> Over RPGs. I simply don't see a lot of fun in them -- the 10 hours (or so) I played were enough
Actual self-described "RPG players" would be insulted by the way you lump them together with CRPGs like that.
(True, you could argue that the non-computerized form should be now be called a PRPG, since Evercrack & FinalFantasy have become so overwhelmingly popular. But automatic transmissions are in 90% of new cars, and yet they're not the standard)
The fact that mplayer is also an encoder is a great feature, and one they don't advertise enough. In fact, their it was less than a month ago that they actually corrected their manual to present the correct syntax for encoding a file!
PS: The word is deprecated. A java compiler would hate you.
First, the people who design & write software aren't "IT" (information technology), they're "SE" (software engineering). ITs are the installers and configurizers, and they're certainly lower on the foodchain than a real SE. (At a technical institute I visited, there was a very formal hierarchy: students enrolled as Computer Engineering or EE, flunked 1st semester and switched to Computer Science or SE, and then became IT after flunking again).
2ndly, Microsoft Windows(tm) isn't a "desktop environment" (unlike KDE). After version 3.11, it because an entire operating system. Integrating a web browser into the operating system is a big technical mistake, because it infects the OS with instabilities and inefficiencies that are tolerable in a standalone application.
SE guys (like myself) get angry whenever bad design choices are made to support marketing needs. Microsoft wanted to bundle Internet Explorer(tm) and Windows(tm) into a single product for marketing purposes, so they glommed the source code together in ways that hurt performance of windows as a whole. (Anyone who used Windows98 (tm) much will remember how easy it was for IE to corrupt the whole OS). Numerous compatibilty and security problems were spawned by the "excessive coupling" of browser and OS. (So far KDE is avoiding this trap, because it treats Mozilla quite nicely)
(To be fair, they had other reasons to integrate IE- for instance, to create the illusion that it was smaller/faster than Netscape Navigator, which was forced to install all its own code)
This report can interest even people who don't play EQ 28hrs/week. Its interesting from several academic standpoints- economically, for instance, this provides a way to quantify how much people value their free time and entertainment (since you can't directly map a person's hourly wage onto the value of his time).
Moreover, this has implications for Your Rights- EULAs and network access regulations may be defined based on this. Sony creates a game and charges for the priviledge of using it- and the most popular use consists of trying to acquire goodies (which are fungible with platinum pieces) as rapidly as possible. Most gamers try to optimize their income of PP/hour (even if they don't conciously think of it like that).
But what happens when someone (like these guys) apparently discover the optimal way to earn PP? Its likely that if they spread it around, the Everquest economy will get boring. Earning will be too easy, and players will log off and lapse their $10/monthly subscriptions. Sony would lose million$.
What can they do about it? Change the game would be the best solution, but it would become a constant struggle against the PP earning optimizers. Corporations are allergic to that kind of indefinite R&D expenditure- they'd rather pay $9/hr network jerks to keep the servers running, not $30/hr software developers to perpetually modify the code.
Instead, they might try to label the optimizers as "hackers" who are subverting their system. They'll start by revoking these player's accounts, and no one likes to be banned for just doing their best. Even worse, there's the outside possibility that if digital intrusion laws get a little more draconian, they could try to have some of these users prosecuted for their lost potential revenue. (Publizing a "hack" which renders the game unplayable could cost Sony days worth of revenue by "denying" them their servers until it gets fixed. Costing other online companies (such as Ebay) a few days of income by denying their service has gotten people tossed in jail.)
Scary to imagine that someday a person could be incarcerated for cheating at a game about elf-girls killing lizardmen.
PS. When I hit google to fact-check my response, the paid ad that popped up offered me platinum cheap!
I'm embarrassed to nitpick, but never say never. Vash was draped in chains in the Trigun episode where Monev The Gale was introduced. Since Monev was the figure that best tied into the McFarlane Toys style (I think the action figure is popular amoung people who knew/cared nothing of Trigun), its understandable they'd focus on a Vash from the same time.
And you could argue that Trigun isn't exactly an unrelated work. The very first manga volume featured a sketch of Spawn, and a hunky face shot of Todd himself. You can add Yasuhiro Nightow to the list of artists with Spawn figures gracing his office. Those toys were likely an inspiration for Trigun's creation.
It's quite likely that most Chinese-government changes to GPL code will make it out, somehow. Firstly, they might want to appear to obey the WIPO regulations they've agreed to. (Not likely to be a big factor in their behavior, though).
Even if they don't feel bound to the license, they still might desire code release- either to take some worldwide market-share from Microsoft (and hurt a leading symbol of US capitalism), or more likely, to benefit from improvements made by generous hackers in Japan, Europe, and America.
And then, if the government STILL doesn't want to release the code, it might filter out anyhow. Its a big country, and even the most draconian restrictions would have trouble intercepting 2 megabytes of nondescript patches. Sure, they might restrict source code access to a small group of closely monitored developers, but then they'd lose much of benefits of Open Source development. (Like the ability to require each of 1 million native computer science students to create a useful kernel improvement to graduate...)
And they're only willing to pay for it because IP laws are so strict. In this case, "reverse engineering" prohibitions keep Microsoft Office alive. (Those restrictions got much stronger very recently, but have always been a factor in discouraging a company from looking too closely at Microsoft's formats).
If "reverse engineering" was more permitted, then Microsoft's monopoly wouldn't be as powerful as it is (or at least their dirty tricks would've come to light years earlier).
In actuality, Microsoft is a government-created monopoly. The best we can hope for from the DOJ case is to treat one specific symptom of the disease- instead of readjusting the laws that caused the problem to develop in the first place.
Its true that software "piracy" leads to higher prices, but for an entirely different reason than the reason given by the software industry CEOs.
Really, the effect of "piracy" (aka widespread copyright infringement) is to retard the developement of Free Software/Open Source solutions. People everywhere have an instinctive feeling that if a product has no physical form, and the per-unit cost of duplication is zero, they should be able to reproduce it at will. If not for extensive copyright laws, they could do so, without having to renogitate the publisher's permission each time.
Since those laws are often ignored, many people get away with behaving like that, even though its illegal. (Home consumers do this all the time. Corporate folks do it on a smaller basis, and try not to leave machines permantently running such code, but often pass through transitional periods of |installed copies| > |paid licenses|.)
If it were harder to "pirate", then the user base would satisfy their need for free copies with "Free" software, and we'd all be better off.
(I haven't listened to the story, but have heard the background...)
The US government in general, and the Department of Defense in particular, are able to bypass most any information-property law, if they can make a good case for it. Something like eminent domain, where they can force you to sell something at a price THEY deem fair, not what you're holding out for.
The first major use of this was in The Great War. Fixed Wing Aircraft had been invented about a decade earlier by the Wrights, who envisioned the horror that aerial bombardment could cause, and barred any use of their invention by the military. Of course, the patent was no good oversees, so the German and British militaries were developing FWA for survelliance, communication, and even air-superiority.
At this point, to enter the war, the US army HAD to get FWA. If they'd been forced to use the open market and abide the patent laws, the Wright's could've held out for an astronomical sum- they probably would've agreed to license for $1 billion or so. (Which would've turned into $1 trillion by today, making their family the undisputed wealthiest people in the world).
Since then, other kinds of compulsory licensing regulations (for some classes of patents) have been created. But still, this case has many uses in anti-IP arguments.
You are simply wrong. I'm a professionally programmer, and all around me I see my colleagues wasting their time re-implementing things that have been done before many times. Sometimes redoing techniques from books, from competing software, from non-competing software (completely different fields). Sometimes even reimplementing their own prior work, because they're not licensed to paste it in again.
If I had to guess, I'd optimistically say that only 10% of programming work is really original. Even if you don't agree with my percentage, you've got to admit that the more time someone spends retracing old ground, the less energy they have to blaze new trails. I feel really guilty that we as an industry use copyright laws to extort money from our customers, by getting paid for the same works over and over again.
This is why a drastic reduction in the efficacy of software IP would do so much to help the industry, and society at large. Even if the looser-reuse laws slashed the income to the software engineering profession by 66%, we'd still come out ahead. The dead weight would be laid off (the guys who jusy re-code the same old stuff), and a greater total amount of investment would go towards new research.
Sure, the Prime Directive sounds like a cool principle, but you shouldn't have to force everyone to reimplement the warp-drive, on the chance that someone will do it in a new & unique way. If someone is really enough of a genius to improve on an established technology, he'll probably be able to make his invention without you forcing him (and everyone) to research it without studying the existing methods.
(Sure, the attempt to derive an idea from first principles can be good practice- I often try to "write my own" before going to get sample code- but in a corporate setting, that kind of random education is a waste of salary)
Hakul's dragon form shouldn't have had a wolf-head. Too reminiscent of Mononoke Hime, visually. I mean, a girl tending the wounds of a bleeding white wolf whose head is as large as her body? I've got a poster of the exact same scene.
Disney's foley-musicians. I'm not 100% sure this was a mouse-corporation addition, but their fingerprints are all over it. Disney's got a crew of classical musicians who've practiced Peter and the Wolf a few too many times, and who like to synchronize musical tweeters to a character's every blink and gaze. During the scene where Chihiro is nervously descending the stairs, they go absolutely overboard and turn her into a full-fledged calliope.
The same thing happened in Kiki's Delivery Service too- Kiki was descending a random staircase, and for no reason at all they decided it should play like a piano. They feel a need to stuff in extra stimulation to keep us Yanks in the seats.
Some relationships to Western myth:
Most of the magical background was Japan's kami, of course. Ubaga was rather like a cross between an oni and a western witch (but original, all her own).
Random associations: "don't look back"- like Orpheus' walk out of Hades, but inverted. (That story also featured the eating of food as a way to bind yourself to a supernatural realm)
"don't take food meant for the gods"- Odysseus' men did the same , and were punished for it. As pigs, no less.
I saw this two days ago at a theater in Cambridge (which isn't TOO far from Taco's stomping ground, I thought).
It's a fine movie if you like Miyazaki's work, although its somewhat less "normal" than his other projects. It's targeted at younger folks than Mononoke Hime was, and lacks the violent action. In fact it turns out to be quite similar to his previous Kiki's Delivery Service (a pre-teen girl looks for a job around the intersection of magic and the real world). This one is a bit more disney-like though, with some more overt antagonism than Kiki faced.
Like Mononoke, you can occasionally see places where the animation budget was preserved, but it detracts not at all.
The dub is just as good as Mononoke Hime's was- that is to say not perfect, there are moments of awkardness when they were obliged to be additionally verbose to help out us slow Americans. But there's nothing as painfully bad as the Gillian Anderson-techno-reverb wolf voice the end of Mononoke suffered from.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't Q3 for Linux come out well after the Windows version?
I think you're wrong- at the very least, the downloadable demos of Quake3 for Mac and Linux were released a long time before there was a Windows one available. That was a ploy by idsoftware to give those platforms a little boost (and maybe convince a few fans to try booting to Linux to check out the game).
Afterwards, I really think the 3 platforms were released to stores simultaneously. Can't be sure that individual stores were in a rush to push linux boxes to the front of the aisle, but of course they stocked it (the publisher paid them, after all)
Unfortunately, at that time, 3d driver support for linux was very lacking (still is). Linux quake3 didn't sell much at all- I just grabbed a metal-boxed copy from a big stack of linux versions, $1.99 each. They'd put stickers on them to explain how to download the windows executable and copy over the data files.
Not totally blind. Today's most popular games have an online component, from which the company can get more accurate OS data. However, Linux users are more likely to have internet access than most, so an online headcount would exaggerate their numbers).
(Its interesting to wonder just how much data that could upload before getting accused of privacy violations- Blizzard got in trouble for that before- so an opt-in checkbox to "report statistics about your computer to help us plan future game development")
The comment meant that if a hobbyist can create something that's externally detectable RF signatures are indistinguishable from a licensed device, then it should be legal for him to do so.
And in fact, it is, by rule 15.23:
(a) Equipment authorization is not required for devices that are not marketed, are not constructed from a kit, and are built in quantities of fire or less for personal use.
(One could argue that techsuperpowers is "marketing" modified devices, even if they're not charging for them. They should be careful about this- but as a professional group, hopefully they are)
If that's illegal, than so are most of these "Professional WISPs" you mention. For a radio system to be certified, not only must each component be certified, but the FCC must approve of the system as a whole. That means each time you add or remove antennas, or reconfigure in any way, you've got to resubmit the layout for the FCC rubberstamp.
Fortunately, "uncertified" doesn't mean "illegal". It does mean that if the FCC gets complaints on you it may take longer for you to get cleared up. But 2.5ghz is unregulated spectrum, do you think they'll monitor it very closely?
Besides, nonprofit providers won't lose anything by pulling the plug for a week or two if the Feds make a stern phone call. Commerical providers with revenue needs don't have the option.
But he does run a free service in the area. He's got 3-5 public spots on that street already. The nearest is at 338 Newbury St, while the Starbucks is 350 Newbury.
Is here
A few comments have insulted this guy, calling his car a dumb publicity stunt. They say he's not really providing a viable alternative to the paid system, because his car will just drive away the next evening.
Wrong! In this neighborhood, he's been working to provide free 802.11b connections for some time. Any property owner on Newbury Street can contact him to get a free WAP installed.
The point is that most of the utility of portable WiFi access is dependent on connectivity, not high bandwidth. Most users will be very satisfied if they can just check/read their email, and download a little text. That works fine with a 30kbps link, and increasing bandwidth only slowly increases percieved value. That kind of data rate can get lost in the noise of anyone's broadband connection- so if you throttle the utilization of anonymous users, you've got essentially $0 costs (besides $100 for the WAP box).
Since the financial barriers to entry are so low, this won't be a viable business for T-Mobile; unless they can somehow block out new entries. And they can do this by grabbing up prime chunks of this unregulated RF spectrum by getting their transmitters installed first.
Its a race- whoever can deploy first will win the consumer mindshare. Once users take 802.11b for granted, they won't be willing to pay. But there will be property owners willing to run cheap WAPs to attract potential customers.
It is true that the War Car is just a stunt for publicity- and it seems to have worked. Maybe this will inspire some other coffee-vendors to ask him for help in competing with Starbucks.
This idea reminds me of a concept from Distraction, by Bruce Sterling. Computers were cheap enough to embedded in disposable pieces of sticky tape. One application was building construction- grab a bunch of appropriate materials, attach a CPU to each piece, and they'll begin to network together and exchange blueprints. The human builders who fit things together can be completely unskilled, because everytime someone picks up a piece, it transmits instructions to his headset telling him where it needs to be stuck in relation to all the other chunks.
This story seems to be the same idea, but on a smaller and non-self-organizing scale.
I understand that although the use of real brands
adds to the credibility of the film, these companies
still paid for product placement, even though they were portrayed really negatively. I thought the
invasivness and uquiquity of the "real world popup ads" was scary (especially on the subway train), and
wouldn't expect real marketers to be associated
with pushy, overaggressive tactics.
Of course, there's no such thing as bad publicity. And the hero was usually blandly accepting of the adverts, providing a role model for the consumer masses to follow. The only time a commercial really angered him- when he threw an overly loud cereal box across the room- the brand name was blatantly fake.
Maybe so. I didn't mean to be so negative, I've been wanting to add Jabber support to my own software. I was unfairly lumping it together with AIM, ICQ, and MSN (to the general public, all instant messengers are the same program with different colored icons).
One problem I have is that, as an external optimist, I assume that "IPv6 is right around the corner". That would mean that no one ever needs to use NAT again, and that a single computer can have multiple IP address for all of its users (or other purposes). And we already have a DNS system to provide mappings from human-readable strings to software-usable network addresses. I feel a little bad (and dubious) about seeing someone try to reimplement that, even if it is the surest way to ensure that the existing DNS features don't get broken.
The final concern I have with this Jabber approach is that its a complete layer above TCP- applications are written to the Jabber API and don't even know that TCP is involved. That's a good thing from the perspective of modularity and OSI-style layering, but bad in terms of evolutionary adoption. Existing software is written for the "static web", and that's where corporate money is going to focus future developement. Without a way to gradually shoehorn into popular internet applications, Jabber support may remain a hobby for open-source outcasts, and not benefit the majority of users.
As a transitionary step, someone could write (maybe someone already did?) a Jabber utility that behaves like a combination of DNS lookup and RPC portmapping- providing a ip address/portnumber in response to a JID string. Many applications could utilize something like that by adding just a few lines after their "hostname()" calls.
Two use cases where evolutionary Jabber ID support could be valuable:
I'd love to read someone a "JID/filename" URI over a telephone, and have him type it into Mozilla/Konqueror/Internet Explorer and pop up a file I've selected to share from my workstation, without having to play around with "Dynamic DNS" services (which are unreliable, expensive, and an even worse hack).
Groups of video-game players ("Clans", they were called, back when Quake came out) should be able to create a server for their own use, and get into it by supplying the server admin's JID into their client software. The gameplay can't afford the overhead of Jabber messages (or even TCP) slowing up the running & shooting, so there should only be a brief burst of Jabber traffic at startup to bootstrap UDP communications. (That's an automation of what today's players do over AIM messages).
John Carmack is friendly to free software- when the inevitable Quake4 developement starts up, someone should offer him a simple Jabber interface as an optional way for players to connect to servers, instead of the corporate Gamespy / MSG Gaming Zone options that you see today.
(Now, if only I knew a way to mix freenet into this equation...)
Actually, I don't think N-Squared is exactly the right function- you're really looking for Metcalf's Law. It states that "The value of a product that interoperates with others of its own type increases as the product becomes more common". This applies to telephones, ethernet cards, internet accounts, and even software like Microsoft Word. It was put forth by the inventor of ethernet in his graduate thesis. For a long overview of the maths, see http://www.eff.org/Net_culture/ethernet_histo ry_gi lder.article
PS. Some texts will print "Gate's Corrolary" beneath the entry for Metcalf's Law. "If the product is software controlled by a single provider, the provider can discontinue interoperability with prior versions to force all existing users to purchase new products, indefinately"
As are all "Instant Message" programs. They are a poorly-designed, short-sighted solution to a problem that should've been addressed elsewhere in the internet architecture.
Part of the problem stems from the fact that IM software addresses 2 applications at the same time, unnecessarily coupling the implementations. These problems could really be approached separately:
Learn the IP address associated with a globally-unique username
Send a text message to the interactive operator of a machine with an IP address
The first problem is the much more interesting one- Jabber & AIM already somewhat solve it, but in an unsatisfactory and poorly extensible way. Better solutions would be based on an extension to the normal DNS system- essentially, you want each human to have a resolvable domain name associated with her. With that in place, InstantMessaging is an easy problem.
A person could try to implement "TCP over IM", but it would've been nicer if the systems had been designed for this from the start.
Actually, there is a 3rd general-purpose facility that might be needed, for reasons of privacy. There should be a way to send a packet to a "resolvable human name", without knowing the IP address it currently maps through. The (trusted) central server will have to forward packets in both directions. (I think that's how AIM normally operates, except that it doesn't accept generic packets, only AIM-formatted messages).
However, that method doesn't uniformly improve privacy. While it does prevent other users from learning your IP address, it makes it much easier for AOL (or other central server operator) to spy on the contents of your discussions. (You should be using encryption, anyway).
Right on! Most avid internetters had been performing Jabber-like tasks years prior to the introduction of ICQ or anything similar, with either SMTP, or IRC or "talk". (The latter two aren't as directly applicable to the problem, though)
I definately remember periods of transmitting emails back & forth at 15 second intervals- this was using "pine", a text-mode emailer that doesn't impose as much GUI-created latency as most email clients.
Its a real same that AOL, Mirabilis, et al, had to create their own new protocols rather than slightly extending SMTP to work in this application. The changes could likely be accomplished with optional extensions, preserving backwards compatibility.
First, POP3 would need a "request push" operation, so that a client could indicate to the server that any new emails within the next 5 minutes should be sent to it immediately. Otherwise, the client would need to query the server every 10 seconds, in order to provide the quick response that IM users want.
Secondly, there should be an optional mail header entry for "instant expiration" priority. Basically a way for the sender to indicate that unless the recipient is online right then, the message can be considered as much less important than ordinary emails. This would just provide a way to segregate traffic by its intended use- client software could ignore it if it wants, although often a different graphical presentation is desirable for IMs vs regular emails. (IMs essentially have only Subject lines, not Bodies)
and the misconception most people will have is
that it's supposed to display some kind of 3-D
data. The only way it can be considered a
"3d output device" is if you only need to output
3D shapes that happen to consist of two parallel
rectangles separated by 3cm.
Traditional 3d hardware includes 3d accelerator
cards, immersive-display goggles, stereoscopic
LCD goggles, crystal-ball type volumetric displays,
and the (theoretical) realtime hologram projector.
But the problems those devices attempt to solve
are almost completely distinct from what the
ActualDepth display is meant for. (Well, except
that a truely effective hologram projector could
emulate any other display technology...)
The point of ActualDepth is to allow your computer
to present you more visual information in the same
space. If you run traditional software that's not
aware of the special screen layout, you can just
use the multi-monitor feature of the OS's gui
system (in X11 they call it Xinerama) to assign
some windows to the front screen and some to the
back. That way you can look at both of them at
once, and for instance can read the online manual
for a game at the same time you play it full screen,
or operate a 3d-modeller in the classic 4-way
parellel projection while a textured preview of
the object sits on the back display. Anything
that you'd do with dual-monitors, you can do with
this, but using less physical real estate,
and, more importantly, with less time to focus
your vision from one to the other. Both screens
are centered in your field of view at the same time,
so there's no looking back and forth nessecary.
It's likely that without modifications,
your GUI interface will only allow the mouse to
switch between screens by you dragging it across
one edge of the screens, where it considers them
seamed together. That is irritating and unintuitive,
so you'd want to use one screen as more of a
read-only device, showing useful data but rarely
needing interaction.
Elsewhere, someone asked if this effect can be
emulated in software just by alpha-blending on image
on top of another. You could try this, but it wouldn't
really work. At the points where the foreground
image is solid (thick black text), the background
will be completely obscured. But with "actual
depth" between the displays, the stereo-graphic
effect of dual-eyeballs comes into play. Assuming
the foreground image is mostly line-art or text and
doesn't consist of large regions of solid color,
then for every pixel in the background image, at
least one of your eyeballs will have an unobstructed
line of sight to it. You remain aware of the contents
of both displays with no additional perceptual effort.
The device I tested had a touch screen attached in front,
and the window-manager (well, Microsoft Windows(tm))
was configured so that a single-click on a titlebar would
shift a window 1024 pixels left or right, effectively
toggling it between the front and back displays.
To begin to recoup some of the enormous pricetag for
ActualDepth hardware, though, you'd need to run software
that's aware of the display's special characteristics.
(The code doesn't need to link any special drivers
or new APIs, but it does need to be aware that graphics
drawn at (X-1024,Y) will appear floating over (X,Y)).
Essentially what the application should do is
allocate one display for data, and one for meta-data.
That is, if you're word-processing a document, the
back display should always give a WYSIWYG preview of the
output, and the front display should present all
the filenames, font names, editing markup (including
those automatically-generated spellchecker warning
scribbles), section breaks, margin, column
boundaries, etc.
I'd really like to see what
user-interface innovations would pop out if the
programming public got to play with these monitors
for a while, but at the current price, that's just
not going to happen. (ActualDepth should sponsor
some free-software authors to modify their code
to exploit their displays- until they get some sample
applications out there, potential users won't
understand the benefits).
Slashdot Mirror
> Over RPGs. I simply don't see a lot of fun in them -- the 10 hours (or so) I played were enough
Actual self-described "RPG players" would be insulted by the way you lump them together with CRPGs like that.
(True, you could argue that the non-computerized form should be now be called a PRPG, since Evercrack & FinalFantasy have become so overwhelmingly popular. But automatic transmissions are in 90% of new cars, and yet they're not the standard)
PS: The word is deprecated. A java compiler would hate you.
2ndly, Microsoft Windows(tm) isn't a "desktop environment" (unlike KDE). After version 3.11, it because an entire operating system. Integrating a web browser into the operating system is a big technical mistake, because it infects the OS with instabilities and inefficiencies that are tolerable in a standalone application.
SE guys (like myself) get angry whenever bad design choices are made to support marketing needs. Microsoft wanted to bundle Internet Explorer(tm) and Windows(tm) into a single product for marketing purposes, so they glommed the source code together in ways that hurt performance of windows as a whole. (Anyone who used Windows98 (tm) much will remember how easy it was for IE to corrupt the whole OS). Numerous compatibilty and security problems were spawned by the "excessive coupling" of browser and OS. (So far KDE is avoiding this trap, because it treats Mozilla quite nicely)
(To be fair, they had other reasons to integrate IE- for instance, to create the illusion that it was smaller/faster than Netscape Navigator, which was forced to install all its own code)
Moreover, this has implications for Your Rights- EULAs and network access regulations may be defined based on this. Sony creates a game and charges for the priviledge of using it- and the most popular use consists of trying to acquire goodies (which are fungible with platinum pieces) as rapidly as possible. Most gamers try to optimize their income of PP/hour (even if they don't conciously think of it like that).
But what happens when someone (like these guys) apparently discover the optimal way to earn PP? Its likely that if they spread it around, the Everquest economy will get boring. Earning will be too easy, and players will log off and lapse their $10/monthly subscriptions. Sony would lose million$.
What can they do about it? Change the game would be the best solution, but it would become a constant struggle against the PP earning optimizers. Corporations are allergic to that kind of indefinite R&D expenditure- they'd rather pay $9/hr network jerks to keep the servers running, not $30/hr software developers to perpetually modify the code.
Instead, they might try to label the optimizers as "hackers" who are subverting their system. They'll start by revoking these player's accounts, and no one likes to be banned for just doing their best. Even worse, there's the outside possibility that if digital intrusion laws get a little more draconian, they could try to have some of these users prosecuted for their lost potential revenue. (Publizing a "hack" which renders the game unplayable could cost Sony days worth of revenue by "denying" them their servers until it gets fixed. Costing other online companies (such as Ebay) a few days of income by denying their service has gotten people tossed in jail.)
Scary to imagine that someday a person could be incarcerated for cheating at a game about elf-girls killing lizardmen.
PS. When I hit google to fact-check my response, the paid ad that popped up offered me platinum cheap!
And you could argue that Trigun isn't exactly an unrelated work. The very first manga volume featured a sketch of Spawn, and a hunky face shot of Todd himself. You can add Yasuhiro Nightow to the list of artists with Spawn figures gracing his office. Those toys were likely an inspiration for Trigun's creation.
Even if they don't feel bound to the license, they still might desire code release- either to take some worldwide market-share from Microsoft (and hurt a leading symbol of US capitalism), or more likely, to benefit from improvements made by generous hackers in Japan, Europe, and America.
And then, if the government STILL doesn't want to release the code, it might filter out anyhow. Its a big country, and even the most draconian restrictions would have trouble intercepting 2 megabytes of nondescript patches. Sure, they might restrict source code access to a small group of closely monitored developers, but then they'd lose much of benefits of Open Source development. (Like the ability to require each of 1 million native computer science students to create a useful kernel improvement to graduate...)
If "reverse engineering" was more permitted, then Microsoft's monopoly wouldn't be as powerful as it is (or at least their dirty tricks would've come to light years earlier).
In actuality, Microsoft is a government-created monopoly. The best we can hope for from the DOJ case is to treat one specific symptom of the disease- instead of readjusting the laws that caused the problem to develop in the first place.
Really, the effect of "piracy" (aka widespread copyright infringement) is to retard the developement of Free Software/Open Source solutions. People everywhere have an instinctive feeling that if a product has no physical form, and the per-unit cost of duplication is zero, they should be able to reproduce it at will. If not for extensive copyright laws, they could do so, without having to renogitate the publisher's permission each time.
Since those laws are often ignored, many people get away with behaving like that, even though its illegal. (Home consumers do this all the time. Corporate folks do it on a smaller basis, and try not to leave machines permantently running such code, but often pass through transitional periods of |installed copies| > |paid licenses|.)
If it were harder to "pirate", then the user base would satisfy their need for free copies with "Free" software, and we'd all be better off.
The US government in general, and the Department of Defense in particular, are able to bypass most any information-property law, if they can make a good case for it. Something like eminent domain, where they can force you to sell something at a price THEY deem fair, not what you're holding out for.
The first major use of this was in The Great War. Fixed Wing Aircraft had been invented about a decade earlier by the Wrights, who envisioned the horror that aerial bombardment could cause, and barred any use of their invention by the military. Of course, the patent was no good oversees, so the German and British militaries were developing FWA for survelliance, communication, and even air-superiority.
At this point, to enter the war, the US army HAD to get FWA. If they'd been forced to use the open market and abide the patent laws, the Wright's could've held out for an astronomical sum- they probably would've agreed to license for $1 billion or so. (Which would've turned into $1 trillion by today, making their family the undisputed wealthiest people in the world).
Since then, other kinds of compulsory licensing regulations (for some classes of patents) have been created. But still, this case has many uses in anti-IP arguments.
If I had to guess, I'd optimistically say that only 10% of programming work is really original. Even if you don't agree with my percentage, you've got to admit that the more time someone spends retracing old ground, the less energy they have to blaze new trails. I feel really guilty that we as an industry use copyright laws to extort money from our customers, by getting paid for the same works over and over again.
This is why a drastic reduction in the efficacy of software IP would do so much to help the industry, and society at large. Even if the looser-reuse laws slashed the income to the software engineering profession by 66%, we'd still come out ahead. The dead weight would be laid off (the guys who jusy re-code the same old stuff), and a greater total amount of investment would go towards new research.
Sure, the Prime Directive sounds like a cool principle, but you shouldn't have to force everyone to reimplement the warp-drive, on the chance that someone will do it in a new & unique way. If someone is really enough of a genius to improve on an established technology, he'll probably be able to make his invention without you forcing him (and everyone) to research it without studying the existing methods.
(Sure, the attempt to derive an idea from first principles can be good practice- I often try to "write my own" before going to get sample code- but in a corporate setting, that kind of random education is a waste of salary)
Two things that bothered me:
The same thing happened in Kiki's Delivery Service too- Kiki was descending a random staircase, and for no reason at all they decided it should play like a piano. They feel a need to stuff in extra stimulation to keep us Yanks in the seats.
Some relationships to Western myth:
Most of the magical background was Japan's kami, of course. Ubaga was rather like a cross between an oni and a western witch (but original, all her own).
Random associations: "don't look back"- like Orpheus' walk out of Hades, but inverted. (That story also featured the eating of food as a way to bind yourself to a supernatural realm)
"don't take food meant for the gods"- Odysseus' men did the same , and were punished for it. As pigs, no less.
It's a fine movie if you like Miyazaki's work, although its somewhat less "normal" than his other projects. It's targeted at younger folks than Mononoke Hime was, and lacks the violent action. In fact it turns out to be quite similar to his previous Kiki's Delivery Service (a pre-teen girl looks for a job around the intersection of magic and the real world). This one is a bit more disney-like though, with some more overt antagonism than Kiki faced.
Like Mononoke, you can occasionally see places where the animation budget was preserved, but it detracts not at all.
The dub is just as good as Mononoke Hime's was- that is to say not perfect, there are moments of awkardness when they were obliged to be additionally verbose to help out us slow Americans. But there's nothing as painfully bad as the Gillian Anderson-techno-reverb wolf voice the end of Mononoke suffered from.
I think you're wrong- at the very least, the downloadable demos of Quake3 for Mac and Linux were released a long time before there was a Windows one available. That was a ploy by idsoftware to give those platforms a little boost (and maybe convince a few fans to try booting to Linux to check out the game).
Afterwards, I really think the 3 platforms were released to stores simultaneously. Can't be sure that individual stores were in a rush to push linux boxes to the front of the aisle, but of course they stocked it (the publisher paid them, after all)
Unfortunately, at that time, 3d driver support for linux was very lacking (still is). Linux quake3 didn't sell much at all- I just grabbed a metal-boxed copy from a big stack of linux versions, $1.99 each. They'd put stickers on them to explain how to download the windows executable and copy over the data files.
Not totally blind. Today's most popular games have an online component, from which the company can get more accurate OS data. However, Linux users are more likely to have internet access than most, so an online headcount would exaggerate their numbers).
(Its interesting to wonder just how much data that could upload before getting accused of privacy violations- Blizzard got in trouble for that before- so an opt-in checkbox to "report statistics about your computer to help us plan future game development")
And in fact, it is, by rule 15.23:
(a) Equipment authorization is not required for devices that are not marketed, are not constructed from a kit, and are built in quantities of fire or less for personal use.
(One could argue that techsuperpowers is "marketing" modified devices, even if they're not charging for them. They should be careful about this- but as a professional group, hopefully they are)
Fortunately, "uncertified" doesn't mean "illegal". It does mean that if the FCC gets complaints on you it may take longer for you to get cleared up. But 2.5ghz is unregulated spectrum, do you think they'll monitor it very closely?
Besides, nonprofit providers won't lose anything by pulling the plug for a week or two if the Feds make a stern phone call. Commerical providers with revenue needs don't have the option.
That's very close!
And if the reporters had bothered to interview him, they'd see that he's fishing for a closer neighbor of Starbucks to host his antenna permanently.
A few comments have insulted this guy, calling his car a dumb publicity stunt. They say he's not really providing a viable alternative to the paid system, because his car will just drive away the next evening.
Wrong! In this neighborhood, he's been working to provide free 802.11b connections for some time. Any property owner on Newbury Street can contact him to get a free WAP installed.
The point is that most of the utility of portable WiFi access is dependent on connectivity, not high bandwidth. Most users will be very satisfied if they can just check/read their email, and download a little text. That works fine with a 30kbps link, and increasing bandwidth only slowly increases percieved value. That kind of data rate can get lost in the noise of anyone's broadband connection- so if you throttle the utilization of anonymous users, you've got essentially $0 costs (besides $100 for the WAP box).
Since the financial barriers to entry are so low, this won't be a viable business for T-Mobile; unless they can somehow block out new entries. And they can do this by grabbing up prime chunks of this unregulated RF spectrum by getting their transmitters installed first.
Its a race- whoever can deploy first will win the consumer mindshare. Once users take 802.11b for granted, they won't be willing to pay. But there will be property owners willing to run cheap WAPs to attract potential customers.
It is true that the War Car is just a stunt for publicity- and it seems to have worked. Maybe this will inspire some other coffee-vendors to ask him for help in competing with Starbucks.
One application was building construction- grab a bunch of appropriate materials, attach a CPU to each piece, and they'll begin to network together and exchange blueprints. The human builders who fit things together can be completely unskilled, because everytime someone picks up a piece, it transmits instructions to his headset telling him where it needs to be stuck in relation to all the other chunks.
This story seems to be the same idea, but on a smaller and non-self-organizing scale.
Of course, there's no such thing as bad publicity. And the hero was usually blandly accepting of the adverts, providing a role model for the consumer masses to follow. The only time a commercial really angered him- when he threw an overly loud cereal box across the room- the brand name was blatantly fake.
One problem I have is that, as an external optimist, I assume that "IPv6 is right around the corner". That would mean that no one ever needs to use NAT again, and that a single computer can have multiple IP address for all of its users (or other purposes). And we already have a DNS system to provide mappings from human-readable strings to software-usable network addresses. I feel a little bad (and dubious) about seeing someone try to reimplement that, even if it is the surest way to ensure that the existing DNS features don't get broken.
The final concern I have with this Jabber approach is that its a complete layer above TCP- applications are written to the Jabber API and don't even know that TCP is involved. That's a good thing from the perspective of modularity and OSI-style layering, but bad in terms of evolutionary adoption. Existing software is written for the "static web", and that's where corporate money is going to focus future developement. Without a way to gradually shoehorn into popular internet applications, Jabber support may remain a hobby for open-source outcasts, and not benefit the majority of users.
As a transitionary step, someone could write (maybe someone already did?) a Jabber utility that behaves like a combination of DNS lookup and RPC portmapping- providing a ip address/portnumber in response to a JID string. Many applications could utilize something like that by adding just a few lines after their "hostname()" calls.
Two use cases where evolutionary Jabber ID support could be valuable:
John Carmack is friendly to free software- when the inevitable Quake4 developement starts up, someone should offer him a simple Jabber interface as an optional way for players to connect to servers, instead of the corporate Gamespy / MSG Gaming Zone options that you see today.
(Now, if only I knew a way to mix freenet into this equation...)
Actually, I don't think N-Squared is exactly the right function- you're really looking for Metcalf's Law. It states that "The value of a product that interoperates with others of its own type increases as the product becomes more common". This applies to telephones, ethernet cards, internet accounts, and even software like Microsoft Word. It was put forth by the inventor of ethernet in his graduate thesis. For a long overview of the maths, seeo ry_gi lder.article
http://www.eff.org/Net_culture/ethernet_hist
PS. Some texts will print "Gate's Corrolary" beneath the entry for Metcalf's Law. "If the product is software controlled by a single provider, the provider can discontinue interoperability with prior versions to force all existing users to purchase new products, indefinately"
Part of the problem stems from the fact that IM software addresses 2 applications at the same time, unnecessarily coupling the implementations. These problems could really be approached separately:
- Learn the IP address associated with a globally-unique username
- Send a text message to the interactive operator of a machine with an IP address
The first problem is the much more interesting one- Jabber & AIM already somewhat solve it, but in an unsatisfactory and poorly extensible way. Better solutions would be based on an extension to the normal DNS system- essentially, you want each human to have a resolvable domain name associated with her. With that in place, InstantMessaging is an easy problem.A person could try to implement "TCP over IM", but it would've been nicer if the systems had been designed for this from the start. Actually, there is a 3rd general-purpose facility that might be needed, for reasons of privacy. There should be a way to send a packet to a "resolvable human name", without knowing the IP address it currently maps through. The (trusted) central server will have to forward packets in both directions. (I think that's how AIM normally operates, except that it doesn't accept generic packets, only AIM-formatted messages).
However, that method doesn't uniformly improve privacy. While it does prevent other users from learning your IP address, it makes it much easier for AOL (or other central server operator) to spy on the contents of your discussions. (You should be using encryption, anyway).
Right on! Most avid internetters had been performing Jabber-like tasks years prior to the introduction of ICQ or anything similar, with either SMTP, or IRC or "talk". (The latter two aren't as directly applicable to the problem, though)
I definately remember periods of transmitting emails back & forth at 15 second intervals- this was using "pine", a text-mode emailer that doesn't impose as much GUI-created latency as most email clients.
Its a real same that AOL, Mirabilis, et al, had to create their own new protocols rather than slightly extending SMTP to work in this application. The changes could likely be accomplished with optional extensions, preserving backwards compatibility.
First, POP3 would need a "request push" operation, so that a client could indicate to the server that any new emails within the next 5 minutes should be sent to it immediately. Otherwise, the client would need to query the server every 10 seconds, in order to provide the quick response that IM users want.
Secondly, there should be an optional mail header entry for "instant expiration" priority. Basically a way for the sender to indicate that unless the recipient is online right then, the message can be considered as much less important than ordinary emails. This would just provide a way to segregate traffic by its intended use- client software could ignore it if it wants, although often a different graphical presentation is desirable for IMs vs regular emails. (IMs essentially have only Subject lines, not Bodies)
Traditional 3d hardware includes 3d accelerator cards, immersive-display goggles, stereoscopic LCD goggles, crystal-ball type volumetric displays, and the (theoretical) realtime hologram projector. But the problems those devices attempt to solve are almost completely distinct from what the ActualDepth display is meant for. (Well, except that a truely effective hologram projector could emulate any other display technology...)
The point of ActualDepth is to allow your computer to present you more visual information in the same space. If you run traditional software that's not aware of the special screen layout, you can just use the multi-monitor feature of the OS's gui system (in X11 they call it Xinerama) to assign some windows to the front screen and some to the back. That way you can look at both of them at once, and for instance can read the online manual for a game at the same time you play it full screen, or operate a 3d-modeller in the classic 4-way parellel projection while a textured preview of the object sits on the back display. Anything that you'd do with dual-monitors, you can do with this, but using less physical real estate, and, more importantly, with less time to focus your vision from one to the other. Both screens are centered in your field of view at the same time, so there's no looking back and forth nessecary.
It's likely that without modifications, your GUI interface will only allow the mouse to switch between screens by you dragging it across one edge of the screens, where it considers them seamed together. That is irritating and unintuitive, so you'd want to use one screen as more of a read-only device, showing useful data but rarely needing interaction.
Elsewhere, someone asked if this effect can be emulated in software just by alpha-blending on image on top of another. You could try this, but it wouldn't really work. At the points where the foreground image is solid (thick black text), the background will be completely obscured. But with "actual depth" between the displays, the stereo-graphic effect of dual-eyeballs comes into play. Assuming the foreground image is mostly line-art or text and doesn't consist of large regions of solid color, then for every pixel in the background image, at least one of your eyeballs will have an unobstructed line of sight to it. You remain aware of the contents of both displays with no additional perceptual effort.
The device I tested had a touch screen attached in front, and the window-manager (well, Microsoft Windows(tm)) was configured so that a single-click on a titlebar would shift a window 1024 pixels left or right, effectively toggling it between the front and back displays.
To begin to recoup some of the enormous pricetag for ActualDepth hardware, though, you'd need to run software that's aware of the display's special characteristics. (The code doesn't need to link any special drivers or new APIs, but it does need to be aware that graphics drawn at (X-1024,Y) will appear floating over (X,Y)).
Essentially what the application should do is allocate one display for data, and one for meta-data. That is, if you're word-processing a document, the back display should always give a WYSIWYG preview of the output, and the front display should present all the filenames, font names, editing markup (including those automatically-generated spellchecker warning scribbles), section breaks, margin, column boundaries, etc.
I'd really like to see what user-interface innovations would pop out if the programming public got to play with these monitors for a while, but at the current price, that's just not going to happen. (ActualDepth should sponsor some free-software authors to modify their code to exploit their displays- until they get some sample applications out there, potential users won't understand the benefits).