In general, it seems that forks only happen if the original group of developers really does a bad job. Because otherwise, it is simply easier to download the work that someone else does for you. In the case of XFree86, it took dissatisfaction among developers and a license change that was seen as unacceptable by many Linux distributors. But once those happened, X.org was founded. By now it has mostly supplanted XFree.
Good point about the environment. Let me add one about the project: A clear goal that brings meaningful improvement, as opposed to random flavors of the week.
Of course, a good team (including the manager!) is more likely to give you goals that make sense:-)
Even so, the small windmills look bad compared to the large unit that was also mentioned.
Best one in price/performance among the small units: The "Skystream" with 10,742 euro for continuous power output of 240.7 watts. That is 44.63 euros per watt. Large unnamed unit with 18 m rotor diameter: 190,000 euro for continuous power output of 16,324 watts. That is 11.64 euros per watt.
So the article is right, big is better. Note that they did not diss wind power in general. Only small units with poor performance compared to the price.
Baen Books, for instance, reports a rise in the sales of older titles after making those available for download (in this case legally).
As others have posted before me, The Pirate Bay is a terrible place to promote stuff because you disappear in the mass.
Myspace is probably better for music, but what you really want is a website that is known for offering similar music for download. That will give you the best chance that potential customers who like the genre listen in. The Baen Free Library (http://www.baen.com/library/) is a good place for checking out Science Fiction authors, and I buy most of my entertainment books from Baen these days. If you can find a similar place to promote your style of music, I'm sure it will get you more attention than TPB.
Actually, the law in some countries already distinguishes between providing access to information other people publish and publishing it yourself. Using German law as an example because that's where I am reasonably sure of the details:
-If you are directly responsible for illegal material being on the internet (as in uploading the stuff to a service like Rapidshare and making it publicly accessible), you can be sued and prosecuted. No doubt about it. But as I understand it, the Pirate Bay does not fall in this category.
-If you provide a "general purpose" service that provides access to all sorts of stuff others have put online, you are not automatically liable. But you may be required to block or remove illegal content once you are made aware of it. How much effort you have to put in the blocking is still being worked out in the courts. Typically, your ISP, Google and the Pirate Bay would fall in this category. If it is true that TPB has outright refused to remove links to copyright violations, they would have lost that lawsuit in Germany. But then again, the law that regulates this is only a few years old and Sweden may not have an equivalent yet. So you'd really need to ask a swedish lawyer about the TPB case.
Possible. But if the cracker released the game a full month before the official launch, there could have been other reasons for the problems. For instance, he somehow got his paws on a beta that was not fully debugged. And then there are games where the bugs are the fault of the developers, or even the fault of uncracked DRM. My copy of X2 (original without any cracks) went from stable to reproducably crashing when I installed the patch to version 1.4. In the same patch, the copy protection was upgraded to a new, more aggressive version of StarForce. Coincidence?
There were some rumors that they would do something like that. And something like a.NET only environment with VirtualPC containers for older software might actually have been a good idea. It would have allowed Microsoft to simplify their set of APIs, stuffing the old ones into an environment that is somewhat decoupled from the rest. But in the end, even that was obviously too daring for Microsoft management.
The point in digital equipment is that the end result is either wrong or right. And computers run at a fixed clock speed.
So the transistors in RAM and CPU will slowly degrade until they cannot do their task within the time frame dictated by the clock speed. Up to that point you will notice nothing, afterwards you get bit errors. Note that this can take decades, and the idea that cheap RAM always fails within 2-3 years is wrong.
In short, computers don't get slower. They will fail at some point but that may take much longer than a few years.
Actually they don't. From the reviews I've read so far, Windows 7 is more like Vista SP3. As in, the proverbial third service pack that finally brings a mature product;-) And backwards compatibility is still king.
If Microsoft wanted to do something revolutionary, they'd try to push this: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/singularity/. But that would mean giving up the greatest advantage of Windows, the huge base of existing and windows-compatible software.
By all accounts I've heard WinME was worse than Win98SE. Same limitations, less support for DOS software, lesser stability. So why release it in the first place? I think going straight from Win98SE to XP would have been better for Microsoft's reputation.
At the same time, Microsoft already had Windows 2000. The geeks in my circle of friends usually skipped WinME and went straight to Windows 2000, which was a much better system. All it lacked was a "home" version so Microsoft could sell a cheap version to the home user without cannibalizing the sales of the "professional" version.
For several years afterwards, Windows 2000 was just as good as XP in terms of stability and application support. Only in the last few years, Windows 2000 suffers increasingly from lack of driver support and maybe subtle incompatibilities to XP (which everyone is developing for).
City traffic with lots of stop and go. The perfect environment for the a hybrid. Maybe electric would work even better, but if you want something that is available soon hybrids are already in the market.
First, as some people have already posted, there is the problem of identity theft through recording the signal from the ear. Second, will there be a sufficently clear signal? In a typical telephone receiver, the microphone is near the mouth of the speaker, not next to the ear. And telephone S/N ration is not that great to begin with. Third, compression algorithms optimized for speech might or might not suppress the signal from the cochlea (think VOIP).
Overall, a typical case of sensationalist journalism that promotes products before the underlying problems are solved.
A lot of gamers have a PC anyway, especially those who are into programming and digital art. The latter are most likely to contribute to an Open Source project anyway. So the lack of a console version may limit the number of consumers who play these games, but it won't threaten the viability of Open Source games.
The question is, is the engine good enough to be used by commercial industry and would they want to given the fact that companies are a bunch of copyright nazi's?
If you look at the FAQ, you will find that they use the GPL. Not the LGPL. Which means the commercial game companies would have to hand out the source code for the entire game. Not gonna happen.
I don't think so. Projects like Nexuiz and Tremulous exist without non-commercial variants. This may be different for office applications, where managers want a vendor they can hold responsible. For instance Sun which still sells the commercial Star Office that is not much different from Open Office.
This said, a big thanks to Id software for open sourcing their older stuff.
A. is true to some extent. The 28 VA will cause some losses on the net on top of the 13 watts you are billed for. But I doubt those losses are greater than maybe 1 or 2 watts. Disclaimer: I'm an electrical engineer by training, but don't work in the power grid business. So take this as an educated guess, not something I have calculated. B. True. With the above estimate, make it 75% less or better. C. Not entirely true, but good quality CFLs last pretty long. In my apartment, both the two 15 Watt CFLs I put in 8 years ago still work fine. A rather small sample but I think it gives you an idea of CFL durability.
I think so. But the real question is why these treatments are offered in the first place.
Here I think it plays a big role that most patients don't have the knowledge to tell their doctor no if he suggests something stupid or overly expensive. So in essence, the salesman tells the customer what to buy, and for the doctor it often seems easiest to prescribe some pills.
On the political level, the pharma companies are good at lobbying against regulation that would put stronger restrictions on what insurance has to pay for. Several years ago, such an attempt failed in Germany: Under the Schröder government, the health ministry was planning to introduce a list of approved medications, and the statutory health insurance would have paid only for these. The industry lobby managed to squash these plans.
Yes, I was talking about my private computing environment. Right now, I'm still running XP. That requires one activation at installation if you have the regular version, and none if you are a bit flexible in matters of copyright;-)
With Office this is even less of an issue, as Open Office does everything I need from an office suite and needs no activation. It actually tends to give me less trouble than the MS Office 2000 I used at my last job. In general, I try to find an Open Source or freeware application first if I need to tackle a new task. Most of the time, I find something that works.
Which leaves games, the main reason for me to use Windows these days. Here I got several that want or need regular contact with some internet server. But then again, a game that stops working some day is much less of a problem than an application that stops working and leaves you with a bunch of inaccessible data.
I have not tried the Win7 beta myself. But most reviews indicate it is what should have been Vista Service Pack 3. A version of Vista that finally runs fast, stable and has the worst quirks removed from the user interface.
So I think it is probably not bad to use and will actually be an UPgrade from XP. Only the people who already have Vista and will have to pay more money for Win7 have reason to be annoyed. Personally I won't run a system that requires periodic product activation, but that's a political rather than technical reason.
I've played the demo of Half-Life 2, and in those levels there was not enough loose materials for building much of a barricade. Typically, I used the bricks and motor blocks as reusable projectiles.
Source Forts, however, sounds like what I had in mind when I wrote my post.
Well, there is one problem there: everybody also competes with older games at bargain bin prices.
There was a time when that was a lot less of a problem, since Doom II looked like crap compared to Quake (and games based on the Quake engine), and then when you had Quake II games the old Quake I started to look like crap by comparison. Nowadays improvements are a lot more incremental. I've even played some ~10 year old games recently and while you can tell a difference, they're not exactly visually offensive either.
Gameplay has also been OK for quite a while now. It's been a long time since we had too little RAM for anything too complex, so you can go quite a bit back in time with your gaming before you run into problems.
Seconded. More exactly, the "good enough" point in technology was reached for me with Half-Life 1 and its mods. It offered -a true 3D environment, no longer the pseudo-3D of Doom -gameplay at higher screen resolutions, so you could actually identify things at a distance -modelling that was not 100% lifelike but started to look good.
Since that time we have seen mostly incremental improvements, but not so many real innovations. The one thing that comes to mind is physics engines that allow realistic kicking around of items. But those seem underutilized to me. For instance, as an FPS player I would like to see a game that is designed to allow building entrenchments. If only by pushing a few crates into position as cover.
About the bargain bin aspect: Even some "free to play" MMOs have the above features by now, and I suspect that they don't earn THAT huge budgets from their item shops. So I agree with TFA that the time of huge budgets is probably over.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bumper_(automobile) has some information on that. It appears that the test speed has been reduced in 1982 to 2.5 miles per hour (4 km/h), and the only requirement is that no safety-related parts of the car may become non-functional. That still allows a lot of cosmetic damage.
While the design looks cool, thing that bugs me is that the car appears to lack a bumper and the "radiator grill" might be the first thing the comes into contact with an obstacle. Misjudge the distance when parking and crack, $2000 repair bill.
Of course the Tesla is not the only car with such questionable design, the same goes for the new Mercedes E class...
In this case, the front end seems to be pretty dumb. While TFA does not give the exact specs of the hardware, the small size and the micro USB power connector imply that there is no "decent GPU" available. I guess the microconsole has hardware acceleration for decompressing MPEG-2, or at best those parts of MPEG-4 that are necessary to stream audio/video. TFA also states that all the rendering is done server-side.
I guess the console will be rather low-end (and not have much in the way of mass storage), so it won't be all that attractive as replacement for a "real" computer. OTOH, it is probably cheap to make and has all the connectors required for a thin client in an office environment. So if the manufacturer sells the MicroConsole separately, that might be an interesting "alternative use".
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, there is a project on Sourceforge that appears to build on the old GPLed ICS code:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/chessd/
In general, it seems that forks only happen if the original group of developers really does a bad job. Because otherwise, it is simply easier to download the work that someone else does for you.
In the case of XFree86, it took dissatisfaction among developers and a license change that was seen as unacceptable by many Linux distributors. But once those happened, X.org was founded. By now it has mostly supplanted XFree.
Good point about the environment. Let me add one about the project:
A clear goal that brings meaningful improvement, as opposed to random flavors of the week.
Of course, a good team (including the manager!) is more likely to give you goals that make sense :-)
Even so, the small windmills look bad compared to the large unit that was also mentioned.
Best one in price/performance among the small units: The "Skystream" with 10,742 euro for continuous power output of 240.7 watts. That is 44.63 euros per watt.
Large unnamed unit with 18 m rotor diameter: 190,000 euro for continuous power output of 16,324 watts. That is 11.64 euros per watt.
So the article is right, big is better. Note that they did not diss wind power in general. Only small units with poor performance compared to the price.
Baen Books, for instance, reports a rise in the sales of older titles after making those available for download (in this case legally).
As others have posted before me, The Pirate Bay is a terrible place to promote stuff because you disappear in the mass.
Myspace is probably better for music, but what you really want is a website that is known for offering similar music for download. That will give you the best chance that potential customers who like the genre listen in.
The Baen Free Library (http://www.baen.com/library/) is a good place for checking out Science Fiction authors, and I buy most of my entertainment books from Baen these days.
If you can find a similar place to promote your style of music, I'm sure it will get you more attention than TPB.
Actually, the law in some countries already distinguishes between providing access to information other people publish and publishing it yourself. Using German law as an example because that's where I am reasonably sure of the details:
-If you are directly responsible for illegal material being on the internet (as in uploading the stuff to a service like Rapidshare and making it publicly accessible), you can be sued and prosecuted. No doubt about it. But as I understand it, the Pirate Bay does not fall in this category.
-If you provide a "general purpose" service that provides access to all sorts of stuff others have put online, you are not automatically liable. But you may be required to block or remove illegal content once you are made aware of it. How much effort you have to put in the blocking is still being worked out in the courts.
Typically, your ISP, Google and the Pirate Bay would fall in this category. If it is true that TPB has outright refused to remove links to copyright violations, they would have lost that lawsuit in Germany. But then again, the law that regulates this is only a few years old and Sweden may not have an equivalent yet. So you'd really need to ask a swedish lawyer about the TPB case.
Possible. But if the cracker released the game a full month before the official launch, there could have been other reasons for the problems. For instance, he somehow got his paws on a beta that was not fully debugged.
And then there are games where the bugs are the fault of the developers, or even the fault of uncracked DRM. My copy of X2 (original without any cracks) went from stable to reproducably crashing when I installed the patch to version 1.4. In the same patch, the copy protection was upgraded to a new, more aggressive version of StarForce. Coincidence?
There were some rumors that they would do something like that. And something like a .NET only environment with VirtualPC containers for older software might actually have been a good idea. It would have allowed Microsoft to simplify their set of APIs, stuffing the old ones into an environment that is somewhat decoupled from the rest.
But in the end, even that was obviously too daring for Microsoft management.
The point in digital equipment is that the end result is either wrong or right. And computers run at a fixed clock speed.
So the transistors in RAM and CPU will slowly degrade until they cannot do their task within the time frame dictated by the clock speed. Up to that point you will notice nothing, afterwards you get bit errors. Note that this can take decades, and the idea that cheap RAM always fails within 2-3 years is wrong.
In short, computers don't get slower. They will fail at some point but that may take much longer than a few years.
Actually they don't. From the reviews I've read so far, Windows 7 is more like Vista SP3. As in, the proverbial third service pack that finally brings a mature product ;-) And backwards compatibility is still king.
If Microsoft wanted to do something revolutionary, they'd try to push this: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/singularity/. But that would mean giving up the greatest advantage of Windows, the huge base of existing and windows-compatible software.
By all accounts I've heard WinME was worse than Win98SE. Same limitations, less support for DOS software, lesser stability. So why release it in the first place? I think going straight from Win98SE to XP would have been better for Microsoft's reputation.
At the same time, Microsoft already had Windows 2000. The geeks in my circle of friends usually skipped WinME and went straight to Windows 2000, which was a much better system. All it lacked was a "home" version so Microsoft could sell a cheap version to the home user without cannibalizing the sales of the "professional" version.
For several years afterwards, Windows 2000 was just as good as XP in terms of stability and application support. Only in the last few years, Windows 2000 suffers increasingly from lack of driver support and maybe subtle incompatibilities to XP (which everyone is developing for).
City traffic with lots of stop and go. The perfect environment for the a hybrid.
Maybe electric would work even better, but if you want something that is available soon hybrids are already in the market.
First, as some people have already posted, there is the problem of identity theft through recording the signal from the ear.
Second, will there be a sufficently clear signal? In a typical telephone receiver, the microphone is near the mouth of the speaker, not next to the ear. And telephone S/N ration is not that great to begin with.
Third, compression algorithms optimized for speech might or might not suppress the signal from the cochlea (think VOIP).
Overall, a typical case of sensationalist journalism that promotes products before the underlying problems are solved.
So what?
A lot of gamers have a PC anyway, especially those who are into programming and digital art. The latter are most likely to contribute to an Open Source project anyway. So the lack of a console version may limit the number of consumers who play these games, but it won't threaten the viability of Open Source games.
The question is, is the engine good enough to be used by commercial industry and would they want to given the fact that companies are a bunch of copyright nazi's?
If you look at the FAQ, you will find that they use the GPL. Not the LGPL. Which means the commercial game companies would have to hand out the source code for the entire game. Not gonna happen.
I don't think so. Projects like Nexuiz and Tremulous exist without non-commercial variants. This may be different for office applications, where managers want a vendor they can hold responsible. For instance Sun which still sells the commercial Star Office that is not much different from Open Office.
This said, a big thanks to Id software for open sourcing their older stuff.
A. is true to some extent. The 28 VA will cause some losses on the net on top of the 13 watts you are billed for. But I doubt those losses are greater than maybe 1 or 2 watts. Disclaimer: I'm an electrical engineer by training, but don't work in the power grid business. So take this as an educated guess, not something I have calculated.
B. True. With the above estimate, make it 75% less or better.
C. Not entirely true, but good quality CFLs last pretty long. In my apartment, both the two 15 Watt CFLs I put in 8 years ago still work fine. A rather small sample but I think it gives you an idea of CFL durability.
I think so. But the real question is why these treatments are offered in the first place.
Here I think it plays a big role that most patients don't have the knowledge to tell their doctor no if he suggests something stupid or overly expensive. So in essence, the salesman tells the customer what to buy, and for the doctor it often seems easiest to prescribe some pills.
On the political level, the pharma companies are good at lobbying against regulation that would put stronger restrictions on what insurance has to pay for. Several years ago, such an attempt failed in Germany:
Under the Schröder government, the health ministry was planning to introduce a list of approved medications, and the statutory health insurance would have paid only for these. The industry lobby managed to squash these plans.
Yes, I was talking about my private computing environment. Right now, I'm still running XP. That requires one activation at installation if you have the regular version, and none if you are a bit flexible in matters of copyright ;-)
With Office this is even less of an issue, as Open Office does everything I need from an office suite and needs no activation. It actually tends to give me less trouble than the MS Office 2000 I used at my last job.
In general, I try to find an Open Source or freeware application first if I need to tackle a new task. Most of the time, I find something that works.
Which leaves games, the main reason for me to use Windows these days. Here I got several that want or need regular contact with some internet server. But then again, a game that stops working some day is much less of a problem than an application that stops working and leaves you with a bunch of inaccessible data.
I have not tried the Win7 beta myself. But most reviews indicate it is what should have been Vista Service Pack 3. A version of Vista that finally runs fast, stable and has the worst quirks removed from the user interface.
So I think it is probably not bad to use and will actually be an UPgrade from XP. Only the people who already have Vista and will have to pay more money for Win7 have reason to be annoyed.
Personally I won't run a system that requires periodic product activation, but that's a political rather than technical reason.
I've played the demo of Half-Life 2, and in those levels there was not enough loose materials for building much of a barricade. Typically, I used the bricks and motor blocks as reusable projectiles.
Source Forts, however, sounds like what I had in mind when I wrote my post.
Seconded.
More exactly, the "good enough" point in technology was reached for me with Half-Life 1 and its mods. It offered
-a true 3D environment, no longer the pseudo-3D of Doom
-gameplay at higher screen resolutions, so you could actually identify things at a distance
-modelling that was not 100% lifelike but started to look good.
Since that time we have seen mostly incremental improvements, but not so many real innovations. The one thing that comes to mind is physics engines that allow realistic kicking around of items.
But those seem underutilized to me. For instance, as an FPS player I would like to see a game that is designed to allow building entrenchments. If only by pushing a few crates into position as cover.
About the bargain bin aspect:
Even some "free to play" MMOs have the above features by now, and I suspect that they don't earn THAT huge budgets from their item shops. So I agree with TFA that the time of huge budgets is probably over.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bumper_(automobile) has some information on that. It appears that the test speed has been reduced in 1982 to 2.5 miles per hour (4 km/h), and the only requirement is that no safety-related parts of the car may become non-functional.
That still allows a lot of cosmetic damage.
While the design looks cool, thing that bugs me is that the car appears to lack a bumper and the "radiator grill" might be the first thing the comes into contact with an obstacle. Misjudge the distance when parking and crack, $2000 repair bill.
Of course the Tesla is not the only car with such questionable design, the same goes for the new Mercedes E class...
In this case, the front end seems to be pretty dumb. While TFA does not give the exact specs of the hardware, the small size and the micro USB power connector imply that there is no "decent GPU" available. I guess the microconsole has hardware acceleration for decompressing MPEG-2, or at best those parts of MPEG-4 that are necessary to stream audio/video. TFA also states that all the rendering is done server-side.
I guess the console will be rather low-end (and not have much in the way of mass storage), so it won't be all that attractive as replacement for a "real" computer. OTOH, it is probably cheap to make and has all the connectors required for a thin client in an office environment. So if the manufacturer sells the MicroConsole separately, that might be an interesting "alternative use".