Yeah, I know I'm not the only one saying it, but I don't see enough posts saying it yet:
Thanks for releasing your CGI code, and double thanks for getting the running code and the public source in sync.
I was one of the more annoyingly whiny complainers before the 0.9 slash release; here's hoping that now that both the slash code and school are out I can do something with it this summer..
If EBay wants to stop a particular client from using it's services, they hardly need to go to court to do it! They can weed out requests based on browser IP, based on whether the client is a spider (robots.txt), based on click-thru agreements...
Basically, imagine that every day, I ask you for a few dollars and you give it to me. Should you then take me to court to force me to stop asking? No! You should just stop handing me your money!
If EBay has such a system in place, and BiddersEdge is ignoring robots.txt, lying about it's client type, or otherwise circumventing it, then fine, moderate this to (-1, Idiot)... but it's late, I'm too lazy to read the article before going to bed, and I've used EBay once or twice without them asking to make sure I wasn't a competitor first.
It's all X's fault. That said, having a networked client/server GUI beats the shit out of a single-user, single desktop GUI anytime.
It's a shame you can't mod and post in the same story; I'd like to be able to both negate the "insightful" rating and explain why it's BS.
Take a look at the drivers they used. Not a one of them sends data over the X pipe. The X server basically is there to say, "yeah, you can bang directly on the hardware" and then get out of the way.
If they were sending data over the X pipe, you'd definitely know it. 3D hardware acceleration is often bandwidth limited; you could get up to a 50% drop in framerate without direct rendering. Smart design would reduce this problem, but I still suspect you'd see 70% optimal framerate, max... and in the LinuxGames tests, 70% was the worst case, not the best.
What was the best case? 99% framerate. This suggests to me that it's not idle processes or the kernel hogging CPU, it's not any weirdness from X or kswapd... it's just that some drivers are better than others. And right now, it looks like Windows drivers are 5% to 40% better than Linux drivers. Frankly, since Windows sales are 500% to 40000% better than Linux sales, I'm not complaining about driver quality.
I am surprised to see the 3Dfx drivers do so poorly, though. Isn't anyone helping out Daryll Strauss now that we've got source code available?
But of course, just how much can you trust the benchmarks? They ran it on one game, using a particular configuration, for a specific kernel.
Well, aside from the usual difficulties, there was one special case; the Matrox testing was done using full OpenGL drivers under Linux and a specific Quake 3 "TurboGL" driver under Windows; TurboGL drivers are Matrox's OpenGL subsets designed to run one game per DLL. In fact, the TurboGL driver postdates the Linux Mesa drivers; at one time (and probably still) the Linux implementation was significantly faster than the full Matrox OpenGL.
Slashdot is the worst pile of a web site I have ever seen.
Don't web surf much, do you?
There are tens of millions of web sites out there, most of which have much lower quality, smaller audiences, and less content than Slashdot.
Oh... but you didn't mean "worst" == "lowest quality", did you? You mean "worst" == "most thousands of readers who think you trolls are childish idiots, and tell you so."
Anyone want to speculate what damages Microsoft will ask for?
Sure: Slashdot will remove the one or two posts that were verbatim copies of the pseudo-kerberos spec, will stand firm on the rest, and Microsoft will back down rather than incur more horrible PR.
Wow, you guys lost a lot of money in the past few months eh?
No, they didn't. Anyone with any sense knew that the RHAT, LNUX, and ANDN stock prices were a bubble, and sold what they could at the top of the bubble to fad speculators. As for those principal shareholders who couldn't sell without losing control of the company, their stock prices are still trading higher than their first indicated IPO price.
Microsoft is valued at 100 times you losers.
And by emotionally attaching yourself to their financial success you somehow shield your ego from your own personal and social failures?
That's just my theory; otherwise I don't see how that sentence was relevant. In theory the judge doesn't ask both parties how much their market value is before making a decision.
MSFT could aquire LNUX 100 times over if they wanted to but they dont.
No, they couldn't. They could afford to acquire LNUX, and could make a private offer the same way they tried to buy linux.com. They could not acquire VA Linux for the same reason they couldn't acquire linux.com: because the owners wouldn't sell to Microsoft.
BECAUSE LINUX SUCKS AND SO DOES SLASHDOT!
I know in my heart that you're just trolling and trying to bait people like me... but part of me fears you're serious. If so, I would suggest that you step away from the computer, and attempt a long period of social interaction. Try to make a friend, or even a girlfriend (but don't tell her that you are a "troll" or that your name is "Dr Kool"). Try to avoid screaming angrily about things that don't concern you, and instead avoid things like "Linux" that seem to be stress factors for you. You'll be happier, and live longer.
Oh, and if you moderate this down, it will be proof that you nazis are trying to stop the flow of information.
You seem to be unclear on the concept of "moderation", the English language, or both. First of all, you continue to use the pronoun "you" even though the audience you are apparantly addressing has changed from the Slashdot employees to the moderators (current moderators? all past moderators? do you understand the difference?). Secondly, you seem to be unaware that "moderating down" a post does not stop any information; even posts moderated to -1, or even those that the Slashdot employees have moderated lower in the past, are still accessable by anyone who desires to read them. Ironically, that universal accessibility is what Microsoft wants to prevent, not Slashdot.
I really hope some trained psychologist takes a look through Slashdot archives someday. There are a plethora of angry, immature individuals like yourself here with a long record of antisocial behavior that is analogous to the real juvenile delinquency increasing around the nation.
But enough feeding the trolls. I suspect you've already been moderated down as you should have been (and as I probably should be, unless "Funny" or "Insightful" cancels out "Offtopic"), and nobody will ever read this. There's just something about that combination of stupidity and arrogance that tweaks a nerve in me.
It's ironic, so shortly after the ILOVEYOU virus, that Microsoft still apparantly expects every single user out there to run random executable files to view a simple document! If everybody tried explicitly opening all attachments with Notepad and tried opening all.exe downloads with Winzip, the world would be a lot safer from million-infection computer viruses.
I'm annoyed, however: kerbspec.exe (wow, and they still use those 8.3 filenames, too) isn't a self-extracting.zip. Someone here said it was a RAR archive, but the only "unrar" program I could find for Linux (binary-only freeware? I feel dirty...) wouldn't open it. Anyone know of Linux tools that will? I'm certainly not going to run it through Wine...
Why not simply use unix filesystem for the unix machines, and NTFS for the Windows ones ?
It's a shame, when most moderators can't figure out the moderation choices already out there (hint: Insightful, Interesting, and Informative are orthogonal concepts), that we'd need to add even more options to make the system thorough.
The above post, for example, was not flamebait. It probably wasn't a troll, either. It is, however, annoying to read the authoritative-sounding opinion of someone who doesn't appear to understand the difference between a block filesystem and a network filesystem. I suppose Flamebait was used in lieu of "Clueless+arrogant"?
I honestly think the safest policy for GPLware would be to ship it as source code only, saying "Here's some code you might be able to make an application out of."
You (I'm using the theoretical, general sense of the word) can bootstrap-install any of the Linux distributions from source tarballs, source RPMs, etc with nothing but a C compiler capable of compiling gcc... but I wouldn't want to.
And I don't see the point. The current statement of most software vendors, "Here's some binary code you might be able to run," seems almost equivalent.
Surely nobody here thinks that a company should be able to sue Linus if their server dies with a kernel panic; the GPL disclaims all warranty, liability, etc. for free software placed under that license, just like the Microsoft EULA.
So how much does a software owner have to charge for a license before they have to be liable for any and all damages caused by someone using it?
Even software makers who are willing to put their money where their mouth is usually give a list of medical, nuclear, etc. applications where that liability doesn't apply. If some idiot tries to put embedded NT into a life support system, should Microsoft be liable when it bluescreens?
I actually removed Linux from my work machine, because the guys kept calling me a "Linux zealot" and an "open source fantic".
And which middle school did you say you worked at? It's a shame peer pressure is so bad there; I hope you manage to stick up for yourself better when they start pushing drugs.
What other things of merit do you avoid because the Roseanne Barr fans of the world don't understand or enjoy them? There's a wonderful world out there which exists outside of the commercial, least common denominator, predigested pap which snags the biggest wedge of the marketing pie charts.
I don't think Linux, for example is for everyone, or even for a large minority everyone, and it will be years before it is. But is that any reason for those of us who are more comfortable with computers and more demanding of our software to avoid using it today? And if among those users are a vocal minority of easily excitable immature zealots, should you hate them so much to avoid using the same software they do? Keep in mind that every operating system (including Windows), political or religious belief system, country, state, race, etc. has a similar gang of loud idiots who can make the whole group look bad if you're foolish enough to pay attention to them.
People can remove Linux for good reason, too. It might be too difficult, it might not run software you need, it might not work with hardware or peripherals you have. "The people at work are picking on me" is not a good reason; it suggests you need to find a new job, not a new OS.
I assisted with moving a satellite command console and some related software from Motif to Tcl/Tk (as an interface wrapped around C, of course; Tcl is horrible for writing large programs in, but it interfaces to your existing code quite easily with a thin GUI layer).
The Motif code was ten times larger and five times buggier for the same functionality. Maybe you could write a useable GUI library based on Motif, but in that case why not start with Xt or Xlib and write something better? Or use Qt or GTK+, by people who already have started with Xlib and wrote something better.
...that RMS seems to base his philosophies off of the same "copyrights are wrong" idea that excites the "information wants to be free" dorks around Slashdot so much. At least Stallman is distinguished from all the warez dudes by actually having created valuable information himself, but that just makes it especially ironic, since he protects that information (both software and his writings) with a (lenient) copyright himself.
Frankly, if you don't like the fact that you can't press a thousand Metallica CDs for a few hundred bucks like you can with GPLed software, the solution is simple: use GPLed software, don't listen to Metallica. This is the same thing Slashdot tells clueless companies who bitch about how "restrictive" the GPL is when they're trying to treat free software like a candy pinata: if you don't like the terms an author sets on the use of his creation, don't use it. It's just as applicable in either case.
If the police pull someone over and there's a bag of crack on the car drivers seat, isn't that enough justification for them to search the trunk too?
If you've been robbed, and you have proof positive that the man down the street took one of your possessions, can you get a warrant for the police to search their house for the rest of your stuff?
Frankly, I'd like to see a few developers allowed by court order to go through the closed source Nvidia drivers at this point; after the obfuscated source drivers a while back I don't trust them as a company at all. A couple hundred lines of perl to pull out whitespace and find the longest matching substrings between two sets of text files, and maybe hours runtime to compare NVidia's drivers to the Linux kernel, Mesa, and Utah GLX (are these GPLed?) drivers...
I'd wager money that there are more violations where we can't see them, and where they'll never be fixed, because Nvidia won't give a damn until they're caught.
there is an even easier solution to the potential depletion of earth's resources: stop friggin using them
Wonderful. And for all the people (you're almost certainly one of them) whose survival depends on large quantities of air-conditioned, truck-delivered food grown from chemical fertilizers with factory-machined farming equipment, should they be euthanized or allowed to starve naturally?
And we're just talking human survival, here; man does not live by bread alone. Why not do us and mother earth a favor and turn off your computer first?
You slashdot people need to put down the lame Science Fiction crap and put you big heads together and look for smarter solutions Here on our planet.
Shouldn't this be part of a rant at some latte-sipping poetry reading or hippie protest group somewhere? Sending your technophobia across a world-girdling computer network is riskier; someone might notice your hypocrisy showing.
People are naive is they simply think that we are just going to move to another planet
No, not move, expand to another planet. We've got a nice one right here that's worth keeping.
And who said anything about planets? This is an asteroid discussion, remember? The sun releases more energy every millisecond than humanity has used throughout history, and most of it never goes anywhere near a planet.
when we burn this one out.
Apocalyptic environmentalism is so much safer than apocalyptic religion; there's so much less pressure to set a date for that rapidly approaching doom, so you don't get disappointed when said dates pass you by.
...they'd probably shatter it so it wouldn't do any harm.
Honestly, could they have picked a worse way to end this trial? Even giving them nothing more than another slap on the wrist and another "no more anticompetitive practices for you" order would have been better, as Microsoft would have then been more likely to continue futilely bashing it's head against Sun and IBM on the high end while getting eaten away by free software on the low end.
I'm sure there are anti-Microsoft fanatics out here who are happy to see Bill get his comeuppance, but think about it. The last thing people who hate Microsoft should want to see is more Microsofts. Sure, they'll only have a few billion dollars in cash a piece, and they'll only have part of the Microsoft software line... so what? Does anyone really expect the corporate culture to change instantly because they're under different names? Will we see Office for Linux now? No.
What we will see is Microsoft forceably saved from it's biggest danger - corporate bloat and sluggishness. I heard someone use the analogy of cutting up a starfish; it doesn't kill the starfish, it just makes more of them. Basically this just drastically reduces the chances that we'll get to see Win32 fade away and see POSIX/X standards develop as a permanent way of ensuring that consumers are never locked into one company's monopoly.
It also sets a hell of a precedent. The original reason for going after Microsoft was bundling IE with Windows, remember? WTF? Should Red Hat be prosecuted for bundling Netscape (and Apache, and a whole lot of other things that are even less "a part of the operating system" than a web browser) with their Linux distribution? Look for the "Federal Software Guidelines and Regulations" series of 1000 page books to start appearing in university libraries everywhere, on the same floor that's filled with all the other selectively-enforced laws and executive orders of similar titles. Hope you included a nice hefty legal budget in your startup's business plan.
I use Linux, not because I think Microsoft is a horrible monopoly, because I don't want to pay for Windows, or even because Windows crashed on me every week and needed to be reinstalled every year when I did use it. Well, actually that last one was a biggie. I use Linux because it has greater capabilities, cleaner code and APIs, and because it gives me more choices of kernel (I could move to a BSD or even a recent commercial Unix without much upset), user interface (some of which I like better than Windows, although Explorer is good), and applications. I don't have to worry that the programs and documents I produce today will be obsolete tomorrow like thousands of Win16 programs and Win* file formats are today. I don't have to worry that Linux is going to get worse or stagnant (when do we get a non-DOS based, stable consumer OS from Microsoft, exactly? Even Win2K doesn't seem any more stable than NT), because there are so many Linux options to choose from, so when Slackware or SuSE falters moving to Mandrake or Debian isn't the end of the world.
But that's not why everyone uses Linux. A lot of people avoid Microsoft because of their outrageous pricing (have you looked at buying a non-OEM license on anything from Microsoft lately?) and instability. Some people switch from Windows because Linux is better on a relative scale; I think most switch because Windows isn't good enough in the absolute sense.
With a Microsoft breakup, that won't be the case. Windows may get cheaper and more stable... not enough to satisfy anyone who has used free software, but enough to slow the expansion of Linux on the desktop, enough to give it a new shot at taking over the embedded and server markets. It may still not be a quality product... but that never stopped McDonalds. People like familiarity too.
Hm. Well, that's my rant for today. I got one hour of sleep last night, and it looks like it shows. I hope there was some coherent logic up there; but basically I'm trying to get across the concept "Microsoft breakup == bad".
The 1024 cylinder limit isn't something that the LILO author made up because he was a lousy designer, it's a limit that PC BIOSes have because they were created by lousy designers. Does LILO not need the BIOS anymore? Did they fit an IDE driver on the master boot record?
Do you need an SMP system? Then you have to get a PIII. Is 90% of your work done with an SSE-enabled, non 3DNow enabled app? Then you want to get a PIII. This probably adds up to less than 5% of the computer buying public, so the continued high prices and good marketshare of the PIII baffle me. Intel marketing, I guess.
At the moment the Athlon line is significantly (more than a hundred dollars, even including a more expensive high-end Athlon mobo) cheaper at all performance levels, and considering availability of GHz chips the Athlon line has the highest performance level.
Now Athlon vs. Celeron vs. K6II, that's where you've got a few good choices and want to consider your individual needs. Most people today would be happier with a K6II300 and a DSL connection than they would be with a PIII850 and a modem... but thanks to marketing, they don't realize it.
I don't think using MaPlay code to play MP3 files instead of WAV files justifies that an entire game's source tree must be GPL'd.
In that case, don't use MaPlay code to play MP3 files. What makes you think you have "justified" rights to this persons code in the first place? By releasing it under the GPL instead of the usual Windows shareware, he's giving you more rights to that code than you would normally have; but he hasn't made it public domain. Taking his code and using it for things not covered by the GPL (whether linking it into your game, calling it as a DLL, etc) is not allowed by that license.
That said, you have a few options:
Option 1: Write a separate executable program which plays MP3 files using the MaPlay source code. Release this program's entire source code under the GPL. Use this program from your closed source game, either by executing it each time you want to play an MP3 or (more efficient for frequent small MP3 playing) by leaving it blocking on IPC in the background until your game sends it a "play this" signal. This is how GIMP can be GPLed but still allow proprietary plugins.
Option 2:
Ask the original author(s) to use the code under a different license. It's their copyright; if you have their permission you can turn their code into an LGPL'ed DLL, into a closed source module, or whatever you want. Odds are 95% good that the authors will be fine with this, but you should get their permission first anyway; simply doing it and hoping they don't sue would be... distasteful, to say the least.
For example, my favorite email client, mutt, has absolutely no chance of propogating a Melissa-style virus.
Are you sure? Even pine was exploitable once via a bug in/etc/mailcap. I think mutt had a workaround until mailcap was fixed, but I don't know whether that workaround was just preemptive caution or whether mutt was vulnerable too.
Although, technically, this isn't a "Melissa-style virus". Melissa required you to open a word file. The mailcap exploit would have just required you to read your mail.
The first damaging Linux virus won't be spread by infected warez or email trojans run by clueless users. It'll be a simple root exploit that propagates itself.
If you're running a promiscuous system of network daemons (and too many people are: I'd wager the ratio of people running imapd to people who need to be running imapd is 100+) then you're probably susceptable to a new root exploit every year or so. If you don't update your system regularly (and that probably includes every newbie Linux user) then you stay susceptable for a long time. If you fit both those categories, then you're a target; and since most newbies installed a distribution whose default configuration has everything turned on, there are a big pool of targets out there.
There was a worm that used the imapd exploit, something like a year after the exploit was discovered and fixed, and it still managed to do some damage. What happens when an aspiring young virus writer prebuilds the framework for a worm, then starts plugging in the exploit of the month and sending it out each time a new vulnerability comes out? If you're subscribed to a security list, using MandrakeUpdate or up2date, or otherwise keeping current, you're probably fine. If not... well, such a worm would find a lot of food.
And now that Linux is becoming a more tempting target (lots of cocky "Linux viruses are impossible" users out there, lots more cluebies to offend the l33t virus writers with their presence, lots more users on fat, useful cable modems or university connections, and just lots more users total), such a scenario becomes more and more likely.
RedHat needs to decide - server/workstation/desktop/beowulf?
Should Red Hat be a server, a workstation, a desktop, or a beowulf system? Yes.
Re:There's a BIG problem with WorkSpot
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Update On WorkSpot
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· Score: 4
As long as the script doesn't assign UID '0' it should be OK. There's nothing special about the username 'root' other than the fact that most of the time it is attached to UID '0':-)
Are you sure that's the only thing that's special? I suspect that if that script ran "passwd root", the effects would qualify as "special".
What if there was some way that you could buy the rights to the MP3s of a record?
There is. You buy the record.
You then have the right to possess and listen to tapes dubbed from that record, CDs sampled from that record, MP3s encoded from that record, or whatever other format you think is most convenient.
A few things in response to the various opinions I've seen posted so far:
Yes, it is NVidia's right to release binary-only Linux drivers, or even to not release any drivers at all. It would also be their right to not produce enough video cards to fill market demand, to produce cards with blurry video quality, or to produce only video cards to sell for $800 a pop. They don't do any of those things because it causes them to lose customers, and that's a big reason why they shouldn't keep their driver source code and programming specs a secret either.
NVidia is losing customers this way - and I'm not just talking about the die-hard Linux geeks like myself and regular Slashdot posters. I have a diehard gamer friend who bought a $350 DDR GeForce, had to return it when the hardware died quickly, and is planning to get a G400Max or G800 instead, because the limitation of having to play at "low" (below 1024x768) resolutions to get a high frame rate was outweighed by the limitation of having to deal with Windows every time he wanted to play Quake 3.
NVidia will be losing opening markets, too. Embedded devices and set tops are looking better and better, now that there's a good operating system to use with them. And while the TNT2 may be the chipset of choice for Windows, it just doesn't cut it compared to what Matrox, ATI, and 3Dfx will let you put in a Linux box. Sure, NVidia's next chipset will go in Microsoft's XBox when that comes out in 2 years, running an operating system "derived from Windows 2000". Does anyone believe any Microsoft promises made one year in advance anymore, much less promises made two years in advance regarding Windows 2000??? I've got this bridge I'd like to sell you...
But regarding the XBox, Microsoft didn't pick an NVidia chipset because they wanted to "cut a deal" and get NVidia to screw Linux users. They did it because NVidia has the fastest video cards available for current PC games, and has the fastest chip bar none for future high-polygon 3D games.
Yes, NVidia's heard the "open source is good for hardware manufacturer" line a thousand times already. They'll hear it a thousand times more before they get it, if that's what it takes. Matrox, Adaptec, Creative Labs, ATI, all of them were in the "we can't release our precious register specs" stage for some point, or for years. But we now have open source drivers for all of them for their leading products. NVidia will concede eventually; it's just a question of whether the resulting drivers will be supporting Quake 3 or Quake 5.
The fact that the NVidia modules won't be using DRI is important. It means they won't be benefitting from the kernel DRI support, from future improvements to the infrastructure (and even Windows closed source drivers don't see the speed of improvement that Linux free software does; Linux closed source drivers can only be worse than both), from things like multihead support as the article here mentions...
And most importantly to me, it means that we'll have a binary-only program banging directly on our hardware. That means NVidia owners won't be able to count on 100% Linux stability, that means SMP users will be even less likely to have bug-free drivers, and that means that security-conscious NVidia users will never be able to turn off module loading and direct memory access to prevent intruders from modifying the kernel.
Well, enough rambling. I guess from my perspective it's probably a good thing; if NVidia had good (read: nonobfuscated, using DMA, starting to use hardware T&L) open source GLX drivers for the GeForce (even if they hadn't been moved to DRI yet) I would have blown hundreds of dollars on a DDR card months ago.
Who was it that said, "99% of science fiction is crap, but 99% of everything is crap."? I think it applies here too.
Publishers don't publish everything they're sent for a reason, and I don't have the time or desire to want to read through their slush piles searching for the occasional gem.
Agreed. Although amateur fiction can be fun, provided you get a little more creative with it than just reading it instead of professional stuff because it's online. My girlfriend used to write serialized, multi-person stories with one of the online groups on "alt.starfleet.rpg"; the writing varied from excellent to mediocre, but it was still more fun than simply reading a book because of the personal involvement. It wasn't quite real-time enough to be a role playing game (since you had to do a lot of playing of everyone else's roles too), but it was a lot more than a static story.
It would have been nice if Katz had found a few similar examples of publishing changed by the net, rather than just bitching about ebooks.
Neither do I want most netizens going through the slush pile to supposedly decide what's worth publishing.
I disagree. You could call it the "Audience Lifeline" effect (although I fear that reveals too much about my entertainment habits; what were you saying about "overcooked turnips"?):
If you get enough people to vote on a question, the people who are wrong will often be wrong in random ways and cancel each others votes out, leaving the right answer to take a (however slim) majority. Yeah, I know, it doesn't always work. But it works pretty well on Slashdot, where the moderation system takes a sea of crap and filters out the dozen or so +4,+5 posts that are a pleasure to read.
It seems almost axiomatic that a peer-review based filtering system will rate those books most highly that will be enjoyed by the most people, and if you don't think that's the ideal way for publishing to work then you're going to have to do some talking to persuade me toward your definition of "ideal".
Of course, on a personal scale there's the problem that my tastes probably don't agree with the majority of the population, netizen or otherwise. (although I'll bet the internet users come a lot closer) Isn't that a problem with traditional publishing as well? Publishers aren't looking primarily for manuscripts that are of the highest literary quality, they're looking for manuscripts that are going to sell enough books to pay their way. And so that just boils down to a majority vote too; just a lot more indirect.
The only problem with peer review of literature on the net is a big one: It doesn't exist. Or if it exists, I certainly haven't discovered it. Where is a website that has a database of links to online fiction, a login procedure to let me score anything I've read from 1-10 or add comments, and sorting functions to let me find what fiction is out there which matches my tastes and is highly rated?
If such a thing exists and I just haven't seen it, by all means post it here (and make it obvious in the subject title; it'd be horribly ironic if such a link wasn't moderated up...)
Well, if it doesn't exist now, it will eventually. And when it does, I'd expect to see the quality of online fiction go up with it. Hell, even the quality of the best slashdot posts went up suddenly after moderation was implemented (although the amount of crap has been increasing for years to balance it out). People would be a lot more eager to write things for the web if they knew that there was a good chance that their work would be noticed, pushed to the forefront of people's attention based on merit, and attract thousands of readers (and maybe a few publishers) to your name. Even writers who wouldn't have given the net a second glance otherwise would want to publish stories online under such a system; a high rating by hundreds of interested readers (and a log with thousands of hits) would be a powerful thing to show to the publisher you're trying to sell a book to.
You think that good games today are often linear because a linear storyline allows the author to control the temp of exposition? That may be true (although the "I need to take a break and rack up XP/GP" interludes in the Final Fantasy games certainly destroyed the story tempo without harming the story line much), but only in the sense that "holding my hand out the window increases drag on my car" is true - it's lost in the noise of a much bigger effect: making a truely interactive game is *just too hard*.
Making a more interactive game requires you to give the player more choices. Each time the player gets to make a choice, the gameplay "branchs" into at least two new games. Assuming you want each of those potential games to be just as fun as your original, less interactive game, you're going to have to have them be just as long, and just as detailed. How do you do this?
Note: the following discussion is oversimplified. I hope it still gets the point across.
Well, in a sports game, or a first person shooter, or just about anything in the "action" genre, you have the computer run a simulated world, where little or none of the gameplay is scripted. You create a set of physics rules and AI rules that give the computer an initial value problem to solve, and at each moment in time you present the user with graphics corresponding to the solution, and get new input to change the physical parameters.
In a role-playing game (and any computer game which involves "story telling" is basically either a role-playing game or a movie), you don't have this option. Story telling requires a story, a stream of language, and we simply can't program a computer to generate a stream of convincingly humanlike language on the fly. If someone out there could create an AI that could play the part of a lifelike non player character in a computer game, they'd basically be passing a limited Turing test. It would be even more strict a requirement than passing a Turing test, because you would have to program the AI to appear human *and* to play his required part in the story, no matter what twisted directions the player might turn the story in.
So what do we do instead? We have the AI follow a tree of player actions/statements and responses. If the player asks question A, respond with answer A. Question B elicits answer B. Etc.
As far as these questions and answers don't affect the game state, that's fine. But that's a limited level of interactivity. When I think of a game as being "non-linear" and "interactive", by that I mean that I can make decisions which will change the outcome of the game. And two different outcomes means two different streams of story. If that game-changing decision comes in the middle of the game, then you have to worry about twice as many endings and 150% as much story. If you have 30 game-changing decisions (which in today's 30+ hour role playing games wouldn't be unreasonable), then that means one billion different endings and 70 million times as much work. Obviously this is ridiculous; there's going to be a huge amount of overlap between those different possible games, but play with some numbers yourself; what do you consider to be a "reasonable" interactive game?
Off the top of my head, I'd say 50 2-way decision points, with 10 percent of the subsequent game text changed by each decision. That means writing 25 times as much text as a linear game of the same length and quality. And that text would be harder to write, too, with loads of different options to worry about for each plotline thread. The more you try to "cheat" by making different choices similar or by making fewer choices, the less interactive the game feels. The more you try to "cheat" by having less text, the lower quality the story feels. Writing an interactive, non-linear story is *hard* - the best examples of it are the Choose Your Own Adventure books, not video games, and that's kind of sad.
I fear we don't; like a Mars landing, we've had the technology for decades but the political obstacles are insurmountable.
If you believe the most die-hard grassroots space advocates, the controversial question is no longer "Are expenditures on NASA programs more beneficial for space development than money going directly to tax breaks on orbital R&D and industry?" the controversial question is "Are expenditures on NASA programs more beneficial for space development than setting money on fire?"
It's horrifying that we're spending billions of dollars per year on Space Shuttle "operations", and a billion dollars on the worst submission (currently falling behind schedule, over weight, and over budget as you read this) for the X-33 project, while companies like Kistler Aerospace and Rotary Rocket are stalling on creating the world's first truely reusable orbital rockets because they can't raise a fraction of that money in investments.
It's shameful that they never bothered to even build a second DC-X rocket after NASA took over the program and crashed the first one.
On the one hand, NASA keeps lots of aerospace engineers employed doing something; on the other hand that something is arguably much less efficient than what they would be doing in more dynamic private companies.
On the one hand, NASA is a nice customer for the big commercial aerospace companies' rockets; on the other hand, the government is a hell of a competitor to explain to potential investors in aerospace start-up companies.
And now NASA says we don't have the technology to put an Earth Return Vehicle on Mars capable of lifting a few pounds of rocks, less than a month after Scientific American spent an article detailing plans (specifically Robert Zubrin's Mars Direct Plan outlined in The Case For Mars and NASA's Mars Semi-Direct modification) which would put humans on Mars (and leave infrastructure there, unlike Apollo) in this decade for less money than we spend on the Shuttle and ISS.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I know I'm not the only one saying it, but I don't see enough posts saying it yet:
Thanks for releasing your CGI code, and double thanks for getting the running code and the public source in sync.
I was one of the more annoyingly whiny complainers before the 0.9 slash release; here's hoping that now that both the slash code and school are out I can do something with it this summer..
If EBay wants to stop a particular client from using it's services, they hardly need to go to court to do it! They can weed out requests based on browser IP, based on whether the client is a spider (robots.txt), based on click-thru agreements...
Basically, imagine that every day, I ask you for a few dollars and you give it to me. Should you then take me to court to force me to stop asking? No! You should just stop handing me your money!
If EBay has such a system in place, and BiddersEdge is ignoring robots.txt, lying about it's client type, or otherwise circumventing it, then fine, moderate this to (-1, Idiot)... but it's late, I'm too lazy to read the article before going to bed, and I've used EBay once or twice without them asking to make sure I wasn't a competitor first.
It's all X's fault. That said, having a networked client/server GUI beats the shit out of a single-user, single desktop GUI anytime.
It's a shame you can't mod and post in the same story; I'd like to be able to both negate the "insightful" rating and explain why it's BS.
Take a look at the drivers they used. Not a one of them sends data over the X pipe. The X server basically is there to say, "yeah, you can bang directly on the hardware" and then get out of the way.
If they were sending data over the X pipe, you'd definitely know it. 3D hardware acceleration is often bandwidth limited; you could get up to a 50% drop in framerate without direct rendering. Smart design would reduce this problem, but I still suspect you'd see 70% optimal framerate, max... and in the LinuxGames tests, 70% was the worst case, not the best.
What was the best case? 99% framerate. This suggests to me that it's not idle processes or the kernel hogging CPU, it's not any weirdness from X or kswapd... it's just that some drivers are better than others. And right now, it looks like Windows drivers are 5% to 40% better than Linux drivers. Frankly, since Windows sales are 500% to 40000% better than Linux sales, I'm not complaining about driver quality.
I am surprised to see the 3Dfx drivers do so poorly, though. Isn't anyone helping out Daryll Strauss now that we've got source code available?
But of course, just how much can you trust the benchmarks? They ran it on one game, using a particular configuration, for a specific kernel.
Well, aside from the usual difficulties, there was one special case; the Matrox testing was done using full OpenGL drivers under Linux and a specific Quake 3 "TurboGL" driver under Windows; TurboGL drivers are Matrox's OpenGL subsets designed to run one game per DLL. In fact, the TurboGL driver postdates the Linux Mesa drivers; at one time (and probably still) the Linux implementation was significantly faster than the full Matrox OpenGL.
Slashdot is the worst pile of a web site I have ever seen.
Don't web surf much, do you?
There are tens of millions of web sites out there, most of which have much lower quality, smaller audiences, and less content than Slashdot.
Oh... but you didn't mean "worst" == "lowest quality", did you? You mean "worst" == "most thousands of readers who think you trolls are childish idiots, and tell you so."
Anyone want to speculate what damages Microsoft will ask for?
Sure: Slashdot will remove the one or two posts that were verbatim copies of the pseudo-kerberos spec, will stand firm on the rest, and Microsoft will back down rather than incur more horrible PR.
Wow, you guys lost a lot of money in the past few months eh?
No, they didn't. Anyone with any sense knew that the RHAT, LNUX, and ANDN stock prices were a bubble, and sold what they could at the top of the bubble to fad speculators. As for those principal shareholders who couldn't sell without losing control of the company, their stock prices are still trading higher than their first indicated IPO price.
Microsoft is valued at 100 times you losers.
And by emotionally attaching yourself to their financial success you somehow shield your ego from your own personal and social failures?
That's just my theory; otherwise I don't see how that sentence was relevant. In theory the judge doesn't ask both parties how much their market value is before making a decision.
MSFT could aquire LNUX 100 times over if they wanted to but they dont.
No, they couldn't. They could afford to acquire LNUX, and could make a private offer the same way they tried to buy linux.com. They could not acquire VA Linux for the same reason they couldn't acquire linux.com: because the owners wouldn't sell to Microsoft.
BECAUSE LINUX SUCKS AND SO DOES SLASHDOT!
I know in my heart that you're just trolling and trying to bait people like me... but part of me fears you're serious. If so, I would suggest that you step away from the computer, and attempt a long period of social interaction. Try to make a friend, or even a girlfriend (but don't tell her that you are a "troll" or that your name is "Dr Kool"). Try to avoid screaming angrily about things that don't concern you, and instead avoid things like "Linux" that seem to be stress factors for you. You'll be happier, and live longer.
Oh, and if you moderate this down, it will be proof that you nazis are trying to stop the flow of information.
You seem to be unclear on the concept of "moderation", the English language, or both. First of all, you continue to use the pronoun "you" even though the audience you are apparantly addressing has changed from the Slashdot employees to the moderators (current moderators? all past moderators? do you understand the difference?). Secondly, you seem to be unaware that "moderating down" a post does not stop any information; even posts moderated to -1, or even those that the Slashdot employees have moderated lower in the past, are still accessable by anyone who desires to read them. Ironically, that universal accessibility is what Microsoft wants to prevent, not Slashdot.
I really hope some trained psychologist takes a look through Slashdot archives someday. There are a plethora of angry, immature individuals like yourself here with a long record of antisocial behavior that is analogous to the real juvenile delinquency increasing around the nation.
But enough feeding the trolls. I suspect you've already been moderated down as you should have been (and as I probably should be, unless "Funny" or "Insightful" cancels out "Offtopic"), and nobody will ever read this. There's just something about that combination of stupidity and arrogance that tweaks a nerve in me.
It's ironic, so shortly after the ILOVEYOU virus, that Microsoft still apparantly expects every single user out there to run random executable files to view a simple document! If everybody tried explicitly opening all attachments with Notepad and tried opening all .exe downloads with Winzip, the world would be a lot safer from million-infection computer viruses.
.zip. Someone here said it was a RAR archive, but the only "unrar" program I could find for Linux (binary-only freeware? I feel dirty...) wouldn't open it. Anyone know of Linux tools that will? I'm certainly not going to run it through Wine...
I'm annoyed, however: kerbspec.exe (wow, and they still use those 8.3 filenames, too) isn't a self-extracting
Why not simply use unix filesystem for the unix machines, and NTFS for the Windows ones ?
It's a shame, when most moderators can't figure out the moderation choices already out there (hint: Insightful, Interesting, and Informative are orthogonal concepts), that we'd need to add even more options to make the system thorough.
The above post, for example, was not flamebait. It probably wasn't a troll, either. It is, however, annoying to read the authoritative-sounding opinion of someone who doesn't appear to understand the difference between a block filesystem and a network filesystem. I suppose Flamebait was used in lieu of "Clueless+arrogant"?
I honestly think the safest policy for GPLware would be to ship it as source code only, saying "Here's some code you might be able to make an application out of."
You (I'm using the theoretical, general sense of the word) can bootstrap-install any of the Linux distributions from source tarballs, source RPMs, etc with nothing but a C compiler capable of compiling gcc... but I wouldn't want to.
And I don't see the point. The current statement of most software vendors, "Here's some binary code you might be able to run," seems almost equivalent.
Surely nobody here thinks that a company should be able to sue Linus if their server dies with a kernel panic; the GPL disclaims all warranty, liability, etc. for free software placed under that license, just like the Microsoft EULA.
So how much does a software owner have to charge for a license before they have to be liable for any and all damages caused by someone using it?
Even software makers who are willing to put their money where their mouth is usually give a list of medical, nuclear, etc. applications where that liability doesn't apply. If some idiot tries to put embedded NT into a life support system, should Microsoft be liable when it bluescreens?
I actually removed Linux from my work machine, because the guys kept calling me a "Linux zealot" and an "open source fantic".
And which middle school did you say you worked at? It's a shame peer pressure is so bad there; I hope you manage to stick up for yourself better when they start pushing drugs.
What other things of merit do you avoid because the Roseanne Barr fans of the world don't understand or enjoy them? There's a wonderful world out there which exists outside of the commercial, least common denominator, predigested pap which snags the biggest wedge of the marketing pie charts.
I don't think Linux, for example is for everyone, or even for a large minority everyone, and it will be years before it is. But is that any reason for those of us who are more comfortable with computers and more demanding of our software to avoid using it today? And if among those users are a vocal minority of easily excitable immature zealots, should you hate them so much to avoid using the same software they do? Keep in mind that every operating system (including Windows), political or religious belief system, country, state, race, etc. has a similar gang of loud idiots who can make the whole group look bad if you're foolish enough to pay attention to them.
People can remove Linux for good reason, too. It might be too difficult, it might not run software you need, it might not work with hardware or peripherals you have. "The people at work are picking on me" is not a good reason; it suggests you need to find a new job, not a new OS.
I assisted with moving a satellite command console and some related software from Motif to Tcl/Tk (as an interface wrapped around C, of course; Tcl is horrible for writing large programs in, but it interfaces to your existing code quite easily with a thin GUI layer).
The Motif code was ten times larger and five times buggier for the same functionality. Maybe you could write a useable GUI library based on Motif, but in that case why not start with Xt or Xlib and write something better? Or use Qt or GTK+, by people who already have started with Xlib and wrote something better.
...that RMS seems to base his philosophies off of the same "copyrights are wrong" idea that excites the "information wants to be free" dorks around Slashdot so much. At least Stallman is distinguished from all the warez dudes by actually having created valuable information himself, but that just makes it especially ironic, since he protects that information (both software and his writings) with a (lenient) copyright himself.
Frankly, if you don't like the fact that you can't press a thousand Metallica CDs for a few hundred bucks like you can with GPLed software, the solution is simple: use GPLed software, don't listen to Metallica. This is the same thing Slashdot tells clueless companies who bitch about how "restrictive" the GPL is when they're trying to treat free software like a candy pinata: if you don't like the terms an author sets on the use of his creation, don't use it. It's just as applicable in either case.
If the police pull someone over and there's a bag of crack on the car drivers seat, isn't that enough justification for them to search the trunk too?
If you've been robbed, and you have proof positive that the man down the street took one of your possessions, can you get a warrant for the police to search their house for the rest of your stuff?
Frankly, I'd like to see a few developers allowed by court order to go through the closed source Nvidia drivers at this point; after the obfuscated source drivers a while back I don't trust them as a company at all. A couple hundred lines of perl to pull out whitespace and find the longest matching substrings between two sets of text files, and maybe hours runtime to compare NVidia's drivers to the Linux kernel, Mesa, and Utah GLX (are these GPLed?) drivers...
I'd wager money that there are more violations where we can't see them, and where they'll never be fixed, because Nvidia won't give a damn until they're caught.
there is an even easier solution to the potential depletion of earth's resources: stop friggin using them
Wonderful. And for all the people (you're almost certainly one of them) whose survival depends on large quantities of air-conditioned, truck-delivered food grown from chemical fertilizers with factory-machined farming equipment, should they be euthanized or allowed to starve naturally?
And we're just talking human survival, here; man does not live by bread alone. Why not do us and mother earth a favor and turn off your computer first?
You slashdot people need to put down the lame Science Fiction crap and put you big heads together and look for smarter solutions Here on our planet.
Shouldn't this be part of a rant at some latte-sipping poetry reading or hippie protest group somewhere? Sending your technophobia across a world-girdling computer network is riskier; someone might notice your hypocrisy showing.
People are naive is they simply think that we are just going to move to another planet
No, not move, expand to another planet. We've got a nice one right here that's worth keeping.
And who said anything about planets? This is an asteroid discussion, remember? The sun releases more energy every millisecond than humanity has used throughout history, and most of it never goes anywhere near a planet.
when we burn this one out.
Apocalyptic environmentalism is so much safer than apocalyptic religion; there's so much less pressure to set a date for that rapidly approaching doom, so you don't get disappointed when said dates pass you by.
...they'd probably shatter it so it wouldn't do any harm.
Honestly, could they have picked a worse way to end this trial? Even giving them nothing more than another slap on the wrist and another "no more anticompetitive practices for you" order would have been better, as Microsoft would have then been more likely to continue futilely bashing it's head against Sun and IBM on the high end while getting eaten away by free software on the low end.
I'm sure there are anti-Microsoft fanatics out here who are happy to see Bill get his comeuppance, but think about it. The last thing people who hate Microsoft should want to see is more Microsofts. Sure, they'll only have a few billion dollars in cash a piece, and they'll only have part of the Microsoft software line... so what? Does anyone really expect the corporate culture to change instantly because they're under different names? Will we see Office for Linux now? No.
What we will see is Microsoft forceably saved from it's biggest danger - corporate bloat and sluggishness. I heard someone use the analogy of cutting up a starfish; it doesn't kill the starfish, it just makes more of them. Basically this just drastically reduces the chances that we'll get to see Win32 fade away and see POSIX/X standards develop as a permanent way of ensuring that consumers are never locked into one company's monopoly.
It also sets a hell of a precedent. The original reason for going after Microsoft was bundling IE with Windows, remember? WTF? Should Red Hat be prosecuted for bundling Netscape (and Apache, and a whole lot of other things that are even less "a part of the operating system" than a web browser) with their Linux distribution? Look for the
"Federal Software Guidelines and Regulations" series of 1000 page books to start appearing in university libraries everywhere, on the same floor that's filled with all the other selectively-enforced laws and executive orders of similar titles. Hope you included a nice hefty legal budget in your startup's business plan.
I use Linux, not because I think Microsoft is a horrible monopoly, because I don't want to pay for Windows, or even because Windows crashed on me every week and needed to be reinstalled every year when I did use it. Well, actually that last one was a biggie. I use Linux because it has greater capabilities, cleaner code and APIs, and because it gives me more choices of kernel (I could move to a BSD or even a recent commercial Unix without much upset), user interface (some of which I like better than Windows, although Explorer is good), and applications. I don't have to worry that the programs and documents I produce today will be obsolete tomorrow like thousands of Win16 programs and Win* file formats are today. I don't have to worry that Linux is going to get worse or stagnant (when do we get a non-DOS based, stable consumer OS from Microsoft, exactly? Even Win2K doesn't seem any more stable than NT), because there are so many Linux options to choose from, so when Slackware or SuSE falters moving to Mandrake or Debian isn't the end of the world.
But that's not why everyone uses Linux. A lot of people avoid Microsoft because of their outrageous pricing (have you looked at buying a non-OEM license on anything from Microsoft lately?) and instability. Some people switch from Windows because Linux is better on a relative scale; I think most switch because Windows isn't good enough in the absolute sense.
With a Microsoft breakup, that won't be the case. Windows may get cheaper and more stable... not enough to satisfy anyone who has used free software, but enough to slow the expansion of Linux on the desktop, enough to give it a new shot at taking over the embedded and server markets. It may still not be a quality product... but that never stopped McDonalds. People like familiarity too.
Hm. Well, that's my rant for today. I got one hour of sleep last night, and it looks like it shows. I hope there was some coherent logic up there; but basically I'm trying to get across the concept "Microsoft breakup == bad".
The 1024 cylinder limit isn't something that the LILO author made up because he was a lousy designer, it's a limit that PC BIOSes have because they were created by lousy designers. Does LILO not need the BIOS anymore? Did they fit an IDE driver on the master boot record?
Do you need an SMP system? Then you have to get a PIII. Is 90% of your work done with an SSE-enabled, non 3DNow enabled app? Then you want to get a PIII. This probably adds up to less than 5% of the computer buying public, so the continued high prices and good marketshare of the PIII baffle me. Intel marketing, I guess.
At the moment the Athlon line is significantly (more than a hundred dollars, even including a more expensive high-end Athlon mobo) cheaper at all performance levels, and considering availability of GHz chips the Athlon line has the highest performance level.
Now Athlon vs. Celeron vs. K6II, that's where you've got a few good choices and want to consider your individual needs. Most people today would be happier with a K6II300 and a DSL connection than they would be with a PIII850 and a modem... but thanks to marketing, they don't realize it.
I don't think using MaPlay code to play MP3 files instead of WAV files justifies that an entire game's source tree must be GPL'd.
In that case, don't use MaPlay code to play MP3 files. What makes you think you have "justified" rights to this persons code in the first place? By releasing it under the GPL instead of the usual Windows shareware, he's giving you more rights to that code than you would normally have; but he hasn't made it public domain. Taking his code and using it for things not covered by the GPL (whether linking it into your game, calling it as a DLL, etc) is not allowed by that license.
That said, you have a few options:
Option 1: Write a separate executable program which plays MP3 files using the MaPlay source code. Release this program's entire source code under the GPL. Use this program from your closed source game, either by executing it each time you want to play an MP3 or (more efficient for frequent small MP3 playing) by leaving it blocking on IPC in the background until your game sends it a "play this" signal. This is how GIMP can be GPLed but still allow proprietary plugins.
Option 2:
Ask the original author(s) to use the code under a different license. It's their copyright; if you have their permission you can turn their code into an LGPL'ed DLL, into a closed source module, or whatever you want. Odds are 95% good that the authors will be fine with this, but you should get their permission first anyway; simply doing it and hoping they don't sue would be... distasteful, to say the least.
For example, my favorite email client, mutt, has absolutely no chance of propogating a Melissa-style virus.
/etc/mailcap. I think mutt had a workaround until mailcap was fixed, but I don't know whether that workaround was just preemptive caution or whether mutt was vulnerable too.
Are you sure? Even pine was exploitable once via a bug in
Although, technically, this isn't a "Melissa-style virus". Melissa required you to open a word file. The mailcap exploit would have just required you to read your mail.
The first damaging Linux virus won't be spread by infected warez or email trojans run by clueless users. It'll be a simple root exploit that propagates itself.
If you're running a promiscuous system of network daemons (and too many people are: I'd wager the ratio of people running imapd to people who need to be running imapd is 100+) then you're probably susceptable to a new root exploit every year or so. If you don't update your system regularly (and that probably includes every newbie Linux user) then you stay susceptable for a long time. If you fit both those categories, then you're a target; and since most newbies installed a distribution whose default configuration has everything turned on, there are a big pool of targets out there.
There was a worm that used the imapd exploit, something like a year after the exploit was discovered and fixed, and it still managed to do some damage. What happens when an aspiring young virus writer prebuilds the framework for a worm, then starts plugging in the exploit of the month and sending it out each time a new vulnerability comes out? If you're subscribed to a security list, using MandrakeUpdate or up2date, or otherwise keeping current, you're probably fine. If not... well, such a worm would find a lot of food.
And now that Linux is becoming a more tempting target (lots of cocky "Linux viruses are impossible" users out there, lots more cluebies to offend the l33t virus writers with their presence, lots more users on fat, useful cable modems or university connections, and just lots more users total), such a scenario becomes more and more likely.
RedHat needs to decide - server/workstation/desktop/beowulf?
Should Red Hat be a server, a workstation, a desktop, or a beowulf system? Yes.
As long as the script doesn't assign UID '0' it should be OK. There's nothing special about the username 'root' other than the fact that most of the time it is attached to UID '0' :-)
Are you sure that's the only thing that's special? I suspect that if that script ran "passwd root", the effects would qualify as "special".
What if there was some way that you could buy the rights to the MP3s of a record?
There is. You buy the record.
You then have the right to possess and listen to tapes dubbed from that record, CDs sampled from that record, MP3s encoded from that record, or whatever other format you think is most convenient.
A few things in response to the various opinions I've seen posted so far:
Yes, it is NVidia's right to release binary-only Linux drivers, or even to not release any drivers at all. It would also be their right to not produce enough video cards to fill market demand, to produce cards with blurry video quality, or to produce only video cards to sell for $800 a pop. They don't do any of those things because it causes them to lose customers, and that's a big reason why they shouldn't keep their driver source code and programming specs a secret either.
NVidia is losing customers this way - and I'm not just talking about the die-hard Linux geeks like myself and regular Slashdot posters. I have a diehard gamer friend who bought a $350 DDR GeForce, had to return it when the hardware died quickly, and is planning to get a G400Max or G800 instead, because the limitation of having to play at "low" (below 1024x768) resolutions to get a high frame rate was outweighed by the limitation of having to deal with Windows every time he wanted to play Quake 3.
NVidia will be losing opening markets, too. Embedded devices and set tops are looking better and better, now that there's a good operating system to use with them. And while the TNT2 may be the chipset of choice for Windows, it just doesn't cut it compared to what Matrox, ATI, and 3Dfx will let you put in a Linux box. Sure, NVidia's next chipset will go in Microsoft's XBox when that comes out in 2 years, running an operating system "derived from Windows 2000". Does anyone believe any Microsoft promises made one year in advance anymore, much less promises made two years in advance regarding Windows 2000??? I've got this bridge I'd like to sell you...
But regarding the XBox, Microsoft didn't pick an NVidia chipset because they wanted to "cut a deal" and get NVidia to screw Linux users. They did it because NVidia has the fastest video cards available for current PC games, and has the fastest chip bar none for future high-polygon 3D games.
Yes, NVidia's heard the "open source is good for hardware manufacturer" line a thousand times already. They'll hear it a thousand times more before they get it, if that's what it takes. Matrox, Adaptec, Creative Labs, ATI, all of them were in the "we can't release our precious register specs" stage for some point, or for years. But we now have open source drivers for all of them for their leading products. NVidia will concede eventually; it's just a question of whether the resulting drivers will be supporting Quake 3 or Quake 5.
The fact that the NVidia modules won't be using DRI is important. It means they won't be benefitting from the kernel DRI support, from future improvements to the infrastructure (and even Windows closed source drivers don't see the speed of improvement that Linux free software does; Linux closed source drivers can only be worse than both), from things like multihead support as the article here mentions...
And most importantly to me, it means that we'll have a binary-only program banging directly on our hardware. That means NVidia owners won't be able to count on 100% Linux stability, that means SMP users will be even less likely to have bug-free drivers, and that means that security-conscious NVidia users will never be able to turn off module loading and direct memory access to prevent intruders from modifying the kernel.
Well, enough rambling. I guess from my perspective it's probably a good thing; if NVidia had good (read: nonobfuscated, using DMA, starting to use hardware T&L) open source GLX drivers for the GeForce (even if they hadn't been moved to DRI yet) I would have blown hundreds of dollars on a DDR card months ago.
99% of the fiction on the web is crap.
Who was it that said, "99% of science fiction is crap, but 99% of everything is crap."? I think it applies here too.
Publishers don't publish everything they're sent for a reason, and I don't have the time or desire to want to read through their slush piles searching for the occasional gem.
Agreed. Although amateur fiction can be fun, provided you get a little more creative with it than just reading it instead of professional stuff because it's online. My girlfriend used to write serialized, multi-person stories with one of the online groups on "alt.starfleet.rpg"; the writing varied from excellent to mediocre, but it was still more fun than simply reading a book because of the personal involvement. It wasn't quite real-time enough to be a role playing game (since you had to do a lot of playing of everyone else's roles too), but it was a lot more than a static story.
It would have been nice if Katz had found a few similar examples of publishing changed by the net, rather than just bitching about ebooks.
Neither do I want most netizens going through the slush pile to supposedly decide what's worth publishing.
I disagree. You could call it the "Audience Lifeline" effect (although I fear that reveals too much about my entertainment habits; what were you saying about "overcooked turnips"?):
If you get enough people to vote on a question, the people who are wrong will often be wrong in random ways and cancel each others votes out, leaving the right answer to take a (however slim) majority. Yeah, I know, it doesn't always work. But it works pretty well on Slashdot, where the moderation system takes a sea of crap and filters out the dozen or so +4,+5 posts that are a pleasure to read.
It seems almost axiomatic that a peer-review based filtering system will rate those books most highly that will be enjoyed by the most people, and if you don't think that's the ideal way for publishing to work then you're going to have to do some talking to persuade me toward your definition of "ideal".
Of course, on a personal scale there's the problem that my tastes probably don't agree with the majority of the population, netizen or otherwise. (although I'll bet the internet users come a lot closer) Isn't that a problem with traditional publishing as well? Publishers aren't looking primarily for manuscripts that are of the highest literary quality, they're looking for manuscripts that are going to sell enough books to pay their way. And so that just boils down to a majority vote too; just a lot more indirect.
The only problem with peer review of literature on the net is a big one: It doesn't exist. Or if it exists, I certainly haven't discovered it. Where is a website that has a database of links to online fiction, a login procedure to let me score anything I've read from 1-10 or add comments, and sorting functions to let me find what fiction is out there which matches my tastes and is highly rated?
If such a thing exists and I just haven't seen it, by all means post it here (and make it obvious in the subject title; it'd be horribly ironic if such a link wasn't moderated up...)
Well, if it doesn't exist now, it will eventually. And when it does, I'd expect to see the quality of online fiction go up with it. Hell, even the quality of the best slashdot posts went up suddenly after moderation was implemented (although the amount of crap has been increasing for years to balance it out). People would be a lot more eager to write things for the web if they knew that there was a good chance that their work would be noticed, pushed to the forefront of people's attention based on merit, and attract thousands of readers (and maybe a few publishers) to your name. Even writers who wouldn't have given the net a second glance otherwise would want to publish stories online under such a system; a high rating by hundreds of interested readers (and a log with thousands of hits) would be a powerful thing to show to the publisher you're trying to sell a book to.
You think that good games today are often linear because a linear storyline allows the author to control the temp of exposition? That may be true (although the "I need to take a break and rack up XP/GP" interludes in the Final Fantasy games certainly destroyed the story tempo without harming the story line much), but only in the sense that "holding my hand out the window increases drag on my car" is true - it's lost in the noise of a much bigger effect: making a truely interactive game is *just too hard*.
Making a more interactive game requires you to give the player more choices. Each time the player gets to make a choice, the gameplay "branchs" into at least two new games. Assuming you want each of those potential games to be just as fun as your original, less interactive game, you're going to have to have them be just as long, and just as detailed. How do you do this?
Note: the following discussion is oversimplified. I hope it still gets the point across.
Well, in a sports game, or a first person shooter, or just about anything in the "action" genre, you have the computer run a simulated world, where little or none of the gameplay is scripted. You create a set of physics rules and AI rules that give the computer an initial value problem to solve, and at each moment in time you present the user with graphics corresponding to the solution, and get new input to change the physical parameters.
In a role-playing game (and any computer game which involves "story telling" is basically either a role-playing game or a movie), you don't have this option. Story telling requires a story, a stream of language, and we simply can't program a computer to generate a stream of convincingly humanlike language on the fly. If someone out there could create an AI that could play the part of a lifelike non player character in a computer game, they'd basically be passing a limited Turing test. It would be even more strict a requirement than passing a Turing test, because you would have to program the AI to appear human *and* to play his required part in the story, no matter what twisted directions the player might turn the story in.
So what do we do instead? We have the AI follow a tree of player actions/statements and responses. If the player asks question A, respond with answer A. Question B elicits answer B. Etc.
As far as these questions and answers don't affect the game state, that's fine. But that's a limited level of interactivity. When I think of a game as being "non-linear" and "interactive", by that I mean that I can make decisions which will change the outcome of the game. And two different outcomes means two different streams of story. If that game-changing decision comes in the middle of the game, then you have to worry about twice as many endings and 150% as much story. If you have 30 game-changing decisions (which in today's 30+ hour role playing games wouldn't be unreasonable), then that means one billion different endings and 70 million times as much work. Obviously this is ridiculous; there's going to be a huge amount of overlap between those different possible games, but play with some numbers yourself; what do you consider to be a "reasonable" interactive game?
Off the top of my head, I'd say 50 2-way decision points, with 10 percent of the subsequent game text changed by each decision. That means writing 25 times as much text as a linear game of the same length and quality. And that text would be harder to write, too, with loads of different options to worry about for each plotline thread. The more you try to "cheat" by making different choices similar or by making fewer choices, the less interactive the game feels. The more you try to "cheat" by having less text, the lower quality the story feels. Writing an interactive, non-linear story is *hard* - the best examples of it are the Choose Your Own Adventure books, not video games, and that's kind of sad.
I fear we don't; like a Mars landing, we've had the technology for decades but the political obstacles are insurmountable.
If you believe the most die-hard grassroots space advocates, the controversial question is no longer "Are expenditures on NASA programs more beneficial for space development than money going directly to tax breaks on orbital R&D and industry?" the controversial question is "Are expenditures on NASA programs more beneficial for space development than setting money on fire?"
It's horrifying that we're spending billions of dollars per year on Space Shuttle "operations", and a billion dollars on the worst submission (currently falling behind schedule, over weight, and over budget as you read this) for the X-33 project, while companies like Kistler Aerospace and Rotary Rocket are stalling on creating the world's first truely reusable orbital rockets because they can't raise a fraction of that money in investments.
It's shameful that they never bothered to even build a second DC-X rocket after NASA took over the program and crashed the first one.
On the one hand, NASA keeps lots of aerospace engineers employed doing something; on the other hand that something is arguably much less efficient than what they would be doing in more dynamic private companies.
On the one hand, NASA is a nice customer for the big commercial aerospace companies' rockets; on the other hand, the government is a hell of a competitor to explain to potential investors in aerospace start-up companies.
And now NASA says we don't have the technology to put an Earth Return Vehicle on Mars capable of lifting a few pounds of rocks, less than a month after Scientific American spent an article detailing plans (specifically Robert Zubrin's Mars Direct Plan outlined in The Case For Mars and NASA's Mars Semi-Direct modification) which would put humans on Mars (and leave infrastructure there, unlike Apollo) in this decade for less money than we spend on the Shuttle and ISS.