project), and FCMP became Aleona's Tales... uh, the web page now says "Wartorn", that project pretty much died because it was so... shall we say... not really going anywhere.
Nowadays, the Stratagus engine runs tons of RTS games - just check out the list in the web page!
Okay, the web sites still don't mention their original names, but you can search for news stories mentioning the Freecraft-to-Stratagus changeover. I believe Slashdot covered it. Yep! They did! (And I believe there was a dupe as well, can't seem to find it right now though =)
Europe has allowed typography to be copyright, whereas the USA has not.
Thanks for the correction! I'm sorry, I was under the impression this thing had been mimicked here from US, too, but looks like US only shoves useless laws (like DMCA) down our throats and not laws that would benefit everyone (uncopyrightability of typefaces) =)
Quite interesting, really; in one university course I was in, the teacher insisted typefaces couldn't be copyrighted (Well, the whole discussion was very tangential and nobody knew for sure anyway. =) But that was the graphical design course; I did take the computing legal issues course and they didn't even mention font copyright issues there.
I actually went to check the law and noted the Finnish copyright law doesn't mention fonts at all, which would lead me to believe they are covered by the general copyright terms, then. I couldn't find Copyright Council's explanatory statement on fonts either (but I could find their statements on funny topics like copyrightability of carpets =)
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When I was a kid, our computer courses taught us how to use Teko Plus (though I personally preferred WordPerfect 5.1 that was also there), program in GW-BASIC, and do spreadsheet and database stuff in Microsoft Works 1.x. There was also some leet graphics stuff in PC-LOGO. And later courses even had some dBase III+ and Turbo Pascal.
As a result, I think I got a rather good idea on what the practical stuff and potential of word processing and spreadsheets and computerized databases was. I didn't learn much of the programming myself (being one that was grown on Commodore 64, and the only thing you could do on the damn thing was programming and games), but the point was, we were given these great toys with thich we could write stuff and such. We were shown some practical things one could do with the word processors. That was the great lesson.
Do you think I have great deal of use for Teko Plus skills right now? These days that thing is a glorious chapter in the Finnish computer history and nothing more - the product is long dead and gone. But did I get a good idea of "if you know how to use one of them, you know how to use them all"? Yeah!
The computer world changes all the time, and you have to be able to transfer your skills as the time comes. Not even Microsoft's own programs stay put!
Yeah, the major pain here is that hardware keyloggers can be installed on the keyboard cable.
Does anyone know if there's small USB keyboards around? It wouldn't be that difficult to make a small keyboard (something similar to what Nokia Communicator uses, or one of those you can plug into cellphones) with USB plug. If you need to enter anything sensitive, just plug that to the USB hole and off you go. No need to trust that ordinary keyboard...
The only way to leech that would be stick a keylogger directly on an USB bus. Which gives me an evil idea...
Next generation keyloggers might look like perfectly ordinary USB hubs that just "happen" to record keypresses - looks and behaves just like ordinary hubs, until you plug them off, flip a switch on the bottom, plug in, and suddenly the system recognizes it as a hub and a storage device, just point your file manager at it and read "keypresses.txt"... =/
And here I am today, deeply pondering and re-reviewing the underlying design and capabilities of my web app which uses flexible relation-based metadata (kept in PostgreSQL) and simple, yet powerful frontend (made with Ruby on Rails), providing extensible, flexible, easy to maintain, user-friendly system with rich front end, good editing capabilities, and multi-user security and collaborative features... (basically the whole boatload of buzzwords and there's more where it came from...) ...for storing furry images.
The application is shaping up really nicely. Probably going to rock for any purpose if you have tons of drawings and other artwork to archive, and tag the heck out of everything. I just kept wondering how the heck I'm going to explain people these various porr-noggg-raphy-related fields. But knowing that people do code sophisticated software for these purposes as well, I guess I'll just mention those features with straight face. =)
Yahoo, yeah, now there's a really weird place, which only happens to come into existence when people really want to use what seemed like the right tools at the time... They have stuff in both Common Lisp and PHP. I can kind of understand CL but PHP is still kind of weird.
(And they have quite a bit of stuff in other languages as well, to be fair - Java and Perl at least. I think I saw a .py or two in an Yahoo URL somewhere a few times. I always kind of liked the fact that they don't make their language choices very apparent unless you point them specifically out.)
Rrrrrrgh. People who suggest Python as Perl replacement are bonkers. People who suggest PHP instead of Perl or Python are clearly insane.
My honest opinion is Ruby beats either as a Perl replacement - Ruby retains a lot of Perl ideas while succeeding in providing a very clean syntax.
And people these days can't even do language trolls properly. Let me try. Ahem. hm. hm. hm. (climbs to mountaintop and shouts:) "We should rewrite the Perl programs in Common Lisp!" (dramatic echo) (gasping heard all over the world) (climbs down) There, much better. Now let's rewrite the apps in both common lisp and ruby! Before Perl 6 ships and we need to rewrite everything again, of course! Go on, hurry!
So that's what it sounds like when the Borg have problems digesting the food... and I always thought they just recharged or whatever... well, I guess they can't always adapt fast enough.
("Captain, may I suggest remodulating the food replicator inputs?")
This isn't a GBA emulator yet.
Plus, this requires people to either do s0m3 qU3st10nAbl3 s0rch1ng to find the ROMs to play on the emulator, or get special hardware to transfer their games from the cartridges, then somehow get the emulator and ROMs to boot. All the while DS' GBA emulation is "just stick the cartridge in, power on, and tap 'Play GBA game' or push down-down-A."
(Okay, DS doesn't play mono-GB or GBC games either. Big deal, I seem to favor new games and I have GBA and GC GBPlayer for those moments I feel I should play the older games...)
Plus, unless you have actual hardware support, or the CPU several hundred to thousands of times faster than the original, emulation isn't going to work properly. I mean, my old P3-600 PC couldn't run VBA at good speed, my *new* XP3000+ PC still has noticeable slowdowns at times... how is PSP supposed to emulate GBA properly??? I've been nourished with hardware-based emulation, I have pretty high standards on what's proper, you know =)
Well, you can already play Quake as a text adventure...
A grunt is standing here, armed with a shotgun and looking rather surly.
The Grunt's shotgun shoots across your shoulder, hitting you for 5 points. It's only a flesh wound.
>attack grunt with shotgun
You hit the Grunt taking off 10 from his health.
The Grunt's shotgun hits you right in the thigh, taking off 10 points. That could have been much worse.
Not really. I don't know pretty much damn about morse code, and while my first thoughts when I heard this beeping was "hey, isn't that SOS?" they were pretty much followed by "no, only two dahs." It does sound different.
Plus, (as noted, I don't know much about morse so correct me if I'm wrong), SOS distress call is supposed to be sent like a single letter (all of the dits and dahs in one group), while the Nokia beep distinctly separates the letters with short pauses ("dit dit dit... dah dah... dit dit dit") - completely different rhythm!
In other words, it probably won't confuse anyone but people who don't know Morse at all, and as I am among those people, I already told how it didn't really fool me that long, either.
And people who really try to get some help with SOS probably beep that stuff all the time.
eMule is good for downloading tons of weird stuff if you're not in a terrible hurry. Two minutes of googling is far better for finding actually working websites with ROMs...
eMule is great for finding all sorts of Weird Pirate Crap(tm) like "not as much homebrew as brewn-in-shady-store-backroom" games and multicarts. And it's a perfect illustration of the intellectual property rights degradation inherent in the system! (Petty P2Ping emulator-using) pirates pirating from (real-world cheap-plastic-hawking) pirates! And if you leave the downloaded file in shared directory, you've got pirates pirating from pirates who pirated from pirates. An illustration of the decadence of morals in modern information society, or a deliberate, diabolically clever scheme used to explode the heads of the game distributors? You decide!
They have various versions of GIMP (Including a special "real estate" edition!), OpenOffice.org, Audacity, CDex, QCAD, Blender and Art of Illusion, last time I counted.
This company has been around at least 'til 2003, and I highly doubt that they would have survived unless they actually put the source code on CDs they sell. So they're probably not GPL violators. Just using really, really deceptive marketing and making themselves look like complete slimeballs.
Though I have doubts about them providing source in all cases. For example, only their most expensive ripoff of Audacity seems to include "source code licensing".
I have a vague recollection that someone at that PearPC thread had taken a look at the codec and found it to be an XviD ripoff. Don't know about the applet, but I know jffmpeg support XviD and people have probably already done various other MPEG4 player applets... so it isn't particularly far-fetched.
By "OGG in AVI" you probably mean "Vorbis in RIFF".
And it's probably a bad idea, RIFF wasn't really made to contain anything really complex, like Vorbis. I don't know how things are nowadays, but last time I tried, Vorbis ACM codec was pretty much busted. Everybody seemed to recommend tossing AVI/RIFF as a container format and using Ogg instead (multiplexing with oggmux and display with Ogg and Vorbis DirectShow filters.).
Too high-tech for now. A space elevator would be a far more reasonable short-term goal.
196 euros extra price? Damn that's greedy!
In Finland, for MP3 players, Teosto charges 0.005 euros per minute on average capacity. For devices over 2.2 gigabytes, they have capped the levy to 15 euros! And that max actually went down recently, from 25 euros per 3.96GB!
Far more reasonable prices in my opinion...
OS X ships with GNU Emacs, right on default install. No X11 support enabled though, which kind of sucks - hard to evangelise about the virtues of One True Text Editor when the only interface you have is Terminal and I've so much grown used to X11 XEmacs on Linux. I hear some folks are working on getting XEmacs Carbonized, which would be nice.
So yes, OS X runs emacs. Now, as for Emacs running OS X... hmm... can't see why not, it bloody well does everything else. Not sure if anyone's tried though.
I'd tell people to start with Scheme, all the while looking at how the things they learn in Scheme get done in Common Lisp.
Haskell, in my opinion, wouldn't be that great as a starter language. For someone who hasn't used functional languages, Lisp dialects are usually confusing but I'd guess Haskell would be downright incomprehensible. Monadic I/O, anyone? At least Lisp lets you use I/O side effects where they make sense =)
DjVu absolutely rocks when storing scans. I can scan 300dpi pages like a whirlwind and djvulibre tools crunch them into very, very small files while pretty much retaining the quality.
The only problem is that PDF is more than just a raster format - it's very suitable for storing stuff that was created on a computer, rendered directly from the application. DjVu is great for digitization of off-line material. Small differences...
AutoREALM is pretty nice, however, there's some small clumsiness in the UI. It's the kind of software that you want to use to create really complex maps, because it sure isn't smooth enough to do anything really simple.
It's sure very powerful, has some nice drawing tools and such. Very nice layering functionality too. The symbol library feature helps too.
The only problems I had were with snapping/accurate ends, zooming and panning (there's a separate pan tool, no mouse shortcut, and panning tends to screw up the display until done). Also, in this day and age, I'd definitely expect the program to do EPS or SVG exporting, but nooo-oo, not yet! Okay, it's been an year since I used it - hope it's being improved a bit...
AutoREALM had one curious feature, too - name generator, based on context-free grammars. I found it a pretty strange coincidence that I spent this day tweaking my context-free grammar based text generator, and the first thing I see in Slashdot after that is some question about AutoREALM. This generator of mine happens to have one AutoREALM grammar as an online demo =)
I knew people would start posting about Final Fantasy stuff. So, to keep proper balance in the world, here's some from Ultima series.
Wayyyyyyy back when I was kid. My very own Commodore 64. Watching Ultima V's intro scene and such (since that was pretty much everything that worked properly in the warezed copy =) I didn't know English very much at the time, so I was just looking at the pretty pictures. Then I realized something very very odd: This game thing actually has a story. You know, video games were supposed to be about shooting things and stuff. (And this was in the C64 era. You couldn't really fit a very long story in 64 kb =)
Wayyyy later (but while I was still quite young) I got a legit copy of the PC Ultima V. I had realized that you can simply press enter to end dialogue instead of saying "bye". Heee! I was going to become a Metagaming Teenager! But then I ran into this one guy in the game that just told me that it was impolite to run away like that! Hrrrm... so much for becoming a Metagaming Teenager then.
Fast forward to last year...
In Ultima VII, one beautiful day, I had throughoutly wasted time in the mines of Minoc. No apparent clues could have been found, let alone anything that could have possibly helped me financially (how un-Avatarlike for me to think of such matters, but hey, this is Ultima VII part 1, no so Everlasting Goblet yet and money buys food). I stepped out of the mines, back to the bright daylike. And my eyes actually hurt. I noticed that the immersion was actually working really well. I was actually filling Avatar's part of the dialogues in my head. (that's what makes this role-playing game, see?) I felt the need to shout at fools who blocked my horse cart's way.
And of course, here's the obligatory EA-bashing bit - note, spoilers for Ultima IX. In the end of the first dungeon, I talked with a Wyrmguard who claimed that he was Iolo, and said that I could easily note that he was who he said since his bow and lute were in the other room. That sounded like the most dumb set-up ever. The guy must be holding Iolo up somewhere, I guessed. Besides, Iolo uses a crossbow! An obvious imposter, and a dumb one at that. So I killed him. ... Too bad the setup actually was that dumb. That was Iolo. I killed Avatar's best friend due to a colossally stupid set-up and a factual error in weaponry. I was very, very angry at myself and really hated EA for rushing this travestry to the market.
Dead for tax purposes? That isn't going to work. Remember the Curse of the Mummy: One of the Pharaohs awakened from 6000-year slumber, and the first thing he saw was the tax man demanding some teeny bit late dues.
(I know, old joke...)
Yes, but if you're doing something "nasty" with this thing, the problem is, you can practically only use them if you're sitting on the shore. The moment you try to get this thing to the public Internet, nasty people come and pull the plug, probably - since the router is under their juridisdiction.
This is really why data havens haven't caught on. You can keep data in, but if you annoy the wrong people, you can't get data out unless you go there in person.
Some of these have been around quite a while, or have made significant leaps during their short existence. For example, Cube has been around only for a year or two but it's very mature. BZFlag has been around forever and then some, and has been very popular for all the time. (It was quite an amazing game ages ago, the old beards say, but kids and their toys nowadays have made them to add just a bit more eye candy and probably will add more later...)
Why aren't they talked about more? Well... um... I don't know. Some of the games are still experimental or not very good; I know BZFlag is fun in small doses, yet I rather play ETF if I want to kill somebody for work. Or, if some games are good, they're kind of like Nethack - already part of the landscape. Everyone knows Nethack exists, it is there, and is the best bloody action-RPG ever made. You don't need to discuss it every time someone mentions RPGs. Imagine, if you will: "Hey, there's this game called Nethack, ever heard of it?" "Yeah, I know, I've been trying to beat it for the last 15 years, goddamnit. And I play every day." See?
Actually, the history of the renaming went like this: There was FreeCraft, which included the core engine, Warcraft II data ripper/support files, and Freecraft Media Project (which was supposed to produce free artwork - hilariously blasphemous stuff*).
After Blizzard C&D'd the whole lot, the original developers said bye-bye. New people started the work. Core engine was renamed to Stratagus, the Warcraft II ripper/data thing was called Wargus (which was originally just included in Stratagus, but quite soon split to another project), and FCMP became Aleona's Tales... uh, the web page now says "Wartorn", that project pretty much died because it was so... shall we say... not really going anywhere.
Nowadays, the Stratagus engine runs tons of RTS games - just check out the list in the web page!
Okay, the web sites still don't mention their original names, but you can search for news stories mentioning the Freecraft-to-Stratagus changeover. I believe Slashdot covered it. Yep! They did! (And I believe there was a dupe as well, can't seem to find it right now though =)
Thanks for the correction! I'm sorry, I was under the impression this thing had been mimicked here from US, too, but looks like US only shoves useless laws (like DMCA) down our throats and not laws that would benefit everyone (uncopyrightability of typefaces) =)
Quite interesting, really; in one university course I was in, the teacher insisted typefaces couldn't be copyrighted (Well, the whole discussion was very tangential and nobody knew for sure anyway. =) But that was the graphical design course; I did take the computing legal issues course and they didn't even mention font copyright issues there.
I actually went to check the law and noted the Finnish copyright law doesn't mention fonts at all, which would lead me to believe they are covered by the general copyright terms, then. I couldn't find Copyright Council's explanatory statement on fonts either (but I could find their statements on funny topics like copyrightability of carpets =)
Maybe I should write to the Copyright Council myself. Or bother Korpela®© about this. Maybe these people could explain exactly what's going on in here. =)