I'd like to think of myself as a graphic designer and musician, and my fonts and music are free, and I permit copying.
That's cool. I didn't mean to say that every artist doesn't permit copying. Rather, all (ok - most) artists want to have the discretion to choose whether their works are made available to be copied OR NOT. It's cool that you distribute your work for free, but you made this decision - it wasn't forced on you. That's the issue. Arguments that copying is not theft and therefore one should be free to abitrarily copy others work (or that it's legally wrong but morally right) are what I'm against.
Theft deprives someone of property directly. Copying does not (though it may, indirectly). There's plenty of reasonable arguments to be made about copying being bad, but none of them come down to analogies about stealing cars.
So what do you call it when I hack your bank and electronically transfer funds from your account to mine? I'm just moving numbers around - no theft of 'property' - I'm not saying it's "copying", just that it goes beyond the bounds of your convenient definition of theft. The stealing cars analogy is grossy over-simplifying the matter. That fact is, the more you look to define what theft is, the more blurry you'll find the distinction between theft and copying.
Let's talk in broader economic terms (note: we could talk in social or environmental on other areas of theft) and the distinction is even more diminished. At best, copying boils down to some sort of "take from the (information) rich, give to the (information) poor" Robin Hood approach.
I think the Free Software and Open Source movements are great - and I directly benefit from them. As do I benefit from artists such as yourself distributing free music and typefaces. I'm not against these things at all. What I am saying is that artists have the choice as to whether they distribute their works free or charge some amount of money for them (or a combination of the two) - we should respect this.
The RIAA and others want you to fall into the mind trap that copying IS theft.
Actually the RIAA, MPAA and every damn author, musician, commercial software developer, director, screen writer, actor, orator, song writer, graphic designer etc.
I don't see any distinction between "theft" and "copying" as particularly relevant at all. Theft is really an economic concept (although the bible espouses it as a moral one) - you're stealing wealth from another person, be it money, physical property or intellectual property. It's simply FUD to imply that "theft" is some kind of amoral, natural law and "copying" is an artificial construct of the RIAA and other nefarious organisations to make more money.
The fact is, there are many, many people whose careers would be undermined if everyone was legally allowed to copy their work. This copying deprives them of wealth either directly or in diminished future earnings. Where's the distinction?
All this post-facto argument is a contrived attempt to justify (and thereby keep alive) this admittedly addictive habit of downloading free music.
Give it up. Downloading illegal mp3s is not a natural progression of Freedom of Speech; it's not some noble crusade to make information free. It's theft.
If I download an mp3 of the latest Britney Spears song so I can listen to it a few times, I would do so without ever intending to buy the CD. I don't like her music, and if for some reason I wanted to hear one of her songs I would not want to pay for it.
So do you demand to be let in to movies for free that aren't sold out? Hey, those empty seats aren't doing anything right? If the management won't let you in, hell just walk in through the fire exit.
The fact is, it's the movie cinema's call - not yours. Sure, you can try and argue you wouldn't pay to see the movie (but your still willing to walk to the cinema and sit through a couple of hours of this movie). But at the end of the day, it's not up to you. The cinema rightly views you a potential customer, and letting you in for free undermines their service to those who did pay.
Same with Napster. You'll search for a song, pay bandwidth charges to download it - yet claim you'd never buy it so who's losing anyway? Well I'm not convinced you wouldn't pay for that song - which is irrelevant in any case as the music label has exclusive rights to sell this song. You're undermining the people who did buy the CD - why should you get it for free when they paid for it? Hell, they may as well start downloading future releases too. Uh oh, you've started a trend that's reduced the future earnings of that artist.
Whether or not it's good for an artist to permit their songs to be traded on Napster (as some artists have) is up to them, not you. It's not something you can force on them because you've decided trading their songs "can't be theft". Your claims that the industry is making more money than ever and that Napster has opened your eyes to new artists are irrelevant - it's not your right to force what you think is best onto someone else (well, unless they're your child).
So you see, trading mp3s can't be theft, because nothing is missing.
Potential revenue is missing and the integrity of the artist and their material is compromised to those who did pay for it.
The idea of bringing older titles such as from the early consoles or PCs to today's less powerful devices is nothing new. Galaga and Arkanoid clones have been thriving on Palm's and other PDAs for a good many years now. Heck, if you're prepared for a little overclocking, you can get a fairly passable GameBoy emulator up and running on your Palm Vx.
"Pong on my Palm would be great because it's simple, easy and people love to play with these games: Atari is a sort of a fast food in the game genre," says Hurlbut.
This guy is living in a bubble. He should out Tucows for all the PDA pong he can handle. Slapping an official Atari logo on it and charging a few bucks for it (or paying ludicrous airtime charges) doesn't sound like much fun to me. Especially for Pong, which may have been a cutting edge tennis simulation in the 70s but offers a very limited nostalgic appeal these days.
The big issue is the interface, if you've ever played Nokia's Snake games you'll have quickly realised how badly suited current mobile phones are to arcade gaming, this is compounded further by the current WAP standard's lack of support for realtime interactive keypad input - it'd be like playing pong by selecting from an HTML drop-down menu for "move up" "move down" and then clicking a submit button.
For decent arcade gaming on mobile phones, you'd be better advised to look at Sun's J2ME platform, a partnership between Sun, Sega and Motorola has resulted in the iDen phone (release here) which addresses gaming from a lower-level approach than can be acheived with the likes of WML/HDML.
You do have a point. But you're not really illustrating a problem with filename/spelling filters - rather, the inadequacies of identifying a piece of music by a filename rather than, say, an ID3 tag.
Once you can look at an MP3 file and properly distinguish artist from trackname then your argument is irrelevant:
Artist: Michael Jackson
Song/Trackname: Thriller vs.
Artist: Stephen King
Song/Trackname: Thriller Result: No problem
Artist: Flying Naked Chainsaws
Song/Trackname: Metallica Stinks vs.
Any Metallica song Result: No problem.
I think Napster should make it compulsory for MP3s to have ID3 tags before they can be shared. This would make their filters more reliable and be a service to the rest of us who prefer to have MP3s with populated ID3 tags. With an ID3 tag editor built in to Napster this would be no real burden on the users either.
Chill out, take a deep breath, and get a sense of humour, dude.
Oh I'm sorry, you must have missed the part where I wrote "Posts complaining about how stories aren't appropriate for Slashdot are as bad as replies to those posts." (explanation: self-effacing humour, dude)
We don't need posters bitching (albeit couched in 'humour') about irrelevant stories. Not liking to be a bitch, I prefer to poke fun at those posters than be all serious and boring. That way, even if you disagree with me, you shouldn't feel like you have to defend your +5 Funny post, and can still have a good laugh.
In any case, this thread has 300+ comments and growing - Claude E. Shannon's death got 148 messages. What's a better metric? Your personal opinion or the cummulative response of all Slashdot readers. You see the futility of the 'this story is irrelevant' post now?
The fact is, Slashdot editors have far better (and less painful) places to look than your witty complaints in gauging the feasability of "the submission process".
First of all, you're not an editor at slashdot so shut the hell up. Posts complaining about how stories aren't appropriate for Slashdot are as bad as replies to those posts.
Secondly, IP has probably never been a bigger issues than it is today, affected parties include both geeks and "gravelbangers".
Thirdly, Blizzard is a hugely popular game developer with a fair amount of mystery surrounding them - it's not surprising people are interested in their activities especially:
As they relate to IP issues and
If they reveal something new (i.e Blizzard is planning on making a Diablo movie)
I know, I know, there are only so many story pitches you can email to Robert Siegel before he takes a restraining order out on you... but that's still no excuse.
Maybe the site is so "in", you have to wake up next to Cox to appreciate little gems like "Temperature control using Beard(tm) technology"?
Maybe Cox himself came up with a new take on the Resume format - "capable of handling practically infinite tasks at a time while churning them all out without a hitch"? What a guy!
Seriously, I haven't seen such an overtly fawning fansite since Ready,steadman,go.
Gnutella will never pull the kind of critical mass needed. It's only a matter of a very small amount of time before it's shut down. There have been many documents written on the major lack of scalability in the Gnutella architecture - whereby single searches start to require gigabytes of bandwidth when you start to get respectable numbers of users on the system.
Nearly all games can be traced back in some way shape or form to the late 80's/early 90's or earlier (there are some exceptions to the rule, thank you Thief, and bring on the Black and White
Funny, because from what I've seen of Black and White it looks like some half-arsed version of Tamagotchi meets Populous.
Banks in Australia are under fire for a similar thing. Over here if you use a competing bank's ATM to take money out of your account you are charged a free ($1-$2) for the 'cross-bank' transfer. Apparently the banks made $650 million on this last year!
Meanwhile they're closing down physical branches as fast as they can. The one's that are open have 1-2 tellers no matter how many thousand people are queued up. Banks really suck.
It'd probably be really inefficient - though i'm sure you could start to get great mileage with a diesel generator under the hood to provide the juice.
Weren't computers supposed to make our lives easier? To me it doesn't make sense that we are forcing what used to be a flexible, tolerant Mark-up into the spend-half-an-hour-looking-for-the-missing-forward -slash nightmare that C and (sometimes) Perl present to us 'less precise' developers.
I personally think it's swell that i don't have to finish tags (<br/> - come on!) or make sure they're all in the right case - let the computers work it out for themselves - they don't mind! really.
I'll admit browsers sometimes go too far - IE is infamous for ignoring MIME types and searching the content of a document to 'work out' whether it's html, xml, or japanese (and let's not talk about it accepting back slashes - just go to http:\\www.microsoft.com\ie\) but come on - we've already been robbed of the meal-in-a-pill, silver body suits and personal jetpacks - let's not start spending our days working for machines!
I don't imagine i'd have much luck trying to
get one of those into my slot-loading drive!
Sure, if you cut a knife shape out of a piece
of paper you could lacerate yourself with it,
but could you use it to spread cottage cheese
on a cracker?
I know this is very shallow and rather sceptical but the fact that the Eazel 'look and feel' is just sooo Apple really bothers me. From the translucent, horizontally stripped navigation and Photorealistic Services icons (very iTools) the whole thing stinks of Apple worship....
...not that there's anything wrong with that...
But come on ANOTHER installer, and yet ANOTHER internet storage solution...
How about a decent font manager? How about printing services? How about a display control panel? These are all things that actually interest me in bringing a higher level of user friendliness to the desktop. I'm no Linux expert - I've come from a Macintosh background - but I can deal fine with FTP and rpm.
Nautilus, don't become the gimp to Adobe's Photoshop (or as Dr Evil would put it: the snake to my mongoose....)
It's interesting that Nader and Browne do so well in this poll. Just for fun(!)...
1. Discount the people who are too young to vote or don't live in the US.
2. Take the people who voted "Jeff" or "Voting is a Waste of Time" and assume they're being funny or not voting because they think either Bush or Gore would make lousy presidents and there's no point voting for someone like Nader or Browne because there's no way they'll win. Split their votes evenly between Nader and Browne.
4. Wow! Nader wins! Now take the people who just read this and realised the small guys could win. These people had previously voted for GWB or AG because they thought anything else would be a waste of a vote - slice some votes off GWB and AG and RN wins by even more!
5. Your vote can make a difference. Use it wisely.
(OK so this is pretty much complete bullshit... but interesting nonetheless)
Nice idea, but they've already invested too heavily in a massively distributed array of nanobots (planted in humans' blood stream - the power supply, duh!) delivered via the back of postage stamps (along with those mind control drugs).
And let's not even mention the complete pointlessness (and lack of commercial application)of the card! Exactly why would someone buy one of these? To get rankings kudos?
Wasn't the point of the distributed approach to harness SPARE cycles?
You've gotta check out this mp3 by The Laziest Men on Mars.
It takes chunks of dialog from the Daikatana characters and sets it to a cheesy porn soundtrack to provide a whole new meaning to the "big sword" moniker. This link came from Old Man Murray.
3. The freebie games are pretty horrendously unexciting. Yay! Hundreds of Tetris and Asteroids variants! Does Open Source somehow imply a lack of creativity?
This question begs for a six page answer - but briefly:
I think Open Source encourages creativity in programmers by making source code accessible and providing great tools for zero cost.
But creativity in programming and creativity in game design, artwork or sound work are completely different things.
Building a quality game by today's standards is an immensley challenging task requiring a pool of multi-discipline resources - not just a talented programmer. There are very few graphic artists and sonic artists using the Linux platform today because there isn't the attraction of great (cheap) tools for them.
There's also the issue of collaboration. There are now quite well established conventions (and tools) for a distributed team of programmers to work together - CVS, code commenting, etc. This infrastructure doesn't exist for graphic design, for example. As someone who's been the Art Director of a creative team I can tell you creative collaboration on a project is hard enough with your entire team in the same room!
Anyway, I've only covered the tip of the iceberg here - but hopefully the point is made.
Not really. I still only need two stylesheets, just a little more checking for these new mac browsers. Even if I didn't have the check for these two platforms I wouldn't "hopelessly screw up these users" -- their fonts would just be a little smaller than I'd like. If consistency mattered on a site I was building then I'd never rely on JavaScript for this functionality.
When you think about it - there's nothing wrong with Windows and Macs having different DPI settings, it's the combination of this with bitmap images (or 'blocks' set using pixels) that causes issues. Maybe it's this issue that needs to be tackled rather than pixel perfect font sizing which, as I mention earlier, I don't think will be a requirement for much longer.
Slashdot Mirror
That's cool. I didn't mean to say that every artist doesn't permit copying. Rather, all (ok - most) artists want to have the discretion to choose whether their works are made available to be copied OR NOT. It's cool that you distribute your work for free, but you made this decision - it wasn't forced on you. That's the issue. Arguments that copying is not theft and therefore one should be free to abitrarily copy others work (or that it's legally wrong but morally right) are what I'm against.
Theft deprives someone of property directly. Copying does not (though it may, indirectly). There's plenty of reasonable arguments to be made about copying being bad, but none of them come down to analogies about stealing cars.
So what do you call it when I hack your bank and electronically transfer funds from your account to mine? I'm just moving numbers around - no theft of 'property' - I'm not saying it's "copying", just that it goes beyond the bounds of your convenient definition of theft. The stealing cars analogy is grossy over-simplifying the matter. That fact is, the more you look to define what theft is, the more blurry you'll find the distinction between theft and copying.
Let's talk in broader economic terms (note: we could talk in social or environmental on other areas of theft) and the distinction is even more diminished. At best, copying boils down to some sort of "take from the (information) rich, give to the (information) poor" Robin Hood approach.
I think the Free Software and Open Source movements are great - and I directly benefit from them. As do I benefit from artists such as yourself distributing free music and typefaces. I'm not against these things at all. What I am saying is that artists have the choice as to whether they distribute their works free or charge some amount of money for them (or a combination of the two) - we should respect this.
--
Actually the RIAA, MPAA and every damn author, musician, commercial software developer, director, screen writer, actor, orator, song writer, graphic designer etc.
I don't see any distinction between "theft" and "copying" as particularly relevant at all. Theft is really an economic concept (although the bible espouses it as a moral one) - you're stealing wealth from another person, be it money, physical property or intellectual property. It's simply FUD to imply that "theft" is some kind of amoral, natural law and "copying" is an artificial construct of the RIAA and other nefarious organisations to make more money.
The fact is, there are many, many people whose careers would be undermined if everyone was legally allowed to copy their work. This copying deprives them of wealth either directly or in diminished future earnings. Where's the distinction?
All this post-facto argument is a contrived attempt to justify (and thereby keep alive) this admittedly addictive habit of downloading free music.
Give it up. Downloading illegal mp3s is not a natural progression of Freedom of Speech; it's not some noble crusade to make information free. It's theft.
--
So do you demand to be let in to movies for free that aren't sold out? Hey, those empty seats aren't doing anything right? If the management won't let you in, hell just walk in through the fire exit.
The fact is, it's the movie cinema's call - not yours. Sure, you can try and argue you wouldn't pay to see the movie (but your still willing to walk to the cinema and sit through a couple of hours of this movie). But at the end of the day, it's not up to you. The cinema rightly views you a potential customer, and letting you in for free undermines their service to those who did pay.
Same with Napster. You'll search for a song, pay bandwidth charges to download it - yet claim you'd never buy it so who's losing anyway? Well I'm not convinced you wouldn't pay for that song - which is irrelevant in any case as the music label has exclusive rights to sell this song. You're undermining the people who did buy the CD - why should you get it for free when they paid for it? Hell, they may as well start downloading future releases too. Uh oh, you've started a trend that's reduced the future earnings of that artist.
Whether or not it's good for an artist to permit their songs to be traded on Napster (as some artists have) is up to them, not you. It's not something you can force on them because you've decided trading their songs "can't be theft". Your claims that the industry is making more money than ever and that Napster has opened your eyes to new artists are irrelevant - it's not your right to force what you think is best onto someone else (well, unless they're your child).
So you see, trading mp3s can't be theft, because nothing is missing.
Potential revenue is missing and the integrity of the artist and their material is compromised to those who did pay for it.
--
"Pong on my Palm would be great because it's simple, easy and people love to play with these games: Atari is a sort of a fast food in the game genre," says Hurlbut.
This guy is living in a bubble. He should out Tucows for all the PDA pong he can handle. Slapping an official Atari logo on it and charging a few bucks for it (or paying ludicrous airtime charges) doesn't sound like much fun to me. Especially for Pong, which may have been a cutting edge tennis simulation in the 70s but offers a very limited nostalgic appeal these days.
The big issue is the interface, if you've ever played Nokia's Snake games you'll have quickly realised how badly suited current mobile phones are to arcade gaming, this is compounded further by the current WAP standard's lack of support for realtime interactive keypad input - it'd be like playing pong by selecting from an HTML drop-down menu for "move up" "move down" and then clicking a submit button.
For decent arcade gaming on mobile phones, you'd be better advised to look at Sun's J2ME platform, a partnership between Sun, Sega and Motorola has resulted in the iDen phone (release here) which addresses gaming from a lower-level approach than can be acheived with the likes of WML/HDML.
--
"As a desktop platform, it works great, but as a server platform, there are things missing,"
-- Andy Henderickson, ILM
They must be running that new "Bizzarro Linux" distibution.
--
You do have a point. But you're not really illustrating a problem with filename/spelling filters - rather, the inadequacies of identifying a piece of music by a filename rather than, say, an ID3 tag.
Once you can look at an MP3 file and properly distinguish artist from trackname then your argument is irrelevant:
Artist: Michael Jackson
Song/Trackname: Thriller
vs.
Artist: Stephen King
Song/Trackname: Thriller
Result: No problem
Artist: Flying Naked Chainsaws
Song/Trackname: Metallica Stinks
vs.
Any Metallica song
Result: No problem.
I think Napster should make it compulsory for MP3s to have ID3 tags before they can be shared. This would make their filters more reliable and be a service to the rest of us who prefer to have MP3s with populated ID3 tags. With an ID3 tag editor built in to Napster this would be no real burden on the users either.
--
Oh I'm sorry, you must have missed the part where I wrote "Posts complaining about how stories aren't appropriate for Slashdot are as bad as replies to those posts." (explanation: self-effacing humour, dude)
We don't need posters bitching (albeit couched in 'humour') about irrelevant stories. Not liking to be a bitch, I prefer to poke fun at those posters than be all serious and boring. That way, even if you disagree with me, you shouldn't feel like you have to defend your +5 Funny post, and can still have a good laugh.
In any case, this thread has 300+ comments and growing - Claude E. Shannon's death got 148 messages. What's a better metric? Your personal opinion or the cummulative response of all Slashdot readers. You see the futility of the 'this story is irrelevant' post now?
The fact is, Slashdot editors have far better (and less painful) places to look than your witty complaints in gauging the feasability of "the submission process".
I repeat, shut the hell up.
--
Secondly, IP has probably never been a bigger issues than it is today, affected parties include both geeks and "gravelbangers".
Thirdly, Blizzard is a hugely popular game developer with a fair amount of mystery surrounding them - it's not surprising people are interested in their activities especially:
I know, I know, there are only so many story pitches you can email to Robert Siegel before he takes a restraining order out on you... but that's still no excuse.
--
Oh right, you mean like Daikatana.
--
Maybe the site is so "in", you have to wake up next to Cox to appreciate little gems like "Temperature control using Beard(tm) technology"?
Maybe Cox himself came up with a new take on the Resume format - "capable of handling practically infinite tasks at a time while churning them all out without a hitch"? What a guy!
Seriously, I haven't seen such an overtly fawning fansite since Ready,steadman,go.
--
"Nuff said?" - not at all, chinless.
Gnutella will never pull the kind of critical mass needed. It's only a matter of a very small amount of time before it's shut down. There have been many documents written on the major lack of scalability in the Gnutella architecture - whereby single searches start to require gigabytes of bandwidth when you start to get respectable numbers of users on the system.
Try again.
--
Funny, because from what I've seen of Black and White it looks like some half-arsed version of Tamagotchi meets Populous.
--
Banks in Australia are under fire for a similar thing. Over here if you use a competing bank's ATM to take money out of your account you are charged a free ($1-$2) for the 'cross-bank' transfer. Apparently the banks made $650 million on this last year!
Meanwhile they're closing down physical branches as fast as they can. The one's that are open have 1-2 tellers no matter how many thousand people are queued up. Banks really suck.
I think you mean millipede - centipede would just
be 100 legs. buy one send it back for 100, send those back for 10000 and send those in for the lot.
foreach (unpack 'C*','aonjixfghklceyrqtuwxvdbpz') {
It'd probably be really inefficient - though i'm sure you could start to get great mileage with a diesel generator under the hood to provide the juice.
Sounds like just the thing for the 21st century!
foreach (unpack 'C*','aonjixfghklceyrqtuwxvdbpz') {
Weren't computers supposed to make our lives easier? To me it doesn't make sense that we are forcing what used to be a flexible, tolerant Mark-up into the spend-half-an-hour-looking-for-the-missing-forward -slash nightmare that C and (sometimes) Perl present to us 'less precise' developers.
I personally think it's swell that i don't have to finish tags (<br/> - come on!) or make sure they're all in the right case - let the computers work it out for themselves - they don't mind! really.
I'll admit browsers sometimes go too far - IE is infamous for ignoring MIME types and searching the content of a document to 'work out' whether it's html, xml, or japanese (and let's not talk about it accepting back slashes - just go to http:\\www.microsoft.com\ie\) but come on - we've already been robbed of the meal-in-a-pill, silver body suits and personal jetpacks - let's not start spending our days working for machines!
I don't imagine i'd have much luck trying to
get one of those into my slot-loading drive!
Sure, if you cut a knife shape out of a piece
of paper you could lacerate yourself with it,
but could you use it to spread cottage cheese
on a cracker?
I DON'T THINK SO, MR THIN MEDIA!
Can we please have a Battlenet server back in Australia now?
I know this is very shallow and rather sceptical but the fact that the Eazel 'look and feel' is just sooo Apple really bothers me. From the translucent, horizontally stripped navigation and Photorealistic Services icons (very iTools) the whole thing stinks of Apple worship....
...not that there's anything wrong with that...
But come on ANOTHER installer, and yet ANOTHER internet storage solution...
How about a decent font manager? How about printing services? How about a display control panel? These are all things that actually interest me in bringing a higher level of user friendliness to the desktop. I'm no Linux expert - I've come from a Macintosh background - but I can deal fine with FTP and rpm.
Nautilus, don't become the gimp to Adobe's Photoshop (or as Dr Evil would put it: the snake to my mongoose....)
riiiiiiigggggghhhht.
1. Discount the people who are too young to vote or don't live in the US.
2. Take the people who voted "Jeff" or "Voting is a Waste of Time" and assume they're being funny or not voting because they think either Bush or Gore would make lousy presidents and there's no point voting for someone like Nader or Browne because there's no way they'll win. Split their votes evenly between Nader and Browne.
3. Tally 'em up! You get:
GWB - 3178 | 25.3%
AG - 3451 | 27.5%
RN - 3605 | 28.7%
HB - 2313 | 18.4%
4. Wow! Nader wins! Now take the people who just read this and realised the small guys could win. These people had previously voted for GWB or AG because they thought anything else would be a waste of a vote - slice some votes off GWB and AG and RN wins by even more!
5. Your vote can make a difference. Use it wisely.
(OK so this is pretty much complete bullshit... but interesting nonetheless)
Nice idea, but they've already invested too heavily in a massively distributed array of nanobots (planted in humans' blood stream - the power supply, duh!) delivered via the back of postage stamps (along with those mind control drugs).
And let's not even mention the complete pointlessness (and lack of commercial application)of the card! Exactly why would someone buy one of these? To get rankings kudos?
Wasn't the point of the distributed approach to harness SPARE cycles?
It takes chunks of dialog from the Daikatana characters and sets it to a cheesy porn soundtrack to provide a whole new meaning to the "big sword" moniker. This link came from Old Man Murray.
Much funnier than ASCII text could ever be.
This question begs for a six page answer - but briefly:
I think Open Source encourages creativity in programmers by making source code accessible and providing great tools for zero cost.
But creativity in programming and creativity in game design, artwork or sound work are completely different things.
Building a quality game by today's standards is an immensley challenging task requiring a pool of multi-discipline resources - not just a talented programmer. There are very few graphic artists and sonic artists using the Linux platform today because there isn't the attraction of great (cheap) tools for them.
There's also the issue of collaboration. There are now quite well established conventions (and tools) for a distributed team of programmers to work together - CVS, code commenting, etc. This infrastructure doesn't exist for graphic design, for example. As someone who's been the Art Director of a creative team I can tell you creative collaboration on a project is hard enough with your entire team in the same room!
Anyway, I've only covered the tip of the iceberg here - but hopefully the point is made.
Not really. I still only need two stylesheets, just a little more checking for these new mac browsers. Even if I didn't have the check for these two platforms I wouldn't "hopelessly screw up these users" -- their fonts would just be a little smaller than I'd like. If consistency mattered on a site I was building then I'd never rely on JavaScript for this functionality.
When you think about it - there's nothing wrong with Windows and Macs having different DPI settings, it's the combination of this with bitmap images (or 'blocks' set using pixels) that causes issues. Maybe it's this issue that needs to be tackled rather than pixel perfect font sizing which, as I mention earlier, I don't think will be a requirement for much longer.