Refusing to confirm the security flaw, the Microsoft spokesman said the company "feel(s) strongly that speculating on the issue while the investigation is in progress would be irresponsible and counterproductive to our goal of protecting our customers' information."
Refusing to confirm the security flaw, the Microsoft spokesman said the company "feel(s) strongly that speculating on the issue while the investigation is in progress would be irresponsible and counterproductive to our goal of protecting our company's reputation."
Java 1.4, PHP, JavaScript and Perl compatibility
on
Apocalypse 5 Released
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· Score: 2
I have fought my way through basic Perl Regexes and for some strange reason have come to like the language for it's sheer obtuseness. The person who made the crack "Perl - $Just @when->$you ${thought} s/yn/tax/ " wasn't joking.
What I see as a real problem for Perl6 and Larry's vision is that other languages have, as he noted, copied Perl5 Regexes and it has more or less become a standard as it is. Those languages are not going to change their implementations of Regexes in a hurry, especially Java which has just aquired it, and this will lead to a schism because, as powerful as Regexes are, they are not for the faint hearted and no one, and I mean no one, wants to learn two different ways of doing them.(Do I use/[bla]*/ or/\Qbla\E*/ or something completely different?).
I can almost guarantee that this is going to hurt the Perl community because many will simply stay with Perl5's way of doing things because of compatibility and habit and I think Perl6 will have a hard time finding a large audience.
I know it's too late to convince Larry otherwise, but I think he should have left things the way they were in the Regex world. My analogy is to human languages. I learnt German years ago, which is more complex grammatically than English but at the same time much more structured and with far less exceptions. None the less, an amazing amount of people speak English and like it because of it's amazing flexibility and ability to enable even a poor speaker to be understood, despite thousands of exceptions in spelling and grammar.
As the poster further down says, copyright is not allowed officialy by islam. This is the case in Iran where basically there is none. Perhaps this has something this something to do with the "Axis of Evil" not paying for MS licences.
Doesn't Transmeta use a software instruction translator to translate x86 instructions to their processor? That means it's transparent whether you write your code for 32 or 64 bit x86, doesn't it?
I have this funny feeling that the one company who could really get the most out of Transmeta's technology is the one company that won't: Apple. Given Apple's constant problems with Motorola and G4 deliveries, this is one processor that could give them a boost. I have no idea though. This is just a question.
I'm surprised that many people react with derision to this article. The US generates more CO2 and uses more energy per capita than any other nation on earth and I would think that they would be interested in some alternate form of energy. Is it perhaps because this *isn't* happening in the US.
The ironic thing about using electrolysis to seperate water is that solar power is just as good for this, so it doesn't have to happen in Iceland. Any country with a fair amount of sun can make their own hydrogen. What's even more ironic is that those countries that presently supply most of the world's oil also have most of the world's sun.
You don't need to be fluent. If a Marine is capable of learning sign language to communicate silently with one another, he is surely capable of learning Shukran, and Shie Shie, which is thank you in Arabic and Mandarin.
No, I was brought up in South Africa, where I had to learn English and Afrikaans. I learnt German, Swiss-German, Dutch, French and Turkish since I came to Europe.
BTW, the Tajiks in Afghanistan speak Dari. There is no language called Tajik, just an ethnic group
This gives you a *Legal* basis to act against someone who repeatedly spamms you. Of course it won't stop a lot of spam, but if you can prove a company is repeatedly spamming you, you can finally act.
Giving cynical comments about how this won't help etc, however doesn't do anything. Spam assasin etc would be better of course but it doesn't have any legal basis and it seems that quite a few politicos in the US have a vested interest in outlawing efforts such as that.
I am impressed with the attempt to try to get a two way translator packed into a little box, but I don't think it's going to be much of a success. I gather the sudden need for computational translation is because the military simply has too few people who speak the languages of the areas that they cover. I also assume that this is in direct relation to the FBI/CIA etc requesting Pashto and Arabic speakers to come forward and help them after 9/11 last year and the difficulties in understanding a lot of the folk in Afghanistan who speak three major different languages (Pashto, Dari and Uzbek) with a whole bunch of dialects.
Sadly I think that it will be a waste of time. I speak six languages and at least one of them, Swiss-German, is not even a written language and here in Switzerland there about three major dialects of the language, some of which are not 100% mutually intelligible, and this in a Swiss-German population of about 5 million. I think that this system will run into the same sort of problems with languages like Arabic which has enormous dialectic variations in dialects say, from Algeria to Syria and people from the various areas can often not understand one another well. No one speaks classical Arabic of the Quran in day to day language use.
My guess is that the Military/CIA etc would be better advised to simply get people to learn the languages and to train others in using day to day expressions. This would have, amongst other things , the positive side effect that soldiers (some of them at least) would be better able to understand the culture and the situation of the local people where they are stationed. Not only this but people in all the countries I've lived in have reacted much, much better to me when I've tried to learn their language instead of being the usual culturally ignorant Anglo Tourist who expects everyone to speak English. I would argue that the general western ignorance (especially amongst English speakers) is one of the causes of the percieved arrogance seen by many third worlders. Another positive effect of learning the languages would be that there would be someone who would understand slang, as I think there's nothing like a bit of slang to throw off any translation software.
The Mac, either Classic OS9 or OSX is generically not safer than Windows. The fact that Microsoft products are virus traps is not only because they are written without any real security in mind. It is also because the platform is so widley used. I can't substantiate this of course, but the sheer volume of Windows, IE, MSSQL and Outlook Virii does point to the fact that *a lot* of people are almost constantly on the lookout for ways to crack the system.
The Classic Mac OS had the one built-in but not for that purpose security measure in that it didn't have a commandline. This prevented anyone from logging in via SSH or whatever and rooting the system. The only widespread server on the Classic OS was Webstar and by default it didn't have any way of getting in via a CGI or buffer overflow unless you installed plug-ins, and even then you could crack the serve but had no way of doing anything else on the computer.
Mac OSX has had the occaisional security hole, the last one I remember (Apart from an IE hole but we won't talk about that) was the HFS case hole. Apple has simply been wise and turned off most of the daemons that are notoriously prone to sniffing etc by default such as telnetd, ftpd etc. If you turn these on, you stand a good chance of getting hacked.
Apple also has a built in Scripting System on both the Classic and OSX systems: AppleScript. The only reason that there have not been more Virii coming in on this channel is because there is no automatic way to execute one of these as there is on windows. You could however easily use social engineering (i.e. trick someone into downloading a bad Applescript application) and wreak havoc on that persons machine.
Anyone who has used Macs in the early '90s will remember many Virii such as mdbf or the CD autoplay worm, some of which were even spread on MacWorld CD's. Apple's loss of marketshare in the mid '90s coincided with less virii being written for the Mac. You work that out.
With the rising marketshare of the *new* Apple under Jobs and Tevanian with the new OS I am willing to bet that the attempts to crack the system will incease.
How Apple will eact to this will determine Apple reputation in this espect. Up until now Apple has been very good and fairly candid at reacting to and releasing patches and hasn't gone on any whining campaigns as MS has done in order to try to draw attention away from buggy products.
So, the article is not entirely wrong but still misses the true issue.
I have bad feelings when I read about the infighting between the various distributions. While it's certainly positive that SuSE, Caldera etc are standardizing their distribution, RedHat's recent competitive upgrades move and the bickering amongst the vendors reminds me only too well of the Unix infighting and splitting in the 70's and 80's. I worry that in the end the winner will once again be Microsoft.
I hate to say this, but the Register seems to have a real problem getting very much straight when it comes to OSX. They flamed it away for ages, rightly so, in the 10.0 era as being slow and buggy, but never bothered to actually check it later when the 10.1 series rolled around and give it some plus points. Likewise this article misses the boat completely - Explorer on OSX *does* have a Scrapbook and Bookmark managment. The clowns at the register seem simply not to have been able to move the mouse to the left part of the window.
The Chimera story is amazing not only for the fact that it is *the* killer browser on OSX (or at least will be at 1.0 or sooner), lightweight, fullfeatured, standards compliant, and responsive. What is the most amazing thing about Chimera is that it has moved so fast. I think most of us will agree that we've never seen a product move ahead so quickly in the opensource, or closed source for that matter, world. And this is the work on just three or four people? I would *not* at all be surprised to learn that Apple has been lending a helping hand behind the scenes, given that the core code is not in the CVS tree and only Dave Hyatt sees it. The reasons for this would be obvious, but not those that the Register is trotting out. Apple has clearly no intention of bargaining with MS over something like a browser these days. MS has not advanced IE in terms of performance in over a year, apart from the occaisional bug fix, and Apple needs a browser that is native, looks good, is responsive and standards compliant and above all modern. IE is dying on the Mac OmniWeb looks good, but has terrible standards compliance and a development pace that makes your average snail seem like an F-15. Mozilla and Netscape are finally starting to work well on OSX but they are extremely bloated and contain far too many features that have no value whatsoever on OSX. OSX already has a simple but good native mail client and 10.2 Jaguar will also have integrated chatting. Pull those things from Mozilla, add a native interface and what do you get? - Chimera. I, personally am willing to bet money that it will be the future of web browsing on the OSX platform.
I think the reviewers at the Register simply get confused and a little bit lost when something positive happens in the Apple world and don't know how to react, given as they are, to useing cynicism as a normal manner of conversation. (Or is it just a steady diet of Fish 'n Chips with too much vinegar?)
Spread the word about the/. system to the faithful. You could make many points alone with your experience in developing, implementing and observing the social processes of the/code user moderated system and how the system tends to be self controlling. I'm not sure whether there are parallels to be seen in software licencing and the whole DRM agony, but if there ever was a truly democratic forum system/. is it.
I think one would be hard pressed to argue with the author in economic terms. As Rob has often said, the solution is probably somewhere in the middle. There are definite benefits in OpenSource from a developers point of view and peer review points of view, but as an unemployed programmer from the dotcom bust I can appreciate that programmers need to earn a living as well. His compromise model seems to be one of the more successful models in the business today. Apple does something similar with it's opening the OS core as Darwin and keeping the GUI and the fancy bits proprietry. This keeps them in money and provides the core with the benefit of many eyes and views and keeps OSS developers happy with something to hack on. I think of all the large companies Microsoft is probably the most scared to go this route with their products, although even they seem to be doing a bit of this even if it is only for PR purposes.
It does however have very much to do creativity and desireability getting lost in the grips of large companies. Hollywood is successful *because* of their size, which allow them to reach far more people than any independant ever could, and to market any article to death with a budget that would feed a country like Madagascar for a year or, closer to home, give an unemployed techie from the dotcom bust a job.
It also has nothing to do with Europe as there are very many independants in the States as well who would appreciate the chance to get some more exposure. Projecting your hatred and fear on someone because his views do not coincide with yours does not give you any more credibility.
Most people here feel that piracy *helped* spread the word on various companies products. MS windows would be nowhere as popular as it is if it hadn't been for rampant piracy. Someone further down pointed out that Sony admitted that piracy helped the PlayStation1 to become as hugely popular as it is. Most people point out that Napster gave them the opportunity to hear songs of CD's that they later bought, as opposed to Napster today that simply has no market left. I for one saw a pirated release of the Matrix at the company where I was working at the time the day after it was released in the States, but that (I should say "of course" but some people don't see the point) didn't stop me from seeing it in the cinema. I could go on.
Society is very much obediant to the physical rule that for every force there is a reaction or counterforce. You can try this out by standing in a doorway and pressing hard against the frame - it presses back. The same is true for increasingly repressive large corporations trying to avoid the obvious changes that technologies are forcing on them. Society is reacting like that dorr frame - it is pressing back. If the large greed corporations are violent enough to repress society enough that that hypothetical doorframe breaks, they are left with no door so to speak. There will simply be no market for their products and we will be left with a kind of neo-fascist society a la Orwell's 1984, where it will be illegal to even complain about the repression that said corporations are forcing upon us.
This is not to say that the tendancy to produce ever more expensive movies with ever more technical effects, or operating systems with ever more gimmicks, or ever more technically polished albums will stop. The problem with these things is that they are like heroin. Society builds up a tolerance level to them. More is NOT better. This is why a cheap film like the Blair Witch Project succedes but it's commercialised sequels do not. A huge technical effort and restrictive laws do NOT encourage creativity. They kill it fairly effectively. Is anyone else out there thankful that there never was a sequel to Blade Runner?
If they carry on the way they are, they will lose, even if we do nothing. The way I see it is that their only chance of survival is to "go with the flow". I for one, naive or not, am going to mail the RIAA, the MPAA and point out these things to them. Will you?
Some are complaining that the game is not good looking or 3D, doesn't run on XP and that there is no OSX source:
1.It's GPL'ed, which means that nothing is stopping you from *making* it run under XP. This is of course theoretical and ignores some of the difficulties, such as GCC incompatibilities under XP, but theoretically, you could make this work with MSVC++ 2.Since it has Linux (and I presume *BSD) source, it means that porting it to OSX, while not trivial, won't be the end of the earth. 3.As many have mentioned, the graphics in the screenshots look bad. This says practically nothing about the developers, who are not graphics artists, and a lot about the consumer mentality of the general public that is gladly willing to use a game if it is free, but are less inclined to accept a different level of quality even if they don't pay for it. 4.At the same time, such comments about the quality of the graphics should not be met with disdain by OSS developers. The general public is very unforgiving and will match OSS products with their commercial competitors, no matter what! While I should point out that anyone can change the graphics of this game, it should serve as notice to OSS developers to place a lot of emphasis on presentation. Apple doesn't do well for nothing. 5.To those who claim that this game is in the past, not high-tech enough etc, I should point out that the popularity of a game is not as dependant on it'stechnology as some may think. There is a commercial game on OSX called Escape Velocity Nova that is a simple 2D space adventure game, but is extremely popular. The game depends on it's playability, not on it's technology. The GBA is another example. I have a feeling that a lot of especially PC commercial game developers, have the idea that their game will only be successful if the technology is cutting edge (vis the post further down from the commercial game developer). I beg to differ. High tech FPS/RPS/RTS games have the immense difficulty in gaining acceptance in the gaming market for thesimple reason that there is very little real difference in the games and in the heat of the competition content and a good story get lost by the wayside. I think that a game can be very successful if the story is enticing and the game has depth. I personally think that the lack of Riven type games (which were extremely popular) or at least the fact that very few developers even bothered to try to take this genre further is a good clue in where the game market is weak. 6.As a lot of gamers know, the ability to mod or expand a game is one of the most important features in a game gaining success. Very many fans like to tinker with their games. Think about it. Expandable games that were/are popular -UnReal/Quake/HalfLife/Homeworld/Myth/EVNova etc. 7.Don't forget that tetris is still popular, as is online backgammon etc.
In the Dune encyclopaedia, the author referrred to the "silicon plague" destroying almost all "thinking machines" and the general state of mankind as being repressed by those machines leading to the "Bulerian Jihad". This applies quite well to modern day contexts, albeit in a slightly diffeent way.
I was happy ina kind of boyish school kid kind of way about reading this. I don't really think it makes that much difference in reality to the actual *need* or feasability for a permanent manned Mars base, because the Mars northern polar cap always had water ice (or was it the southern one? in any case one did) and a manned base would have had to melt the stuff anyway.
The long term effect of this is that perhaps our descendants will be able to terraform the planet as envisaged by Kim Stanley Robinson and this is the kind of news piece that NASA needs to get public support for a Martian base, although, as I said above, in reality it doesn't change things that much.
To the guy who warned about Radiation poisoning from solar storms on the trip to Mars. Ship designers have been thinking about that one for a long time and this is where the concept of a storm cell on board a ship comes from - a thick walled cell whose walls are basically water tanks to absorb the radiation i.e. ionised particles.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for all the hard work!
He deserves it.
Refusing to confirm the security flaw, the Microsoft spokesman said the company "feel(s) strongly that speculating on the issue while the investigation is in progress would be irresponsible and counterproductive to our goal of protecting our customers' information."
Refusing to confirm the security flaw, the Microsoft spokesman said the company "feel(s) strongly that speculating on the issue while the investigation is in progress would be irresponsible and counterproductive to our goal of protecting our company's reputation."
I have fought my way through basic Perl Regexes and for some strange reason have come to like the language for it's sheer obtuseness. The person who made the crack "Perl - $Just @when->$you ${thought} s/yn/tax/ " wasn't joking.
/[bla]*/ or /\Qbla\E*/ or something completely different?).
What I see as a real problem for Perl6 and Larry's vision is that other languages have, as he noted, copied Perl5 Regexes and it has more or less become a standard as it is. Those languages are not going to change their implementations of Regexes in a hurry, especially Java which has just aquired it, and this will lead to a schism because, as powerful as Regexes are, they are not for the faint hearted and no one, and I mean no one, wants to learn two different ways of doing them.(Do I use
I can almost guarantee that this is going to hurt the Perl community because many will simply stay with Perl5's way of doing things because of compatibility and habit and I think Perl6 will have a hard time finding a large audience.
I know it's too late to convince Larry otherwise, but I think he should have left things the way they were in the Regex world. My analogy is to human languages. I learnt German years ago, which is more complex grammatically than English but at the same time much more structured and with far less exceptions. None the less, an amazing amount of people speak English and like it because of it's amazing flexibility and ability to enable even a poor speaker to be understood, despite thousands of exceptions in spelling and grammar.
The huge amounts of anti-Linux trolling speak volumes about MS' fear of becoming another Novell.
As the poster further down says, copyright is not allowed officialy by islam. This is the case in Iran where basically there is none. Perhaps this has something this something to do with the "Axis of Evil" not paying for MS licences.
Much ado about nothing.
Doesn't Transmeta use a software instruction translator to translate x86 instructions to their processor? That means it's transparent whether you write your code for 32 or 64 bit x86, doesn't it?
I have this funny feeling that the one company who could really get the most out of Transmeta's technology is the one company that won't: Apple. Given Apple's constant problems with Motorola and G4 deliveries, this is one processor that could give them a boost. I have no idea though. This is just a question.
I'm surprised that many people react with derision to this article. The US generates more CO2 and uses more energy per capita than any other nation on earth and I would think that they would be interested in some alternate form of energy. Is it perhaps because this *isn't* happening in the US.
The ironic thing about using electrolysis to seperate water is that solar power is just as good for this, so it doesn't have to happen in Iceland. Any country with a fair amount of sun can make their own hydrogen. What's even more ironic is that those countries that presently supply most of the world's oil also have most of the world's sun.
You don't need to be fluent. If a Marine is capable of learning sign language to communicate silently with one another, he is surely capable of learning Shukran, and Shie Shie, which is thank you in Arabic and Mandarin.
No, I was brought up in South Africa, where I had to learn English and Afrikaans. I learnt German, Swiss-German, Dutch, French and Turkish since I came to Europe.
BTW, the Tajiks in Afghanistan speak Dari. There is no language called Tajik, just an ethnic group
This gives you a *Legal* basis to act against someone who repeatedly spamms you. Of course it won't stop a lot of spam, but if you can prove a company is repeatedly spamming you, you can finally act.
Giving cynical comments about how this won't help etc, however doesn't do anything. Spam assasin etc would be better of course but it doesn't have any legal basis and it seems that quite a few politicos in the US have a vested interest in outlawing efforts such as that.
I am impressed with the attempt to try to get a two way translator packed into a little box, but I don't think it's going to be much of a success. I gather the sudden need for computational translation is because the military simply has too few people who speak the languages of the areas that they cover. I also assume that this is in direct relation to the FBI/CIA etc requesting Pashto and Arabic speakers to come forward and help them after 9/11 last year and the difficulties in understanding a lot of the folk in Afghanistan who speak three major different languages (Pashto, Dari and Uzbek) with a whole bunch of dialects.
Sadly I think that it will be a waste of time. I speak six languages and at least one of them, Swiss-German, is not even a written language and here in Switzerland there about three major dialects of the language, some of which are not 100% mutually intelligible, and this in a Swiss-German population of about 5 million. I think that this system will run into the same sort of problems with languages like Arabic which has enormous dialectic variations in dialects say, from Algeria to Syria and people from the various areas can often not understand one another well. No one speaks classical Arabic of the Quran in day to day language use.
My guess is that the Military/CIA etc would be better advised to simply get people to learn the languages and to train others in using day to day expressions. This would have, amongst other things , the positive side effect that soldiers (some of them at least) would be better able to understand the culture and the situation of the local people where they are stationed. Not only this but people in all the countries I've lived in have reacted much, much better to me when I've tried to learn their language instead of being the usual culturally ignorant Anglo Tourist who expects everyone to speak English. I would argue that the general western ignorance (especially amongst English speakers) is one of the causes of the percieved arrogance seen by many third worlders. Another positive effect of learning the languages would be that there would be someone who would understand slang, as I think there's nothing like a bit of slang to throw off any translation software.
The Mac, either Classic OS9 or OSX is generically not safer than Windows. The fact that Microsoft products are virus traps is not only because they are written without any real security in mind. It is also because the platform is so widley used. I can't substantiate this of course, but the sheer volume of Windows, IE, MSSQL and Outlook Virii does point to the fact that *a lot* of people are almost constantly on the lookout for ways to crack the system.
The Classic Mac OS had the one built-in but not for that purpose security measure in that it didn't have a commandline. This prevented anyone from logging in via SSH or whatever and rooting the system. The only widespread server on the Classic OS was Webstar and by default it didn't have any way of getting in via a CGI or buffer overflow unless you installed plug-ins, and even then you could crack the serve but had no way of doing anything else on the computer.
Mac OSX has had the occaisional security hole, the last one I remember (Apart from an IE hole but we won't talk about that) was the HFS case hole. Apple has simply been wise and turned off most of the daemons that are notoriously prone to sniffing etc by default such as telnetd, ftpd etc. If you turn these on, you stand a good chance of getting hacked.
Apple also has a built in Scripting System on both the Classic and OSX systems: AppleScript. The only reason that there have not been more Virii coming in on this channel is because there is no automatic way to execute one of these as there is on windows. You could however easily use social engineering (i.e. trick someone into downloading a bad Applescript application) and wreak havoc on that persons machine.
Anyone who has used Macs in the early '90s will remember many Virii such as mdbf or the CD autoplay worm, some of which were even spread on MacWorld CD's. Apple's loss of marketshare in the mid '90s coincided with less virii being written for the Mac. You work that out.
With the rising marketshare of the *new* Apple under Jobs and Tevanian with the new OS I am willing to bet that the attempts to crack the system will incease.
How Apple will eact to this will determine Apple reputation in this espect. Up until now Apple has been very good and fairly candid at reacting to and releasing patches and hasn't gone on any whining campaigns as MS has done in order to try to draw attention away from buggy products.
So, the article is not entirely wrong but still misses the true issue.
I have bad feelings when I read about the infighting between the various distributions. While it's certainly positive that SuSE, Caldera etc are standardizing their distribution, RedHat's recent competitive upgrades move and the bickering amongst the vendors reminds me only too well of the Unix infighting and splitting in the 70's and 80's. I worry that in the end the winner will once again be Microsoft.
which would change the nature of your post a bit.
I hate to say this, but the Register seems to have a real problem getting very much straight when it comes to OSX. They flamed it away for ages, rightly so, in the 10.0 era as being slow and buggy, but never bothered to actually check it later when the 10.1 series rolled around and give it some plus points. Likewise this article misses the boat completely - Explorer on OSX *does* have a Scrapbook and Bookmark managment. The clowns at the register seem simply not to have been able to move the mouse to the left part of the window.
The Chimera story is amazing not only for the fact that it is *the* killer browser on OSX (or at least will be at 1.0 or sooner), lightweight, fullfeatured, standards compliant, and responsive. What is the most amazing thing about Chimera is that it has moved so fast. I think most of us will agree that we've never seen a product move ahead so quickly in the opensource, or closed source for that matter, world. And this is the work on just three or four people? I would *not* at all be surprised to learn that Apple has been lending a helping hand behind the scenes, given that the core code is not in the CVS tree and only Dave Hyatt sees it. The reasons for this would be obvious, but not those that the Register is trotting out. Apple has clearly no intention of bargaining with MS over something like a browser these days. MS has not advanced IE in terms of performance in over a year, apart from the occaisional bug fix, and Apple needs a browser that is native, looks good, is responsive and standards compliant and above all modern. IE is dying on the Mac OmniWeb looks good, but has terrible standards compliance and a development pace that makes your average snail seem like an F-15. Mozilla and Netscape are finally starting to work well on OSX but they are extremely bloated and contain far too many features that have no value whatsoever on OSX. OSX already has a simple but good native mail client and 10.2 Jaguar will also have integrated chatting. Pull those things from Mozilla, add a native interface and what do you get? - Chimera. I, personally am willing to bet money that it will be the future of web browsing on the OSX platform.
I think the reviewers at the Register simply get confused and a little bit lost when something positive happens in the Apple world and don't know how to react, given as they are, to useing cynicism as a normal manner of conversation. (Or is it just a steady diet of Fish 'n Chips with too much vinegar?)
Spread the word about the /. system to the faithful. You could make many points alone with your experience in developing, implementing and observing the social processes of the /code user moderated system and how the system tends to be self controlling. I'm not sure whether there are parallels to be seen in software licencing and the whole DRM agony, but if there ever was a truly democratic forum system /. is it.
I think one would be hard pressed to argue with the author in economic terms. As Rob has often said, the solution is probably somewhere in the middle. There are definite benefits in OpenSource from a developers point of view and peer review points of view, but as an unemployed programmer from the dotcom bust I can appreciate that programmers need to earn a living as well. His compromise model seems to be one of the more successful models in the business today. Apple does something similar with it's opening the OS core as Darwin and keeping the GUI and the fancy bits proprietry. This keeps them in money and provides the core with the benefit of many eyes and views and keeps OSS developers happy with something to hack on. I think of all the large companies Microsoft is probably the most scared to go this route with their products, although even they seem to be doing a bit of this even if it is only for PR purposes.
This alone makes going to one of these parties worthwhile. Now if only we could explain this to the rest of society.
It does however have very much to do creativity and desireability getting lost in the grips of large companies. Hollywood is successful *because* of their size, which allow them to reach far more people than any independant ever could, and to market any article to death with a budget that would feed a country like Madagascar for a year or, closer to home, give an unemployed techie from the dotcom bust a job.
It also has nothing to do with Europe as there are very many independants in the States as well who would appreciate the chance to get some more exposure. Projecting your hatred and fear on someone because his views do not coincide with yours does not give you any more credibility.
Most people here feel that piracy *helped* spread the word on various companies products. MS windows would be nowhere as popular as it is if it hadn't been for rampant piracy. Someone further down pointed out that Sony admitted that piracy helped the PlayStation1 to become as hugely popular as it is. Most people point out that Napster gave them the opportunity to hear songs of CD's that they later bought, as opposed to Napster today that simply has no market left. I for one saw a pirated release of the Matrix at the company where I was working at the time the day after it was released in the States, but that (I should say "of course" but some people don't see the point) didn't stop me from seeing it in the cinema. I could go on.
Society is very much obediant to the physical rule that for every force there is a reaction or counterforce. You can try this out by standing in a doorway and pressing hard against the frame - it presses back. The same is true for increasingly repressive large corporations trying to avoid the obvious changes that technologies are forcing on them. Society is reacting like that dorr frame - it is pressing back. If the large greed corporations are violent enough to repress society enough that that hypothetical doorframe breaks, they are left with no door so to speak. There will simply be no market for their products and we will be left with a kind of neo-fascist society a la Orwell's 1984, where it will be illegal to even complain about the repression that said corporations are forcing upon us.
This is not to say that the tendancy to produce ever more expensive movies with ever more technical effects, or operating systems with ever more gimmicks, or ever more technically polished albums will stop. The problem with these things is that they are like heroin. Society builds up a tolerance level to them. More is NOT better. This is why a cheap film like the Blair Witch Project succedes but it's commercialised sequels do not. A huge technical effort and restrictive laws do NOT encourage creativity. They kill it fairly effectively. Is anyone else out there thankful that there never was a sequel to Blade Runner?
If they carry on the way they are, they will lose, even if we do nothing. The way I see it is that their only chance of survival is to "go with the flow". I for one, naive or not, am going to mail the RIAA, the MPAA and point out these things to them. Will you?
Some are complaining that the game is not good looking or 3D, doesn't run on XP and that there is no OSX source:
1.It's GPL'ed, which means that nothing is stopping you from *making* it run under XP. This is of course theoretical and ignores some of the difficulties, such as GCC incompatibilities under XP, but theoretically, you could make this work with MSVC++
2.Since it has Linux (and I presume *BSD) source, it means that porting it to OSX, while not trivial, won't be the end of the earth.
3.As many have mentioned, the graphics in the screenshots look bad. This says practically nothing about the developers, who are not graphics artists, and a lot about the consumer mentality of the general public that is gladly willing to use a game if it is free, but are less inclined to accept a different level of quality even if they don't pay for it.
4.At the same time, such comments about the quality of the graphics should not be met with disdain by OSS developers. The general public is very unforgiving and will match OSS products with their commercial competitors, no matter what! While I should point out that anyone can change the graphics of this game, it should serve as notice to OSS developers to place a lot of emphasis on presentation. Apple doesn't do well for nothing.
5.To those who claim that this game is in the past, not high-tech enough etc, I should point out that the popularity of a game is not as dependant on it'stechnology as some may think. There is a commercial game on OSX called Escape Velocity Nova that is a simple 2D space adventure game, but is extremely popular. The game depends on it's playability, not on it's technology. The GBA is another example. I have a feeling that a lot of especially PC commercial game developers, have the idea that their game will only be successful if the technology is cutting edge (vis the post further down from the commercial game developer). I beg to differ. High tech FPS/RPS/RTS games have the immense difficulty in gaining acceptance in the gaming market for thesimple reason that there is very little real difference in the games and in the heat of the competition content and a good story get lost by the wayside. I think that a game can be very successful if the story is enticing and the game has depth. I personally think that the lack of Riven type games (which were extremely popular) or at least the fact that very few developers even bothered to try to take this genre further is a good clue in where the game market is weak.
6.As a lot of gamers know, the ability to mod or expand a game is one of the most important features in a game gaining success. Very many fans like to tinker with their games. Think about it. Expandable games that were/are popular -UnReal/Quake/HalfLife/Homeworld/Myth/EVNova etc.
7.Don't forget that tetris is still popular, as is online backgammon etc.
In the Dune encyclopaedia, the author referrred to the "silicon plague" destroying almost all "thinking machines" and the general state of mankind as being repressed by those machines leading to the "Bulerian Jihad". This applies quite well to modern day contexts, albeit in a slightly diffeent way.
I was happy ina kind of boyish school kid kind of way about reading this. I don't really think it makes that much difference in reality to the actual *need* or feasability for a permanent manned Mars base, because the Mars northern polar cap always had water ice (or was it the southern one? in any case one did) and a manned base would have had to melt the stuff anyway.
The long term effect of this is that perhaps our descendants will be able to terraform the planet as envisaged by Kim Stanley Robinson and this is the kind of news piece that NASA needs to get public support for a Martian base, although, as I said above, in reality it doesn't change things that much.
To the guy who warned about Radiation poisoning from solar storms on the trip to Mars. Ship designers have been thinking about that one for a long time and this is where the concept of a storm cell on board a ship comes from - a thick walled cell whose walls are basically water tanks to absorb the radiation i.e. ionised particles.