Well, I use AllOfMp3.com from Canada, because it offers a pretty good catalog (maybe 75% of what I'm looking for), and awesome encoding selection options, good bandwidth, and a low cost. It's a lot easier and nicer than wandering the slums that are P2P networks.
Is it ethical? Well, first of all, the last time I heard, downloading is legal in Canada (while uploading is illegal albeit unenforcable), and secondly, my oh so helpful Canadian Government has taken care of the artist compensation mechanism by charging me extra on the CD-R's I use to backup my data. (Insert note of sarcasm here.) They take my money, and I'm sure they figure out which artists I downloaded music from and give them their share, because I always phone in to my local top40 radio station and request all my favorite psytrance and progressive ambient and movie soundtracks etc, which they are always so kind to play for me, all the way through the album.
I want good artists to be compensated. Not $0.99 per track (which is about the same as a physical copy -- utterly ridiculous), and not the $0.10-0.20 per track that the Russians get for a 5 minute song at high quality lossy encoding, but maybe somewhere in between.
The system is horribly broken, corrupted by corporate greed, and muddied by copyright crime, and in Canada, confused further by half-baked measures that give moral grounds to make it ok to be a downloader, while not solving the money chain problem (reminds me of communist style governmental brain damage), and even making it worse for small-time artists, who are handicapped by levies.
Since when does motive constitute a violation of the constitution? Is that really what you yanks have in your law?
IMO, preventing encouragement to think critically about something that may otherwise be presented to as indisputable, completely and comprehensible and knowable fact (to impressionable kids), is defense of dogma, and is dogmatically religious in my books.
ID has taken a lot of hits in this discussion for being dogmatic religion in disguise, but this dogmatism in favor evolution also needs to be separated from the state in favor of true critical thought, which if the evolutionists are right will lead to evolution anyway. Stooping to dogmatism is not how to beat dogmatics -- being calmly reasonable is how.
School should be about fairly presenting kids with a reasonable spectrum of information, teaching them to discern fact from theory from fiction, and letting them decide on their own.
Force-feed a kid evolution as fact, and that everything else is crackpotted brain-poison that he/she shouldn't even consider, and you'll have a zealot. You ravenous evolutionists who all seem to be modded up in this article might not having more zealots on your side (their zeal can be handy), but in the long run, zealots are not in anyone's interest and if you believe in social darwinism, will be weeded out at some point...Build critical thinking and information assessment skills, and you'll have an intelligent person who can see for themselves that natural selection and many other facets of the theory of evolution carry a lot of support in the form of direct evidence.
As grammar fascist says, this debate is such a mess, with both sides being arrogant and muddying the waters. I respect evolutionists and non-evolutionists who are cool-headed, fair, and rational, and am pretty fed up with the rest of the population. I am a Christian who stopped following the evolution vs whatever debate a long time ago, largely because whether you're an atheist, evolutionist, ID'er or creationist, this ridiculous debate has made monkeys/sinners out of a lot of people and we have a long way to evolve/find love and wisdom to become civil and reasonable.
In the end I think the chasm in schools of reason (basically physical empiricism vs personal experientialism) comes down to science vs religion, and will never be resolved until science learns all the things religion knows, or religion gets replaced by scientific knowledge (which are both the same thing, IMO.) The downsides to each approach are that science is missing out on things religion knows, ruling out having a meaningful understanding of some or a lot of things that exist, and religion is prone to believing some or a lot of extra things, which interfere with having an accurate understanding of reality.
Re:Why I dislike Halo (and all modern console game
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Halo 2 Goes Gold
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Is a lower-resolution 36 inch television located ~3m away really have an advantage over a high-res 19 inch screen that's 1.5-2 feet in front of you? I think that more important than physical screen size is angular screen size and resolution from your p.o.v.
Of course, I think that more important than the screen is whether I'm sitting on my comfy couch or a rigid computer chair.
I almost forgot... One of the best features of OGRE is its awesome developer forum. Ogre has one of the most mature, professional, and helpful developer communities around.
Even though I'm not involved in all the collaborative projects, it is a breath of fresh air to see intelligent people working together to produce awesome features, like paging scene managers, modular game frameworks (making use of OpenAL, FMod, ODE, etc), and CrazyEddie's GUI, which may end up being one of the best performant and most feature-filled GUIs for any 3D environment. (Note: CEGUI won't just be for Ogre.)
I second the advice to take a look at Ogre. Ogre has an very clean, well designed, and stable API. (Especially compared to some other engines. I for one found it many times easier to understand and more organized than Crystal Space when I stopped following it a couple years ago.)
While Irrlicht may be designed to provide a very nice and quick API for beginners to 3D programming, Ogre has seemed more professional to me. As a graphics engine, Ogre seems top-notch in terms of performant implementation of bleeding edge features that won't run on anything less than the latest generation video cards. (I have not really taken a close look at Irrlicht since about version 0.5 though.)
There have been at least a couple commercial games released (an arcade machine and some game appearing on Finnish television) done with Ogre.
I think that because it is new, and maybe because it is a graphics engine and not a game engine, Ogre has been getting less press than it may deserve. Anyway, be sure to check it out.
Also, don't judge an engine by their demo screenshots. Open source authors often don't have the resources to make beautiful artwork to dazzle people with (nor do they have the financial incentive to do so).
Irrespective of whether IBM has warm fuzzies about helping OSS, the OSS community can (try to) flex its muscle by supporting IBM.
How, exactly, I don't know -- one guy suggested recommending G5's.. word-of-mouth advertising is something of good value that a mob can offer.
And for companies that we don't like (Microsoft, SCO, and maybe IBM in 10 years), we can speak badly of them, boycott them, and encourage the opposition. I for one stopped buying and using M$ products sooner than I would have if it weren't for the OSS community influencing me, and I pass on influence of my own. Word of mouth, and apps I write will be portable to Linux/OSX, and I even plan to release a beta of a game for Linux users first, (I've even thought of a discount for the Linux/Mac version of the game.)
Things like this might not be much, but mindshare adds up and who knows how big of a mob we the OSS peeps can turn out to be.
The way things are going, M$ is losing it's edge and ability to lock-in customers. OOo is one example, as are WineX and Citrix, and more will follow. When CTO and lead IT guys start getting a choice between Linux and Windows (or IBM vs ???), they're going to obviously start choosing the one they love and scrap the one they hate.
As the playing field levels, general popular opinion starts to matter more. Companies like Microsoft do suffer in some ways right now for being "a soulless life-sucking entity that represents all that is evil in the world"... maybe negligibly compared to the billions they rake in, but the starry-eyed idealist in me hopes that karma as manifested in angering or pleasing we the consumers will start to matter someday.
While I have put up several websites, I ain't a professional web developer but I think "Looks best in Firefox and other Standards Compliant Browsers" logos might not be so bad (assuming Firefox is compliant of course.) "Warning! US Department of Homeland Security advises against the usage of MSIE" logos might not be so bad either;)
In the past, when I have put up websites for random purposes, I run into MSIE's buggily inaccurate interpretation of CSS positionings, and not to mention that the year is two thousand freaking four and MSIE still doesn't properly support (IMO anyway) transparent PNGs. Microsoft is keeping us in the dark ages, although it at least gives pro web developers a little boost to their job security, as hacks for MSIE and other noncompliant browsers become a part of their job and their resume.
I would take 90% dominance by an open source browser over MSIE anyday. At least then when I want to scream because I don't want to learn how to hack up my webpage to have different versions for MSIE and standards compliant browsers, I can choose to vent my energies into patches with which I can gift the world at the next iteration cycle.
That's the second angry vent I've had lately....Patents and PNGs. Someone should patent 'a method and system for incorrect display of PNG alpha channels coupled with mangling of CSS', and then sue Micro$oft for infringement.
As a casual web developer, I'm at the point where I don't care enough anymore to make things look ultra pretty on MSIE. As it stands now, some of my sites do look better in Mozilla/Firefox/Konqueror and maybe others, simply because they support PNG alpha channels without nonstandard hacks. If you are reading this from MSIE, take note that your browsing experience *will* be worse from my sites than it is from better browsers.
I don't have WinXP on my PC, and have never used it on anyone else's for more than a couple minutes at a time. I have never seen this feature, but it's blindingly obvious stuff, and plenty of reason to complain.
If every micro-innovation and 2 cent idea gets patented, and everyone starts sueing everyone else for every little thing, the technology industry will eventually come to a screetching halt, with the first casualties being everyone except for large American corporations with vast amounts of patent portfolios and lawyers, and the second casualty being the very same corporate America, for being so darned caught-up in gaining points in the game that is the legal system that the rest of the worlds says 'forget you punks' and leaves the brainlessly tyrannical USPTO-dictated courts-gaming nation in the dust until the voting US populace realizes all of the rebel anti-software patent nations have a significant advantage, and US's position as a superpower and dominant global market wanes too much to impose its software "patents" on the rest of the world.
Patents do have a valid purpose. However, people seem to have forgotten that this purpose is not to provide a means for corporations to grow fangs in the mouths of their lawyers.
(..Well, this USPTO stuff keeps making me madder by the day. I needed to vent, FWIW, just my $0.02, God Bless America, et al.)
I'd say Gentoo has half-taken the plunge. I just did a new install a few days ago and virtual-x11 or whatever points to x.org, not xfree. Of course, with X.org masked (~x86), this means the default X11 is masked, which is weird and should probably be fixed one way or the other.
It took me several tries, but I eventually just got my key. (Using Konqueror.) I was also cheesed that the GameSpyID sign-up questionnaire didn't have a checkbox for Linux gamers:P Of course, I'm also mad about the Linux version not being up for download.
Fileplanet reminds me of Real in that they are both internet companies with seemingly marginal business models that have to be really annoying in order to make any money.
Gates doesn't care about what's good for consumers, he cares about what's profitable for the company he leads. Only sometimes is what's good for consumers also good for Microsoft.
> and the equivalent of SETI@home (which similarly, has some people looking for a Mate).
I had always wondered why people ran SETI@home; now I know: they have given up on mating fellow humans (Is their self esteem that low? Has obesity gotten that bad in America?) and are looking to find love with aliens, once we decrypt the personal ads they have been sending us via interstellar radio.
(I think ambiguous appositives like these are a good reason to switch to Lojban)
I'm not too much of an RPG fan... but KOTOR is the first RPG I've played all the way thru. (I'm still about 80% through the first Zelda 64, which I think is really cool and immersive but after a few dozen hours of gameplay, all the puzzles bore me as I look up how to do everything in a walkthrough and I just want to watch more of a more linear movie unfold like KOTOR:) )
I'll quickly mention that in both of these games I like the real-time combat, and probably wouldn't have played them without it.
I agree that KOTOR is pretty good with the characters. The good voice acting means there's an actual person behind the game character, and the actors' character comes through. This combined with good visuals of the people's faces and body language, plus 40 or so hours of interaction with them leads to feeling like you could actually know these people.
The various plot twists and character reactions didn't seem nearly as arbitrary, at least for a couple characters... I found myself impacted by what was happening to the people, and after I put the game down they still occupied my thoughts and emotions somewhat.
Depending on who you ask, I think KOTOR could be called a success in emotional engagement. A lot probably comes down to whether you can relate to the characters in the game, but the quality of the voice-overs was very good I think and perhaps the single most distinctive factor in this game. Of course, the romanticism of good vs evil and the force in Star Wars universe also helps capture the imaginations of many.
The only way I would be interested in this thing is if it came with a keyboard / mouse, and oh, NTSC resolution is too low... gotta be at least 1024x768. Hmm.. I guess I already have one of these.
So the main appeal it seems is the distribution channel. Perhaps this can help make the indy/shareware-level type market more serious and worthwhile, both for customers who are sick of weeding through crap on the net, and for devs who get lost among the crap on the net and don't have good access to marketing resources. I'm thinking something along the lines of mp3.com, except with all the best items rising to the top of the charts.
Just like mp3.com was great for indy music makers and seekers alike, perhaps this can do something for the game industry, and perhaps enable some fresh ideas to rise to the top and get noticed. However, the XBox guy, and especially the "DRM up the wazoo" part freaks me out. I can see indy developers porting their stuff to Phantom just to gain more recognition for themselves in the PC or console world.
Of course, if Phantom never gains market share (which at this point would be no big surprise, except for the surprise that it turns out not to be vaporware), this won't be worth it, and if the returns to game devs get all the revenue milked by this mischevious Infinium CEO, then that could be bad as well.
Ooh... on the other hand, perhaps this is a chance to reform and revolutionize the gaming industry. IMO, input devices these days kinda suck. Consoles got with it and released controllers with dual analog sticks (and no mice), but the PC world is still mostly stuck with one 2D analog device (dual analog is too fringe to be a requirement in games). So my oddball and probably ignored idea is, use this as a chance to put in a new input paradigm, with a keyboard for typing, and two optical mice with loads (5-15) of buttons on them. Yeeahh! (Or maybe one of those 3D input devices)
I was thinking to myself, man, what a troll. What a jerk. People won't know enough not to take this guy seriously. 100 MB 'ls'? Configure ls before it shows stuff? That will never happen, retard.
But then I kept reading, and he, like myself, runs Gentoo. Obviously, he's a smart guy. So props for the troll. Got to keep solidarity with my gentoo brothers...it's hard being a gentoo user these days.
Seriously, though, I agree with another respondent...such trolls can be good and provide interesting discussion, even if the poster doesn't fully agree with what he's saying.
Do you know it's really legal? Couldn't they just buy the CDs (not the rights to sell/redistribute) and charge whatever they want for it without paying royalties, and when the RIAA comes, they just say you don't have jurisdiction here? What's stopping me from selling my personal CD collection from Sealand for $0.01/meg, or $0.25/tune? (Perhaps I would have to live on Sealand to avoid prosecution.)
I don't really understand this sort of law or Russia's integration with American laws, but it seems a little too good to be able to cover royalties to the copyright holders, let alone provide a profit margin, although I'm sure operating costs are lower in the motherland.
OTOH, if it's illegitimate, and we all sent money to Russia with love, how can people come to us and say, "you need to pay again for that music."
That's a good point. We already pay the RI-eh-eh to legally download our music, so why would we pay extra money to someone like Puretracks?
Puretracks must be there to undercut the global market, or for Canadian schmuks who believe in a capitalist free market so much that they want to pay $US0.76 per track anyway.
Meanwhile, the rest of us legalized pirates (dirty commies) will buy CD-Rs and iPods and watch our money go to Martingrad to pump up a centrally planned slush fund which will help us achieve our 5-year plans.
(FTR, I don't believe in downloading music without compensating artists (record labels can whither and die in this info age for all I care) and I don't believe in undercutting the free-market with a inherently doomed centralized wealth redistribution system and think our country totally sucks in this regard.)
Prediction: 'SCO Group will settle its lawsuit against IBM. Both sides will declare victory.'
Comment: "IBM has a vested interest in... making sure SCO is crushed into a fine-grained dust."
I think it's more safe to say IBM has a vested interest in pulling off the biggest win possible, whatever that is for them. If there is a settlement, it will involve SCO paying lots of money (or something else) to IBM. If SCO manages to claim it's a victory, it would go something like this:
SCO Information Minister: "The enemy's wallet is committing suicide at our gates. We did not settle to IBM's counter suits for 30 million dollars. We did not surrender to IBM our rights over UNIX. We did not get penalized by the court for playing the legal system like a lottery. We won the lottery."
And then when the backdrop shows debt collectors taking away furniture from the SCO building, the Darl information minister will be saying: "The court decision is a win because we are paying for violating IBM's patents. It is a great victory for American capitalism and IP rights! And doom for communist penguin lovers who disregard patents!"
Finally, when he is in jail behind bars, and has only himself as an audience, he will be talking to himself "I did not go to jail, I passed go and collected my $200 for keeping the company black for 3 qu... I mean 4... darn! I wonder what Muhammed Saeed al-Sahaf is up to these days."
But the answer to all of this is clear. We need a fellowship of the one ring of power, which has the power to rule them all (UNIX) to return it to mount doom. Can the ragtag group destroy the ring and restore dignity to Linux? The fate rests in the hands of a brave but little hobbit (RedHat), a dwarf (Novell), noble and skilled elf (SuSE & German legal system) and man of former kingship (IBM), who are on a mission help return the ring to mount doom and oblivion? Or will greedy Boromir (SCO) who has stolen the ring bring doom upon all middle earth?
Will IBM Return as King, placing the fate of middle earth into the hands of men, who are capable of much good and also much evil? Will the King gain a beautiful elven woman (open source) as a wife and an asset to his kingship? Will open source fall from grace (pure hobbyism) and embrace dangerous mortality (corporate amoralism)? Or will the white wizard (Steve Ballmer) and the uruk-hai armies of Sarumann (Developers! Developers! Developers!) come and overwhelm all of them? Will the whisperings of Grima Wormtongue (FUD spreading journalists) influence the kings of men (PHBs) to make tragic decisions? Will Treebeard (Brooke Wells...she has a beard?) the Ents (US legal system) take so long to make up their mind that middle earth perishes by their inaction? Will the noble Eowyn (Pamela Jones) be able to come out of nowhere and slay the hideous beast (SCO's legal arguments)? Will the undead (*BSD and its copyrights) sweep in at the last moment to save middle earth before being released from their oath into eternal peace (uh oh this just turned into a BSD dying troll..I better quit before someone mods me up^H^Hdown.)...espresso is good for the imagination, bad for remembering to sleep.
Give up Linux? Not really using your current distro? Perhaps you should try gentoo! Some people said "Do we really need another Linux distro", but gentoo people said yes, and thanks to that, running linux is now a dream!
And I'm sure you like whatever non-gentoo distro you use too.
These people who say why have more competition blow my mind. They are so eager to be a part of the Slashbot hate-everything bandwagon (flash haters, gentoo zealot haters, gentoo zealot hater haters, **IA h8rs, and even the reactionary slashbot haters) but then they forget to check in their brains. Oops.
"I want there to be only TWO online music distributors, darnit! That way it is less likely that I will find one that has music I like, and it will be more likely that I will get to pay more money, just like I get to pay $300 for my operating system."
Of course, if the ones carrying indy labels are forced out of the market, that would suck.
BTW, most of the music I listen to is from mp3.com. I want to hear trance, which isn't on any local radio stations (although I just discovered Digitally Imported which is sweet), but going to local music stores' listening booths sucks because it's physically inconvenient and selection is so limited, and I've had enough of buying blindly.
-- "Karma is earned to be burned. It is how balance is kept in the universe."
Hmm, perhaps I should have been more obvious about that:) I figured you have to try hard to mess up the spelling of Mensa, especially in a post about spelling. On the Internet, spelling 'lose' incorrectly is somewhat of a phenomenon, a mistake that's easy to make because the phonetics come out 'oo'. I admit that I have thought about comitting that mistake once or twice:)
A month or so ago someone on Slashdot posted an inspiring flame about how people very often spell 'lose' incorrectly, so I thought I'd take my turn at carrying the torch, especially when I saw the Mensa member bit. If people in the top two percentile of intelligence engage in persistent spelling mistake, what hope is there for the rest of the world? Card carrying Mensa people should be ones to set a standard in things like spelling, learning from others' horendously common mistakes, and humility.
For most people, I make allowances, since not everyone has an eye for spelling. But my faith in humanity is pretty low and I have to find hope somewhere. Admitdetly, I don't even have a great deal of confidence even in 98th percentile IQ testees, but that is another matter.
The 2nd most common spelling mistake I can think of is one of ignorance, and not accidental: that of spelling 'a lot' as one word instead of two. But if you inadvertantly spell Mensa with to e's, you probably have peanut butter stuck in your keyboard or something. That makes me think... if Star Trek style teleportation existed, I wonder if there would be mischievous people who teleported bits of peanut butter into people's brains at the exact right spot so that they always spell 'lose' incorrectly. Or maybe there already are! Hmm I must go think now.....
And I peaked at 312.7 kB/s! Thats for the linux download.. maybe all the windows dudes are leeches:)
So uhh...(don't want to get modded troll like parent)... have a nice day:) and I'm sorry if I make you jealous:)
FWIW I'm currently still uploading at 37 kB/s. From all the torrenting I've started doing lately, I wonder if my cable provider will start bugging me about my uploading.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I use AllOfMp3.com from Canada, because it offers a pretty good catalog (maybe 75% of what I'm looking for), and awesome encoding selection options, good bandwidth, and a low cost. It's a lot easier and nicer than wandering the slums that are P2P networks.
Is it ethical? Well, first of all, the last time I heard, downloading is legal in Canada (while uploading is illegal albeit unenforcable), and secondly, my oh so helpful Canadian Government has taken care of the artist compensation mechanism by charging me extra on the CD-R's I use to backup my data. (Insert note of sarcasm here.) They take my money, and I'm sure they figure out which artists I downloaded music from and give them their share, because I always phone in to my local top40 radio station and request all my favorite psytrance and progressive ambient and movie soundtracks etc, which they are always so kind to play for me, all the way through the album.
I want good artists to be compensated. Not $0.99 per track (which is about the same as a physical copy -- utterly ridiculous), and not the $0.10-0.20 per track that the Russians get for a 5 minute song at high quality lossy encoding, but maybe somewhere in between.
The system is horribly broken, corrupted by corporate greed, and muddied by copyright crime, and in Canada, confused further by half-baked measures that give moral grounds to make it ok to be a downloader, while not solving the money chain problem (reminds me of communist style governmental brain damage), and even making it worse for small-time artists, who are handicapped by levies.
Since when does motive constitute a violation of the constitution? Is that really what you yanks have in your law?
..Build critical thinking and information assessment skills, and you'll have an intelligent person who can see for themselves that natural selection and many other facets of the theory of evolution carry a lot of support in the form of direct evidence.
IMO, preventing encouragement to think critically about something that may otherwise be presented to as indisputable, completely and comprehensible and knowable fact (to impressionable kids), is defense of dogma, and is dogmatically religious in my books.
ID has taken a lot of hits in this discussion for being dogmatic religion in disguise, but this dogmatism in favor evolution also needs to be separated from the state in favor of true critical thought, which if the evolutionists are right will lead to evolution anyway. Stooping to dogmatism is not how to beat dogmatics -- being calmly reasonable is how.
School should be about fairly presenting kids with a reasonable spectrum of information, teaching them to discern fact from theory from fiction, and letting them decide on their own.
Force-feed a kid evolution as fact, and that everything else is crackpotted brain-poison that he/she shouldn't even consider, and you'll have a zealot. You ravenous evolutionists who all seem to be modded up in this article might not having more zealots on your side (their zeal can be handy), but in the long run, zealots are not in anyone's interest and if you believe in social darwinism, will be weeded out at some point.
As grammar fascist says, this debate is such a mess, with both sides being arrogant and muddying the waters. I respect evolutionists and non-evolutionists who are cool-headed, fair, and rational, and am pretty fed up with the rest of the population. I am a Christian who stopped following the evolution vs whatever debate a long time ago, largely because whether you're an atheist, evolutionist, ID'er or creationist, this ridiculous debate has made monkeys/sinners out of a lot of people and we have a long way to evolve/find love and wisdom to become civil and reasonable.
In the end I think the chasm in schools of reason (basically physical empiricism vs personal experientialism) comes down to science vs religion, and will never be resolved until science learns all the things religion knows, or religion gets replaced by scientific knowledge (which are both the same thing, IMO.) The downsides to each approach are that science is missing out on things religion knows, ruling out having a meaningful understanding of some or a lot of things that exist, and religion is prone to believing some or a lot of extra things, which interfere with having an accurate understanding of reality.
Is a lower-resolution 36 inch television located ~3m away really have an advantage over a high-res 19 inch screen that's 1.5-2 feet in front of you? I think that more important than physical screen size is angular screen size and resolution from your p.o.v.
Of course, I think that more important than the screen is whether I'm sitting on my comfy couch or a rigid computer chair.
I almost forgot... One of the best features of OGRE is its awesome developer forum. Ogre has one of the most mature, professional, and helpful developer communities around.
Even though I'm not involved in all the collaborative projects, it is a breath of fresh air to see intelligent people working together to produce awesome features, like paging scene managers, modular game frameworks (making use of OpenAL, FMod, ODE, etc), and CrazyEddie's GUI, which may end up being one of the best performant and most feature-filled GUIs for any 3D environment. (Note: CEGUI won't just be for Ogre.)
I second the advice to take a look at Ogre. Ogre has an very clean, well designed, and stable API. (Especially compared to some other engines. I for one found it many times easier to understand and more organized than Crystal Space when I stopped following it a couple years ago.)
While Irrlicht may be designed to provide a very nice and quick API for beginners to 3D programming, Ogre has seemed more professional to me. As a graphics engine, Ogre seems top-notch in terms of performant implementation of bleeding edge features that won't run on anything less than the latest generation video cards. (I have not really taken a close look at Irrlicht since about version 0.5 though.)
There have been at least a couple commercial games released (an arcade machine and some game appearing on Finnish television) done with Ogre.
I think that because it is new, and maybe because it is a graphics engine and not a game engine, Ogre has been getting less press than it may deserve. Anyway, be sure to check it out.
Also, don't judge an engine by their demo screenshots. Open source authors often don't have the resources to make beautiful artwork to dazzle people with (nor do they have the financial incentive to do so).
Irrespective of whether IBM has warm fuzzies about helping OSS, the OSS community can (try to) flex its muscle by supporting IBM.
How, exactly, I don't know -- one guy suggested recommending G5's.. word-of-mouth advertising is something of good value that a mob can offer.
And for companies that we don't like (Microsoft, SCO, and maybe IBM in 10 years), we can speak badly of them, boycott them, and encourage the opposition. I for one stopped buying and using M$ products sooner than I would have if it weren't for the OSS community influencing me, and I pass on influence of my own. Word of mouth, and apps I write will be portable to Linux/OSX, and I even plan to release a beta of a game for Linux users first, (I've even thought of a discount for the Linux/Mac version of the game.)
Things like this might not be much, but mindshare adds up and who knows how big of a mob we the OSS peeps can turn out to be.
The way things are going, M$ is losing it's edge and ability to lock-in customers. OOo is one example, as are WineX and Citrix, and more will follow. When CTO and lead IT guys start getting a choice between Linux and Windows (or IBM vs ???), they're going to obviously start choosing the one they love and scrap the one they hate.
As the playing field levels, general popular opinion starts to matter more. Companies like Microsoft do suffer in some ways right now for being "a soulless life-sucking entity that represents all that is evil in the world"... maybe negligibly compared to the billions they rake in, but the starry-eyed idealist in me hopes that karma as manifested in angering or pleasing we the consumers will start to matter someday.
While I have put up several websites, I ain't a professional web developer but I think "Looks best in Firefox and other Standards Compliant Browsers" logos might not be so bad (assuming Firefox is compliant of course.) "Warning! US Department of Homeland Security advises against the usage of MSIE" logos might not be so bad either ;)
...Patents and PNGs. Someone should patent 'a method and system for incorrect display of PNG alpha channels coupled with mangling of CSS', and then sue Micro$oft for infringement.
In the past, when I have put up websites for random purposes, I run into MSIE's buggily inaccurate interpretation of CSS positionings, and not to mention that the year is two thousand freaking four and MSIE still doesn't properly support (IMO anyway) transparent PNGs. Microsoft is keeping us in the dark ages, although it at least gives pro web developers a little boost to their job security, as hacks for MSIE and other noncompliant browsers become a part of their job and their resume.
I would take 90% dominance by an open source browser over MSIE anyday. At least then when I want to scream because I don't want to learn how to hack up my webpage to have different versions for MSIE and standards compliant browsers, I can choose to vent my energies into patches with which I can gift the world at the next iteration cycle.
That's the second angry vent I've had lately.
As a casual web developer, I'm at the point where I don't care enough anymore to make things look ultra pretty on MSIE. As it stands now, some of my sites do look better in Mozilla/Firefox/Konqueror and maybe others, simply because they support PNG alpha channels without nonstandard hacks. If you are reading this from MSIE, take note that your browsing experience *will* be worse from my sites than it is from better browsers.
I don't have WinXP on my PC, and have never used it on anyone else's for more than a couple minutes at a time. I have never seen this feature, but it's blindingly obvious stuff, and plenty of reason to complain.
If every micro-innovation and 2 cent idea gets patented, and everyone starts sueing everyone else for every little thing, the technology industry will eventually come to a screetching halt, with the first casualties being everyone except for large American corporations with vast amounts of patent portfolios and lawyers, and the second casualty being the very same corporate America, for being so darned caught-up in gaining points in the game that is the legal system that the rest of the worlds says 'forget you punks' and leaves the brainlessly tyrannical USPTO-dictated courts-gaming nation in the dust until the voting US populace realizes all of the rebel anti-software patent nations have a significant advantage, and US's position as a superpower and dominant global market wanes too much to impose its software "patents" on the rest of the world.
Patents do have a valid purpose. However, people seem to have forgotten that this purpose is not to provide a means for corporations to grow fangs in the mouths of their lawyers.
(..Well, this USPTO stuff keeps making me madder by the day. I needed to vent, FWIW, just my $0.02, God Bless America, et al.)
I'd say Gentoo has half-taken the plunge. I just did a new install a few days ago and virtual-x11 or whatever points to x.org, not xfree. Of course, with X.org masked (~x86), this means the default X11 is masked, which is weird and should probably be fixed one way or the other.
It took me several tries, but I eventually just got my key. (Using Konqueror.) I was also cheesed that the GameSpyID sign-up questionnaire didn't have a checkbox for Linux gamers :P Of course, I'm also mad about the Linux version not being up for download.
Fileplanet reminds me of Real in that they are both internet companies with seemingly marginal business models that have to be really annoying in order to make any money.
Gates doesn't care about what's good for consumers, he cares about what's profitable for the company he leads. Only sometimes is what's good for consumers also good for Microsoft.
> and the equivalent of SETI@home (which similarly, has some people looking for a Mate).
I had always wondered why people ran SETI@home; now I know: they have given up on mating fellow humans (Is their self esteem that low? Has obesity gotten that bad in America?) and are looking to find love with aliens, once we decrypt the personal ads they have been sending us via interstellar radio.
(I think ambiguous appositives like these are a good reason to switch to Lojban)
I'm not too much of an RPG fan... but KOTOR is the first RPG I've played all the way thru. (I'm still about 80% through the first Zelda 64, which I think is really cool and immersive but after a few dozen hours of gameplay, all the puzzles bore me as I look up how to do everything in a walkthrough and I just want to watch more of a more linear movie unfold like KOTOR :) )
I'll quickly mention that in both of these games I like the real-time combat, and probably wouldn't have played them without it.
I agree that KOTOR is pretty good with the characters. The good voice acting means there's an actual person behind the game character, and the actors' character comes through. This combined with good visuals of the people's faces and body language, plus 40 or so hours of interaction with them leads to feeling like you could actually know these people.
The various plot twists and character reactions didn't seem nearly as arbitrary, at least for a couple characters... I found myself impacted by what was happening to the people, and after I put the game down they still occupied my thoughts and emotions somewhat.
Depending on who you ask, I think KOTOR could be called a success in emotional engagement. A lot probably comes down to whether you can relate to the characters in the game, but the quality of the voice-overs was very good I think and perhaps the single most distinctive factor in this game. Of course, the romanticism of good vs evil and the force in Star Wars universe also helps capture the imaginations of many.
The only way I would be interested in this thing is if it came with a keyboard / mouse, and oh, NTSC resolution is too low... gotta be at least 1024x768. Hmm.. I guess I already have one of these.
So the main appeal it seems is the distribution channel. Perhaps this can help make the indy/shareware-level type market more serious and worthwhile, both for customers who are sick of weeding through crap on the net, and for devs who get lost among the crap on the net and don't have good access to marketing resources. I'm thinking something along the lines of mp3.com, except with all the best items rising to the top of the charts.
Just like mp3.com was great for indy music makers and seekers alike, perhaps this can do something for the game industry, and perhaps enable some fresh ideas to rise to the top and get noticed. However, the XBox guy, and especially the "DRM up the wazoo" part freaks me out. I can see indy developers porting their stuff to Phantom just to gain more recognition for themselves in the PC or console world.
Of course, if Phantom never gains market share (which at this point would be no big surprise, except for the surprise that it turns out not to be vaporware), this won't be worth it, and if the returns to game devs get all the revenue milked by this mischevious Infinium CEO, then that could be bad as well.
Ooh... on the other hand, perhaps this is a chance to reform and revolutionize the gaming industry. IMO, input devices these days kinda suck. Consoles got with it and released controllers with dual analog sticks (and no mice), but the PC world is still mostly stuck with one 2D analog device (dual analog is too fringe to be a requirement in games). So my oddball and probably ignored idea is, use this as a chance to put in a new input paradigm, with a keyboard for typing, and two optical mice with loads (5-15) of buttons on them. Yeeahh! (Or maybe one of those 3D input devices)
Oh well, if infinium can dream, so can I...
I was thinking to myself, man, what a troll. What a jerk. People won't know enough not to take this guy seriously. 100 MB 'ls'? Configure ls before it shows stuff? That will never happen, retard.
But then I kept reading, and he, like myself, runs Gentoo. Obviously, he's a smart guy. So props for the troll. Got to keep solidarity with my gentoo brothers...it's hard being a gentoo user these days.
Seriously, though, I agree with another respondent...such trolls can be good and provide interesting discussion, even if the poster doesn't fully agree with what he's saying.
Do you know it's really legal? Couldn't they just buy the CDs (not the rights to sell/redistribute) and charge whatever they want for it without paying royalties, and when the RIAA comes, they just say you don't have jurisdiction here? What's stopping me from selling my personal CD collection from Sealand for $0.01/meg, or $0.25/tune? (Perhaps I would have to live on Sealand to avoid prosecution.)
I don't really understand this sort of law or Russia's integration with American laws, but it seems a little too good to be able to cover royalties to the copyright holders, let alone provide a profit margin, although I'm sure operating costs are lower in the motherland.
OTOH, if it's illegitimate, and we all sent money to Russia with love, how can people come to us and say, "you need to pay again for that music."
And they just got slashdotted.....
I wonder how you say 'slashdotted' in Russian?
That's a good point. We already pay the RI-eh-eh to legally download our music, so why would we pay extra money to someone like Puretracks?
Puretracks must be there to undercut the global market, or for Canadian schmuks who believe in a capitalist free market so much that they want to pay $US0.76 per track anyway.
Meanwhile, the rest of us legalized pirates (dirty commies) will buy CD-Rs and iPods and watch our money go to Martingrad to pump up a centrally planned slush fund which will help us achieve our 5-year plans.
(FTR, I don't believe in downloading music without compensating artists (record labels can whither and die in this info age for all I care) and I don't believe in undercutting the free-market with a inherently doomed centralized wealth redistribution system and think our country totally sucks in this regard.)
Prediction: 'SCO Group will settle its lawsuit against IBM. Both sides will declare victory.'
... making sure SCO is crushed into a fine-grained dust."
...espresso is good for the imagination, bad for remembering to sleep.
Comment: "IBM has a vested interest in
I think it's more safe to say IBM has a vested interest in pulling off the biggest win possible, whatever that is for them. If there is a settlement, it will involve SCO paying lots of money (or something else) to IBM. If SCO manages to claim it's a victory, it would go something like this:
SCO Information Minister: "The enemy's wallet is committing suicide at our gates. We did not settle to IBM's counter suits for 30 million dollars. We did not surrender to IBM our rights over UNIX. We did not get penalized by the court for playing the legal system like a lottery. We won the lottery."
And then when the backdrop shows debt collectors taking away furniture from the SCO building, the Darl information minister will be saying: "The court decision is a win because we are paying for violating IBM's patents. It is a great victory for American capitalism and IP rights! And doom for communist penguin lovers who disregard patents!"
Finally, when he is in jail behind bars, and has only himself as an audience, he will be talking to himself "I did not go to jail, I passed go and collected my $200 for keeping the company black for 3 qu... I mean 4... darn! I wonder what Muhammed Saeed al-Sahaf is up to these days."
But the answer to all of this is clear. We need a fellowship of the one ring of power, which has the power to rule them all (UNIX) to return it to mount doom. Can the ragtag group destroy the ring and restore dignity to Linux? The fate rests in the hands of a brave but little hobbit (RedHat), a dwarf (Novell), noble and skilled elf (SuSE & German legal system) and man of former kingship (IBM), who are on a mission help return the ring to mount doom and oblivion? Or will greedy Boromir (SCO) who has stolen the ring bring doom upon all middle earth?
Will IBM Return as King, placing the fate of middle earth into the hands of men, who are capable of much good and also much evil? Will the King gain a beautiful elven woman (open source) as a wife and an asset to his kingship? Will open source fall from grace (pure hobbyism) and embrace dangerous mortality (corporate amoralism)? Or will the white wizard (Steve Ballmer) and the uruk-hai armies of Sarumann (Developers! Developers! Developers!) come and overwhelm all of them?
Will the whisperings of Grima Wormtongue (FUD spreading journalists) influence the kings of men (PHBs) to make tragic decisions? Will Treebeard (Brooke Wells...she has a beard?) the Ents (US legal system) take so long to make up their mind that middle earth perishes by their inaction? Will the noble Eowyn (Pamela Jones) be able to come out of nowhere and slay the hideous beast (SCO's legal arguments)? Will the undead (*BSD and its copyrights) sweep in at the last moment to save middle earth before being released from their oath into eternal peace (uh oh this just turned into a BSD dying troll..I better quit before someone mods me up^H^Hdown.)
The sad part is that they kill great shows to promote ones with far less lasting power.
I remember when they killed Space: Above and Beyond this way. The Chigs were right... abandon all hope [in FOX executives].
Perhaps the term "prolific" isn't referring to scale, but to percentage or per-capita tapping. ...BTW, what about echelon?
Give up Linux? Not really using your current distro? Perhaps you should try gentoo! Some people said "Do we really need another Linux distro", but gentoo people said yes, and thanks to that, running linux is now a dream!
And I'm sure you like whatever non-gentoo distro you use too.
These people who say why have more competition blow my mind. They are so eager to be a part of the Slashbot hate-everything bandwagon (flash haters, gentoo zealot haters, gentoo zealot hater haters, **IA h8rs, and even the reactionary slashbot haters) but then they forget to check in their brains. Oops.
Of course, if the ones carrying indy labels are forced out of the market, that would suck.
BTW, most of the music I listen to is from mp3.com. I want to hear trance, which isn't on any local radio stations (although I just discovered Digitally Imported which is sweet), but going to local music stores' listening booths sucks because it's physically inconvenient and selection is so limited, and I've had enough of buying blindly.
--"Karma is earned to be burned. It is how balance is kept in the universe."
The one I played most was Barren Realms Elite. Fear the Gooie Kablooie!
Hmm, perhaps I should have been more obvious about that :) I figured you have to try hard to mess up the spelling of Mensa, especially in a post about spelling. On the Internet, spelling 'lose' incorrectly is somewhat of a phenomenon, a mistake that's easy to make because the phonetics come out 'oo'. I admit that I have thought about comitting that mistake once or twice :)
A month or so ago someone on Slashdot posted an inspiring flame about how people very often spell 'lose' incorrectly, so I thought I'd take my turn at carrying the torch, especially when I saw the Mensa member bit. If people in the top two percentile of intelligence engage in persistent spelling mistake, what hope is there for the rest of the world? Card carrying Mensa people should be ones to set a standard in things like spelling, learning from others' horendously common mistakes, and humility.
For most people, I make allowances, since not everyone has an eye for spelling. But my faith in humanity is pretty low and I have to find hope somewhere. Admitdetly, I don't even have a great deal of confidence even in 98th percentile IQ testees, but that is another matter.
The 2nd most common spelling mistake I can think of is one of ignorance, and not accidental: that of spelling 'a lot' as one word instead of two. But if you inadvertantly spell Mensa with to e's, you probably have peanut butter stuck in your keyboard or something. That makes me think... if Star Trek style teleportation existed, I wonder if there would be mischievous people who teleported bits of peanut butter into people's brains at the exact right spot so that they always spell 'lose' incorrectly. Or maybe there already are! Hmm I must go think now.....
And I peaked at 312.7 kB/s! Thats for the linux download.. maybe all the windows dudes are leeches :)
:) and I'm sorry if I make you jealous :)
So uhh...(don't want to get modded troll like parent)... have a nice day
FWIW I'm currently still uploading at 37 kB/s. From all the torrenting I've started doing lately, I wonder if my cable provider will start bugging me about my uploading.