What microsoft has been trying to do from day one is to avoid the ideas and basics of Unix.
what day was it when they bought zenix and tried to market their own unix based os? was day one the day they sold that to sco and agreed to a contract that said they would never create a unixlike operating system that would compete with sco unix?
The word "evil" can have many shades of meaning, and using it to refer to something bad is hardly an egregious misuse of the word.
i agree. my original issue was actually the opposite situation. Someone took issue with the use of the word evil in connection with Microsoft. Another person supplied dictionary definitions and exposition on why they applied to microsoft. The original poster replied saying that the fact a dictionary definition applies to Microsoft doesn't make it appropriate to apply the term it is defining to Microsoft.
Since we agree, i think, that dictionaries do describe accepted and common ways words are used; would you agree that the applicability of dictionary definitions to a specific use of a word would demonstrate that it isnt a misuse of the word?
Dictionaries stabilize definitions; they do not create them.
absolutely. it is beyond the scope of a dictionary's purpose to create words or meanings for words.
Words don't mean whatever a person wants them to mean, they mean whatever people understand them to mean.
That's a fair point. I was taking your argument to be more from the speaker's intent than the listener's understanding of what he says. I still feel that the listener's misunderstanding of the use of the word doesnt make it a legitimate definition for the word until that misunderstanding is widespread enough to be ubiquitous.
I do agree that it isnt inclusion in a dictionary that makes it a legitimate use of the word; it's the use being so widespread that it is known and accepted by the population as a whole.
Saying that established rules define language is also ridiculous because language is so complex that we have not yet devised any set of rules adequate to describe language in all situations.
Well, established rules define dead languages. I agree that established rules cannot fully define a living language because the situations it has to describe evolve with the environment of the users of that language.
But one must understand that it is an arbitrary, artificial creation, and that "real" language is defined by how people actually speak.
All language is an arbitrary, artificial creation.
I personally dislike it when people misuse the phrase "beg the question" here, because unlike say, "chomp at the bit," it actually has a different meaning than "raises the question," and erodes the ability to use it meaningfully.
This i have a problem with. Your argument to this point would suggest that the misuse of "beg the question" to mean "raises the question" should make them legitimately interchagable. After all, that is how it is being popularly used and popularly understood on Slashdot.
I do agree with you that it is a misuse of the phrase. I think where we really disagree is where the threshold is between things being a misuse of a term and being a legitimate new use of the term.
But pulling out a dictionary for the word evil?
Well, the dictionary definitions are common ways people use the word evil. It isnt always used in a deep philosophical context.
But context is based on the words around that word. The context relies on me not misusing other words. That seems a pretty shaky way to determine what things mean.
Words are used to convey ideas--if a person misuses a word, it is still usually possible to discern what they meant to say. The fact that you figured out what they were trying to say doesn't mean that they didn't do a poor job of saying it. If i consistently call a table a chair and you figure out i am talking about a table due to the context of how i am using it, that doesnt make my use of "chair" correct.
The real question is, how popular does a non-standard usage have to become in order to become standard?
ubiquitous
Inflammable is far from being accepted as standard or formal for "not flammable."
what do "standard" and "formal" mean here? Word meanings are based on usage, right? if many people are using inflammable to mean "not flammable" that is an acceptable use of the word right? so, depending on context, inflammable should mean "not flammable" or "flammable".
People have been communicating with each other for a lot longer than dictionaries have been around.
true. and people saw value in the creation, publication, and possession of a book that attempts to describe the definitive meanings of words. That's why dictionaries were created and that's why they called the things they wrote in them "definitions".
Even without dictionaries, people still had language structures and words still had meanings. words didn't just mean whatever the guy who said it wanted it to mean.
If someone is writing something for publication, or giving a formal speech, certainly they should try to adhere to prescriptive standards of language.
why? if context is all that matters and everyone should be able to understand what he meant to say, why should he adhere to any standards of language?
Language exists to convey ideas. It only works because we have a common understanding of what those words mean. Dictionaries are just compilations of what the common understanding of those words are. if your misuse of the word becomes ubiquitous, it becomes a commonly understood meaning for the word and should be added to the dictionary. Until that happens, it's still a misuse of the word and potentially hinders the ability to understand what you are trying to say. Just because I figured out what you were trying to say, doesn't make how you said it correct.
Your caveat that any formal use of the language should adhere to those standards seems to imply that you acknowledge them as more definitive. Otherwise, why should they adhere to those standards?
Also, what criteria determines which usage of the word is the definitive one?
If it is determined by popular use, how many people have to agree on a definition to make that definition change from a misuse of the word to the definitive use of the word?
Since most people think inflammable means "not flammable" (even though it actually means "flammable"), does that mean propane and acetylene tanks are mislabeled when they say "caution: inflammable material"?
But as far as I know, in a trial, you are presumed innocent until proven guilty. When it comes to an appeal, you are presumed guilty until proven innocent.
I am not a lawyer either, but I'm pretty sure this is incorrect. (in the U.S. at least)
In a criminal trial, you are presumed innocent until proven guilty. In a civil trial, the burden of proof is a preponderence of the evidence. (i.e. you dont have to be proven guilty, just proven that is't pretty likely)
An appeal does not presume guilt or innocence and doesnt prove guilt or innocence. In an appeal, the defendant is claiming that there was some failure of the process that makes the first trial unreliable as the basis for a decision. If you are successful in an appeal, it doesn't mean you are innocent. It means that first trial is voided and you can be retried (with possible stipulations from the appeals court intended to avoid making the same failure again).
In the E.U., I imagine an appeal is used in a similar way.
It is the defendant's duty in an appeal to prove that the findings of fact and final judgement in the trial are wrong.
it's the defendant's job to prove the process was flawed in a way that voids the trial. It doesnt necessarily mean the facts are wrong. It could mean evidence was unfairly excluded or that evidence wasn't properly disclosed, or the judge made a bad ruling, or a juror violated their responsibilities in a way that tainted the jury, or any number of other things.
In the U.S. antitrust case, the appeals court used the judge's behaviour to overturn the judgement. They upheld the findings of fact, but accepted the argument that his statements demonstrated a bias that made him unfit to determine Microsoft's punishment.
The problem is that the market wasnt static during that time. The market grew dramatically. And while the market's size was increasing, Nintendo's userbase was shrinking. They not only failed grow their segment of the market, their installed base was eaten away by their competitors.
I'm not going to sound the death knell for Nintendo, but when your installed base decreases while your potential market increases, there's no way to make that look positive.
Thanks for the info. I don't know Niels, but I do know Bruce, and will take their previous association as sufficient to assure me of Niels' honest intent.
But do you know Zeinfeld? You're taking his word for the association between Niels and Bruce on which you are trusting Niels.
(no offense intended toward any involved party. I was just observing that trusting Niels because of that post alone is no more reliable than trusting him on his word)
Given that Jobs created NeXT, and Pixar, and the iPod, I'm sure he would've come up with something else without Woz around. Smart engineers are a dime a dozen; brilliant entrepreneurs, on the other hand, are astoundingly rare.
Jobs didn't create Pixar. Jobs bought Pixar from Lucasfilm Ltd. for $10 million.
What the Xbox 360 does offer is external verification that the player did in fact complete the game a certain way. So essentially the "innovative" feature is bragging rights, e-penis++, and all that jazz.
This reminds me of a scene from Tin Cup. Costner's character tells Don Johnson's character, after having played the back 9 with just a 7 iron, "Well have you ever finished the back 9 with just a 7 iron?" and Johnson's character says, "Hell, Roy. It never even occurred to me to try."
I got the impression from your first post that you might not be aware of what they've done since origin. I was just trying to explain why people are listening to them about the MMO market and why their perspective might be worth taking a look at.
With respect to Tabula Rasa, my understanding was that they started over with it because the original idea was determined to be too confusing and too different when it was shown to people and less because it wasnt functional technologically. (what i mean is, it wasnt restarted for technical reasons, it was restarted because they decided the concept didnt work for the audience.) I dont think that that decision says anything really negative about Garriott or his ability to make an mmo. I think it says he tried something a bit risky and dropped it when he decided it wasnt working.
My personal opinion is that he is definitely right that there will be a few large companies that do the really high profile games like COH, WOW, EQ, etc. and if you want to make an MMO out of your franchise, you go to them.
At the same time, you are definitely right that there will always be a market for niche games like A Tale in the Desert or Meridian 59. The niche games can thrive as long as they can remain profitable with a small player base (compared to the major games like WOW). The niche developers will also need to accept that, barring something incredibly lucky happening, they wont be made millionaires by their MMO.
I think online play is the last area of computer gaming where the big companies like EA cannot lock out the independent developers because it's the one place the developers don't need their distribution channels to sell the game.
The independents will have to work hard to provide compelling and innovative gameplay though, to counter the marketing machine and budgets the majors have. The major games will probably stick to proven gameplay elements and steal the successful ideas from the niche games. In that sense, it will be a lot like true independent film vs. hollywood blockbusters.
You have a mistaken perception of where the Garriots are coming from when they speak. This isn't to say that this information will change your mind, but they are not speaking from a position of single player game developers.
The Garriots run NC Soft Austin and Robert is (I believe) on the board of directors for NC Soft Inc. NC Soft Austin publishes Lineage, Lineage II, City of Heros, City of Villains, Guild Wars, and soon, Auto Assault.
They will also be publishing Richard Garriot's next game (from his company Destination Games, which was bought by NC Soft), Tabula Rasa. Tabula Rasa is also an MMO.
I think they speak with some understanding of the MMO environment and market. Also, considering NC Soft is a Korean company, I suspect they have a pretty good idea what is going on in the Korean market.
This isn't to say they cannot be wrong or to invalidate your perspective. I just wanted to correct the mistaken perception of them as Single Player game creators or that they do not have a foundation to base their opinions on.
Logging in and typing "help" IS using the software. Please at least get familiar with the major details before saying something did or didn't happen
as you yourself pointed out, he telnetted to a port and typed "help". that no more binds him to the license for the software than i am bound to sendmail's license if i telnet to it's port and play with the available commands. If I were to telnet to a public port on a machine a friend owns and play around with the commands available to me, and it happened to be the port bitkeeper runs on, how does that make me subject to a license i've never seen and never agreed to?
Tridge was considered to be bound by the licence because he was working for a company that was granted a licence.
Tridge was considered to be bound by the license by Bitkeeper's assertion. I've never seen anything that said OSDL agreed to any licensing terms involving Bitkeeper or that Linus was allowed to agree to licensing terms on behalf of the company and its employees. Linus was bound by the license and he was the one granted a license. Unless you can provide some documentation to support that OSDL had agreed to any licensing terms with Bitkeeper, I cannot see any way that Tridge was bound to any agreement with Bitkeeper.
If I was to consider myself legally free to make copies of MS Windows software purchased by my workplace it would be just as stupid as those who are saying Tridge didn't break the licence.
show me anything that says OSDL purchased any licenses for Bitkeeper. Show me anything that says the licensing agreement between OSDL and Bitkeeper bound all of the OSDL employees to its terms, even the ones who didn't use it.
Your analogy also fails on the fact that Tridge never possessed a copy of any software made by Bitkeeper.
Please bother to actually read the entire previous post where I mentioned Samba. Actually i did read what you said about Samba. I fail to see how Tridge violated any licenses creating Samba too.
Tridgell didn't use the software, so why would he have anything to do with its license?
What Tridgell did was access packets being transmitted over a network and access ports on a computer with the permission of the computer and network owner. From this information, he reverse engineered how the bitkeeper client worked without ever touching the bitkeeper client.
If you think this is inappropriate, i hope you aren't using Samba, because that's exactly the way samba was created.
This isnt necessarily a well thought out idea but i thought i'd throw it out there for the sake of discussion anyway.
The issue with these posters is that they are using the link in the story submission to increase their page rank (by being linked to from slashdot's index, which is a highly ranked page). So what if the link in the story text linked to a cgi that then redirected to the url the submitter provided?
The submitter gets to have his link, but it's coming from a url with a much lower page rank than the index page.
If i was microsoft i would say "ok...well see you later Europe."
Microsoft cannot do this. Microsoft's entire business is structured around leveraging their monopolies on the desktop and office applications. If they abandoned The EU, they would be creating a market for a competitor. Whomever took that market would have enough market share that Microsoft would have to interoperate with them. That would be disasterous for them.
Even worse, it leaves room for that market to be carved up between several different applications that work together using a standard interface (like open document format for office, for example).
But usually, brainwashing does work and does persist. As in your case, it does not always succeed.
i disagree that it was brainwashing. my family exposed me to a set of beliefs that they held. Some of those beliefs i have evaluated and found merit in. Some of those beliefs i have evaluated and discarded. I do not accept the notion that exposing me to ideas is equivalent to brainwashing.
But just look at the simple statistics, of the amounts of people who persist their parents' beliefs vs. the amounts of people that don't. If brainwashing was not an issue, then persistence should be around 50%, and we both agree it is far above that, is it not?
Why should persistence be around 50%? Where are you getting these statistics? Are we talking about what people actually believe, or what they present to the public?
I think you are neglecting motivations other than brainwashing.
my family took me to church when i was a child. Now that i'm an adult, i don't go to church. How is my choice to not go to church as an adult always demonstrative of free will while another person's choice to continue going to church always demonstrative of brainwashing?
I played baseball and soccer as a child. I dont play either now. Are the people i know who still play those games brainwashed?
Maybe they just found something enjoyable or valuable in it and have chosen to continue to participate while i didnt find anything valuable and chose to spend my time in other ways.
I had a friend in college who was in her 30s and converted from being an atheist to being catholic. Is she free thinking? A guy i used to study martial arts with converted from christianity to islam. Is he free thinking?
If you raise your children to not beleive in a god, are you brainwashing them?
The difference betweeen "brainwashed by your parents" and "made your own choice" cannot be determined by the choice you made. It is determined by the reason you made the choice. If you continue to go to church because you enjoy it, it's a choice. If you continue to go to church because it's what you've always done, you can call it brainwashing.
how are you going to offer a significant discount? You need to pay the production costs of generating a print run of the books for you to sell. That print run is going to be a lot more expensive than the "official" print run because you are only printing the number of books you expect to sell in your local store.
Alternatively, you could outsource that printing job to a printer who provides copies for different stores and can thus reduce the cost per unit to produce...but at that point you might as well just buy from the official distributor.
When someone complains the fourth gear in a car doesn't work, do you agree it better would? Or do you recommend third gear, and throw in comments about conserving fuel and tire wear?
That's a ridiculous comparison. The issue is the flash plugin eating resources. It isn't even a problem with Mozilla itself. How do you derive from that an analogy to an essential part of a car failing?
How about a better analogy, like : You bought a Honda Civic. You installed after-market, 3rd party ground effects on it. Now every speedbump you go over damages your car. Is that Honda's problem?
Slashdot Mirror
What microsoft has been trying to do from day one is to avoid the ideas and basics of Unix.
what day was it when they bought zenix and tried to market their own unix based os?
was day one the day they sold that to sco and agreed to a contract that said they would never create a unixlike operating system that would compete with sco unix?
- Animals are more similar to humans. We wouldn't want to eat humans, but we eat animals because we think less of them.
So plants are sufficiently different to humans that it is ok to think less of them?
Basically, you're drawing the same arbitrary line meat eaters are.
The word "evil" can have many shades of meaning, and using it to refer to something bad is hardly an egregious misuse of the word.
i agree. my original issue was actually the opposite situation. Someone took issue with the use of the word evil in connection with Microsoft. Another person supplied dictionary definitions and exposition on why they applied to microsoft. The original poster replied saying that the fact a dictionary definition applies to Microsoft doesn't make it appropriate to apply the term it is defining to Microsoft.
Since we agree, i think, that dictionaries do describe accepted and common ways words are used; would you agree that the applicability of dictionary definitions to a specific use of a word would demonstrate that it isnt a misuse of the word?
Dictionaries stabilize definitions; they do not create them.
absolutely. it is beyond the scope of a dictionary's purpose to create words or meanings for words.
Words don't mean whatever a person wants them to mean, they mean whatever people understand them to mean.
That's a fair point. I was taking your argument to be more from the speaker's intent than the listener's understanding of what he says. I still feel that the listener's misunderstanding of the use of the word doesnt make it a legitimate definition for the word until that misunderstanding is widespread enough to be ubiquitous.
I do agree that it isnt inclusion in a dictionary that makes it a legitimate use of the word; it's the use being so widespread that it is known and accepted by the population as a whole.
Saying that established rules define language is also ridiculous because language is so complex that we have not yet devised any set of rules adequate to describe language in all situations.
Well, established rules define dead languages. I agree that established rules cannot fully define a living language because the situations it has to describe evolve with the environment of the users of that language.
But one must understand that it is an arbitrary, artificial creation, and that "real" language is defined by how people actually speak.
All language is an arbitrary, artificial creation.
I personally dislike it when people misuse the phrase "beg the question" here, because unlike say, "chomp at the bit," it actually has a different meaning than "raises the question," and erodes the ability to use it meaningfully.
This i have a problem with. Your argument to this point would suggest that the misuse of "beg the question" to mean "raises the question" should make them legitimately interchagable. After all, that is how it is being popularly used and popularly understood on Slashdot.
I do agree with you that it is a misuse of the phrase. I think where we really disagree is where the threshold is between things being a misuse of a term and being a legitimate new use of the term.
But pulling out a dictionary for the word evil?
Well, the dictionary definitions are common ways people use the word evil. It isnt always used in a deep philosophical context.
Usage is based on context.
But context is based on the words around that word. The context relies on me not misusing other words. That seems a pretty shaky way to determine what things mean.
Words are used to convey ideas--if a person misuses a word, it is still usually possible to discern what they meant to say.
The fact that you figured out what they were trying to say doesn't mean that they didn't do a poor job of saying it. If i consistently call a table a chair and you figure out i am talking about a table due to the context of how i am using it, that doesnt make my use of "chair" correct.
The real question is, how popular does a non-standard usage have to become in order to become standard?
ubiquitous
Inflammable is far from being accepted as standard or formal for "not flammable."
what do "standard" and "formal" mean here? Word meanings are based on usage, right? if many people are using inflammable to mean "not flammable" that is an acceptable use of the word right? so, depending on context, inflammable should mean "not flammable" or "flammable".
People have been communicating with each other for a lot longer than dictionaries have been around.
true. and people saw value in the creation, publication, and possession of a book that attempts to describe the definitive meanings of words. That's why dictionaries were created and that's why they called the things they wrote in them "definitions".
Even without dictionaries, people still had language structures and words still had meanings. words didn't just mean whatever the guy who said it wanted it to mean.
If someone is writing something for publication, or giving a formal speech, certainly they should try to adhere to prescriptive standards of language.
why? if context is all that matters and everyone should be able to understand what he meant to say, why should he adhere to any standards of language?
Language exists to convey ideas. It only works because we have a common understanding of what those words mean. Dictionaries are just compilations of what the common understanding of those words are. if your misuse of the word becomes ubiquitous, it becomes a commonly understood meaning for the word and should be added to the dictionary.
Until that happens, it's still a misuse of the word and potentially hinders the ability to understand what you are trying to say. Just because I figured out what you were trying to say, doesn't make how you said it correct.
Your caveat that any formal use of the language should adhere to those standards seems to imply that you acknowledge them as more definitive. Otherwise, why should they adhere to those standards?
Several analysts have downgraded Apple's stock, after the meeting.
They cited the lack of any major product announcement in his presentation as a sign of weakness.
ok. so what is the definitive meaning of "evil"?
Also, what criteria determines which usage of the word is the definitive one?
If it is determined by popular use, how many people have to agree on a definition to make that definition change from a misuse of the word to the definitive use of the word?
Since most people think inflammable means "not flammable" (even though it actually means "flammable"), does that mean propane and acetylene tanks are mislabeled when they say "caution: inflammable material"?
wow. so the dictionary definition is not definitive?
did you actually read what your wrote, or do you not know what those words mean?
But as far as I know, in a trial, you are presumed innocent until proven guilty.
When it comes to an appeal, you are presumed guilty until proven innocent.
I am not a lawyer either, but I'm pretty sure this is incorrect. (in the U.S. at least)
In a criminal trial, you are presumed innocent until proven guilty.
In a civil trial, the burden of proof is a preponderence of the evidence. (i.e. you dont have to be proven guilty, just proven that is't pretty likely)
An appeal does not presume guilt or innocence and doesnt prove guilt or innocence. In an appeal, the defendant is claiming that there was some failure of the process that makes the first trial unreliable as the basis for a decision. If you are successful in an appeal, it doesn't mean you are innocent. It means that first trial is voided and you can be retried (with possible stipulations from the appeals court intended to avoid making the same failure again).
In the E.U., I imagine an appeal is used in a similar way.
It is the defendant's duty in an appeal to prove that the findings of fact and final judgement in the trial are wrong.
it's the defendant's job to prove the process was flawed in a way that voids the trial. It doesnt necessarily mean the facts are wrong. It could mean evidence was unfairly excluded or that evidence wasn't properly disclosed, or the judge made a bad ruling, or a juror violated their responsibilities in a way that tainted the jury, or any number of other things.
In the U.S. antitrust case, the appeals court used the judge's behaviour to overturn the judgement. They upheld the findings of fact, but accepted the argument that his statements demonstrated a bias that made him unfit to determine Microsoft's punishment.
I wouldn't presume he's an arab. Iranians have a different ethnicity (Persian) and a different language (Farsi) than the Arabic people.
The problem is that the market wasnt static during that time. The market grew dramatically. And while the market's size was increasing, Nintendo's userbase was shrinking. They not only failed grow their segment of the market, their installed base was eaten away by their competitors.
I'm not going to sound the death knell for Nintendo, but when your installed base decreases while your potential market increases, there's no way to make that look positive.
Thanks for the info. I don't know Niels, but I do know Bruce, and will take their previous association as sufficient to assure me of Niels' honest intent.
But do you know Zeinfeld? You're taking his word for the association between Niels and Bruce on which you are trusting Niels.
(no offense intended toward any involved party. I was just observing that trusting Niels because of that post alone is no more reliable than trusting him on his word)
Given that Jobs created NeXT, and Pixar, and the iPod, I'm sure he would've come up with something else without Woz around. Smart engineers are a dime a dozen; brilliant entrepreneurs, on the other hand, are astoundingly rare.
Jobs didn't create Pixar. Jobs bought Pixar from Lucasfilm Ltd. for $10 million.
In many poker tournaments, use of profanity at the table is forbidden.
Making your opponent lose his cool is ok, but if you have any talent at it, you dont need profanity to do it.
What the Xbox 360 does offer is external verification that the player did in fact complete the game a certain way. So essentially the "innovative" feature is bragging rights, e-penis++, and all that jazz.
This reminds me of a scene from Tin Cup.
Costner's character tells Don Johnson's character, after having played the back 9 with just a 7 iron, "Well have you ever finished the back 9 with just a 7 iron?"
and Johnson's character says, "Hell, Roy. It never even occurred to me to try."
As cool as this is, i feel bad for the guy. But he's had plenty of warning.
It's just a matter of time before Davros hijacks his research to create the Daleks.
I got the impression from your first post that you might not be aware of what they've done since origin. I was just trying to explain why people are listening to them about the MMO market and why their perspective might be worth taking a look at.
With respect to Tabula Rasa, my understanding was that they started over with it because the original idea was determined to be too confusing and too different when it was shown to people and less because it wasnt functional technologically. (what i mean is, it wasnt restarted for technical reasons, it was restarted because they decided the concept didnt work for the audience.) I dont think that that decision says anything really negative about Garriott or his ability to make an mmo. I think it says he tried something a bit risky and dropped it when he decided it wasnt working.
My personal opinion is that he is definitely right that there will be a few large companies that do the really high profile games like COH, WOW, EQ, etc. and if you want to make an MMO out of your franchise, you go to them.
At the same time, you are definitely right that there will always be a market for niche games like A Tale in the Desert or Meridian 59. The niche games can thrive as long as they can remain profitable with a small player base (compared to the major games like WOW). The niche developers will also need to accept that, barring something incredibly lucky happening, they wont be made millionaires by their MMO.
I think online play is the last area of computer gaming where the big companies like EA cannot lock out the independent developers because it's the one place the developers don't need their distribution channels to sell the game.
The independents will have to work hard to provide compelling and innovative gameplay though, to counter the marketing machine and budgets the majors have. The major games will probably stick to proven gameplay elements and steal the successful ideas from the niche games. In that sense, it will be a lot like true independent film vs. hollywood blockbusters.
You have a mistaken perception of where the Garriots are coming from when they speak. This isn't to say that this information will change your mind, but they are not speaking from a position of single player game developers.
The Garriots run NC Soft Austin and Robert is (I believe) on the board of directors for NC Soft Inc. NC Soft Austin publishes Lineage, Lineage II, City of Heros, City of Villains, Guild Wars, and soon, Auto Assault.
They will also be publishing Richard Garriot's next game (from his company Destination Games, which was bought by NC Soft), Tabula Rasa. Tabula Rasa is also an MMO.
I think they speak with some understanding of the MMO environment and market. Also, considering NC Soft is a Korean company, I suspect they have a pretty good idea what is going on in the Korean market.
This isn't to say they cannot be wrong or to invalidate your perspective. I just wanted to correct the mistaken perception of them as Single Player game creators or that they do not have a foundation to base their opinions on.
Logging in and typing "help" IS using the software. Please at least get familiar with the major details before saying something did or didn't happen
as you yourself pointed out, he telnetted to a port and typed "help". that no more binds him to the license for the software than i am bound to sendmail's license if i telnet to it's port and play with the available commands. If I were to telnet to a public port on a machine a friend owns and play around with the commands available to me, and it happened to be the port bitkeeper runs on, how does that make me subject to a license i've never seen and never agreed to?
Tridge was considered to be bound by the licence because he was working for a company that was granted a licence.
Tridge was considered to be bound by the license by Bitkeeper's assertion. I've never seen anything that said OSDL agreed to any licensing terms involving Bitkeeper or that Linus was allowed to agree to licensing terms on behalf of the company and its employees. Linus was bound by the license and he was the one granted a license. Unless you can provide some documentation to support that OSDL had agreed to any licensing terms with Bitkeeper, I cannot see any way that Tridge was bound to any agreement with Bitkeeper.
If I was to consider myself legally free to make copies of MS Windows software purchased by my workplace it would be just as stupid as those who are saying Tridge didn't break the licence.
show me anything that says OSDL purchased any licenses for Bitkeeper. Show me anything that says the licensing agreement between OSDL and Bitkeeper bound all of the OSDL employees to its terms, even the ones who didn't use it.
Your analogy also fails on the fact that Tridge never possessed a copy of any software made by Bitkeeper.
Please bother to actually read the entire previous post where I mentioned Samba.
Actually i did read what you said about Samba. I fail to see how Tridge violated any licenses creating Samba too.
Tridgell didn't use the software, so why would he have anything to do with its license?
What Tridgell did was access packets being transmitted over a network and access ports on a computer with the permission of the computer and network owner. From this information, he reverse engineered how the bitkeeper client worked without ever touching the bitkeeper client.
If you think this is inappropriate, i hope you aren't using Samba, because that's exactly the way samba was created.
This isnt necessarily a well thought out idea but i thought i'd throw it out there for the sake of discussion anyway.
The issue with these posters is that they are using the link in the story submission to increase their page rank (by being linked to from slashdot's index, which is a highly ranked page). So what if the link in the story text linked to a cgi that then redirected to the url the submitter provided?
The submitter gets to have his link, but it's coming from a url with a much lower page rank than the index page.
If i was microsoft i would say "ok...well see you later Europe."
Microsoft cannot do this. Microsoft's entire business is structured around leveraging their monopolies on the desktop and office applications. If they abandoned The EU, they would be creating a market for a competitor. Whomever took that market would have enough market share that Microsoft would have to interoperate with them. That would be disasterous for them.
Even worse, it leaves room for that market to be carved up between several different applications that work together using a standard interface (like open document format for office, for example).
But usually, brainwashing does work and does persist.
As in your case, it does not always succeed.
i disagree that it was brainwashing. my family exposed me to a set of beliefs that they held. Some of those beliefs i have evaluated and found merit in. Some of those beliefs i have evaluated and discarded. I do not accept the notion that exposing me to ideas is equivalent to brainwashing.
But just look at the simple statistics, of the amounts of people who persist their parents' beliefs vs. the amounts of people that don't. If brainwashing was not an issue, then persistence should be around 50%, and we both agree it is far above that, is it not?
Why should persistence be around 50%?
Where are you getting these statistics? Are we talking about what people actually believe, or what they present to the public?
I think you are neglecting motivations other than brainwashing.
my family took me to church when i was a child. Now that i'm an adult, i don't go to church. How is my choice to not go to church as an adult always demonstrative of free will while another person's choice to continue going to church always demonstrative of brainwashing?
I played baseball and soccer as a child. I dont play either now. Are the people i know who still play those games brainwashed?
Maybe they just found something enjoyable or valuable in it and have chosen to continue to participate while i didnt find anything valuable and chose to spend my time in other ways.
I had a friend in college who was in her 30s and converted from being an atheist to being catholic. Is she free thinking?
A guy i used to study martial arts with converted from christianity to islam. Is he free thinking?
If you raise your children to not beleive in a god, are you brainwashing them?
The difference betweeen "brainwashed by your parents" and "made your own choice" cannot be determined by the choice you made. It is determined by the reason you made the choice.
If you continue to go to church because you enjoy it, it's a choice.
If you continue to go to church because it's what you've always done, you can call it brainwashing.
how are you going to offer a significant discount? You need to pay the production costs of generating a print run of the books for you to sell. That print run is going to be a lot more expensive than the "official" print run because you are only printing the number of books you expect to sell in your local store.
Alternatively, you could outsource that printing job to a printer who provides copies for different stores and can thus reduce the cost per unit to produce...but at that point you might as well just buy from the official distributor.
When someone complains the fourth gear in a car doesn't work, do you agree it better would? Or do you recommend third gear, and throw in comments about conserving fuel and tire wear?
That's a ridiculous comparison. The issue is the flash plugin eating resources. It isn't even a problem with Mozilla itself. How do you derive from that an analogy to an essential part of a car failing?
How about a better analogy, like :
You bought a Honda Civic. You installed after-market, 3rd party ground effects on it. Now every speedbump you go over damages your car. Is that Honda's problem?