Michael Simms is the CEO of LGP and he was the one that was asking about it on LinuxGames. I know, I was one of the ones that responded in the negative (This was before I signed on with them- they actually had a better game in the process of being approved, Disiples 2...). Tzar was an okay game, but not okay enough in my opinion to bother with it.
Racing games, eh? I'd have thought that Ballistics would count for that category.
As for the stuff Hyperion's porting, more power to them. I'll probably buy certain titles from them because they're a short diversion worth $10 or so.
While I won't say that Hyperion's not important, isn't what LGP doing something of similar importance? I'd hate to think I was working for nothing now...:->
Titles like Tropico, GTA, etc. cost large sums of money just to get the privilage to port them. This is part of the reason why Loki went under in the first place- too many top titles too soon. You probably won't see a port of Tropico unless one of the LGP people win the lottery in their respective locations as the publisher and studio want way, way too much (which is their right, afterall) for it to be economical to port it. The same goes for Warcraft (and anything else from Blizzard), any part of the GTA franchise, sports games from EA, etc...
To be sure, while I'm glad Hyperion's back in the Linux porting business, I'm a little confused as to why they're working with what is basically a valu-soft style company. However, if they're priced accordingly, they'll probably do okay at it all the same.
I knew about it because I had played the Windows version and caught the beta announcement on LinuxGames. The main problem with sales is that they're nearly unknown with a game only the hardcore RPG crowd would want. It's a 2D map game that has simplistic graphics. While the story's really pretty good, it competes in a space occupied by at least 71 other (as listed in The Linux Game Tome) games in the genre, most of which are free.
I doubt it was piracy or a lack of a userbase- it's more likely something more along the lines of a lack of advertising and a lack of desire for the game. Shareware works best if it's on something akin to a BBS or is a very popular thing like PKZip was. This, coupled with the very real fact that they're not much different in quality or eye-candy to a LOT of free alternatives... You get the picture.
I distinctly remember the conversation about DirectPlay amongst major developers being about both sides of the equation- server and client side. It was as much about console support (DP8 only runs on Windows- hence it's an X-Box only play from the console world...) as it was about servers. Sadly, there's a lot of nifty/cool games out there produced by smaller studios that just can't afford to roll their own network layer code and don't know/care that there are several cross-platform layer libraries that are as good or better than DP8.
SDL is more of a wrapper layer for the underlying API's that correspond to Joysticks, Sound, etc. If it were DirectX again, as you put it, it wouldn't run on GGI, DirectFB, X, DirectX, with the same level of performance and ease that it does.
Don't take me wrong, I'm sure they'll tweak WineX to play that one- it's going to be on the hit list for Transgaming's fixes. However, WineX doesn't play things at full speed- no matter WHAT they say to the contrary. You need a modern machine with a lot of muscle to make a game play like it was on a less modern machine (Something like a 1.5GHz machine to be able to play like a 800MHz one...). Lest you wonder, I DO happen to have a subscription to WineX- I'm not impressed enough (maybe with their latest, though) to continue the same. It's just not the same answer as a native version. It never will be.
There was this company that did EXACTLY what you are describing- and for the reasons of sites being Slashdotted. They burned some 70 million dollars in one year's time partly because they couldn't figure out how to sell the service (They kept trying to sell the dynamic content handling features when they should have been going directly after Akamai's business and then some...) and partly because the whole system was kind-of pricey to implement.
Why do I know about all of this? I used to work for this comany in question (epicRealm) and they laid off most of thier staff so they could change business plans from a content delivery network to an app accelerator (which the idea in question DOES work well at).
They're not going after a big violator. All these people did was provide an indexing service- yes, it's contributory infringement, but they're not going after the real violators, namely the people providing the file shares.
Also worth noting is that they're going to pursue violators AND impose those controls. This isn't about copyright infringement, it's about control- and they'll do their level best to have it no matter what the cost is to their customers.
EMP only affects electronic devices. Had you followed the links, the basic operation of this laser gun is mechanical/atomic in nature.
Of course, I don't see this beast ever seeing the light of day in the proposed form. Po-210's not exactly easily made in large quantities and it's not exactly one of the nicer isotopes (Estimated to be 2.4e11 times more toxic to life than hydrocyanic acid...).
The EOL for NT4 Workstation is in June. This isn't June, if I'm not mistaken, nor is it June for another couple of months. Furthermore, NT4 Server has a much longer lifespan than Workstation does.
No offense, but you are missing something. OS X is nice, and probably fills your needs. However, it doesn't run on all PPC hardware (there's TerraSoft's briq, IBM's PPC stuff, etc.) and PPC Linux, more specifically, YellowDog, DOES. Not to mention it makes a machine that was shipped with MacOS 9.X run much like a box running MacOS X with less cost, etc.
Not all machines shipped with MacOS X. MacOS X makes it easier to learn to use the machine, but not easier to use it- many complex tasks are made more difficult with a GUI. MacOS X may be easier to learn, but at a cost in performance- only the hottest machines shine with MacOS X, the others may be able to run it, but only in a dog-slow manner.
"Stockholders have learnt alot since the 80's, and don't invest in companies that screw their labor, or who hoard the cash."
Then why are they rewarding all these companies who are doing these mass layoffs- just so that they look more "profitable", never mind that they needed the people anyway to keep doing business and they're going to be hurting in a year or two's time. It's WHY we have had all the mass layoffs in the first place- to appease Wall St.
No, they keep investing in what they think will make them a quick buck. If that means backing a stock of a company that is poorly treating their employees (and mass-layoffs is one form of poor treatment, don't delude yourself otherwise) or hoarding the cash (Microsoft...) if it means they are going to get a 20-30% return on their investment in 6-24 months, then so be it.
In the first three, I reference not one or two, but three different 2-stroke lawnmowers that are in current production and sales. The last link is for a rather popular home and garden tool, the Ryobi Trimmer Plus- a modular system that allows for spin-trimmer, blade edger, pole pruner, tiller and other attachments to the power head, a 2-stroke engine.
Just because there's stricter emissions rules doesn't mean they've gone away. Check your facts next time.
It's because they're THERE and most of the time, if you know what in the hell you're doing, you can get out of there in one piece. With the mail-order places, you have to wait a while. Sometimes that's just not an option. So you spend a little more than you would on the mail-order parts (like Crucial- which I'd reccomend to anyone that could afford the wait time) and get the premium parts from Fry's and go on.
They're suing over breaches of NDA and License to Unix code that SCO claims IBM had with them. Patented stuff- in the Linux kernel (Otherwise why would they be harping about SMP systems?).
And, they have the unmitigated GALL to say that Linux systems purchased from them have no issues because they have the license bundled in with their distribution licenses. That is a GPL violation, pure and simple. Either there ISN'T a patent issue or there is- if there is, then the patented stuff has to go bye-bye or have a GPL compatible license. SCO's not claiming to have licensed the alleged tech that way in their press releases.
No, this is SCO commiting corporate suicide in the most public, painful way possible. Picking an IP fight with IBM is not one of the wiser things to do- and to set the stakes so that IBM HAS to do something about it rather than settle simply and easily is downright insane. IBM is all about IP and is pretty much anal about IP handling- with theirs and their partners'. If they don't countersue with their own infringement suit (thus getting the whole mess dropped- SCO can't afford a legal battle on two fronts...) they'll prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that there's nothing to SCO's claims. And that's just the lawsuit part of this whole mess- the bad blood they just earned with the community just torpedoed themselves, UnitedLinux, and anyone that associates themselves too closely with SCO.
"1) The OpenGL renderer is not as fast as the Direct3D renderer at this time. This is not the Athlon64's fault. You can see this on 32-bit Windows, since it can use both renderers. Since this is a Linux port of the game, we're using the GL renderer on the Athlon64 at this time."
I saw that and determined that they were more Windows type people and plain flat didn't know that the OpenGL renderer is much weaker (not due to the API, but due to this being much the first cut of the thing...) than the D3D. What they measured was pretty good considering that detail.
I was about to chime in with similar comments- but it's so much better when the person that did the work (and knows what in the Hell he's talking about) says it.
They had an Athlon64 machine running RedHat and an Athlon64 optimized version of UT2k3 running on it at the AMD Reality Check show in Dallas- they made a very big deal out of it, in fact. This fact was verified by Ryan Gordon (icculus), one of Epic's contractors doing the Linux specific work. They're not waiting for MS because the workstation market that the Athlon64 is intended to go into can run MS' offerings rather well (better than an XP machine...) and Linux already runs on it- the two most likely workstation OSes already run on it anyway.
1) I wouldn't know, but if they don't they'll be held in contempt of court since this is a court order. Depends on what the judge decides at that point.
2) They're not being told to ship the MS JVM; they're being ordered to ship the SUN one which isn't broken.
The assignee has to be changed when the IP rights change hands, otherwise it's still theirs. Any of the AT&T patents would most likely have expired and a rough check of the Novell patents doesn't seem to reveal much of anything applicable either.
A quick check of the USPTO searchable database turns up only TWO patents to SCO's name (Using SCO's name spelled out for the assignee name as the search criteria) and neither of the two seem to really apply to Linux in general.
2. The Constitution specifically forbids the prosecution from calling Dmitri to the stand--that whole pesky "Fifth Amendment" thing, which states, in part, "nor shall [he] be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself." That means that the prosecutor couldn't call him to the stand, even if he wanted to
This also means they couldn't have used the deposition against him nor even depose him- for the same reasons you give. Your line of reasoning doesn't work.
The reason why they used the deposition was that there was no way for cross-examination of the "Witness" in the case of the taped deposition. If they would have called him to the stand, the defense could have cross-examined Dimitry and weakened the prosecution's case. They didn't want to take chances on their case because it was somewhat shaky to begin with.
All a semi-automatic gun is load the next round from a magazine into the chamber. It allows you to clean up a kill that you might have made messy by allowing you to fire off another round quickly.
To be bluntly honest, a deer rifle or other bolt-action rifle can be as deadly or deadlier if you're trying to kill someone. Most semi-autos are carbines, good for brush shooting (close-quarters deer hunting, etc.) and aren't very accurate much past a football field in distance. Brush hunting is seldom done with a scope and I'd rather be hunting with one of my semi-auto's in those conditions than the lever action 30-30 I also have.
However, the 30-06 that most people hunt with hails from the M1 Grand, a military weapon from WWI- and has an accurate lethal range of well over a mile with a scope. I'll ask you do people need that? Yes- to ensure a clean kill at larger distances like you'd find in Colorado, New Mexico, etc. where a LOT of deer and antelope hunting occurs.
Slashdot Mirror
Michael Simms is the CEO of LGP and he was the one that was asking about it on LinuxGames. I know, I was one of the ones that responded in the negative (This was before I signed on with them- they actually had a better game in the process of being approved, Disiples 2...). Tzar was an okay game, but not okay enough in my opinion to bother with it.
Racing games, eh? I'd have thought that Ballistics would count for that category.
As for the stuff Hyperion's porting, more power to them. I'll probably buy certain titles from them because they're a short diversion worth $10 or so.
While I won't say that Hyperion's not important, isn't what LGP doing something of similar importance? I'd hate to think I was working for nothing now... :->
Titles like Tropico, GTA, etc. cost large sums of money just to get the privilage to port them. This is part of the reason why Loki went under in the first place- too many top titles too soon. You probably won't see a port of Tropico unless one of the LGP people win the lottery in their respective locations as the publisher and studio want way, way too much (which is their right, afterall) for it to be economical to port it. The same goes for Warcraft (and anything else from Blizzard), any part of the GTA franchise, sports games from EA, etc...
To be sure, while I'm glad Hyperion's back in the Linux porting business, I'm a little confused as to why they're working with what is basically a valu-soft style company. However, if they're priced accordingly, they'll probably do okay at it all the same.
I knew about it because I had played the Windows version and caught the beta announcement on LinuxGames. The main problem with sales is that they're nearly unknown with a game only the hardcore RPG crowd would want. It's a 2D map game that has simplistic graphics. While the story's really pretty good, it competes in a space occupied by at least 71 other (as listed in The Linux Game Tome) games in the genre, most of which are free.
I doubt it was piracy or a lack of a userbase- it's more likely something more along the lines of a lack of advertising and a lack of desire for the game. Shareware works best if it's on something akin to a BBS or is a very popular thing like PKZip was. This, coupled with the very real fact that they're not much different in quality or eye-candy to a LOT of free alternatives... You get the picture.
I distinctly remember the conversation about DirectPlay amongst major developers being about both sides of the equation- server and client side. It was as much about console support (DP8 only runs on Windows- hence it's an X-Box only play from the console world...) as it was about servers. Sadly, there's a lot of nifty/cool games out there produced by smaller studios that just can't afford to roll their own network layer code and don't know/care that there are several cross-platform layer libraries that are as good or better than DP8.
SDL is more of a wrapper layer for the underlying API's that correspond to Joysticks, Sound, etc. If it were DirectX again, as you put it, it wouldn't run on GGI, DirectFB, X, DirectX, with the same level of performance and ease that it does.
Don't take me wrong, I'm sure they'll tweak WineX to play that one- it's going to be on the hit list for Transgaming's fixes. However, WineX doesn't play things at full speed- no matter WHAT they say to the contrary. You need a modern machine with a lot of muscle to make a game play like it was on a less modern machine (Something like a 1.5GHz machine to be able to play like a 800MHz one...). Lest you wonder, I DO happen to have a subscription to WineX- I'm not impressed enough (maybe with their latest, though) to continue the same. It's just not the same answer as a native version. It never will be.
It's in the same class as MPEG4 and is based off of VP3, which while it's patented, On2's licensed it out in a GPL compatible manner.
There was this company that did EXACTLY what you are describing- and for the reasons of sites being Slashdotted. They burned some 70 million dollars in one year's time partly because they couldn't figure out how to sell the service (They kept trying to sell the dynamic content handling features when they should have been going directly after Akamai's business and then some...) and partly because the whole system was kind-of pricey to implement.
Why do I know about all of this? I used to work for this comany in question (epicRealm) and they laid off most of thier staff so they could change business plans from a content delivery network to an app accelerator (which the idea in question DOES work well at).
They're not going after a big violator. All these people did was provide an indexing service- yes, it's contributory infringement, but they're not going after the real violators, namely the people providing the file shares.
Also worth noting is that they're going to pursue violators AND impose those controls. This isn't about copyright infringement, it's about control- and they'll do their level best to have it no matter what the cost is to their customers.
EMP only affects electronic devices. Had you followed the links, the basic operation of this laser gun is mechanical/atomic in nature.
Of course, I don't see this beast ever seeing the light of day in the proposed form. Po-210's not exactly easily made in large quantities and it's not exactly one of the nicer isotopes (Estimated to be 2.4e11 times more toxic to life than hydrocyanic acid...).
The EOL for NT4 Workstation is in June. This isn't June, if I'm not mistaken, nor is it June for another couple of months. Furthermore, NT4 Server has a much longer lifespan than Workstation does.
It, according to MS, is still supported.
No offense, but you are missing something. OS X is nice, and probably fills your needs. However, it doesn't run on all PPC hardware (there's TerraSoft's briq, IBM's PPC stuff, etc.) and PPC Linux, more specifically, YellowDog, DOES. Not to mention it makes a machine that was shipped with MacOS 9.X run much like a box running MacOS X with less cost, etc.
Not all machines shipped with MacOS X. MacOS X makes it easier to learn to use the machine, but not easier to use it- many complex tasks are made more difficult with a GUI. MacOS X may be easier to learn, but at a cost in performance- only the hottest machines shine with MacOS X, the others may be able to run it, but only in a dog-slow manner.
Then why are they rewarding all these companies who are doing these mass layoffs- just so that they look more "profitable", never mind that they needed the people anyway to keep doing business and they're going to be hurting in a year or two's time. It's WHY we have had all the mass layoffs in the first place- to appease Wall St.
No, they keep investing in what they think will make them a quick buck. If that means backing a stock of a company that is poorly treating their employees (and mass-layoffs is one form of poor treatment, don't delude yourself otherwise) or hoarding the cash (Microsoft...) if it means they are going to get a 20-30% return on their investment in 6-24 months, then so be it.
There's all kinds of 2-stroke engines for yard and other uses out there.
s tore/pages/lawnmower-26.html s tore/pages/lawnmower-27.html
Try some links on for size:
http://www.mowdirect.co.uk/acatalog/600i-2_2.htm
http://www.shophutt.co.nz/sites/lawnmower/online_
http://www.shophutt.co.nz/sites/lawnmower/online_
http://www.epinions.com/content_70547902084
In the first three, I reference not one or two, but three different 2-stroke lawnmowers that are in current production and sales. The last link is for a rather popular home and garden tool, the Ryobi Trimmer Plus- a modular system that allows for spin-trimmer, blade edger, pole pruner, tiller and other attachments to the power head, a 2-stroke engine.
Just because there's stricter emissions rules doesn't mean they've gone away. Check your facts next time.
It's because they're THERE and most of the time, if you know what in the hell you're doing, you can get out of there in one piece. With the mail-order places, you have to wait a while. Sometimes that's just not an option. So you spend a little more than you would on the mail-order parts (like Crucial- which I'd reccomend to anyone that could afford the wait time) and get the premium parts from Fry's and go on.
They're suing over breaches of NDA and License to Unix code that SCO claims IBM had with them. Patented stuff- in the Linux kernel (Otherwise why would they be harping about SMP systems?).
And, they have the unmitigated GALL to say that Linux systems purchased from them have no issues because they have the license bundled in with their distribution licenses. That is a GPL violation, pure and simple. Either there ISN'T a patent issue or there is- if there is, then the patented stuff has to go bye-bye or have a GPL compatible license. SCO's not claiming to have licensed the alleged tech that way in their press releases.
No, this is SCO commiting corporate suicide in the most public, painful way possible. Picking an IP fight with IBM is not one of the wiser things to do- and to set the stakes so that IBM HAS to do something about it rather than settle simply and easily is downright insane. IBM is all about IP and is pretty much anal about IP handling- with theirs and their partners'. If they don't countersue with their own infringement suit (thus getting the whole mess dropped- SCO can't afford a legal battle on two fronts...) they'll prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that there's nothing to SCO's claims. And that's just the lawsuit part of this whole mess- the bad blood they just earned with the community just torpedoed themselves, UnitedLinux, and anyone that associates themselves too closely with SCO.
And you had to post that anonymously. Shameful really- I was complimenting someone, not doing a me-too.
I saw that and determined that they were more Windows type people and plain flat didn't know that the OpenGL renderer is much weaker (not due to the API, but due to this being much the first cut of the thing...) than the D3D. What they measured was pretty good considering that detail.
I was about to chime in with similar comments- but it's so much better when the person that did the work (and knows what in the Hell he's talking about) says it.
They had an Athlon64 machine running RedHat and an Athlon64 optimized version of UT2k3 running on it at the AMD Reality Check show in Dallas- they made a very big deal out of it, in fact. This fact was verified by Ryan Gordon (icculus), one of Epic's contractors doing the Linux specific work. They're not waiting for MS because the workstation market that the Athlon64 is intended to go into can run MS' offerings rather well (better than an XP machine...) and Linux already runs on it- the two most likely workstation OSes already run on it anyway.
1) I wouldn't know, but if they don't they'll be held in contempt of court since this is a court order. Depends on what the judge decides at that point.
2) They're not being told to ship the MS JVM; they're being ordered to ship the SUN one which isn't broken.
The assignee has to be changed when the IP rights change hands, otherwise it's still theirs. Any of the AT&T patents would most likely have expired and a rough check of the Novell patents doesn't seem to reveal much of anything applicable either.
A quick check of the USPTO searchable database turns up only TWO patents to SCO's name (Using SCO's name spelled out for the assignee name as the search criteria) and neither of the two seem to really apply to Linux in general.
Here's the link to the search request so you can see for yourselves
This also means they couldn't have used the deposition against him nor even depose him- for the same reasons you give. Your line of reasoning doesn't work.
The reason why they used the deposition was that there was no way for cross-examination of the "Witness" in the case of the taped deposition. If they would have called him to the stand, the defense could have cross-examined Dimitry and weakened the prosecution's case. They didn't want to take chances on their case because it was somewhat shaky to begin with.
All a semi-automatic gun is load the next round from a magazine into the chamber. It allows you to clean up a kill that you might have made messy by allowing you to fire off another round quickly.
To be bluntly honest, a deer rifle or other bolt-action rifle can be as deadly or deadlier if you're trying to kill someone. Most semi-autos are carbines, good for brush shooting (close-quarters deer hunting, etc.) and aren't very accurate much past a football field in distance. Brush hunting is seldom done with a scope and I'd rather be hunting with one of my semi-auto's in those conditions than the lever action 30-30 I also have.
However, the 30-06 that most people hunt with hails from the M1 Grand, a military weapon from WWI- and has an accurate lethal range of well over a mile with a scope. I'll ask you do people need that? Yes- to ensure a clean kill at larger distances like you'd find in Colorado, New Mexico, etc. where a LOT of deer and antelope hunting occurs.