somewhat true. It is also very similar to the Nuon project, which hasn't quite failed (yet) but certainly hasn't been a rousing success.
There is somewhat of a unique twist in this effort though, as those who don't want to shell out the big-dollars can buy the stand-alone GameCube while those who don't have DVDs already and are buying GCs may want to spring for the integrated unit at a price slightly less than the two components would cost seperately.
While I wouldn't bet on these Panasonic units flying off the shelf, their compatibility with a low-cost standard console means they don't suffer from the developer/consumer catch-22 that plagued 3DO and Nuon.
Scott Draeker is NOT the person you talk to about porting The Sims. You talk to someone in Maxis or EA corporate. THEN, you have someone who is someone give Scott a call.
No sh*t Scott copped a "go away kid, you're bothering me" attitude.
Sorry for the dual replies but I couldn't let the larger issue here slip. This type of logic is exactly why Loki was doomed from the start. Why should anyone from Maxis or EA give Linux a second thought when they are going to make insignificant revenue from it compared to the Windows version? Its Scott's job to go out there and sell these companies who make successful games on the vision of Linux gaming. If he can't do that, Loki has no reason to exist...
Who wants 3-5 year old ports of games that were shit to begin with (*cough*Postal*cough*)?
This sort of attitude just proves my point that Scott has no grounding in reality and his company was just a ploy to cash in on the Linux craze of a couple years ago. He should do his employees and his investors a favor and just kill Loki and sell off what he can and call it a day.
...not to mention the fact that Hopkin's previous work is enough to get him dismissed out of hand by any Unix user or game company employee.
Hopkin's work on The Sims, the extremely popular high-selling game of the past year? His work on Pie Menus, which have become pretty much de facto standard on 3D Apps and other creative tools?
You must be one of Scott Draeker's blind lackeys if you'd dismiss him out of hand.
Loki is a big huge failure. Scott is to blame. The guy shouldn't even be managing a McDonalds.
I met Scott Draeker at the Game Developers conference on March 7 2000, about a month after The Sims shipped on Feb 4. I suggested that Loki port The Sims to Linux, because I was optimistic that it was going to be a popular game. He didn't seem to think so, and brushed me off, with a "go away kid, you're bothering me" attitude.
Just goes to show what a stellar business-man Scott Draeker is. Maybe that's why Loki's business is in the shitter and all of the good programmers jumped shipped months ago. If I were the Transgaming folks, I'd be happy that Scott Draeker was poo-pooing my idea as he has shown time and time again that he has no idea what he is talking about and in fact is often doing the exact opposite of what the right thing is.
Commodore was started in New York. It moved to Canada later, but it was also based in the Bahamas after that.
In any case, during the height of the C64 and Amiga, its primary operations were in West Chester, PA, despite where it was legally incorporated.
In any case, by Corporate America I'm sure he meant it in spirit, not in law. For example, Sony is a shining symbol of Corporate America despite being a Japanese company.
Monsters, Inc is a Pixar movie. Who sold Pixar to Steve Jobs? George Lucas. There's still pretty strong ties between Pixar and Lucasfilm/ILM, so there you go...
With Harry Potter the connections are (among other things) ILM doing many of the special effects and John Williams doing the score.
LOTR is a different beast...A New Line movie, music by Howard Shore/Enya, WETA doing the special effects...
The general Internet buzz, which thus far has proved to be correct (it predicted the teaser on Monsters, Inc about a month ago) is that there are going to be three seperate trailers in quick succession, one with Monsters, Inc (Nov 2); one (longer one) with Harry Potter (Nov 16); and one Internet trailer that is released between the two.
My semi-educated guess would be Nov 9th is when the Internet trailer will be released..maybe as a DVD exclusive at first(?).
You get a special URL that works in conjunction with some proprietary Windows-browser that does some sort of checksum on the DVD-ROM disc (needs to be inserted in your computer's DVD drive).
There's already content on this DVD-ROM only site, still pictures from Episode 2, etc...The few people that have redistributed this content on publically accessible web-sites have, not surprisingly, been spanked by Lucasfilm.
Be aware that there's a fake fan-trailer or two that have been circulating for months now. What you find on gnutella might not be the real thing.
Of course, then again it might be real -- according to many Internet rumor sites a lot of preview-audiences and movie-house projectionists have seen the new trailer..someone may have cammed it and digitzed it as was done with the Phantom Menace trailer before an official net version was posted.
It was the 802.11 device that was failing. The phone would always work fine, but whenever the base or receiver for said phone was within 100-200 feet of any of the 802.11 devices, the 802.11 network would go offline completely. Shutting the phones off or removing them from range would bring it back, nothing else would.
None of these devices were using Bluetooth. The point I was trying to make is broader than Bluetooth vs 802.11, it seems to be a general lack of worrying about playing-nicely-with-others that device manufacturers using the same frequency bands suffer from. Even if these protocols have methods of dealing with interference (in my experience) they seem not to be implemented very widely.
We really need a SPAM moderation, perhaps with a -2 attached to it. I'm really fucking sick of seeing your god-damn ads for your Artificial Minds project. You try to link the stupid thing to any and every topic posted to Slashdot.
After the second such post you're just alienating Slashdot readers that might otherwise have been interested in your project.
For those who don't know what I'm talking about, look at Mentifex's user info:
Click some of the links...Notice how every post he's made is an ad for his project, usually completely off-topic for the Slashdot article, but linked in with silly connections (ie. in an XP related post 'Artificial Minds (link included) will not use XP!').
Anyway, to keep THIS post somewhat on-topic, REBOL is a fairly nice language but it will never catch on with the silly greedy-licencing model they have. When is the last time a language that you had to pay royalties to use caught on? (Hint: Never).
As others have mentioned, Sony is, even DMCA notwithstanding, within its rights to tell this guy to pull down their software. It is copyrighted software.
However, this is still yet another case of a company doing more harm than good in their zealous over-protection of intellectual property laws. Though the software involved was largely copyrighted by Sony, with small tweaks by the people running the site, the software was only of use to people who owned Aibo's in the first place. Sony should realize what part of the Aibo it is that actually makes them money (hint: its the Aibo hardware, without which the software is useless) and focus on that. Having people enthusastically modifying the software to do cool things can only help their market share.
They must have forgotten that the Aibo is NOT a mainstream product, its a product for geeks with a lot of money. This sort of action is exactly the type that will erode that market fast. Lego realized this early on, and that's why they've mostly been OK (with the exception of the LegOS name, which I totally understand for trademark reasons) with people hacking their product.
This is really a small incident that is part of a MUCH larger problem that involves things such as specs for video cards and other add-in devices, the future of fair-use when it comes to media, etc. I wonder how long its going to take the US government to realize that, while they may gain (in the form of lobby money) in the short-term, these laws (like DMCA) they are passing are going to have a disasterous effect on America in the long-term..If its illegal for kids to hack, where are the top-flight engineers going to come from 10 years from now? Not the USA, that's for sure.
And, lastly, screw Sony anyway. I used to be a loyal Sony customer until about 4-5 years ago. They used to sell great products at reasonable prices and weren't known for their legal transgressions... These days it's impossible for me to support a company whose quality of products has fallen, who have been trying to create a Microsoft-like monopoly in the console gaming industry, who is a major player in both the MPAA and RIAA, etc. Fuck you, Sony. You won't ever get a dime of my money in the future.
I think this whole situation in one in which theory doesn't mesh with practice. The technologies in question may be capable of dealing with high interference but in my experience (and the experience of the original author you are responding to, and seemingly many others) these devices tend to stomp all over each other making all of them within a typical house-radius often unusable.
From (the admittedly small amount of stuff) I know
about these wireless technologies, there are supposed to be built-in checks to deal with this interference, but in practice it would seem like very many vendors are not bothering to implement these and their devices, either at the hardware or driver level just cannot deal with any meaningful amount of interference.
I've personally had to pull my 802.11 network due to proximity of cordless phones and even a logitech wireless mouse/keyboard. Maybe the card vendor (DLINK, fwiw), is at fault -- not the underlying protocols, but in any case it is a very real problem that many people are running into in practice.
Linux developers are too stupid to fully implement a state of the art file-system like NTFS. They are just barely getting their heads around file-system concepts that were new 30 years ago. That's why NTFS support will perpetually be in unusable-beta as far as writing goes.
Try clicking the 'Advanced Search' link. Google does support these types of searches... On the advanced search page you can do exact-strings and filter on specific words, etc. It's all there.
You can also do "Which pages link to mine?" searches off that page, or to do it quickly from the mainpage, enter (for example) "link:www.slashdot.org"
Nice idea in practice, but the speed hit to check all of the returned results in real-time would be significant. With Google, I get results in a fraction of a second...if they were to take on the added CPU and network load of checking all these results before they gave them to me, it would be much much slower, especially considering the amount of traffic they are fielding as the #1 (by far) search engine.
As long as they keep their database relatively updated (and google does) I'll be happy getting back un-checked results as fast as possible. Also, the google cache feature is REALLY nice and takes away most of the sting of 404s when they do pop up.
I'm not usually one to defend Slashdot editors, but I think his statement is valid, though he didn't properly clarify it.
The majority of DDOS attacks to date have relied of hackers breaking into many computers beforehand, often these are home computers (PCs) running over cable or DSL lines. Compared to that type of a system, a commercial router (particularly one located close to a backbone) is capable of a hell of a lot more traffic generation.
Word and IE are great and widely used, but there's a lot of other software in use by millions of people each day. By and large this software is on PCs. The PC platform is so dominant now that its very unlikely Apple will ever catch up in terms of third party developer support.
The real question is, why did the PC get the developers in the first place (which created the apps, which brought the users...) and that is mostly Apple's fault. If you talk to any Apple-platform developers (outside of Apple) that have been around more than a couple years almost every single one will tell you horror stories of how Apple has treated developers over the years, almost to the point of being openly hostile...Microsoft on the other hand, has been very good to developers in terms of APIs and great documentation (yes, I said it, MSDN is a great source of documentation)..Of course Microsoft might look a bit less rosy if you create Apps that compete with their's (Netscape, Real, or whatever) but for the average developer their support has been, historically, top notch.
Why does it matter that they only offer one pointing device? Most PC manufacturers do the same. If you dont like manufacturer X's trackpad, then you are out of luck as well, unless you go with manufacturer Y's product.
That was exactly the original poster's point..In the PC market, you have different vendors, each of which offers different options..But they all run the same software...If you want to run OS X you have two basic laptop choices and very little in they way of input variety at all, because Apple is the only vendor.
One of the problems with dealing with the Palm OS is the brick wall you hit when you want to extend the OS. To get access to parts of the OS source code, you have to go through all sorts of rigmorole, signing NDAs, etc. Maybe now with the spinoff, they might Open Source it.
I don't follow your logic?
It seems to me an OS (Operating System, not to be confused with Open Source) spin-off would make it LESS likely that the OS would go Open Source. For a combined company, a case could be made that Open Source helps make the OS more bug free, and thus the product gets better, thus more HW is sold...
If the company's whole business model revolves around OS licensing, on the other hand, things are very different. Just as one example, Handspring, Sony, etc are now free to use the code (varies by license, but in general..) as long as they publish their changes... And the OS is way too simple for the end-user for downline 'support' to be an option for making money...So how do they stay in business?
Slashdot Mirror
somewhat true. It is also very similar to the Nuon project, which hasn't quite failed (yet) but certainly hasn't been a rousing success.
There is somewhat of a unique twist in this effort though, as those who don't want to shell out the big-dollars can buy the stand-alone GameCube while those who don't have DVDs already and are buying GCs may want to spring for the integrated unit at a price slightly less than the two components would cost seperately.
While I wouldn't bet on these Panasonic units flying off the shelf, their compatibility with a low-cost standard console means they don't suffer from the developer/consumer catch-22 that plagued 3DO and Nuon.
Yeah but ask yourself how they got that monopoly?
It wasn't granted by God or the government.
Scott Draeker is NOT the person you talk to about porting The Sims. You talk to someone in Maxis or EA corporate. THEN, you have someone who is someone give Scott a call.
No sh*t Scott copped a "go away kid, you're bothering me" attitude.
Sorry for the dual replies but I couldn't let the larger issue here slip. This type of logic is exactly why Loki was doomed from the start. Why should anyone from Maxis or EA give Linux a second thought when they are going to make insignificant revenue from it compared to the Windows version? Its Scott's job to go out there and sell these companies who make successful games on the vision of Linux gaming. If he can't do that, Loki has no reason to exist...
Who wants 3-5 year old ports of games that were shit to begin with (*cough*Postal*cough*)?
This sort of attitude just proves my point that Scott has no grounding in reality and his company was just a ploy to cash in on the Linux craze of a couple years ago. He should do his employees and his investors a favor and just kill Loki and sell off what he can and call it a day.
Hopkin's work on The Sims, the extremely popular high-selling game of the past year? His work on Pie Menus, which have become pretty much de facto standard on 3D Apps and other creative tools?
You must be one of Scott Draeker's blind lackeys if you'd dismiss him out of hand.
Loki is a big huge failure. Scott is to blame. The guy shouldn't even be managing a McDonalds.
I met Scott Draeker at the Game Developers conference on March 7 2000, about a month after The Sims shipped on Feb 4. I suggested that Loki port The Sims to Linux, because I was optimistic that it was going to be a popular game. He didn't seem to think so, and brushed me off, with a "go away kid, you're bothering me" attitude.
Just goes to show what a stellar business-man Scott Draeker is. Maybe that's why Loki's business is in the shitter and all of the good programmers jumped shipped months ago. If I were the Transgaming folks, I'd be happy that Scott Draeker was poo-pooing my idea as he has shown time and time again that he has no idea what he is talking about and in fact is often doing the exact opposite of what the right thing is.
Commodore was started in New York. It moved to Canada later, but it was also based in the Bahamas after that.
In any case, during the height of the C64 and Amiga, its primary operations were in West Chester, PA, despite where it was legally incorporated.
In any case, by Corporate America I'm sure he meant it in spirit, not in law. For example, Sony is a shining symbol of Corporate America despite being a Japanese company.
Its politics and business really.
Monsters, Inc is a Pixar movie. Who sold Pixar to Steve Jobs? George Lucas. There's still pretty strong ties between Pixar and Lucasfilm/ILM, so there you go...
With Harry Potter the connections are (among other things) ILM doing many of the special effects and John Williams doing the score.
LOTR is a different beast...A New Line movie, music by Howard Shore/Enya, WETA doing the special effects...
The general Internet buzz, which thus far has proved to be correct (it predicted the teaser on Monsters, Inc about a month ago) is that there are going to be three seperate trailers in quick succession, one with Monsters, Inc (Nov 2); one (longer one) with Harry Potter (Nov 16); and one Internet trailer that is released between the two.
My semi-educated guess would be Nov 9th is when the Internet trailer will be released..maybe as a DVD exclusive at first(?).
You get a special URL that works in conjunction with some proprietary Windows-browser that does some sort of checksum on the DVD-ROM disc (needs to be inserted in your computer's DVD drive).
There's already content on this DVD-ROM only site, still pictures from Episode 2, etc...The few people that have redistributed this content on publically accessible web-sites have, not surprisingly, been spanked by Lucasfilm.
Be aware that there's a fake fan-trailer or two that have been circulating for months now. What you find on gnutella might not be the real thing.
Of course, then again it might be real -- according to many Internet rumor sites a lot of preview-audiences and movie-house projectionists have seen the new trailer..someone may have cammed it and digitzed it as was done with the Phantom Menace trailer before an official net version was posted.
Matt Dillon falls off his rocker, calls for this project to be renamed BSD/GNU-Darwin.
It was the 802.11 device that was failing. The phone would always work fine, but whenever the base or receiver for said phone was within 100-200 feet of any of the 802.11 devices, the 802.11 network would go offline completely. Shutting the phones off or removing them from range would bring it back, nothing else would.
None of these devices were using Bluetooth. The point I was trying to make is broader than Bluetooth vs 802.11, it seems to be a general lack of worrying about playing-nicely-with-others that device manufacturers using the same frequency bands suffer from. Even if these protocols have methods of dealing with interference (in my experience) they seem not to be implemented very widely.
Who's to blame for not being able to play QuickTime Movies in Linux?
Your answer: Apple
Correct Answer: Soreson.
Correct Answer #2: Those who encode using Sorenson rather than a more free QT codec.
We really need a SPAM moderation, perhaps with a -2 attached to it. I'm really fucking sick of seeing your god-damn ads for your Artificial Minds project. You try to link the stupid thing to any and every topic posted to Slashdot.
After the second such post you're just alienating Slashdot readers that might otherwise have been interested in your project.
For those who don't know what I'm talking about, look at Mentifex's user info:
http://slashdot.org/~Mentifex/
Click some of the links...Notice how every post he's made is an ad for his project, usually completely off-topic for the Slashdot article, but linked in with silly connections (ie. in an XP related post 'Artificial Minds (link included) will not use XP!').
Anyway, to keep THIS post somewhat on-topic, REBOL is a fairly nice language but it will never catch on with the silly greedy-licencing model they have. When is the last time a language that you had to pay royalties to use caught on? (Hint: Never).
As others have mentioned, Sony is, even DMCA notwithstanding, within its rights to tell this guy to pull down their software. It is copyrighted software.
However, this is still yet another case of a company doing more harm than good in their zealous over-protection of intellectual property laws. Though the software involved was largely copyrighted by Sony, with small tweaks by the people running the site, the software was only of use to people who owned Aibo's in the first place. Sony should realize what part of the Aibo it is that actually makes them money (hint: its the Aibo hardware, without which the software is useless) and focus on that. Having people enthusastically modifying the software to do cool things can only help their market share.
They must have forgotten that the Aibo is NOT a mainstream product, its a product for geeks with a lot of money. This sort of action is exactly the type that will erode that market fast. Lego realized this early on, and that's why they've mostly been OK (with the exception of the LegOS name, which I totally understand for trademark reasons) with people hacking their product.
This is really a small incident that is part of a MUCH larger problem that involves things such as specs for video cards and other add-in devices, the future of fair-use when it comes to media, etc. I wonder how long its going to take the US government to realize that, while they may gain (in the form of lobby money) in the short-term, these laws (like DMCA) they are passing are going to have a disasterous effect on America in the long-term..If its illegal for kids to hack, where are the top-flight engineers going to come from 10 years from now? Not the USA, that's for sure.
And, lastly, screw Sony anyway. I used to be a loyal Sony customer until about 4-5 years ago. They used to sell great products at reasonable prices and weren't known for their legal transgressions... These days it's impossible for me to support a company whose quality of products has fallen, who have been trying to create a Microsoft-like monopoly in the console gaming industry, who is a major player in both the MPAA and RIAA, etc. Fuck you, Sony. You won't ever get a dime of my money in the future.
I think this whole situation in one in which theory doesn't mesh with practice. The technologies in question may be capable of dealing with high interference but in my experience (and the experience of the original author you are responding to, and seemingly many others) these devices tend to stomp all over each other making all of them within a typical house-radius often unusable.
From (the admittedly small amount of stuff) I know
about these wireless technologies, there are supposed to be built-in checks to deal with this interference, but in practice it would seem like very many vendors are not bothering to implement these and their devices, either at the hardware or driver level just cannot deal with any meaningful amount of interference.
I've personally had to pull my 802.11 network due to proximity of cordless phones and even a logitech wireless mouse/keyboard. Maybe the card vendor (DLINK, fwiw), is at fault -- not the underlying protocols, but in any case it is a very real problem that many people are running into in practice.
Linux developers are too stupid to fully implement a state of the art file-system like NTFS. They are just barely getting their heads around file-system concepts that were new 30 years ago. That's why NTFS support will perpetually be in unusable-beta as far as writing goes.
Try clicking the 'Advanced Search' link. Google does support these types of searches... On the advanced search page you can do exact-strings and filter on specific words, etc. It's all there.
You can also do "Which pages link to mine?" searches off that page, or to do it quickly from the mainpage, enter (for example) "link:www.slashdot.org"
That'll teach me to skip previewing my comments. "Nice idea in theory" is what I meant, of course.
Nice idea in practice, but the speed hit to check all of the returned results in real-time would be significant. With Google, I get results in a fraction of a second...if they were to take on the added CPU and network load of checking all these results before they gave them to me, it would be much much slower, especially considering the amount of traffic they are fielding as the #1 (by far) search engine.
As long as they keep their database relatively updated (and google does) I'll be happy getting back un-checked results as fast as possible. Also, the google cache feature is REALLY nice and takes away most of the sting of 404s when they do pop up.
I'm not usually one to defend Slashdot editors, but I think his statement is valid, though he didn't properly clarify it.
The majority of DDOS attacks to date have relied of hackers breaking into many computers beforehand, often these are home computers (PCs) running over cable or DSL lines. Compared to that type of a system, a commercial router (particularly one located close to a backbone) is capable of a hell of a lot more traffic generation.
It is without a doubt due to the software.
Word and IE are great and widely used, but there's a lot of other software in use by millions of people each day. By and large this software is on PCs. The PC platform is so dominant now that its very unlikely Apple will ever catch up in terms of third party developer support.
The real question is, why did the PC get the developers in the first place (which created the apps, which brought the users...) and that is mostly Apple's fault. If you talk to any Apple-platform developers (outside of Apple) that have been around more than a couple years almost every single one will tell you horror stories of how Apple has treated developers over the years, almost to the point of being openly hostile...Microsoft on the other hand, has been very good to developers in terms of APIs and great documentation (yes, I said it, MSDN is a great source of documentation)..Of course Microsoft might look a bit less rosy if you create Apps that compete with their's (Netscape, Real, or whatever) but for the average developer their support has been, historically, top notch.
Why does it matter that they only offer one pointing device? Most PC manufacturers do the same. If you dont like manufacturer X's trackpad, then you are out of luck as well, unless you go with manufacturer Y's product.
That was exactly the original poster's point..In the PC market, you have different vendors, each of which offers different options..But they all run the same software...If you want to run OS X you have two basic laptop choices and very little in they way of input variety at all, because Apple is the only vendor.
The voice is meant to be a generic "Kennedy"/Hyannis accent. But the character is modelled after many politicians, real and imaginary.
I don't follow your logic?
It seems to me an OS (Operating System, not to be confused with Open Source) spin-off would make it LESS likely that the OS would go Open Source. For a combined company, a case could be made that Open Source helps make the OS more bug free, and thus the product gets better, thus more HW is sold...
If the company's whole business model revolves around OS licensing, on the other hand, things are very different. Just as one example, Handspring, Sony, etc are now free to use the code (varies by license, but in general..) as long as they publish their changes... And the OS is way too simple for the end-user for downline 'support' to be an option for making money...So how do they stay in business?