Our legal system was designed to prosecute people after the fact. Not to prevent them from breaking the law (which never works), but to try them for it afterwards. This is why the laws that are passed based on an argument from prevention never bear themselves out. Like VB under Solaris, it's just a bad idea.
Examples: (if you care...)
"The death penalty is the best deterrent to violent crime."
The murder rates in Texas and Florida pretty much kill that one.
"Toughen the crack laws so there'll be less B&Es."
B&Es went up in most major metro areas, back in the 80s. So did hard drug use.
"We need the FBI to read our e-mail to protect us from terrorists!"
Real terrorists wouldn't plan their Wile E. Coyote bullshit online. That's what stupid script kiddies do, not fanatic killers.
The reality of the matter is, they want this just because they know they can have it. It's politically useful for everyone involved: the FBI can use their data to get favors from Congress and the Prez, Congressmen/Presidents can use the data to beat their opponents, and anyone who questions their little scam can be publicly humiliated when the info is turned against them. The courts take a lot of flak for interfering with legislation relating to law enforcement, but they're really all we have left these days.
Speaking of which, the republican candidate raised the money he did on one promise: pack the Supreme Court with opponents of the Sherman Antitrust act. Keep your eyes open for that, it'll bite us later.
I'm not talking about making chips at home. I mean the manufature plants, design teams, sales offices, etc don't all have to be owned by the same corp. Each should be its own company, bidding on projects the other companies want. This will put pressure to innovate on everyone involved, rather than the landless mini-states that companies like Compaq have turned into. It will also leave them so busy fighting each other that they'll have no time to commit treason during the electoral process in the USA.
The same law that broke Ford into a dozen contractors early in this century needs to be applied more liberally to these corps, who are NOT needed to produce chips.
It's vertical integration that allows them to do this. By centralizing purchasing and distribution, they can cut out middlemen that tend to equalize the prices in a given market. Vertical integration is illegal under US antitrust law, but everyone forgets about it. I think the last major VI breakup was movie studios/theaters in the fifties. By the way, they're back now, too. Viacom owns tons of movie theaters as well as Blockbuster, along with making films that show and are rented there, respectively. Not very capitalist, is it?
I say again, this isn't true. European aristocracy had already basically lost power to the mercantile class by that time. They were, in fact, rebelling against "Taxation without Representation" -- in Parliament, that is. The King was a figurehead used by us colonists for propaganda and nothing more.
It doesn't take a big corporation to own a factory. Most factories are still owned by companies whose sole purpose is to operate that one factory. The only difference would be when someone sat down to write the CHRP standards, people would have to follow them or they'd be knocked out of the market by people who did. Unlike now, when Intel and MS sit down and figure out where they're going to go and screw everyone else today.
I've lived up and down the US East Coast, and what you're missing in Baltimore is missing all over the place here. I'm in Boston, now, where you can still find some good food, but you have to look.
The worst part is, the McDs costs the same as the local sub shops, but people still eat at McDs! Seems to me someone should mention to the French they're not the only ones suffering...
Last time I checked, the revolutionaries in 1776 were vast supporters of Adam Smith and a free market society.
This is true, but you draw a questionable conclusion. American businesses at the time were small and local, unlike the European businesses that Americans had to deal with: Faceless bureaucracies which were in league with, and therefore susceptible to, the whims of the arrogant plutocracies that effectively held power in their "home country." Now look at the supernationals Jon's talking about. Their structure is essentially no different than the Dutch East India Tea Company back in colonial times, whose structure was likewise little different than the feudal governments that gave rise to aristocracy in the first place.
Remember, their beef (no pun intended) was with being ruled without representation by some braindead aristocratic loser thousands of miles away
No, it wasn't. Even then, the King couldn't wield much power without going through Parliament or his own trading interests in various companies, just like now. Make no mistake: the King was a figurehead, just like our presidents are. The people were rallied against him, but our real enemies were parliament and the "multinational" trading companies of the day.
The rest of what you said...well...most of us grew out of that a long time ago, patriotism being a 'virtue of the vicious' and all...
There is a big difference between the kind of free-market capitalism Smith (and his faithful back then) were supporting and the vertically integrated multinationals of both then and now. They are "foreign powers" in their own right, landless feudal structures whose only interest is their self-perpetuation, but the real danger they pose isn't their ability to sell one billion dishwashers in China, it's the power structures that are becoming entrenched around them. Structures like the G8 that have no elected representatives and are therefore not accountable to anyone.
I'm not one to waste my time and effort protesting things I have no control over, but if what you wrote is really all you think there is to the 4th, it's time you looked a little more deeply into the world around you. Just because this country, our country, set a high-water mark once or twice in its history, doesn't mean there isn't still room for improvement. We can start by getting these supernational foreign powers out of our own Constitutional process.
I post as myself because I stand by what I say. That AC post above wasn't mine, but I don't think it deserved what it got. I got hit with a troll mod, too.
Y'know, it may be time we came up with a clear delineation between a post like this and a real troll-post. It's a short, sharp reply to the post above it. It states an opinion which is on topic and relevant to the discussion, even if it offers no support for that opinion.
If it hadn't been modded down to -1, would it have started a thread of more reasonable posts which would have considered the circumstances and motivations surrounding M$ new programming language vs. those surrounding Sun's development of Java? Those of us who read at -1 have seen it happen.
Is stating an opinion about some language, OS or company really trolling? If this guy posted a comment that said "MS sucks" or "Windows sucks" and got modded down -1 flamebait, I could understand, but whoever this AC is, his post is at least on topic and relevant. He didn't post it 500 times in a row, and he didn't craft it to look like a normal post only to change halfway through to a post about NP or grits or whatever. I don't think it's a troll.
Bothers me, too. But what's to be done? Short of a massive Supreme Court precedent that broadens the (currently underapplied) 9th Amendment, it doesn't look good for personal freedom.
The station made a choice to protect its financial interests. They could have sued the Census people, though what company makes that decision these days?
Actually, that would be "booted into DOS". I never saw a PC game that booted into its own OS.
You're right, I wasn't being clear.
Sounds like a good start for a console, but not for a PC.
I'd like to see it happen, anyway. Just to see if it's a better environment. It's not like there's too much going on with Be otherwise.
Not true... they are only developed graphically. Yeah, but they're all looking at the PC games market (which IS shrinking) and the console market (which is growing) and we're going to get screwed. Which is a shame, since the RPGs and RTS games are my favorite.
You're the first person who ever responded to my hypothetical. It's not something they'll post as an Ask Slashdot, and I needed to hear why it wouldn't work. Sorry the wording pissed you off, but sometimes it takes a little prodding to get a response...
This is a classic clueless fanboy post.
I'm NOT a BeOS fan, AC. Nor do I read any of their info. I had a bunch of the same PCs lying around at work, installed Win98SE on one, BeOS on the other. I ran the same videos on each one. Then I ran more than one at a time. Mixed a few apps in. Result: BeOS ran the video with nary a flicker. Windows didn't.
Now look at Civ3. A god-game any os can manage (even linux). Watch the little movies pop up when you build a wonder. Watch the video flicker and the mouse skip across the screen under Windows. (Not much better under Linux). What would that be like under BeOS?
Now look at the increasing amount of CG cutscenes used in video games. You think M$ would fix DirectX to handle them? No. Their video continues to trip over their own mouse drivers.
Their sound is good?
I set up the sound card and it worked. Same with Windows and Linux. Can't ask for much more than that.
Their multithreading is good? They support threading primatives just like unix and win32 Perhaps you're refering to the fact that the APIs force you to use a thread per window, even when it doesn't make sense? You can have your app broken up into 1000 threads, but since 99% of the time, one of those threads is doing all the compute bound tasks sequentially, you gain nothing, and lose due to scheduler overhead.
Frightening as it is, AC, I actually get what you're saying here. The threading makes no real difference unless you have multiple chips to spread the threads among, right? Now, if you were some sort of Lord High Quake god, and you had to have the best machine to beat the other Quake gods, and Quake ran multithreaded under the hypothetical BeOS runtime, how many chips would your computer have? As many as you could fit inside. Win2K handles more than one chip, too, right? Who's multithreading is better?
Who would buy a BeOS game OS? who would write games for it? what is the advantage?
It would come with the games, just like the old DOS runtimes, BUT it would install once and then any other games that needed it would run it. The advantage is that you have an environment to run graphics and sound JUST FOR THE GAME. The other advantage is that it would run under PPC, too. Not that I'm a Mac fan, either.
...they need a OS that they can tell to get the fuck out of the way.
But Windows DOESN'T get out of the way. Windows freezes and GPFs all the time while we play games on it. This runtime I'm HYPOTHESIZING would never be in the fucking way in the first place.
Please try to think rationally, and more importantly, know when you're in way over your head technically. You're just making yourself look like an idiot.
You disagreed with me. Fine. You presented technical information to refute what I suggested. Good, I don't mind being wrong, and I've learned more reading this board over the past two years than I could ever teach anyone else.
All the same, there's no call to question my ability to think rationally. It's the one area where I'm never over my head.
Nope, won't work. DirectX is M$'s baby, it's the reason that PC games don't boot into their own environments anymore. It has drawbacks, of course: less resources devoted to the games themselves, not all hardware works perfectly inside it (take my ATI card...please!), any limitations of DirectX become limitations in the game you develop, and you basically need to run windows to develop for it.
Since it's proprietary, no GPL program can ever be linked to it (see KDE), which would make running it under linux even more of a waste. Not that most games are GPL'd. Other people are trying to make similar stuff, but it never works quite right, and they don't have the finances to hire programmers for the big push it takes to finish projects of that scope.
I've said this before on this board, but BeOS would be a great runtime environment for games. Strip it down so it takes 100MB of the HD, just for the environment and drivers, then boot into it with System Commander to play video games off the CD/main HD part.
Not that it matters, anyway. PCs are really losing popularity as game machines: the consoles are so well developed now that they'll soon exceed PCs for all kinds of games. Add in Broadband and you won't need a $2500 game machine anymore.
It's a real shame, I think. A lot of us got immersed in computing by pirating games on the C64. Where's the learning environment going to come from if the only game's the one they advertise?
Selling, using and advocating drug use is illegal and immoral.
Selling drugs is illegal, unless you're Pfizer. Using drugs is not illegal, unless you're actively trying to commit suicide, which is often illegal. Advocating drug use is not illegal.
I'm going to go way out on a limb with the last one: You are not smart enough to decide for me whether any of these things is immoral. You're just going to have to trust me to do that for myself.
nothing, this is the next mpeg (it's not called divx by the people who first developed it). It's like going up a version of software, but this time, the files get smaller and the video is crisper.
Because of that, there was supposed to be some sort of copy protection built into it. M$'s first version of the software didn't have the protection, but a bunch of people downloaded it anyway. Now it's going to be the porno standard for a while. It's a good thing.
BeOS video is superior, and their sound is good. Their multithreading is good, too. I still think they should strip the OS down and make it a runtime environment for network games.
Electricity, of course, is a bigger deal and always will be. Phones and the other stuff can't be as big as electricity. Think about it: You can buy pure energy, and direct it into any amount of force. How can anything compete with that?
Besides, electricity took a little while, too. You had lights and then radio, but the electric appliance revolution didn't really pick up until after WWII.
T.Hobbes is right, digital stuff only adds functionality to electricity and phones. For now, the rest of us are just early adopters, but once the appliance flood starts...
So the Times can check back in another 50-75 years to see if digitization's had a big enough effect on society for them.
Tell me, do you really care that much about a license that you would stop using good software just because the license is not what others say it should be? Yes. When it comes to doing the right thing, the devil's in the details.
And remember, we are not talking about a "no benchmarking, no copying" type of software license. Those I just ignore altogether.
KDE is free. Anyone will admit at least that. Free as in beer, but not free as in GPL.
How the hell did we end up with free software violating the GPL in the first place? How something being completely free ( the way RMS envisioned ) can violate his own license? His vision, it seems to me, did not necessarily include getting the software for free, but having the freedom to do what you want with it once you got it. From what I've read of the QPL, it does violate the definition of free "RMS envisioned".
Maybe the problem is on the GPL's end? Okay, but be more specific. How is the problem the GPL's? If the reason the two won't work together is because the QPL doesn't allow the freedom to modify and redistribute the source, and the POINT of the GPL is source modification/redistribution, how is KDE's decision to mix the two incompatible licenses the GPL's fault?
I understand that the KDE people are responsible for choosing the GPL as their license, but maybe we should examine the GPL for what it is and see if it is freedom we were looking for? There go those crazy americans again, always wanting freedom. The GPL allows more freedom in code modification, and it is designed to be a sort of virus in the American legal system. By not allowing it to mix with other, more restrictive licenses, it sets firm boundaries on what it covers, thereby making it easier to defend in an American court.
It is my understanding that other countries are a little freer with their reverse engineering laws, but here in the draconian-IP US, it's all or nothing with this stuff. It's not a social or political stance, it has a very real purpose.
How come the majority of Open Source projects are not GPLed? Mostly, the FSF owns the tools and Linux is just about the only significant piece of software under the GPL license. Since I don't work on those projects, I have no idea what goes into the decision-making process. i think RedHat's stuff, including the "significant" rpm code, is GPLed, though.
RMS may be good programmer who gave us some nice tools, but it has nothing to do with his social stance. Gcc is great, not because it is GPLed, but because there are bunch of very dedicated programmers working on it. The GPL has a philosophical idea that it was based on, but the GPL's terms and wording seem designed to protect it in a court of law. I think the decision was a legal one, not a "social" one. By using the QPL license for their libraries, TrollTech could sell their control over the source to some company that "upgraded" it, Microsoft-style, and then KDE, their developers and the end users would all be screwed.
Same with KDE. I never said KDE was any good, I just said I used it. I DID say I was tired of all the bloated crap that comes with it.
I tried to laugh but I couldn't. Guess I'll have to restart that service...
That sig's interesting. Are you really asking people to contribute to a closed-source OS for free? Don't get me wrong, BeOS video stuff kicks ass. Even if I could code well, though, I can't imagine going out of my way for an OS that's a) going nowhere fast and b) not really written by/for the benefit of the users who MIGHT use it, if it had more functional apps.
Why no mozilla port? Why spend all that time replacing free not-great software with Be's not-great software?
I just want you to strip Be down to a runtime environment with multiplatform HW drivers, so people can write better video games without having to use the pissy DirectX. Is that too much to ask?
It's cheaper to produce a CD than a tape. But they can charge what they want, because they manipulate the demand and control the supply. The only thing wrong with any of this is that no one (not the bands, not the listeners) are given a choice. There is no alternate, competing method of music distribution. Every time someone tries to build one, the RIAA will step on them. They're right to go after Napster USERS this time, but the idea behind the software will pop up in another service, and another, etc. until one hits the right formula of broad distribution/renumeration.
The record companies try now and again, but charge too much. The Napsters charge too little. A Napster-like service with and optional tipping system and links to merchandising (T-shirts, Posters) with a chunk of the profits going back to the band would be just about right.
Of course, initially, only indie bands would sign up. But if the licensing was perpetual (The bands gets 80% of all the online revenue in return for licensing those rights to the service for the length of the copyrights (is it up to 10000 years yet?) on all future work, then the record labels would have to leave those rights out of their contracts (if they don't, it's collusion, a nasty charge in court). A few of the indie bands would hit, and you'd have a viable service.
Slashdot Mirror
Our legal system was designed to prosecute people after the fact. Not to prevent them from breaking the law (which never works), but to try them for it afterwards. This is why the laws that are passed based on an argument from prevention never bear themselves out. Like VB under Solaris, it's just a bad idea.
Examples: (if you care...)
"The death penalty is the best deterrent to violent crime."
The murder rates in Texas and Florida pretty much kill that one.
"Toughen the crack laws so there'll be less B&Es."
B&Es went up in most major metro areas, back in the 80s. So did hard drug use.
"We need the FBI to read our e-mail to protect us from terrorists!"
Real terrorists wouldn't plan their Wile E. Coyote bullshit online. That's what stupid script kiddies do, not fanatic killers.
The reality of the matter is, they want this just because they know they can have it. It's politically useful for everyone involved: the FBI can use their data to get favors from Congress and the Prez, Congressmen/Presidents can use the data to beat their opponents, and anyone who questions their little scam can be publicly humiliated when the info is turned against them. The courts take a lot of flak for interfering with legislation relating to law enforcement, but they're really all we have left these days.
Speaking of which, the republican candidate raised the money he did on one promise: pack the Supreme Court with opponents of the Sherman Antitrust act. Keep your eyes open for that, it'll bite us later.
-jpowers
I'm not talking about making chips at home. I mean the manufature plants, design teams, sales offices, etc don't all have to be owned by the same corp. Each should be its own company, bidding on projects the other companies want. This will put pressure to innovate on everyone involved, rather than the landless mini-states that companies like Compaq have turned into. It will also leave them so busy fighting each other that they'll have no time to commit treason during the electoral process in the USA.
The same law that broke Ford into a dozen contractors early in this century needs to be applied more liberally to these corps, who are NOT needed to produce chips.
-jpowers
It's vertical integration that allows them to do this. By centralizing purchasing and distribution, they can cut out middlemen that tend to equalize the prices in a given market. Vertical integration is illegal under US antitrust law, but everyone forgets about it. I think the last major VI breakup was movie studios/theaters in the fifties. By the way, they're back now, too. Viacom owns tons of movie theaters as well as Blockbuster, along with making films that show and are rented there, respectively. Not very capitalist, is it?
-jpowers
I say again, this isn't true. European aristocracy had already basically lost power to the mercantile class by that time. They were, in fact, rebelling against "Taxation without Representation" -- in Parliament, that is. The King was a figurehead used by us colonists for propaganda and nothing more.
-jpowers
It doesn't take a big corporation to own a factory. Most factories are still owned by companies whose sole purpose is to operate that one factory. The only difference would be when someone sat down to write the CHRP standards, people would have to follow them or they'd be knocked out of the market by people who did. Unlike now, when Intel and MS sit down and figure out where they're going to go and screw everyone else today.
-jpowers
I've lived up and down the US East Coast, and what you're missing in Baltimore is missing all over the place here. I'm in Boston, now, where you can still find some good food, but you have to look.
The worst part is, the McDs costs the same as the local sub shops, but people still eat at McDs! Seems to me someone should mention to the French they're not the only ones suffering...
-jpowers
McD gets most of their beef from Central and South America, which is not covered by the French ban.
-jpowers
Last time I checked, the revolutionaries in 1776 were vast supporters of Adam Smith and a free market society.
This is true, but you draw a questionable conclusion. American businesses at the time were small and local, unlike the European businesses that Americans had to deal with: Faceless bureaucracies which were in league with, and therefore susceptible to, the whims of the arrogant plutocracies that effectively held power in their "home country." Now look at the supernationals Jon's talking about. Their structure is essentially no different than the Dutch East India Tea Company back in colonial times, whose structure was likewise little different than the feudal governments that gave rise to aristocracy in the first place.
Remember, their beef (no pun intended) was with being ruled without representation by some braindead aristocratic loser thousands of miles away
No, it wasn't. Even then, the King couldn't wield much power without going through Parliament or his own trading interests in various companies, just like now. Make no mistake: the King was a figurehead, just like our presidents are. The people were rallied against him, but our real enemies were parliament and the "multinational" trading companies of the day.
The rest of what you said...well...most of us grew out of that a long time ago, patriotism being a 'virtue of the vicious' and all...
There is a big difference between the kind of free-market capitalism Smith (and his faithful back then) were supporting and the vertically integrated multinationals of both then and now. They are "foreign powers" in their own right, landless feudal structures whose only interest is their self-perpetuation, but the real danger they pose isn't their ability to sell one billion dishwashers in China, it's the power structures that are becoming entrenched around them. Structures like the G8 that have no elected representatives and are therefore not accountable to anyone.
I'm not one to waste my time and effort protesting things I have no control over, but if what you wrote is really all you think there is to the 4th, it's time you looked a little more deeply into the world around you. Just because this country, our country, set a high-water mark once or twice in its history, doesn't mean there isn't still room for improvement. We can start by getting these supernational foreign powers out of our own Constitutional process.
-jpowers
I post as myself because I stand by what I say. That AC post above wasn't mine, but I don't think it deserved what it got. I got hit with a troll mod, too.
-jpowers
Y'know, it may be time we came up with a clear delineation between a post like this and a real troll-post. It's a short, sharp reply to the post above it. It states an opinion which is on topic and relevant to the discussion, even if it offers no support for that opinion.
If it hadn't been modded down to -1, would it have started a thread of more reasonable posts which would have considered the circumstances and motivations surrounding M$ new programming language vs. those surrounding Sun's development of Java? Those of us who read at -1 have seen it happen.
Is stating an opinion about some language, OS or company really trolling? If this guy posted a comment that said "MS sucks" or "Windows sucks" and got modded down -1 flamebait, I could understand, but whoever this AC is, his post is at least on topic and relevant. He didn't post it 500 times in a row, and he didn't craft it to look like a normal post only to change halfway through to a post about NP or grits or whatever. I don't think it's a troll.
-jpowers
It is purty. I liked the BeExistential icon set. Hmmm... can't seem to find the link...
-jpowers
Bothers me, too. But what's to be done? Short of a massive Supreme Court precedent that broadens the (currently underapplied) 9th Amendment, it doesn't look good for personal freedom.
The station made a choice to protect its financial interests. They could have sued the Census people, though what company makes that decision these days?
-jpowers
Actually, that would be "booted into DOS". I never saw a PC game that booted into its own OS.
You're right, I wasn't being clear.
Sounds like a good start for a console, but not for a PC.
I'd like to see it happen, anyway. Just to see if it's a better environment. It's not like there's too much going on with Be otherwise.
Not true... they are only developed graphically.
Yeah, but they're all looking at the PC games market (which IS shrinking) and the console market (which is growing) and we're going to get screwed. Which is a shame, since the RPGs and RTS games are my favorite.
-jpowers
You're the first person who ever responded to my hypothetical. It's not something they'll post as an Ask Slashdot, and I needed to hear why it wouldn't work. Sorry the wording pissed you off, but sometimes it takes a little prodding to get a response...
...they need a OS that they can tell to get the fuck out of the way.
This is a classic clueless fanboy post.
I'm NOT a BeOS fan, AC. Nor do I read any of their info. I had a bunch of the same PCs lying around at work, installed Win98SE on one, BeOS on the other. I ran the same videos on each one. Then I ran more than one at a time. Mixed a few apps in. Result: BeOS ran the video with nary a flicker. Windows didn't.
Now look at Civ3. A god-game any os can manage (even linux). Watch the little movies pop up when you build a wonder. Watch the video flicker and the mouse skip across the screen under Windows. (Not much better under Linux). What would that be like under BeOS?
Now look at the increasing amount of CG cutscenes used in video games. You think M$ would fix DirectX to handle them? No. Their video continues to trip over their own mouse drivers.
Their sound is good?
I set up the sound card and it worked. Same with Windows and Linux. Can't ask for much more than that.
Their multithreading is good? They support threading primatives just like unix and win32 Perhaps you're refering to the fact that the APIs force you to use a thread per window, even when it doesn't make sense? You can have your app broken up into 1000 threads, but since 99% of the time, one of those threads is doing all the compute bound tasks sequentially, you gain nothing, and lose due to scheduler overhead.
Frightening as it is, AC, I actually get what you're saying here. The threading makes no real difference unless you have multiple chips to spread the threads among, right? Now, if you were some sort of Lord High Quake god, and you had to have the best machine to beat the other Quake gods, and Quake ran multithreaded under the hypothetical BeOS runtime, how many chips would your computer have? As many as you could fit inside. Win2K handles more than one chip, too, right? Who's multithreading is better?
Who would buy a BeOS game OS? who would write games for it? what is the advantage?
It would come with the games, just like the old DOS runtimes, BUT it would install once and then any other games that needed it would run it. The advantage is that you have an environment to run graphics and sound JUST FOR THE GAME. The other advantage is that it would run under PPC, too. Not that I'm a Mac fan, either.
But Windows DOESN'T get out of the way. Windows freezes and GPFs all the time while we play games on it. This runtime I'm HYPOTHESIZING would never be in the fucking way in the first place.
Please try to think rationally, and more importantly, know when you're in way over your head technically. You're just making yourself look like an idiot.
You disagreed with me. Fine. You presented technical information to refute what I suggested. Good, I don't mind being wrong, and I've learned more reading this board over the past two years than I could ever teach anyone else.
All the same, there's no call to question my ability to think rationally. It's the one area where I'm never over my head.
-jpowers
Nope, won't work. DirectX is M$'s baby, it's the reason that PC games don't boot into their own environments anymore. It has drawbacks, of course: less resources devoted to the games themselves, not all hardware works perfectly inside it (take my ATI card...please!), any limitations of DirectX become limitations in the game you develop, and you basically need to run windows to develop for it.
Since it's proprietary, no GPL program can ever be linked to it (see KDE), which would make running it under linux even more of a waste. Not that most games are GPL'd. Other people are trying to make similar stuff, but it never works quite right, and they don't have the finances to hire programmers for the big push it takes to finish projects of that scope.
I've said this before on this board, but BeOS would be a great runtime environment for games. Strip it down so it takes 100MB of the HD, just for the environment and drivers, then boot into it with System Commander to play video games off the CD/main HD part.
Not that it matters, anyway. PCs are really losing popularity as game machines: the consoles are so well developed now that they'll soon exceed PCs for all kinds of games. Add in Broadband and you won't need a $2500 game machine anymore.
It's a real shame, I think. A lot of us got immersed in computing by pirating games on the C64. Where's the learning environment going to come from if the only game's the one they advertise?
-jpowers
AoE 1 and 2 may be the best programs M$ ever sold.
Of course, they bought them off someone else. That Visio program wasn't half bad, either. Oh wait...
I concur with the port idea, though. Civ III worked out pretty well. The problem is AoE is pretty well tied into the DirectX stuff.
-jpowers
There's no law against ingestion, unless you're trying to commit suicide. It's possession, really, which would be covered by the Fifth(?).
"What are you doing with my plants? Hey! you're going to have to pay for those!"
-jpowers
Selling, using and advocating drug use is illegal and immoral.
Selling drugs is illegal, unless you're Pfizer.
Using drugs is not illegal, unless you're actively trying to commit suicide, which is often illegal.
Advocating drug use is not illegal.
I'm going to go way out on a limb with the last one:
You are not smart enough to decide for me whether any of these things is immoral.
You're just going to have to trust me to do that for myself.
-jpowers
nothing, this is the next mpeg (it's not called divx by the people who first developed it). It's like going up a version of software, but this time, the files get smaller and the video is crisper.
Because of that, there was supposed to be some sort of copy protection built into it. M$'s first version of the software didn't have the protection, but a bunch of people downloaded it anyway. Now it's going to be the porno standard for a while. It's a good thing.
-jpowers
BeOS video is superior, and their sound is good. Their multithreading is good, too. I still think they should strip the OS down and make it a runtime environment for network games.
-jpowers
Couldn't someone just rewrite one of those e-mail collecting spambots to do this kind of work, then e-mail to the page admin if his links were broken?
The problem with this sort of stuff is that the people who'd pay big bucks for it usually hire web admins smart enough to take care of it themselves.
-jpowers
Electricity, of course, is a bigger deal and always will be. Phones and the other stuff can't be as big as electricity. Think about it: You can buy pure energy, and direct it into any amount of force. How can anything compete with that?
Besides, electricity took a little while, too. You had lights and then radio, but the electric appliance revolution didn't really pick up until after WWII.
T.Hobbes is right, digital stuff only adds functionality to electricity and phones. For now, the rest of us are just early adopters, but once the appliance flood starts...
So the Times can check back in another 50-75 years to see if digitization's had a big enough effect on society for them.
-jpowers
Tell me, do you really care that much about a license that you would stop using good software just because the license is not what others say it should be?
Yes. When it comes to doing the right thing, the devil's in the details.
And remember, we are not talking about a "no benchmarking, no copying" type of software license.
Those I just ignore altogether.
KDE is free. Anyone will admit at least that.
Free as in beer, but not free as in GPL.
How the hell did we end up with free software violating the GPL in the first place? How something being completely free ( the way RMS envisioned ) can violate his own license?
His vision, it seems to me, did not necessarily include getting the software for free, but having the freedom to do what you want with it once you got it. From what I've read of the QPL, it does violate the definition of free "RMS envisioned".
Maybe the problem is on the GPL's end?
Okay, but be more specific. How is the problem the GPL's? If the reason the two won't work together is because the QPL doesn't allow the freedom to modify and redistribute the source, and the POINT of the GPL is source modification/redistribution, how is KDE's decision to mix the two incompatible licenses the GPL's fault?
I understand that the KDE people are responsible for choosing the GPL as their license, but maybe we should examine the GPL for what it is and see if it is freedom we were looking for?
There go those crazy americans again, always wanting freedom. The GPL allows more freedom in code modification, and it is designed to be a sort of virus in the American legal system. By not allowing it to mix with other, more restrictive licenses, it sets firm boundaries on what it covers, thereby making it easier to defend in an American court.
It is my understanding that other countries are a little freer with their reverse engineering laws, but here in the draconian-IP US, it's all or nothing with this stuff. It's not a social or political stance, it has a very real purpose.
How come the majority of Open Source projects are not GPLed? Mostly, the FSF owns the tools and Linux is just about the only significant piece of software under the GPL license.
Since I don't work on those projects, I have no idea what goes into the decision-making process. i think RedHat's stuff, including the "significant" rpm code, is GPLed, though.
RMS may be good programmer who gave us some nice tools, but it has nothing to do with his social stance. Gcc is great, not because it is GPLed, but because there are bunch of very dedicated programmers working on it.
The GPL has a philosophical idea that it was based on, but the GPL's terms and wording seem designed to protect it in a court of law. I think the decision was a legal one, not a "social" one. By using the QPL license for their libraries, TrollTech could sell their control over the source to some company that "upgraded" it, Microsoft-style, and then KDE, their developers and the end users would all be screwed.
Same with KDE.
I never said KDE was any good, I just said I used it. I DID say I was tired of all the bloated crap that comes with it.
-jpowers
I tried to laugh but I couldn't. Guess I'll have to restart that service...
That sig's interesting. Are you really asking people to contribute to a closed-source OS for free? Don't get me wrong, BeOS video stuff kicks ass. Even if I could code well, though, I can't imagine going out of my way for an OS that's a) going nowhere fast and b) not really written by/for the benefit of the users who MIGHT use it, if it had more functional apps.
Why no mozilla port? Why spend all that time replacing free not-great software with Be's not-great software?
I just want you to strip Be down to a runtime environment with multiplatform HW drivers, so people can write better video games without having to use the pissy DirectX. Is that too much to ask?
-jpowers
It's cheaper to produce a CD than a tape. But they can charge what they want, because they manipulate the demand and control the supply. The only thing wrong with any of this is that no one (not the bands, not the listeners) are given a choice. There is no alternate, competing method of music distribution. Every time someone tries to build one, the RIAA will step on them. They're right to go after Napster USERS this time, but the idea behind the software will pop up in another service, and another, etc. until one hits the right formula of broad distribution/renumeration.
The record companies try now and again, but charge too much. The Napsters charge too little. A Napster-like service with and optional tipping system and links to merchandising (T-shirts, Posters) with a chunk of the profits going back to the band would be just about right.
Of course, initially, only indie bands would sign up. But if the licensing was perpetual (The bands gets 80% of all the online revenue in return for licensing those rights to the service for the length of the copyrights (is it up to 10000 years yet?) on all future work, then the record labels would have to leave those rights out of their contracts (if they don't, it's collusion, a nasty charge in court). A few of the indie bands would hit, and you'd have a viable service.
Call it "Tipster" or some such
-jpowers