But really, I tried using Gnutella and I couldn't make it work, so I'm not as worried about it as I was about Napster. I spoke to about 20 people who agreed. Of course, anybody who wants to steal music will do it; the diligent pirate will always succeed, but that doesn't mean we should allow it to become mainstream.
If the history of bleeding edge apps which serve a purpose has taught me anything, it's that rapid improvment comes quickest to those packages which are potentially the most useful. Mr Howard A. King doesn't know it yet, but he should be far more worried about Gnutella than he is now. Napster was easy to sue - public, high-profile, has management in suits etc. Gnutella (and other desperately subversive tools like IRC and ftp) will just take up the slack - untraceable and impervious to lawsuits.
Veteran, you would be dead right but for one thing: in the long term and starting right now, nation states are going to be almost powerless against a global digital network, no matter what technical data they've obtained, er... how big their guns are.
Your imagery is spot on for 30 years ago but I think completely irrelevant for today. The connected citizen who disagrees strongly enough with his elected (or not) government has enough power to shake himself free without physical protest. The Internet makes it possible to work anywhere in the world, untaxed and undetected by a government or legal system. And I think civil disobedience in this day and age will be characterised more by code and data flowing through networks than bodies lying on University lawns.
Sure there will be casualties and I agree that the huge machine that is the Federal Goverment and legal system is not going to go down without a fight, but I think the very example you give of a Cobra gunship shows just how the rules have changed. Will the Government deploy Cobras and the National Guard against sysadmins mirroring DeCSS or Linux-using DVD software programmers? They can't.
What can they do? There are countries other than the U.S who think the DMCA is a crock of shit. If you're an information worker or a programmer or an artist, hell you can go and work there. You could even have your money in yet another jurisdiction - preferably one which laughs at any IRS attempts to come calling. Remember I'm not talking about a faceless mass of blue-collar workers here: this is a highly skilled bunch of people who don't like what their Governments are doing in the name of big companies.
I look forward to the next 20 years or so when the elephants realise they've been outsmarted...
You know, this is amusing. If Q3 were Open Sourced, anyone could modify the source code and integrate whatever music playing technology you want.
OTOH, if Q3 were already open-sourced, licencees of id would have no need to pay licensing fees for the Q3 engine.
Id are such pathetic hypocrites. They release Quake on Linux, but will not Open Source it.
Er - check again. Quake has been released on Linux and the source is under the GPL which is an Open Source compatible license (if that's what you mean). Try here for more info.
IMNSHO, id are as far from being "pathetic hypocrites" as it is possible to get. Not only have they donated large sums of money to the FSF, they pioneered the development of games under Linux with their Doom and Quake releases. Added to that the source for everything up to Quake I has been GPLed. No-one really knows how the business model of Open Sourced games works yet, but I would say id lead the way in walking the tightrope between commercial profit and open code. I have no problem with a closed engine and open game logic - it makes mods possible while preserving the company's profits.
Open Source Quake 3 now! Or better, someone write an Open Source Quake!
Even better than that, go and download the QuakeForge's source which is comprised of the pristine original sources from id plus loads of bug-fixes and enhancements...
Re:My $0.02 from my talks with pals who work at MS
on
The Myth Of The Borg
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· Score: 2
If you want to attack laissez-faire, call it over-simplified, call it irresponsible even, but don't call it childish.
My apologies - what I meant was child-like as in innocent curiosity. /me slaps forehead - use the preview button!
Re:My $0.02 from my talks with pals who work at MS
on
The Myth Of The Borg
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· Score: 3
This is dead on. I'm not sure if your friends have always worked for Visual Studio team but I know several people who used to work for other companies and then were hired by Microsoft. Within a few months, they seem to lose a few capabilities: rational thought, the ability to respond to objective criticism and large portions of their Sense-Of-Humour centres. It's like watching a CPU implant take over the brain over time. I'm not trying to be funny or frivolous - just stating what I've seen first-hand.
They believe they are always right.
This is just one of the company mantras - others include:
Bill Gates is always right
100% share is an acceptable figure to aim for in any market we compete in
Bill Gates is always right
Product passion - no matter how bad the product
To win, everyone else must lose
Bill Gates is always right
Most MS employees I know are exceptionally bright, motivated and talented in their fields. But with these doctrines permeating nearly every aspect of the company culture, it's not surprising that some of it sinks in. As a result the feedback I get from them is almost one of childish wonder like: "why should the nasty big government be threatening us when all we want to do is make computing easier?"
...is our attention. Media companies have always competed for it and always will. If this deal means the merged entity will get more of our attention, it will work. Otherwise it won't.
... but also old classic PC games such as Xenon 2 have had their tunes remixed. It was incredibly difficult to work out where I had heard the MegaBlast tune before since you don't normally associate computer game music with a dance track in the middle of a club...
Half of me says this phenomenon is remixers getting desperate for new material - the other half says anything to keep the memories alive.
Amateurs with smallish telescopes still contribute a lot to worldwide observation efforts. Any chance of this happening with at least some aspects of radio astronomy?
But what most concerned this coalition were the two large bodyguards who stood outside Fenne's office that afternoon. The pair wore large pouches strapped around their waists, leading some - including Pixelon interim CEO Paul Ward, according to a lawsuit - to believe they were armed.
You can't keep anything hidden from top CEOs these days...
There's no shortage of people who would be willing to do this kind of documentation work if they were able to. Right now there seem to be some roadblocks in the way.
I also think it's possible that anyone with a good enough grasp of the latest kernel and how it works is more than likely writing code rather than writing docs.
I would really like to see a documentation project similar to TLK that is kept as up-to-date as possible. Unfortunately the rate of change of the kernel, the immense amount of traffic of the lists and the years of experience required to understand and interpret the latest changes, rules out most people. Those it doesn't seem to be writing code:)
I would happy to be corrected by someone like Joe Pranevich for example...
I don't think that's supported currently. I know the developers are looking at increasing the number of game-oriented formats it will export but already people have written exporters themselves (using Python). You can export UV coords for textures as well.
Off the top of my head, VRML, Wavefront, DXF are natively exported and 3ds, 3DSMax and some others can be done using Python. XRacer - a WipeOut clone - uses Blender for its modelling. Check out the source which includes all the export scripts here.
I dunno but in answer to the question: tread carefully. I was in the same situation a couple of years ago, decided a fork() or two would solve the problem and now I have two child processes to worry about...
Both were asked for their response to the situation.
Stallman says: "I think that corporate contribution to any particular free software development activity is always welcome, but corporate influence in impeding the extension of free software to do an additional job is obstructionism."
Raymond says: "I'm not worried. What I see is corporations realizing that if they want our results, they have to buy into our process--and if they don't, they'll be eaten by a competitor who does."
Probably - I got them from a paper on the subject which is ~2 years old. 208m polys per second sounds a little better - that's ~7m polys at 30fps. Does that figure include shading, T&L?
It took several man-years to build, so it's not exactly something you write out of a hobby.
Don't lie Jouni - I've seen your picture in the credits for INSIDE:) And that used SurRender the mighty 3d engine too yes.
While this kind of dynamic methods are certainly more expensive to perform at run-time than pre-calculated visible sets, they are not mutually exclusive with those. You can still use portals and cell based visibility as well as static PVS if desired, but what's important that we're finally reaching a point where you don't need to
Cool - I look forward to seeing some new games with the new component.
..is that it becomes more and more important to find and use good visible surface determination algorithms correctly in software. When you hear figures of 3 million polygons per second done by the latest GeeWhiz 2 GFX card, remember that has to be divided by 30 frames per second to get acceptable animation quality. SGI's InfiniteReality Engine pumps out 100 000 polys at 30 frames per second. Quite quick - until you realise that a complex model of an aircraft or a city may be comprised of tens of millions of polygons. Rejecting as many of those as possible as quickly as possible (normally because you can't see them from your viewpoint) is problem which many bright people have been hammering on for 30 years now.
I know many graphics coders who are depressed because all of their hard-won knowledge coding polygon fillers, environment map effects and realistic shading engines in software seem completely superceded by advances in hardware. They shouldn't be. There's still tons left to research and better algorithms to be found - even more so now that more powerful graphics cards are becoming cheaper.
There's zillions of good Web references on the subject - here is a place to start.
RYAN : Captain, I'm telling you he wants to defect!
MANCUSO Sonar, Conn - Jonesy, has he sent any emails in the last hour?
JONES Conn, Sonar - getting a fix on them now captain... Aye captain, two to the Konavolov which seem to be taunts, one to his cousin in Chechnya, and there seems to be a stream of unidentified messages sent through a forged Hotmail address...
MANCUSO My orders are specific Mr Ryan. Russian submarine spamming has been getting out of hand. Mr Thompson - flood tubes one and two and plot a solution.
An AK-47 fits perfectly in a Fender Strat guitar case.
It does - how did you know that?:)
Aim for the center of mass. Keep shooting until all movement ceases.
As someone who has fired more than just a few rounds through an AK, I prefer aiming a little lower - somewhere around the knees. Then you can rely on the recoil to take the next few rounds up and into the body.
Sheesh, in Africa we have these discussions all the time:)
Bubble sort actually kicks butt for mostly-sorted lists. If you have a list which you know is almost in order but couldn't be bothered to apply one of the better general algorithms to it, use bubble sort.
I saw a code example in x86 assembler once that implemented bubble sort. It was written by one of the guys who did Tomb Raider - I believe it's buried somewhere in tr.exe and actually does something useful.
Adobe's way of looking after InDesign customers...
on
Copyrant
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· Score: 2
If you bought InDesign 1.0, the bugfix "upgrade" would have cost you $99 - even though they called it version 1.5.
I know of several cases where people bought site licenses for 1.0 just a couple of days before Adobe announced 1.5. No word from them to hold off a bit because the new improved version was coming.
Sounds like another case of "enormous inconvenience" Mr Warnock.
can be found at Attrition's page on the subject. In a nutshell, it's much harder than it looks, legally questionable and more often than not ends up screwing around with innocent third parties.
I disagree almost completely with this view. The reason governments worldwide are trying to control the Internet is that they are afraid of it. Very afraid of it.
The Internet and powerful, accessible workstations have the potential to free the individual from the shackles of the Nation State as never before. By shackles I mean the millions of laws, rules, regulations and taxes imposed by governments on their citizens. Encryption and digital signing means global e-cash (or multiple systems of global e-cash) become viable - uncrackable, untraceable and most importantly - untaxable. Governments the world over depend on tax revenue for their continued survival. If the top 1% of US earners could move their assets offshore, the Federal Government would lose 30% of its tax revenue.
Connected corporations are just as nimble. Don't like the laws or regulations in your country? Save your documents, code or whatever and take the next plane out. Information companies are going to see that the tyranny of phyical location is completely irrelevant when you can do your business with anyone in the world via the Net - no matter where you are.
We have international groups forming standards that are often ignored by the companies making the stuff of the internet but this will likely change once legislators here and abroad start passing laws requiring companies to adhere religously to set standards in order to sell goods in that country complete with policing rules
This may apply to physical goods but there's no way it can apply to information. There's no customs officers at my router, no government officials telling what I may and may not download from anywhere on the Net. If I like, I can pay for information using a secure, internationally guaranteed credit card drawn on funds in a jurisdiction which forbids interference by any government.
Soon countries (and their citizens) will become familiar with the idea of global laws and global a truly global marketplace complete with global governance.
The opposite is happening if you step back and take a look at the bigger picture. Don't be fooled by governments pretending they control the Net. The global marketplace is happening because people all around the world are finding out they can talk to each other, trade goods and services or even barter - something which locality has made unviable up until now. Nation states have had little to do with the rise of global business-to-consumer ecommerce. And as for global laws and global governments - well, they may apply to those people unable to escape to the Net with their money and their skills - they won't apply to those who can.
Slashdot Mirror
But really, I tried using Gnutella and I couldn't make it work, so I'm not as worried about it as I was about Napster. I spoke to about 20 people who agreed. Of course, anybody who wants to steal music will do it; the diligent pirate will always succeed, but that doesn't mean we should allow it to become mainstream.
If the history of bleeding edge apps which serve a purpose has taught me anything, it's that rapid improvment comes quickest to those packages which are potentially the most useful. Mr Howard A. King doesn't know it yet, but he should be far more worried about Gnutella than he is now. Napster was easy to sue - public, high-profile, has management in suits etc. Gnutella (and other desperately subversive tools like IRC and ftp) will just take up the slack - untraceable and impervious to lawsuits.
Your imagery is spot on for 30 years ago but I think completely irrelevant for today. The connected citizen who disagrees strongly enough with his elected (or not) government has enough power to shake himself free without physical protest. The Internet makes it possible to work anywhere in the world, untaxed and undetected by a government or legal system. And I think civil disobedience in this day and age will be characterised more by code and data flowing through networks than bodies lying on University lawns.
Sure there will be casualties and I agree that the huge machine that is the Federal Goverment and legal system is not going to go down without a fight, but I think the very example you give of a Cobra gunship shows just how the rules have changed. Will the Government deploy Cobras and the National Guard against sysadmins mirroring DeCSS or Linux-using DVD software programmers? They can't.
What can they do? There are countries other than the U.S who think the DMCA is a crock of shit. If you're an information worker or a programmer or an artist, hell you can go and work there. You could even have your money in yet another jurisdiction - preferably one which laughs at any IRS attempts to come calling. Remember I'm not talking about a faceless mass of blue-collar workers here: this is a highly skilled bunch of people who don't like what their Governments are doing in the name of big companies.
I look forward to the next 20 years or so when the elephants realise they've been outsmarted...
You know, this is amusing. If Q3 were Open Sourced, anyone could modify the source code and integrate whatever music playing technology you want.
OTOH, if Q3 were already open-sourced, licencees of id would have no need to pay licensing fees for the Q3 engine.
Id are such pathetic hypocrites. They release Quake on Linux, but will not Open Source it.
Er - check again. Quake has been released on Linux and the source is under the GPL which is an Open Source compatible license (if that's what you mean). Try here for more info.
IMNSHO, id are as far from being "pathetic hypocrites" as it is possible to get. Not only have they donated large sums of money to the FSF, they pioneered the development of games under Linux with their Doom and Quake releases. Added to that the source for everything up to Quake I has been GPLed. No-one really knows how the business model of Open Sourced games works yet, but I would say id lead the way in walking the tightrope between commercial profit and open code. I have no problem with a closed engine and open game logic - it makes mods possible while preserving the company's profits.
Open Source Quake 3 now! Or better, someone write an Open Source Quake!
Even better than that, go and download the QuakeForge's source which is comprised of the pristine original sources from id plus loads of bug-fixes and enhancements...
My apologies - what I meant was child-like as in innocent curiosity.
/me slaps forehead - use the preview button!
They believe they are always right.
This is just one of the company mantras - others include:
- Bill Gates is always right
- 100% share is an acceptable figure to aim for in any market we compete in
- Bill Gates is always right
- Product passion - no matter how bad the product
- To win, everyone else must lose
- Bill Gates is always right
Most MS employees I know are exceptionally bright, motivated and talented in their fields. But with these doctrines permeating nearly every aspect of the company culture, it's not surprising that some of it sinks in. As a result the feedback I get from them is almost one of childish wonder like: "why should the nasty big government be threatening us when all we want to do is make computing easier?"Half of me says this phenomenon is remixers getting desperate for new material - the other half says anything to keep the memories alive.
You can't keep anything hidden from top CEOs these days...
I also think it's possible that anyone with a good enough grasp of the latest kernel and how it works is more than likely writing code rather than writing docs.
I would really like to see a documentation project similar to TLK that is kept as up-to-date as possible. Unfortunately the rate of change of the kernel, the immense amount of traffic of the lists and the years of experience required to understand and interpret the latest changes, rules out most people. Those it doesn't seem to be writing code :)
I would happy to be corrected by someone like Joe Pranevich for example...
Off the top of my head, VRML, Wavefront, DXF are natively exported and 3ds, 3DSMax and some others can be done using Python. XRacer - a WipeOut clone - uses Blender for its modelling. Check out the source which includes all the export scripts here.
g_blow_chunks();
I'm not sure what the memory requirements for a neutron star are though - probably quite high.
Stallman says: "I think that corporate contribution to any particular free software development activity is always welcome, but corporate influence in impeding the extension of free software to do an additional job is obstructionism."
Raymond says: "I'm not worried. What I see is corporations realizing that if they want our results, they have to buy into our process--and if they don't, they'll be eaten by a competitor who does."
Don't lie Jouni - I've seen your picture in the credits for INSIDE :) And that used SurRender the mighty 3d engine too yes.
While this kind of dynamic methods are certainly more expensive to perform at run-time than pre-calculated visible sets, they are not mutually exclusive with those. You can still use portals and cell based visibility as well as static PVS if desired, but what's important that we're finally reaching a point where you don't need to
Cool - I look forward to seeing some new games with the new component.
I know many graphics coders who are depressed because all of their hard-won knowledge coding polygon fillers, environment map effects and realistic shading engines in software seem completely superceded by advances in hardware. They shouldn't be. There's still tons left to research and better algorithms to be found - even more so now that more powerful graphics cards are becoming cheaper.
There's zillions of good Web references on the subject - here is a place to start.
RYAN : Captain, I'm telling you he wants to defect!
MANCUSO Sonar, Conn - Jonesy, has he sent any emails in the last hour?
JONES Conn, Sonar - getting a fix on them now captain...
Aye captain, two to the Konavolov which seem to be taunts, one to his cousin in Chechnya, and there seems to be a stream of unidentified messages sent through a forged Hotmail address...
MANCUSO My orders are specific Mr Ryan. Russian submarine spamming has been getting out of hand.
Mr Thompson - flood tubes one and two and plot a solution.
It does - how did you know that? :)
Aim for the center of mass. Keep shooting until all movement ceases.
As someone who has fired more than just a few rounds through an AK, I prefer aiming a little lower - somewhere around the knees. Then you can rely on the recoil to take the next few rounds up and into the body.
Sheesh, in Africa we have these discussions all the time :)
I saw a code example in x86 assembler once that implemented bubble sort. It was written by one of the guys who did Tomb Raider - I believe it's buried somewhere in tr.exe and actually does something useful.
I know of several cases where people bought site licenses for 1.0 just a couple of days before Adobe announced 1.5. No word from them to hold off a bit because the new improved version was coming.
Sounds like another case of "enormous inconvenience" Mr Warnock.
"I saw what id did with six people in nine months on Quake. I extrapolated that and reckoned we could do better in seven months with more people."
Can you say Brooks' Law?
Here's how to disinfect yourself.
The Internet and powerful, accessible workstations have the potential to free the individual from the shackles of the Nation State as never before. By shackles I mean the millions of laws, rules, regulations and taxes imposed by governments on their citizens.
Encryption and digital signing means global e-cash (or multiple systems of global e-cash) become viable - uncrackable, untraceable and most importantly - untaxable. Governments the world over depend on tax revenue for their continued survival. If the top 1% of US earners could move their assets offshore, the Federal Government would lose 30% of its tax revenue.
Connected corporations are just as nimble. Don't like the laws or regulations in your country? Save your documents, code or whatever and take the next plane out. Information companies are going to see that the tyranny of phyical location is completely irrelevant when you can do your business with anyone in the world via the Net - no matter where you are.
We have international groups forming standards that are often ignored by the companies making the stuff of the internet but this will likely change once legislators here and abroad start passing laws requiring companies to adhere religously to set standards in order to sell goods in that country complete with policing rules
This may apply to physical goods but there's no way it can apply to information. There's no customs officers at my router, no government officials telling what I may and may not download from anywhere on the Net. If I like, I can pay for information using a secure, internationally guaranteed credit card drawn on funds in a jurisdiction which forbids interference by any government.
Soon countries (and their citizens) will become familiar with the idea of global laws and global a truly global marketplace complete with global governance.
The opposite is happening if you step back and take a look at the bigger picture. Don't be fooled by governments pretending they control the Net. The global marketplace is happening because people all around the world are finding out they can talk to each other, trade goods and services or even barter - something which locality has made unviable up until now. Nation states have had little to do with the rise of global business-to-consumer ecommerce. And as for global laws and global governments - well, they may apply to those people unable to escape to the Net with their money and their skills - they won't apply to those who can.